US Slave

Julianne Malveaux To Step Down as Bennett College President

2012-03-03T08:08:00.002-08:00

History: Bennett College began as a teacher’s college to provide to education to newly emancipated slaves. It became a women’s college in 1926. Bennett’s brother school is Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. Recently Bennett implemented three new programs to increase global awareness of successes and struggles of women including: Womanist Religious Studies, Global Studies, and Africana Women's Studies

Dioni L. Wise of the Greensboro News & Record, reported on 24 June 2011 that "Bennett College's accreditation under review,"--GREENSBORO — Bennett College for Women learned Thursday that its accreditation was placed on a six-month probation for financial instability.

Thursday’s judgement came two years after SACS reaccredited the college for a 10-year period.

President Julianne Malveaux said the probation will not affect financial aid, and the college is not at risk and continues to be accredited.

She said she is confident that the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) Commission on Colleges, which accredits institutions in 11 southern states, will reverse its ruling. The college has seen unprecedented expansion over the last four years, she said.

“We were most disappointed that, in the midst of this phenomenal progress, SACS has chosen to place us on probation for one-time occurrences in 2010,” Malveaux said in a statement.

The college plans to demonstrate in an October meeting that the occurrences, which were not explained, “are not part of our permanent fiscal picture.” (source: News & Record)

HISTORY: Bennett College is a private, United Methodist Church affiliated, four-year liberal arts institution for women. Founded in 1873 as a coeducational institution with the first sessions held in the basement of St. Matthews United Methodist Church (then Warnersville Methodist Episcopal Church North), the school was founded through the inspiration of newly emancipated slaves.

During then next few years, African-American members of the Methodist Church attempted to raise funds for land and a school building. However, when contributions fell short of the goal, a businessman from New York named Lyman Bennett donated $10,000. Shortly thereafter Bennett died of pneumonia, but in memoriam, the institution was renamed Bennett Seminary and it's first building named Bennett Hall. Bennett was reorganized in 1926 to become a College for Women. (source: Soul of America )

Dr. Julianne Malveaux To Step Down as Bennett College President in May 2012

Dr. Julianne Malveaux, president of Bennett College, announced Tuesday that she will be stepping down as the school’s chief executive on May 6. Malveaux, who has led the Greensboro, N.C.-based women’s college since 2007, indicated “her desire to pursue other challenges as the reason for her resignation,” according to a Bennett College statement.

“As I reflect on my accomplishments and of the college’s growth and transformation during my tenure, I realize that it is time for Bennett, and for me, to embark on a new chapter,” Malveaux said. “Five years is the longest time I’ve ever held a job in my life, and, while I remain committed to HBCUs and the compelling cause of access in higher education, I will actualize that commitment, now, in other arenas.”

An economist by training, Malveaux is an author and popular speaker.

Charles Barrentine, chairman of the school’s board of trustees, praised Malveaux for her service and pointed out Bennett’s progress under her leadership.

“During her tenure, an ambitious $21 million capital improvements program renovated existing facilities and erected four new buildings—the first new construction on campus in 28 years,” Barrentine wrote in a Feb. 28 letter to Bennett alumnae. “She increased enrollment to a historic high of more than 735 students in 2009, expanded alumnae involvement, and enhanced the curriculum with a focus on women’s leadership, entrepreneurship, excellence in communications and global awareness.”

Greensboro North Carolina NC 1930s view of Carrie Barge Hall at Bennett College.

Also under Malveaux's leadership, Bennett's accreditation was reaffirmed December 2011 through 2014 by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

Malveaux has created a 2020 Master Plan, which recommends construction of a new high-tech library. (source: Diverse Staff , February 29, 2012 )

Greensboro Ministers Support Bennett College

John Brown: The Man Who Ended Slavery

2012-03-02T22:28:00.000-08:00

Christopher Htichens writes in the Atlantic Monthly, "The Man Who Ended Slavery: Slandered by craven abolitionists as unhinged, John Brown was in fact an eloquent, cool-headed tactician who succeeded in his long-range plan: launching a civil war"

When Abraham Lincoln gave an audience to Harriet Beecher Stowe, he is supposed to have greeted her by saying that she was the little woman who had started this great war. That fondly related anecdote illustrates the persistent tendency to Parson Weemsishness in our culture. It was not at all the tear-jerking sentiment of Uncle Tom's Cabin that catalyzed the War Between the States. It was, rather, the blood-spilling intransigence of John Brown, field-tested on the pitiless Kansas prairies and later deployed at Harpers Ferry. And John Brown was a man whom Lincoln assiduously disowned, until the time came when he himself was compelled to adopt the policy of "war to the knife, and the knife to the hilt," as partisans of the slaveocracy had hitherto been too proud of saying.

David Reynolds sets himself to counter several misapprehensions about the pious old buzzard (Brown, I mean, not Lincoln). Among these are the impressions that he was a madman, that he was a homicidal type, and that his assault on a federal arsenal was foredoomed and quixotic. The critical thing here is context. And the author succeeds admirably in showing that Brown, far from being a crazed fanatic, was a serious legatee of the English and American revolutions who anticipated the Emancipation Proclamation and all that has ensued from it.

Until 1850, perhaps, the "peculiar institution" of slavery might have had a chance of perpetuating itself indefinitely by compromise. But the exorbitance and arrogance of "the slave power" forbade this accommodation. Not content with preserving their own domain in its southeastern redoubt, the future Confederates insisted on extending their chattel system into new territories, and on implicating the entire Union in their system. The special symbol of this hubris was the Fugitive Slave Act, which legalized the recovery of human property from "free" states. The idea of secession or separation first arose among abolitionists confronted with this monstrous imposition. Men like William Lloyd Garrison took their text from the Book of Isaiah, describing the U.S. Constitution as a "covenant with death and an agreement with hell," and exhorting their supporters to "come out now and be separate." (This hermeneutic rejectionism, incidentally, is identical to that preached today by Ian Paisley and the Presbyterian hard-liners of Northern Ireland.)

The proto-libertarian and anarchist Lysander Spooner argued that nowhere did the Constitution explicitly endorse slavery. It was for defenders of the values of 1776 and 1789 to help the slaves overthrow an illegitimate tyranny. In this he had the support of the Republican Frederick Douglass, who also wanted the United States to live up to its founding documents rather than to nullify or negate them. Meanwhile, the Democrats were unashamed advocates of the extension of slavery, and Lincoln was willing to submit to one humiliation after another in order, as he never tired of saying, "to preserve the Union."

John Brown could effortlessly outdo Garrison in any biblical condemnation of slavery. He could also easily surpass Lysander Spooner in his zeal to encourage and arm what the authorities called "servile insurrection." He strongly agreed with Douglass that the Union should be preserved and not dissolved. But he was incapable of drawing up any balance sheet between "preservation" and gradual emancipation, because he saw quite plainly that the balance was going the other way, and that the slave power was influencing and subordinating the North, rather than the other way about. Thus, despite his commitment to the Union, he was quite ready to regard the federal government as an enemy.

Originally a New Englander (and possibly a Mayflower descendant), Brown appeared to adopt and exemplify the adamant Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards, with his strict insistence on predestination and the "elect" and his vivid belief in eternal punishment for sinners. Reynolds gives some hair-raising examples of the culture of corporal punishment and cruel austerity that ruled Brown's own upbringing and the raising of his twenty children, and it is easy to see how such a combination of dogma and discipline might have given rise to the persistent rumor that he was partly unhinged (more than one of his sons became mentally disturbed). However, the story of his longer evolution makes this speculation a highly unsafe one.

For all his attachment to Calvinist orthodoxy, Brown felt himself very close to the transcendental school of Emerson and Thoreau. He formed important friendships in this circle, and relied on a "Secret Six" committee of supporters in Massachusetts, who stood ready to provide money and even weapons for his projects. He can hardly have been unaware of the religious heterodoxy of this group; and when it came to the no less critical matter of choosing his immediate entourage of radical would-be guerrillas, he readily included Jews, Indians, Paine-ite deists, and agnostics. Most of all, however, he insisted on including blacks. This at once distinguished him from most abolitionists, who preferred to act "for" the slaves rather than with them. But Brown had made a friendship with a slave boy at the age of twelve, and would appear to have undergone a Huck Finn—like experience in the recognition of a common humanity. Later he studied the life and tactics of Nat Turner, and of the rebellious Haitian Toussaint L'Ouverture, and decided that a full-scale revolt of the oppressed, rather than any emancipation from above, was the need of the hour.

I was very much interested to learn that his other great hero was Oliver Cromwell, whose "New Model Army" had swept away profane kingship in England and established a Puritan regime. The revisionist view of Cromwell as a liberator rather than a regicide was the work of Thomas Carlyle in the 1840s, and a result of Carlyle's friendship with Emerson. The American writer Joel Tyler Headley "recycled" Carlyle, as Reynolds phrases it, for the American mass market, portraying Cromwell as an ancestor of the American Revolution as well as a synthesizer of "religion, republicanism, and violence." (It seems probable that Brown got his introduction to Cromwell from Headley rather than directly from Carlyle: I cannot easily imagine him esteeming the Carlyle who apostatized from Calvinism, let alone the Carlyle who, in justifying slavery in the West Indies in 1850, published "Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question." Reynolds does not discuss this awkward paradox.)

Reynolds focuses on the three most sanguinary and dramatic episodes in Brown's career: the engagements at Pottawatomie and Osawatomie, in Kansas, and the culminating battle at Harpers Ferry. To read this extended account is to appreciate that Brown, far from being easily incited to rage and rashness, was capable of playing a very long game. He was naturally drawn to Kansas, because it had become the battleground state in a Union that was half slave and half free. The pro-slavery settlers and infiltrators from Missouri were determined to colonize the territory and to pack its polling booths, and in this they often had the indulgence of decrepit and cowardly presidents, including Franklin Pierce. Until the appearance of Brown and his men on the scene, the slave power had had things mostly its own way, and was accustomed to using any method it saw fit. After the murder of the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy, and especially after the famous assault on Senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston Brooks, Brown decided on a reprisal raid, and slew several leading pro-slavery Kansans in the dead of night. There is no question that this represented only a small installment of payback, though Reynolds nervously characterizes it as "terrorism" and spends a great deal of time and ink in partly rationalizing the deed.

The superfluity of this is easily demonstrated. Not only had the slaveholders perpetrated the preponderance of atrocities, and with impunity at that, but they had begun to boast that northerners and New Englanders were congenitally soft and altogether lacking in "chivalric" and soldierly qualities. What could be more apt than that they should encounter John Brown, careless of his own safety and determined to fill the ungodly with the fear of the risen Christ? Every Cavalier should meet such a Roundhead. After Pottawatomie the swagger went out of the southerners, and after the more conventional fighting at Osawatomie, and Brown's cool-headed raid to liberate a group of slaves and take them all the way to Canada, they came to realize that they were in a hard fight. Furthermore, their sulfurous reaction to this discovery, and their stupid tendency to paint Brown as an agent of the Republican Party, made it harder and harder for the invertebrate Lincolnians to keep the issue of slavery under control.

In his work in Kansas, and his long toil on the Underground Railroad, Brown was essentially mounting a feint. He knew that subscribers and supporters in New England would give him money, and even arms, for these limited and shared objectives. But he wanted to divert the money, and the arms, to the larger purpose of making any further Lincolnian retreats and compromises impossible. For years he had been studying the keystone town of Harpers Ferry, situated at the confluence of the Shenandoah and the Potomac, and handily placed for the potentially guerrilla-friendly Allegheny Mountains.

Reynolds shows that the strategic design was not as quixotic as one has often been led to believe. This northwestern portion of Virginia was generally sympathetic to abolition and to the Union (indeed, its later cleaving into the new free state of West Virginia, in 1862, is the only secession from that epoch that still survives). The fall months were the harvest season, when disaffection among overdriven slaves was more general. And the national political climate was becoming more febrile and polarized.

Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry failed badly, of course, but the courage and bearing he demonstrated after his humiliating defeat were of an order to impress his captors, who announced that far from being "mad," their prisoner was lucid and eloquent as well as brave. The slander of insanity was circulated by the weaker members of the anti-slavery camp, who cringingly sought to avoid the identification with Brown that the southern press had opportunistically made. By falling for its own propaganda, however, and in the general panic that followed the botched insurrection, the South persuaded itself that war was inevitable and that Lincoln (who had denounced Brown in his campaign against Douglas and in his famous speech at Cooper Union) was a Brown-ite at heart. The history of the six years after 1859 is the history not so much of Brown's prophecy as of the self-fulfilling prophecy of his enemies. As Reynolds hauntingly words it,

The officer who supervised the capture of Brown was Robert E. Lee … Lee's retreat from the decisive battle of Gettysburg would pass over the same road that Brown took to Harpers Ferry on the night of his attack. The lieutenant who demanded Brown's surrender was J.E.B. Stuart, later Lee's celebrated cavalry officer. Among the officers who supervised at Brown's hanging was Thomas Jackson, soon to become the renowned "Stonewall." Among the soldiers at Brown's execution was a dashing Southern actor, John Wilkes Booth.

If this does not vindicate Brown's view that all had been predestined by the Almighty before the world was made, it nonetheless does do something to the hair on the back of one's neck. As do the words finally uttered in Lincoln's Second Inaugural, about every drop of blood drawn by the lash being repaid by the sword, and the utter destruction of the piled-up wealth of those who live by the bondsman's toil. The final reckoning with slavery and secession was described by Lincoln himself as one great "John Brown raid" into the South, and was on a scale that would have brought a wintry smile to the stern face of Oliver Cromwell. The "Marseillaise" of that crusade ("The Battle Hymn of the Republic," which first appeared, as did many other important documents of the Brown-Emerson alliance, in the pages of this magazine) was an adaptation of the foot soldiers' song about Old Osawatomie Brown. One reserves the term "quixotic" for hopeless causes. Harpers Ferry was the first defeat, as it was also the seminal victory, of a triumphant cause, precisely because it sounded a trumpet that could never call retreat.

John Brown

So much for the apocalyptic and, if you like, "transcendental" influence of Brown. Reynolds, building on the earlier work of Merrill Peterson, traces another, gentler influence that may be no less consequential. Almost all whites in that epoch feared almost all blacks. And many blacks resented the condescension of anti-slavery organizations—most especially those groups that wanted to free them and then deport them to Africa. John Brown shared his life with slaves, and re-wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution so as to try to repair the hideous wrong that had been done to them. (In issuing these documents, by the way, he exculpated himself from any ahistorical charge of "terrorism," which by definition offers nothing programmatic.) The record shows that admiration for Brown was intense, widespread, and continuous, from Douglass to DuBois and beyond. Our world might be a good deal worse than it is had not numberless African-Americans, from that day to this, taken John Brown as proof that fraternity and equality, as well as liberty, were feasible things and could be exemplified by real people. (source: The Atlantic Monthly, Christopher Hitchens)

Click here to watch David Reynolds on C-Span discussing his book--John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights

Christopher Hitchens about Reparations for slavery ( 2001)

2012-03-02T21:10:00.001-08:00

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens debates reparations in 2001: "Beware when someone tries to make 'the best' the enemy of 'the good.'"

Christopher Hitchen's Thought Experiment on Reparations:

Was there an original traceable offense?

Was there a taking, a theft, a rape, a dispossession, a confiscation?

There isn't a thinking person that can say “no” to that. The evidence is very clear. And it mounts with every chapter of historical inquiry.

Did it consist of (as I said ) a confiscation?

Can it be made, therefore, good?

If not all of it can be made “good,” can some of it be made “good”?

Can ANY of it be repaired? Again, don't make the “best“ the enemy of the “good”

Is the anything that can be rescued from this terrible story?

Is there anything that can done once it's been recognized?

We can not possibly undo … I don't actually think we can imagine the scope of what it would take to undo the damage that has been done to Africa, especially West Africa by colonization, colonial division, plunder, slavery and rape. We can't undo the forced underdevelopment of Africa....the amputation and dismemberment of Africa.

Christopher Hitchens about Reparations for slavery ( 2001)

A Letter from a Union Soldier Describing Contrabands

2012-03-02T12:42:00.000-08:00

A Letter from a Union Soldier Describing Contrabands Published in a Northern Paper

On the 2st inst., one of our sentinels thought he heard a cry for help floating down from far up the river: 'come and get us!" was the rude, faint voice that came from more than two miles across the water from an island of mud and rank grass. From the ramparts of the fort we discovered an object which proved to be a pole holding up a towel raised by the suffering wanderers. A boat was dispatched which brought in three besmeared starving colored men. These reported more men and three women in a similar situation further up the river. A second boat was sent out, which after hours of search, venturing close to the enemy's lines, rescued the periled and destitute company. These refugees were a spectacle--almost naked, the women having only little miserable skirts that reached to their knees, besmeared with mud, as one said,, "boggy as de bog eself,' famished and almost entirely exhausted.

For nine weary days and fearful nights they had been feeling their perilous way from the slave pens, twelve miles beyond Savannah, through the rebel bivouacs and lines, wading through swamps, skulking through forests, and swimming three rivers, the women clinging to the necks of the men, floundering across the mud islands, as they said, "like de alligators," till they discovered the dear tars and stripes floating over fort Pulaski.

The original party consisted of twelve; four gave out on the way. The famished but persevering eight were consuming their last morsel of food when they descried our garrison flag. One of them said," when I seed that flag, it fill me right up." What a compliment from the human soul to our standard! How unspeakably sweet is the thought of liberty! Tell us not that the slave is indifferent to freedom.

But miles of distance and the swift flowing Savannah still divided them from help and safety. The wind baffled their uplifted voices. Another night of hunger, nakedness, and peril, was before them on their island of mud, where they mired to their waists. Before the sun went down they saw a steamer visit the fort, and hoping they had been heard, looked longingly for her to come up the river after them, but when they saw her leave the fort and disappear from view on her way towards Port Royal, their hearts egan to fail them: one remarked, "when I seed de steamboat go way, my heart go down to de bottom of my foot." But the calm of the following morning allowed their cry of freedom to reach our ears and their rude stick an little towel attracted our eyes.

A group of photographs show slave children who were released by Union troops. Two of these show a brother and sister who were freed from their owner, Thomas White of Mathews County, Virginia, by Captain Riley of the 6th U. S. 0.1. on February 20, 1864, and taken to the Society of Friends in Philadelphia to be educated at the Orphan’s Shelter. The cartes-de-visite were sold to raise funds to educate the children. The captions on the photographs explain that the children’s mother had been “beaten, branded and sold at auction because she was kind to Union Soldiers.” She had been taken away to be sold in Richmond only seven days before the children were freed. Their story, when placed next to the Pywell photograph, puts the pain of the slave market into chilling perspective.

Pitiable yet unutterably happy creatures they were when they reached our garrison. One moment's view of them and interview with them would have melted the most obdurate of "copperheads." They had been working for the confederate government and a little corn bread daily was their whole compensation. As we handed to one of them a loaf of bread, he ejaculated, "Gorry, Massa, dat be work two or free dollar in Sawannna." In almost every sentence they would exclaim, "Tank the Lord, we get away."--Letter from Fort Pulaski (source: http://faculty.assumption.edu/aas/Intros/contrabands.html)

--"Touching Story of Contrabands," The Worcester Daily Spy, April 8, 1864

Negrophobic Propaganda

2012-03-02T10:07:00.000-08:00

Question: In Chapter 17 you write, “Just as American ideas about liberty and self-government had circulated around the world in the age of revolution, American racial attitudes had a global impact in the Age of Empire.” Would you elaborate on that?

Eric Foner: Well, we’d like to think, and correctly, of the world impact of some of our highest ideals—individual freedom, self-government, democracy—and certainly those ideals have inspired people in many other countries. But it’s also important that some of our perhaps less noble ideas and practices have also had a worldwide impact. In this period at the end of the nineteenth century, beginning of the twentieth century, American segregation affected the way the people of South Africa were implementing apartheid; American anti-Chinese legislation was picked up in Australia in what they called the White Australia Policy that they inaugurated in 1901 when Australia became self-governing. Canadians watched our efforts to restrict immigration from Asia and they adopted those policies as well.

The failure of Reconstruction in the United States was seen in these white settler societies as indicating that nonwhite people were not really capable of self-government. People in other countries cited what happened in Reconstruction in the United States to say, look, we don’t need to give black people the right to vote because they tried that in the United States and it didn’t work. This was a distorted view of what happened in Reconstruction, but that distorted view affected racial thinking in other places. So as the American system of Jim Crow, segregation, disenfranchisement of black voters, Asian exclusion is implemented in this country, other countries are watching what we do and are learning racial policy from us as well.

The Civil War Unravelled Slavery

2012-03-02T08:53:00.000-08:00

Three slaves Shepherd Mallory, Frank Baker, and James Townsend, belonging to Charles King Mallory appeared before Major General Benjamin F. Butler, Post Commander of Fortress Monroe. Major General Butler determined them to be “Contraband of War,” since the Southerners referred to them as property.

Historian Eric Foner writes "How the Civil War Unravelled Slavery," in the Guardian's website on 17 May 2011 -- One hundred fifty years ago this week, one month into the American civil war, three slave men made their way to Fortress Monroe, Virginia, where General Benjamin F Butler commanded Union forces. The three fugitives told Butler that they were about to be sent "to Carolina" to build fortifications for the Confederate army. Needing manpower himself, Butler decided not to return them; instead, he put them to work. Shortly thereafter, an agent of Colonel Charles K Mallory, their owner and the Confederate commander in the area, arrived under a flag of truce asking for the return of his human property. Butler refused.

When Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, inaugurating the civil war, Charles Sumner, the radical senator from Massachusetts, rushed to the White House to tell President Lincoln that, under the Constitution's "war power", he now had the right to emancipate the south's slaves. But Lincoln, seeking the broadest base of popular support in the north, insisted that the war's purpose was to restore national unity. Indeed, he promised that the "utmost care" would be taken to avoid interference with property rights in the seceded states. In the first weeks of the war, military commanders returned to their owners slaves who sought refuge with the Union army.

The Caption Reads -- "Morning mustering of the "Contrabands" at Fortress Monroe, on their way to their day's work. As a living illustration of one of the aspects of the Civil War, a sketch is given above of the contrabands "Niggers" going to their daily work at the Fortress Monroe. The variety of the Ethiopian countenance is capitally given, and while some remind us of the merry phiz of George Christy in his sable mood, others wear the ponderous gravity of a New Jersey justice. The colored men had a comparatively pleasant time under their state of contraband existence." [Frank Leslie's "The Soldier in Our Civil War" (1893)]

War, however, destabilises slavery. It strips away its constitutional protections. Contending sides make slavery a military target to weaken their opponents. They enlist slave soldiers. This happened many times in the western hemisphere, including during the American Revolution, and it would happen during the civil war.

Butler called the three escaped slaves "contrabands of war". He claimed to be drawing on international law, even though the term "contraband" means goods used for military purposes that a neutral country ships to one side in a conflict, and which the other combatant may lawfully seize. Nonetheless, Butler had introduced a new word into the political vocabulary. Soon, there would be "contraband camps" for fugitive slaves, "contraband schools" and extended debate about the status and future of "the contrabands". Butler's actions did not imply a broad attack on slavery. He recognised the fugitives as property but used that very status to release them from service to their owners.

But word of his action spread quickly among local slaves. On 27 May, 47 more, including a three-month-old infant, arrived at what blacks now called the "freedom fort".

"Slaves Entering Sally Port of Fort Monroe" [ Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, June 8, 1861. Virginia Historical Society (General Collection O.S. AP2 .F82) ]

Butler at that point requested instructions from Washington. Lincoln privately supported what Butler had done. He laughingly called his action "Butler's fugitive slave law". On 30 May 1861, after a cabinet meeting, the secretary of war informed Butler that his policy "is approved". But no public announcement was issued – and other army officers continued to return fugitive slaves.

By the end of July, there were nearly 1,000 fugitives at Fortress Monroe. "Are these men, women, and children slaves?" Butler wondered. "Are they free?" For the moment, no answer was forthcoming. But together, the actions of runaway slaves and of a Union army commander had initiated the long, complex process of wartime emancipation. (source: Eric Foner Website)

Reconstruction. The Second Civil War

2012-03-01T21:12:00.001-08:00

NARRATOR: April 11th, 1865, two days after the end of the Civil War. In the White House, President Abraham Lincoln agonized over his first speech since the defeat of the South. The jubilant crowd outside expected a celebration of the Union victory. Instead, the president warned that "Reconstruction," as he called it, would be "fraught with great difficulty."

EDWARD AYERS, HISTORIAN: The war has spiraled far beyond the worst imaginings of anyone. Over six hundred thousand people had died in the last four years. The largest slave system in the modern world is in shambles and no one knows what is going to replace it. People just can't imagine how they're going to put the country back together again.

DAVID BLIGHT, HISTORIAN: It is a revolutionary, chaotic situation, and the responsibility now was to come up with a plan to restore this society. But you also had to do it with this deep and abiding division over race.

NARRATOR: Three days later, the statesman who led the Union through the Civil War was assassinated. Suddenly, the extraordinary challenge of reconstructing the nation was in the hands of ordinary men and women. A Yankee officer would venture to the most violent corner of Louisiana to try to impose order. A plantation mistress whose slaves were now free would struggle to reclaim her place in the world. A fiery black minister would mount a pitched battle with white landowners. And a new President would force a dramatic showdown with Congress.

ERIC FONER, HISTORIAN: An old order, an old social order has been destroyed; and everything is up for grabs.

CLARENCE WALKER, HISTORIAN: The violence in the South was a way to reestablish white Supremacy. This was a war of terror.

NARRATOR: After four bloody years of Civil War, Americans, North and South would continue to fight over the meaning of freedom, the meaning of citizenship, and the survival of the nation itself.

Reconstruction. The Second Civil War PT1

Congressional Resolution Freeing the Families of Black Soldiers

2012-03-01T20:38:00.000-08:00

A Resolution to encourage Enlistments and to promote the Efficiency of the military Forces of the United States.

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That, for the purpose of encouraging enlistments and promoting the efficiency of the military and naval forces of the United States, it is hereby enacted that the wife and children, if any he have, of any person that has been, or may be, mustered into the military or naval service of the United States, shall, from and after the passage of this act, be forever free, any law, usage, or custom whatsoever to the contrary notwithstanding; and in determining who is or was the wife and who are the children of the enlisted person herein mentioned, evidence that he and the woman claimed to be his wife have cohabited together, or associated as husband and wife, and so continued to cohabit or associate at the time of the enlistment, or evidence that a form or ceremony of marriage, whether such marriage was or was not authorized or recognized by law, has been entered into or celebrated by them, and that the parties thereto thereafter lived together, or associated or cohabited as husband and wife, and so continued to live, cohabit, or associate at the time of the enlistment, shall be deemed sufficient proof of marriage for the purposes of this act, and the children born of any such marriage shall be deemed and taken to be the children embraced within the provisions of this act, whether such marriage shall or shall not have been dissolved at the time of such enlistment.

APPROVED, March 3, 1865.

U.S., Statutes at Large, Treaties, and Proclamations of the United States of America, vol. 13 (Boston, 1866), p. 571.

Freedmen's Bureau Marriage Records

2012-03-01T20:29:00.000-08:00

Freedmen's Bureau Marriage Records

This microfilm series contains hundreds of marriage records of newly liberated African Americans in the post-Civil War era collected from 1861 through 1869 first by the Union Army and then the Freedmen's Bureau in its field offices in the Southern States and the District of Columbia, and sent to the Washington, DC, headquarters. Record types include unbound marriage certificates, marriage licenses, monthly reports of marriages, and other proofs of marriages. Record type and quantity varies with each state. (source: National Archives)

Freedmen’s Bureau Project

Installed in the Public Vault, “We the People,” this interactive lets the documents tell the story of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—also known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. Visitors can select records grouped according to states or themes including labor, marriage, education, and land. The “Enhanced Record Viewer” lets visitors review every detail of the documents, turn pages, transcribe handwriting, and reveal interpretive hot spots that explain important elements and passages.

How to Order Microfilm Rolls

Online: Go to the National Archives online ordering.
Telephone: Credit card orders call toll free 1-800-234-8861 (301-837-2000 in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area), 8 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. EST. Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover are accepted.
Fax: Fax your order to 301-837-3191.
Mail: Mail checks or money orders to the National Archives Trust Fund, P.O. Box 100793, Atlanta, GA 30384-0793. Include daytime telephone number with order.

Please identify the microfilm publication number (e.g., M1875) and the specific roll number(s) you are interested in.

Let No Man Put Asunder: Freedmen's Bureau Marriage Records

Amazon Rubber Slavery

2012-02-29T10:46:00.002-08:00

New York Times, "Empire of Savagery in the Amazon," by Greg Grandin, 12 February 2010 -- The 19th-century doctrine of progress held slavery and capitalism to be incompatible. Coercion, liberals believed, violated the ideals of natural rights and free labor. Wage work, Marxists thought, was more profitable than forced work, and that alone would doom slavery. Then in 1904, nearly four decades after Appomattox, Roger Casement, an Irish-born career diplomat in the British Foreign Office, wrote his Congo report, revealing that King Leopold of Belgium had enriched himself by presiding over a rubber trade founded on pure cruelty. “What has civilization itself been to them?” Casement asked of Leopold’s Congolese victims, 10 million of whom, by some estimates, had perished in but two decades. He himself had the answer: “A thing of horror.”

“The Devil and Mr. Casement,” by Jordan Goodman, the author of several works of history, reconstructs the Casement investigation in the Putumayo region of the Amazon rain forest that followed the Congo report. There, the Peruvian Julio César Arana ruled over a rubber empire of 10,000 square miles, and from 1910 to 1913, Casement exhausted himself trying to force the British government to take action against Arana and his London-incorporated Peruvian Amazon Company. He twice traveled to the Amazon, collecting evidence of whipping, torture, mass rape, mutilation, executions and the hunting of the region’s Indians, whose population Casement calculated had fallen to 8,000 in 1911 from 50,000 in 1906.

Goodman’s book adds to Casement’s reputation as a pioneer of the human rights movement’s tactics, including the on-the-spot investigation, the gathering of victims’ testimony and the leveraging of public outrage to spur reform. Casement was one of the first to use the phrase “crime against humanity,” and he judged Arana to be guilty of “not merely slavery but extermination” — what later would be called genocide.

But Casement’s moral trajectory ran opposite to that of many modern human rights activists. France’s current foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, for example, dropped his youthful support for national liberation movements to embrace what some have criticized as “humanitarian imperialism.” Casement tried at first to use the services of a foreign office to ease suffering. Yet he veered off what he called the “high road to being a regular Imperialist jingo.” His time in Congo and the Amazon deepened his sense of anticolonial solidarity. “I was looking at this tragedy,” he said of Congolese slavery, “with the eyes of another race” — the Irish — “a people once hunted themselves.” Knighted in 1911 for his humanitarian work, he was hanged by the British five years later for conspiring with the Germans on behalf of Irish independence.

Casement’s execution is not the climax of Goodman’s story, because this book doesn’t have a climax. It tapers off without resolution. The British directors of Arana’s company are interrogated by members of Parliament. Reports are issued, sermons are preached, politicians are outraged. Arana appears before Parliament’s committee on the Putumayo, after which he boards a steamer back to Peru untouched. The reader is left to ponder the fate of his indigenous victims.

This is an apt ending to a fine and meticulous book, for a kind of slavery still remains in force in the Amazon. Thousands of workers, for instance, trapped in conditions nearly as dismal as those documented a century ago in the Putumayo, make the charcoal used to forge pig iron, which is then purchased by international corporations to produce the steel used in everyday products, including popular makes of cars.

Arana ultimately lost his company and died broke. Yet the devil continues to get the better of Mr. Casement. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/books/review/Grandin-t.html)

African Colonization: Serial Enslavers

2012-02-29T09:04:00.000-08:00

As reported by the BBC "Slavery and the 'Scramble for Africa'" by Dr Saul David on 17 February 2011 -- What were the motives behind the European colonization of Africa at the end of the 19th century? Did the stamping out of slavery really play a part?

European colonisation

Until the 19th century, Britain and the other European powers confined their imperial ambitions in Africa to the odd coastal outpost from which they could exert their economic and military influence. British activity on the West African coast was centred around the lucrative slave trade.

Between 1562 and 1807, when the slave trade was abolished, British ships carried up to three million people into slavery in the Americas. In total, European ships took more than 11 million people into slavery from the West African coast, and European traders grew rich on the profits while the population of Africa's west coast was devastated.

As late as the 1870s, only 10% of the continent was under direct European control, with Algeria held by France, the Cape Colony and Natal (both in modern South Africa) by Britain, and Angola by Portugal. And yet by 1900, European nations had added almost 10 million square miles of Africa - one-fifth of the land mass of the globe - to their overseas colonial possessions. Europeans ruled more than 90% of the African continent.

One of the chief justifications for this so-called 'scramble for Africa' was a desire to stamp out slavery once and for all. Shortly before his death in May 1873 at Ilala in central Africa, the celebrated missionary-explorer David Livingstone had called for a worldwide crusade to defeat the slave trade controlled by Arabs in East Africa, that was laying waste the heart of the continent.

The only way to liberate Africa, believed Livingstone, was to introduce the 'three Cs': commerce, Christianity and civilization.

The Berlin Conference-- This was a period in history when few Europeans doubted their innate superiority over the 'lesser' races of the world.

The theory that all the peoples of Europe belonged to one white race which originated in the Caucasus (hence the term 'Caucasian') was first postulated at the turn of the 19th century by a German professor of ethnology called Johann Blumenbach.

Blumenbach's colour-coded classification of races - white, brown, yellow, black and red - was later refined by a French ethnologist, Joseph-Arthur Gobineau, to include a complete racial hierarchy with white-skinned people of European origin at the top.

Britons like Livingstone felt they had a duty to 'civilise' Africa.

Such pseudo-scientific theories were widely accepted at the time and motivated Britons like Livingstone to feel they had a duty to 'civilise' Africa.

The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, convened by Otto von Bismarck to discuss the future of Africa, had the stamping out slavery high on the agenda. The Berlin Act of 1885, signed by the 13 European powers attending the conference, included a resolution to 'help in suppressing slavery'.

In truth, the strategic and economic objectives of the colonial powers, such as protecting old markets and exploiting new ones, were far more important.

The Berlin Conference began the process of carving up Africa, paying no attention to local culture or ethnic groups, and leaving people from the same tribe on separate sides of European-imposed borders.

British interests

Britain was primarily concerned with maintaining its lines of communication with India, hence its interest in Egypt and South Africa. But once these two areas were secure, imperialist adventurers like Cecil Rhodes encouraged the acquisition of further territory with the intention of establishing a Cape-to-Cairo railway.

Britain was also interested in the commercial potential of mineral-rich territories like the Transvaal, where gold was discovered in the mid-1880s, and in preventing other European powers, particularly Germany and France, from muscling into areas they considered within their 'sphere of influence'.

Tens of thousands of Herero men, women and children fell victim to von Trotha's infamous extermination order.

As a result, during the last 20 years of the 19th century, Britain occupied or annexed Egypt, the Sudan, British East Africa (Kenya and Uganda), British Somaliland, Southern and Northern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe and Zambia), Bechuanaland (Botswana), Orange Free State and the Transvaal (South Africa), Gambia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, British Gold Coast (Ghana) and Nyasaland (Malawi). These countries accounted for more than 30% of Africa's population.

The other chief colonisers were France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

Germany had only been unified in 1871 and so was a late starter in imperial terms. Its first acquisition in 1884 was German South-West Africa (Namibia), which at the time was peopled by two semi-nomadic tribes, the Herero of the arid central plateau and the Nama of the still more arid steppes to the south.

When the two tribes went to war over cattle grazing, German traders and missionaries persuaded their government to intervene and fill the political vacuum.

A later Herero rebellion in 1904, provoked by the brutality of the German settlers, was put down by General Lothar von Trotha with savage efficiency, and tens of thousands of Herero men, women and children fell victim to his infamous 'Vernichtungsbefehl' (extermination order).

'Spirit of Berlin'

The philanthropic 'spirit of Berlin', however, was not entirely hollow. Once it became known that slavery was alive and well in the Congo, which was run as a personal fiefdom of Leopold, King of Belgium, an international anti-slavery conference was held in Brussels in 1889-1890.

By taking the women of Congolese villages hostage, Leopold had turned the men into forced labourers.

The man who exposed the existence of slavery in Leopold's Congo was a French missionary to Africa called Cardinal Charles Lavigerie. During a sermon at St Sulpice in Paris in 1888, Lavigerie had shocked his audience by describing the horrors of the Congo slave trade: villages surrounded and burnt; men captured and yoked together; women and children penned like cattle in the slave markets.

The upshot of the Brussels conference was that Leopold cynically agreed to stamp out Arab slavery in return for the right to tax imports. He thereby overturned one of the key resolutions of the Act of Berlin, which had guaranteed free trade for the region.

But while Leopold made all the right noises, his agents in the Congo used forced labour (slaves in all but name) to extract rubber, his single most profitable export. By 1902, rubber sales had risen 15 times in eight years, and were valued at 41 million francs (£1.64 million).

By taking the women of Congolese villages hostage, Leopold had turned the men into forced labourers, with a monthly quota of wild rubber to collect from the rain forest. The system was harsh. Many hostages starved to death and many male forced labourers were worked to death.

More people were killed as rebellions were brutally crushed. Demographers today estimate that the population of the Congo fell roughly by half over the 40-year period beginning in around 1880.

The truth behind the Congo's rubber trade - 'legalised robbery enforced by violence' - was finally exposed by Edmond Morel, an Anglo-French ex-shipping clerk, who wrote a series of accusatory articles in 'The Speaker' in 1900.

By arguing that Leopold's illegal state monopoly was robbing British merchants as well as African peasants, Morel was able to enlist the support of both businessmen and humanitarians. A British consul, Roger Casement, was sent to investigate, and the publication of his damning report in 1904 was, for Leopold, the beginning of the end.

In 1908, in return for £3.8 million, Leopold handed over control of the Congo to the Belgian state. But even then, the forced labour system continued. It took a different form during World War One, when tens of thousands of Congolese were conscripted as porters for the Belgian army.

The forced labour system significantly changed only in the early 1920s, when Belgian colonial authorities realised the population was dropping so rapidly that they soon might have no labour force left.

An end to African slavery?

The signatories of the General Act of the Brussels Conference of 1889-1890 had declared an intention to put an end to the traffic of African slaves. This was extended, by the Convention of St-Germain-en-Laye in 1919, to include the complete suppression of slavery in all its forms and of the slave trade by land and sea.

Under all the colonial powers, forced labour remained in place into the 1940s.

In September 1926, the International Slavery Convention was signed at Geneva under the auspices of the League of Nations 'to find a means of giving practical effect throughout the world to such intentions'.

It defined a slave as a 'person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised', and undertook 'to bring about, progressively and as soon as possible, the complete abolition of slavery in all its forms'.

But this was never applied against the practice of forced labour in colonial Africa, for example, requiring a village to provide men to work on roads and other public works. Under all the colonial powers, forced labour of one kind or another remained in place into the 1940s, and the imposition of taxes forced people into low-paid mining, industry or agribusiness jobs when they might otherwise have remained farmers.

The first practical consequence of the convention was that Ethiopia became the last African state to abolish slavery in 1932. All colonial regimes had long since done the same. Yet even today slavery is not unknown in Africa, particularly in countries such as the Sudan where law and order are often absent.

Nor have the colonists ever really gone away. White-owned businesses still dominate the mining of Africa's most valuable natural resources - particularly gold and diamonds - and in the eyes of some the continent has never stopped being plundered.

(source: BBC)

“The Sweet Hell Inside” by Edward Ball

2012-02-28T21:42:00.002-08:00

From Salon on 26 February 2002, a book review “The Sweet Hell Inside” by Edward Ball From the author of "Slaves in the Family" comes an inside look at the relatively easy life among the elite mixed-race families of the Deep South by Jonelle Bonta --“My father,” wrote Edward Ball, a descendant of South Carolinian plantation owners, in the opening of his National Book Award-winning “Slaves in the Family,” “had a little joke that made light of our legacy as a family that had once owned slaves. ‘There are five things we don’t talk about in the Ball family,’ he would say. ‘Religion, sex, death, money, and the Negroes.’”

Three hundred years after his family acquired their first slaves, Ball, a former columnist for the Village Voice, decided it was time to talk. Leaving New York for his native Charleston, Ball combed the accumulated records of 10 generations of family papers. He interviewed relatives and in the process discovered quite a few he never dreamed he had. For instance, while researching “Slaves in the Family,” he received a phone call from one Edwina Harleston Whitlock, who turned out to be an elderly, elegant, light-skinned black woman who was also a journalist. Edwina informed Ball that they were cousins. Welcome to the New South, Mr. Ball.

Born in Charleston in 1882, Edwin Augustus Harleston was the third of six children of Edwin Galliard and Louisa Moultrie Harleston.

Ball’s follow-up book, “The Sweet Hell Inside,” is the result of his fortuitous meeting with his newfound cousin. Based on a roomful — literally — of material preserved by Mrs. Whitlock, “The Sweet Hell Inside” is the history of the Harleston family of Charleston, specifically the family of Edwin “Captain” Harleston, one of eight children born to William Harleston, owner of “The Hut” plantation, and his slave, Kate Wilson. After the Civil War, William Harleston bought his mulatto family a house in Charleston that proved to be their haven after his nephew bilked Kate out of the inheritance William intended for her. Despite this setback, Kate and William’s offspring fared well by the standards of their color and the day; they were educated and employed in the more professional jobs available to blacks in Southern cities during Reconstruction. Their fifth child, Edwin “Captain” Harleston, succeeded in a shipping business and eventually founded a successful funeral home.

Ball focuses on two of the Captain’s children — Edwin, nicknamed “Teddy,” who pursued his dream as a painter while working at the family’s funeral business (simultaneously attending art classes and embalming school), and Eloise or “Ella,” who married the Reverend Daniel Jenkins, founder of the Jenkins Orphanage for black foundlings and its touring Jenkins Orphanage Band, which became well known across the United States and in Europe and spawned several notable jazz careers. Teddy and Ella, by far the most interesting of the Captain’s children, were also the two who raised their orphaned niece Edwina, the cousin who telephoned Edward Ball.

Elise Forrest Harleston

“The Sweet Hell Inside” is invaluable for its insight into black cultural traditions of the 19th century, the history of cakewalks and minstrel shows, embalming techniques of the time, the black jazz scene in post-World War I Paris, the few successful black artists of the first 25 years or so of this century and the tightening of segregation laws throughout the South. But that doesn’t make it what much of the press is touting it as, namely a representative tale of the struggles of a black family to overcome racism. (“On Unsure Footing in a Racist Era” read the headline to the Los Angeles Times review.)

Rather, it’s a cutaway view of the life of a well-educated mixed-race family in post-Reconstruction Charleston. The Harlestons belonged to a small society of about only 50 families. In Edwina’s words, “The Harlestons were light, and we didn’t associate with people who were much darker than we were. Of course we didn’t associate with white people either. We were a kind of in-between people. But we were Negroes all the same, and everyone in our circle was colored to one degree or another.”

In fact, because the Harlestons’ livelihood was derived from the black community, “The Sweet Hell Inside” illustrates how little the members of this particular “colored elite” were restricted by race. Not that race didn’t permeate every aspect of the characters’ lives. It’s simply that this detailed study of their aspirations, triumphs, successes and failures reveals them to be a great deal less obsessed by the subject than current readers with modern sensibilities would have them be.

The only conflicted Harleston is Edwina’s uncle Teddy, and his lifelong dilemma was his desire for an art career (he was a limited artist but a notable portrait painter) vs. the economic necessity of working at the family business. His aspirations to paint full time were finally crushed when his father died in 1931 and the full responsibility of the business fell on Teddy’s shoulders. By several accounts he died of a broken heart, aided by pneumonia caught from his father’s deathbed, and died less than two weeks after the Captain.

Rich in historical detail, “The Sweet Hell Inside” offers an inside look at a culture pretty much ignored even by period historians. But what makes parts of the book fascinating also outlines its limitations. With so many voices, “Slaves in the Family” had an epic feel to it, a sense of connections between generations of people, many of whom never met despite sharing a genealogy. (One can almost picture an enterprising black novelist working this raw material into an American version of “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”)

“The Sweet Hell Inside” is a miniature that employs only Edwina’s voice; it reads like a long footnote to “Slaves in The Family.” At times Ball seems restricted by his subject, perhaps because he didn’t come to the material on his own.

What does make “The Sweet Hell Inside” unique is its subject and its author’s access to a family member who lived with them. One can’t help but wonder, given the relative ease of the Harlestons’ lives, where the “Sweet Hell” of the book’s title may be. It comes from Walt Whitman: “the messenger there arous’d, the first, the sweet hell within, The unknown want, the destiny of me.”

Of the many Harlestons, only Teddy, who had aspirations of reaching the world beyond their insular subculture, seemed to truly suffer, forever caught between the constrictions of art and commerce and Jim Crow. When the world seemed on the verge of being able to acknowledge his talent, he found himself left behind by the bigotry of modernism. He is both a noble and tragic figure, the true hero of the story and, regrettably, neither Edward Ball nor Edwina Whitlock seems to be fully aware of that fact. (source: Salon.com)

Click here to view author Edward Ball discuss his book "The Sweet Hell Inside: A Family History"

Empire: From Conquest to Control

2012-02-28T19:47:00.003-08:00

Empire: From Conquest to Control: Gresham College Professor Richard J Evans (24 January 2012)

In 1884, the Berlin Conference that set off the scramble for colonies in Africa and other parts of the world laid down the basic principle that in order to establish the formal right of rule over a colony, a European power had to establish ‘effective occupation’. This applied, however, only to coastal areas, which at the time were the main concern of most European powers in Africa. The hinterland of continental Africa, which was the subject of the main phase of the ‘scramble’, was a different matter. Here, European states drew straight lines across the map with complete disregard for geographical features, delimiting the territories they claimed from one another but leaving them still to be brought under real control. In many ways the story of colonization in the 1890s and 1900s is the story of how European empires tried to convert paper colonies into real colonies.

In my last lecture I noted how in some cases this attempt met with failure, most notably with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1896. Similarly, the Boxer rebellion in China deterred European powers from converting treaty ports into hubs of real colonization. But these were exceptions. In most of Africa, and many parts of the Pacific, European powers moved from the 1890s onwards to establish their control over the land they now claimed as their own.

What drove them to do so were two separate but ultimately intermeshing influences. The first was ideological. The 1880s ushered in the age of empire, the decades of imperialism – a word that first entered the English language in the 1870s and was, as J. A. Hobson noted in 1900, ‘on everybody’s lips…used to denote the most powerful movement in the current politics of the western world’. Imperialism was propagated by governments keen to gain popular support for the principle of maintaining, usually at some cost, overseas possessions. The cult of empire began in Britain already in the 1870s with the proclamation of Queen Victoria as empress of India. Within a few years, British royal ceremonies, including Queen Victoria’s golden and diamond jubilees and the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902, were featuring maharajas and colonial troops. As the Daily Mail reported in 1897, the diamond jubilee procession displayed ‘new types, new realms at every couple of yards, an anthropological museum – a living gazetteer of the British Empire. With them came their English officers, whom they obey and follow like children’. Huge publicity was given to the ceremonies – durbars – held in India in 1877 to proclaim Queen Victoria Empress of India, and in 1902 and 1911 to celebrate the coronation of her successors. 1902 saw the inauguration of ‘Empire Day’ in Britain, especially directed at schools, and imperial propaganda could be found everywhere, on railway bookstalls, in political meetings, in novels, magazines and history books and even in the ‘empire plate’ manufactured for the Diamond Jubilee in 1897. The coronation of Edward VII in particular was given a strong imperial flavour, to celebrate, as a contemporary put it, ‘the recognition, by a free democracy, of a hereditary crown, as a symbol of the world-wide dominion of their race’.

International expositions, a tradition inaugurated by Britain’s Great Exhibition of 1851, began to include ‘colonial pavilions’ – 18 of them at the Paris exposition of 1889, clustering around the Eiffel Tower that had been specially built for the occasion.Colonial museums opened in most European countries to display looted artifacts, and most remarkably perhaps, zoos began to include ‘native villages’ among their exhibits. Hagenbeck’s Tierpark in Hamburg for example showed a series of African and other indigenous groups to gawping crowds of visitors who – at a safe distance, to avoid the danger of physical contact - could observe the ‘primitive world’ that Germany had conquered in Africa.

In Belgium in the 1880s and 1890s exhibitions were held including a typical Congolese village, where imported Africans were told to do what they normally did at home, which was mostly not much, since at home they would have been out hunting or in the fields. A pool was provided and stocked with fish, and spectators threw coins in for the Congolese to dive for. Sometimes they threw in bottles of gin and brandy too, to make them drunk. Sometimes stages were set up for the men to re-enact battles with spears and shields. The Congolese had to go around half-naked in a display of ‘authenticity’ and in cold weather many of them became ill. Such displays were put on to underline European superiority, so there was no interest in, for example, getting the villagers to make or display artworks or put on musical events. In a similar way, Buffalo Bill’s enormously popular Wild West Show, which toured Europe at this time, demonstrated the inferiority of Native Americans, doomed to extinction in battle with the better armed forces of civilization.

European notions of superiority were caricatured but also reaffirmed in cartoons of the time: here for example is one portraying a new governor of German East Africa as a ‘new idol’ replacing or perhaps just adding to the ones already worshipped by the native heathens.All this served to enlist the middle classes and potentially too the working classes in patriotic enthusiasm for the ideals of empire, a tactic that was more successful in some countries, notably Britain, than others. The press followed colonial campaigns closely and whipped up jingoistic sentiment, expressed in events such as the triumph of the British over the Ashanti in the 1870s.Imperial enthusiasm reached new heights with the emergence of mass-circulation newspapers like the Daily Mail, fuelling events such as the popular celebrations in London of the relief of Mafeking during the Boer War.The age of high imperialism coincided with the coming of the age of mass communications and the popular press, and both fed off each other.

The events of the Boer War pointed to the other major force apart from imperialist ideology driving forward European powers’ establishment of control over their colonies, and that was, the actions and policies of men on the ground, in the colonies themselves. For most of the nineteenth century it was missionaries, traders and explorers who brought in the colonizing state to further their interests or, more frequently, to rescue them when they got into trouble with indigenous peoples. In some colonies, however, in the age of high imperialism, European settlers began arriving in ever increasing numbers and, with or without the approval of the colonial state, seizing land for cattle farming or rubber or palm oil plantations. The clashes such actions sparked were among the most violent in the history of European empire. And nowhere were they more dramatic than in the German colony of South-west Africa, today’s Namibia.

South-west Africa had begun as a protectorate run by a limited company, but as early as 1888 the company failed and the state was obliged to take over. Much of the land was desert or semi-arid and was inhabited by nomadic cattle herders of the Herero and Nama tribes. During the 1890s German settlers moved in and began setting up cattle ranches, fencing off the land from the nomads, whose livelihood was also being undermined by an outbreak of a fatal cattle disease, Rinderpest, at the end of the 1890s. The rapidly mounting pace of land seizures by the colonial government in the early 1900s led eventually to attacks on German farmers, resulting in around 150 settler deaths by 1904, when the attacks reached a peak. Kaiser Wilhelm II took this as a provocation, even a personal insult. Germany was not going to be humiliated as Italy had been in Ethiopia in 1896.

14,000 German troops were dispatched from Berlin under General Lothar von Trotha, a hard-line Prussian army officer with previous colonial experience. ‘I know’ he said, ‘that African tribes yield only to violence. To exercise this violence with crass terrorism and even with gruesomeness was and is my policy.’ After defeating a Herero force at Waterberg, Trotha announced: ‘Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be executed.’ Herero cattle-herders caught in the action were shot or hanged on the spot, while the remaining men, along with Herero women and children, were driven into the desert and left to starve. The few who emerged alive were little more than skeletons, as this contemporary photograph shows (see powerpoint).The Chief of the General Staff in Berlin, Alfred von Schlieffen, in thrall, like all Prussian officers, to the supposedly Clausewitzian doctrine that the aim of a war must be the total annihilation of the enemy force, praised von Trotha’s campaign as ‘brilliant’, especially his use of the desert to complete what he called approvingly ‘the extermination of the Herero nation’. Popular commemorative books were printed celebrating the triumph of German arms in the war. (source: Gresham College, UK)

Empire: From Conquest to Control - Professor Richard J Evans FBA

Tintin's Racist Past

2012-02-27T17:24:00.000-08:00

Traveling in a hammock, Belgian Congo [Photograph taken or provided by Émile Gorlia (1887-1966)] Hammocks carried by African porters were an important means of transportation for Europeans during the colonial period. Some African leaders also used palanquins and other carrying devices as symbols of their status.

From Forbes Magazine, "Tintin's Racist Past," by Lionel Laurent, on 23 July 2007 --LONDON - When British lawyer David Enright opened the pages of a comic book entitled Tintin In The Congo while in a shop with his wife and two young boys, he was probably expecting a benign adventure story full of fun for all the family.

Instead what he found was a "highly offensive" collection of racist caricatures of Africans, from superstitious natives to incoherent simpletons, and in a letter of complaint he demanded that the Borders bookstore in his hometown of St. Albans stop selling the comic book.

Tintin is Belgium's most famous export, with over 200 million copies of his adventures sold worldwide. In May Variety even reported that co-founder of DreamWorks Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson were planning a Tintin trilogy, no doubt tempted by the $3 billion gross raked in by Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. Could one angry British lawyer derail the reputation of a true comic book hero?

The incident has snowballed into a very British scandal, with the Commission for Racial Equality backing Enright and demanding that all Borders stores take Tintin's Congolese adventures off their shelves. Now even the police are involved, with the Hertfordshire police deciding to record Enright's complaint as a "racist incident."

Borders' response has been to move all copies of the comic to the "adult graphic" section of the store from the childrens' section, but the book seller refused to stop selling it outright.

It's not the first time accusations of racism have been leveled against Hergé, the late Belgian cartoonist who created the iconic orange-haired reporter known as Tintin. When the character first appeared in Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets at the end of the 1920s, he stood for conservative, Catholic values, showing up the godless credo of communism. It is no accident that in his second adventure in 1931, Tintin In The Congo, the intrepid reporter is saved from the snapping jaws of angry crocodiles by a bearded Catholic missionary dressed in white.

But Hergé himself regretted his early work, as well as his personal attachment to a Catholic abbot with fascist sympathies called Norbert Wallez. In an interview released in 1983, the artist said: "The fact is that while I was growing up, I was being fed the prejudices of the bourgeois society that surrounded me. It's true that Soviets and Congo were youthful sins. I'm not rejecting them. However, if I were to do it again, they would be different."

Democratic Republic of Congo (Belgian Congo) - Kuba King "Dr. William Henry Sheppard (1865-1927), an African American missionary for the American Presbyterian Congo Mission, who later became an outspoken critic of King Léopold's regime, was the first overseas visitor to reach the kingdom's capital in 1890. The Kuba, famous for their arts, subsequently attracted many visitors, ranging from anthropologists to photographers, who sought to depict the legendary kings, the visual splendor of the royal court and important chiefs, among them Chief Ndombe of Bieeng. Casimir Zagourski, who traveled through the royal capital in the 1930s, took a classic, often-published portrait of then ruler Kot Mabiinc (ruled 1919-1939), who was paralyzed. Eliot Elisofon (1911-1973), an American photographer who worked for Life magazine, followed in Zagourski's footsteps in 1947, creating evocative portraits of Kot Mabiinc's successor, Mbop Mabiinc maMbeky (ruled 1939-1969). Photographic encounters in the capital became commonplace and orchestrated--grand performances for the cameras of the Westerners. Kuba kings used the opportunity to further the reputation of the Kuba as the foremost artists in central Africa." (flicker)

Tintin In The Congo did not even make it to the U.K. until 2005, over 70 years after its first appearance in French, because of the controversy surrounding it. When the publisher Egmont finally released the English version, it billed it as an "essential volume for collectors," making sure to wrap a label around the comic that warned readers of its potentially "offensive" content.

And the huge divide between post-colonial Britain and Belgium in the 1930s, when the kingdom still owned the Congo, adds to the shock of today's reader discovering Tintin's adventure for the first time. The story is filled with witch doctors, lazy natives who need to be put to work and over-the-top violence against animals.

According to Mark Rodwell, representative of Moulinsart--the firm that manages Hergé's estate--this explains why children ignorant of the past don't have the same reaction.

"The criticism is that it's not suitable for children," he told Forbes.com. "But it's the adults that have the problem with it. It's a book of its time." (source: Forbes)

Virginia's First Africans In 1619

2012-02-27T11:45:00.000-08:00

From the Washington Post, "Mystery of Va.'s First Slaves Is Unlocked 400 Years Later," by Lisa Rein, on 3 September 2006--JAMESTOWN -- They were known as the "20 and odd," the first African slaves to set foot in North America at the English colony settled in 1607.

For nearly 400 years, historians believed they were transported to Virginia from the West Indies on a Dutch warship. Little else was known of the Africans, who left no trace.

Now, new scholarship and transatlantic detective work have solved the puzzle of who they were and where their forced journey across the Atlantic Ocean began.

The slaves were herded onto a Portuguese slave ship in Angola, in Southwest Africa. The ship was seized by British pirates on the high seas -- not brought to Virginia after a period of time in the Caribbean. The slaves represented one ethnic group, not many, as historians first believed.

The discovery has tapped a rich vein of history that will go on public view next month at the Jamestown Settlement. The museum and living history program will commemorate the 400th anniversary of Jamestown's founding by revamping the exhibits and artifacts -- as well as the story of the settlement itself.

Although historians have thoroughly documented the direct slave trade from Africa starting in the 1700s, far less was known of the first blacks who arrived in Virginia and other colonies a century earlier. A story of memory and cultural connections between Africa and the early New World is being unearthed in a state whose plantation economy set the course for the Civil War.

"We went entirely back to the drawing board," said Tom Davidson, senior curator of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation. "The problem has always been that all of the things that make for a human story [of the Africans] were missing. . . . Now we can talk about the Africans with the same richness we talk about the English and the Powhatans."

Behind him, an Angolan man was depicted stripping bark from a baobab tree in a re-created village featured in the museum's new 30,000-square-foot gallery, which will open Oct. 16. It's double the space of the previous one, to cover a long span of the 17th century and the African story, which was barely featured before.

How the story of the charter generation of Africans in Virginia has come to life in a new $25 million museum wing is a tale of two scholars who helped connect two coasts of the Atlantic Ocean.

The early 1600s was a time of war and empire-building in Southwest Africa; Portuguese traders under the rule of the king of Spain had established the colony of Angola. The exporting of slaves to the Spanish New World was a profitable enterprise. The Portuguese waged war against the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo to the north, capturing and deporting thousands of men and women. They passed through a slave fortress at the port city of Luanda, still Angola's capital.

At Jamestown, tobacco was on the verge of a boom after the British had failed at several industries. Indentured servants from England were common in the settlement, now close to 1,000 people strong.

John Rolfe, Virginia's first tobacco planter and husband of the Indian princess Pocahontas, wrote the widely held account of the African landing in a letter to the Virginia Company of London. The captain of a Dutch warship that arrived in Jamestown in August 1619 "brought not any thing but 20 and odd Negroes, wch the Governor and Cape Marchant bought for victuale . . . at the best and easyest rate they could." Rolfe explained that the ship and another called the Treasurer had embarked from the West Indies.

A retired University of California at Berkeley historian, Engel Sluiter, made a startling discovery in the Spanish national archives in the late 1990s as he did research for a book on Spanish America. A colonial shipping document he uncovered in an account book identified a Portuguese slave ship called the San Juan Bautista. About 350 slaves were bound for Veracruz, on the east coast of modern-day Mexico, when the ship was robbed of its human cargo off the coast of Mexico in 1619 by two unidentified pirate ships, the record said.

Sluiter, who died in 2001, published his discovery in the William and Mary Quarterly. It caught the eye of John Thornton, an expert on the Portuguese colonies in Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The outlines of the other half of the story took shape.

"I said, 'I can figure out how these people were enslaved,' " said Thornton, a Boston University professor who, with his wife, historian Linda Heywood, is publishing a book on the slave trade between Angola and the North American colonies. Previous scholarship has documented the slave trade from Ghana, Senegal and other parts of West Africa. "We know Angola was a big exporter of slaves to Brazil and the Spanish colonies, but now we know that they showed up here," Thornton said.

Through records of a legal dispute between the pirate ships, Thornton identified the British vessels as the Treasurer and the White Lion, which was flying a Dutch flag. Each took 20 to 30 slaves before the San Juan Bautista continued to Veracruz. They landed at Jamestown within four days of each other and traded the Africans for provisions. The Treasurer then sailed to Bermuda, dropping off more slaves, and returned to Virginia a few months later, trading the final nine or 10 more.

Many Angolans followed -- not just to Virginia, but to New York and New England, say Thornton and Heywood, who are consultants to the Jamestown Settlement. Their research draws a portrait of the first Africans as urban people connected by common languages, who had had contact with Europeans for many years.

Virginia's first Africans spoke Bantu languages called Kimbundu and Kikongo. Their homelands were the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo, regions of modern-day Angola and coastal regions of Congo. Both were conquered by the Portuguese in the 1500s. The Africans mined tar and rock salt, used shells as money and highly valued their children, holding initiation ceremonies to prepare them for adulthood.

And they most likely had been baptized as Christians, because the kingdom of Ndongo converted to Christianity in 1490. Many were literate. This background may be one reason some of Virginia's first Africans won their freedom after years as indentured servants, the historians said.

The Portuguese and Catholic roots figure prominently on a glass wall in the new gallery at the Jamestown Settlement. Mareo, Christian, Nando, Acquera, Palmena, Cuba, Salvo -- they are among 400 African names engraved on the wall, one for each anniversary year.

One is Angelo, whose name appears on a 1624 census of the colony discovered in the past decade. She is listed as a "Negro woman" who came on the Treasurer and worked as a servant in the home of Capt. William Pierce and his wife, June. Historians assume the slave's name was Angela.

It is Angela, played by a young Angolan actress, who stars in the introductory film visitors will see as they watch the new story of Jamestown unfold. The 23-minute movie was filmed on a beach in Luanda in 2004.

The film will replace a 15-year-old version that gives the first Africans only a passing mention. Now visitors will be transported to a Portuguese cathedral in Luanda, where a Jesuit priest breaks bread with the captains of the San Juan Bautista. They discuss the souls to be saved and riches to be made from the continued shipment of slaves from Massangano, an inland city. The film cuts to a hut on the shore of the Kwanza River, where Angela, a young woman in her twenties, pounds grain and smiles. Then she and thousands of others are captured and taken to a beach at Luanda. A Jesuit priest asks her if she has been baptized, and she answers yes.

"Then she is a child of God. When she dies, she will go to heaven," the priest says. And the slave ship sets sail against the evening sun. (source: The Washington Post)

Brazil Diamond Slavery

2012-02-26T20:24:00.002-08:00

With mine officials nearby, Brazilian slaves wash the gravel from riverbeds to concentrate the denser minerals in which diamonds are found. Dependency on slave labor was an unfortunate part of early diamond mining in Brazil. "Diamond washing in Brazil." Published in 1884.

When diamonds were discovered by alluvial gold miners in Brazil in 1725, Indian diamond sources were near exhaustion and European demand for the stone continued unabated. From 1730 to 1870 Brazil was the world's major source of diamonds. Indeed, mining in Brazil was so active that by the late 1730s production far exceeded demand, and diamond prices fell by as much as 70%. Beginning in 1850, production rose again, following the discovery of rich deposits in Bahia, but after 1861 it rapidly declined as deposits were depleted, leading to a great shortage of rough diamonds in the European cutting centers in the late 1860s. (source: American Museum of Natural History)

Slaves Diamond Mining in the Serro Frio Region, Minas Gerais, Brazil

"Diamonds in Brazil"-- Until 1725, India was the world's only producer of diamonds. In that year, Brazilian natives tasked with washing sand as part of the gold panning process discovered the precious stones, prompting the Portuguese government to move the gold mining industry out en masse to make way for diamonds.

J. Willard Hershey, writing in his comprehensive history The Book of Diamonds, tells us that for the first few years after diamonds were discovered in Brazil, the Portuguese government allowed a few plantation owners to work the land for diamonds using slave labor. By the 1740s, the system had changed and contractors – usually in charge of teams of some 600 slaves – would receive exclusive rights to the diamonds in the land they were working. Most contractors sold the majority of their diamonds to the Portuguese crown.

In the second half of the 18th century, more diamond discoveries extended Brazil's diamond fields from Diamantia (formerly Tejuco, where the stones were first found) to Bahia in the north, Goyaz in the west, and Matto Grasso in the jungle.

As Brazilian diamonds began to infiltrate the European market, owners of Indian diamonds feared a glut that would devalue their own stones and began to spread erroneous rumors that Brazilian diamonds were inferior in quality. In fact, Brazilian diamonds – while small, averaging 1/4 to 1/2 carats – can match the quality of diamonds found anywhere, and have often been noted for their rich color. Brazil is also the only known source for black or carbonado diamonds.

Diamond Mining, Brazil, ca. 1770s

In 1772, the Portuguese government took over the diamond mining sector from the contractors, to no great success. In 1822, Brazil gained its independence and anyone who could afford to pay taxes was allowed to mine for diamonds. Slavery, however, was still legal and slaves did nearly all the actual diamond mining. Any slave who found a diamond was required to alert the overseer immediately. If the diamond was over 17 carats, the slave was handed not only his freedom, but the right to hunt for diamonds for himself. Slaves who found smaller diamonds were more modestly rewarded.

Slaves washing diamonds, Brazil

In 1818, Brazil's total diamond production stood at 3,240,000 carats. By 1850, the South American nation had produced some 10,000,000 carats. But in succeeding years, diamond production waned, and in 2009, according to the Kimberley Process Annual Global Summary, Brazil produced only 21,000 carats of rough diamonds valued at $830,000. (source: http://www.avipaz.com/DiamondsBrazil)

African American Jockeys in the USA

2012-02-26T17:29:00.000-08:00

Teresa Genaro, Contributor to Forbes Magazine, "A brief history of black jockeys in the United States" --The sport of horse racing is the only instance where the participation of blacks stopped almost completely while the sport itself continued—a sad commentary on American life…Isaac Murphy, so highly admired during his time for his skills and character, would have been ashamed of his sport. –Arthur Ashe, quoted by Edward Hotaling in They’re Off! Horse Racing at Saratoga

Isaac Murphy was the first jockey to win the Kentucky Derby three times, and he was the first black jockey to be inducted in the Thoroughbred racing Hall of Fame, in 1955. Oliver Lewis, the winning jockey in the first Kentucky Derby, in 1875, was African-American, one of 13 black jockeys in a 15-horse race that year. Black jockeys won 15 of the first 28 Kentucky Derbies.

But at any race track in this country now, you’d have a hard time finding an African-American in the saddle.

In the early days of racing in this country, African-American faces were prominent. Slaves in the south grew up on farms, working in stables, and plantation owners wouldn’t hesitate to put their slaves on their horses’ backs in informal racing in the south. When racing became organized sport in the early 19th century, black boys and men were in the vanguard in the saddle, dominating racing until the turn of the century.

But as was the case with so many other segments of American life, racism pushed black jockeys out of the saddle – literally and figuratively – and by the early part of the 20th century, they had virtually disappeared from horses’ backs at America’s biggest racetracks.

Jimmy Winkfield was a black jockey who rose to national prominence with his riding skills; he won the Kentucky Derby in 1901 and 1902, the first jockey to win America’s most famous race back to back, and one of only five to ever accomplish that feat. But even he was not immune to the social forces that worked to marginalize African-Americans’ role in racing.

Winkfield got his start in Kentucky, but in 1900, he came to New York to try his hand here, at the nation’s most prestigious tracks. The experiment didn’t last long.

As Joe Drape details in Black Maestro, his biography of Winkfield, the jockey’s skill was secondary to the color of his skin:

An Anti-Colored Union was in place, with the goal of running the black riders off the racetrack. It had begun earlier in the year at the Queens County track when the white jockeys…put the word out that if owners wanted to take home first-place purses, they’d best not ride the colored jockeys…Sometimes [the white jockeys] pocketed, or surrounded, a black jockey until they could ride him into and over the rail. Their whips found the thighs, hands, and face of the colored boy next to them more often than the horse they were riding. Every day a black rider ended up in the dirt; and every day racing officials looked the other way.

According to Drape, Winkfield only lasted a couple of weeks in New York. And within four years, he left the United States for Europe, where he became a celebrity on and off the track, marrying into Russian aristocracy. His influence on American racing ended in 1904, the year that he left this country. He was 22 years old.

In 2004, Winkfield was inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame, and the following year, the New York Racing Association named a race in his honor, run each year on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. In December 2004, NPR’s Tavis Smiley talked to John Lee, at the time director of broadcasting at NYRA, about the decision to name a race after Winkfield.

Lee: There had been an idea floating around that we really should name the stakes race we run on Martin Luther King, Jr. day for an African-American racing figure, and it had been a little bit on the back burner, and Jimmy Winkfield going into the Hall of Fame this year… helped push things along. And a key guy in moving it along was Coach Mike Jarvis, formerly of St John’s…he’s also a member of our New York Racing Association board of trustees…He…put it on the agenda for the next board of trustees meeting. He got a very receptive hearing from the chairman of the board, Barry K. Schwartz, and starting in 2005, we have the Jimmy Winkfield Stakes.

The first Winkfield stakes was run on January 17, 2005, won by a horse named Maddy’s Lion. Later that year, Representative Bobby Rush of Illinois sponsored a resolution honoring Winkfield and celebrating “the significant contributions and excellence of African American jockeys and trainers in the sport of horse racing and in the history of the Kentucky Derby.” The release for the resolution is dated May 6, 2005, the day before the Kentucky Derby.

Winkfield died in 1974; a New York Times obituary by Gerald Eskenazi observed, “Only turf historians, or perhaps those who heard stories told by their grandfathers, would have recognized Winkfield’s name in the United States this decade.” And perhaps not even turf historians: Winkfield’s name doesn’t appear in the index of William H.P. Robertson’s A History of Thoroughbred Racing in America, a seminal volume of racing history in this country.

In a 1988 article on African-Americans in sport, Ashe called the story of black jockeys “the saddest case,” comparing the role of African-Americans in racing in the late 19th century to their “domination” in the NBA today. And while acknowledgement of that role was for too long as invisible as African-Americans in the saddle over the last 100 years, a number of books in the last decade have explored, recorded, and honored the contributions of Murphy, Winkfield, and their contemporaries.

And at about 3:45 this afternoon, at Aqueduct Racetrack in Ozone Park in Queens, the Jimmy Winkfield Stakes will be run, the only race to be run today that will commemorate the contributions and accomplishments of African-Americans in racing. (source: Forbes)

Lexington, Kentuck's Slave Trade

2012-02-26T16:37:00.000-08:00

On 1 February 2012, Lexington Herald-Leader's columnist, Tom Eblen wrote: "Without the Civil War, who knows when Lexington's slave trade might have ended?" -- A century and a half ago, the Civil War began to reach Kentucky and bring an end to one of Lexington's most thriving businesses: the sale of people.

Slave labor built the prosperous hemp and tobacco plantations and stock farms of the antebellum Bluegrass. Whites also owned black slaves to cook their food, clean their homes and care for their children.

As Black History Month begins, it is worth noting that from the 1820s until the Civil War, Lexington was one of America's largest slave markets. Geography, demography and economics "put Lexington right in the center of this activity," said Gerald Smith, a University of Kentucky history professor.

By the 1820s, Virginia, Maryland and Central Kentucky had a surplus of slaves just as the Deep South's expanding cotton, rice and sugar plantations needed more labor. Much of that surplus ended up in Lexington to literally be "sold down the river." Listen to the words of the state song, My Old Kentucky Home; that is their story.

When the Civil War began, Lexington had more than 10,000 slaves — almost half the total population — and about 1,700 slave owners. Still, many slave owners looked down on slave traders as cruel beasts — perhaps not wanting to acknowledge the full picture of their own "peculiar institution."

Some sales were conducted privately at the several slave jails along Short Street. The largest of those jails were Megowan's at Short Street and Limestone, Pullum's on Broadway just north of Short, and Robards' on Short between Broadway and Bruce Street.

But many slaves were sold at public auction at Cheapside. The auction block was on the southwest corner of the Fayette County courthouse. On the northeast corner was the slave whipping post — a locust log 10 feet tall and a foot in diameter. It was installed in 1826, and when it wore out in the 1840s, it was replaced by a nearby poplar tree.

"It was an embarrassment for many Lexingtonians to have this slave trading going on downtown," Smith said. "It didn't conform with the cosmopolitan image they wanted to cultivate."

Cheapside Slave Auction Block, Lexington, Kentucky

When future President Abraham Lincoln visited his wife's family in Lexington for three weeks in the fall of 1847, five slaves were sold at Cheapside to settle a judgment that her father, Robert Todd, had won against their owner, John F. Leavy, according to William Townsend's book, Lincoln and the Bluegrass.

Several controversial laws tried to prohibit traders from bringing slaves to Kentucky from other states to be sold. An 1833 law, one of the toughest of any slave state was widely ignored. But after a pro-slavery state constitution was adopted in 1849, Kentucky's slave trade flourished. More than 15 percent of Kentucky slaves were sold south from 1850 to 1860.

Smith said that, more than any slave-trading city except New Orleans, Lexington was known for its "fancy girls" — light-skinned, mixed-race young women who were sold into sexual slavery. The best-known dealer was Lewis Robards, who kept his "choice stock" in parlors above his Short Street office.

Not all of these deals were conducted behind closed doors. The most infamous case involved a beautiful young woman named Eliza — said to be just 1⁄64 black — who was sold at Cheapside in May 1843 to satisfy the debts of her deceased master and father.

Abolitionist accounts of the sale tell of a hard-hearted auctioneer who exposed Eliza's breasts and thighs to encourage bidders, much to the horror of the assembled crowd. The bidding came down to a Frenchman and the Rev. Calvin Fairbanks, who had come to Lexington for the purpose of buying Eliza and setting her free. Fairbanks won with a bid of $1,485.

Without the Civil War, who knows when Lexington's trade in black men, women and children might have ended? Most whites 150 years ago were content to look the other way — unless slavery's victims looked too much like them.

"Several of these fancy girls, if you didn't know any better, you would have thought they were white," Smith said, adding that Eliza's story added steam to the abolitionist movement. "It was as though a white woman was on display, and people were not going to stand for that." -- By Tom Eblen (source Lexington Herald-Ledger)

Slave auction on Cheapside, Lexington. (1940)

Lexington, Kentucky: "Cheapside" -- During the dark era of slavery in Kentucky, the section of town in Lexington known as "cheapside" became the largest slave-trading locality in the state. In fact, the area was one of the most well known of the slave market districts in the South. Africans were beaten and families were separated forever as they were auctioned and sold in the courtyard. According to historical narratives, President Abraham Lincoln once observed the selling of slaves at this site. In the post-war period, "cheapside" served as a public square and a market. This photograph shows a court day in November 1887.
(source:http://www.visitlex.com/afamheritage-trail/03Cheapside.php )

Slaves of the Rebel General Thomas F. Drayton

2012-02-25T17:17:00.003-08:00

Slaves of the Rebel General Thomas F. Drayton

Background Information--This photograph, depicting a large group of slaves, was taken by Henry P. Moore at Hilton Head, South Carolina, in 1862. In 1860, fourteen prominent families and their slaves lived on Hilton Head and most spent their time off the island. At the time the picture was made, Hilton Head's population had grown to over forty thousand individuals and included Union troops, civilian storekeepers, missionaries, prisoners of war, and slaves seeking refuge from their owners.

In 1856, soldier Thomas Fenwick Drayton took control of his wife’s parents’ seven-hundred-acre Fish Haul Plantation. The plantation was largely dedicated to producing cotton. Fifty-two slaves worked and lived on the plantation. (source: J. Paul Getty Museum Education Department)

May 1862 Photograph of Drayton Plantation--Negroes Quarters--Hilton Head, SC

This image is one of several Moore made at Hilton Head. Revealing the everyday lives of slaves and former slaves, his photographs from this period include images of slaves’ living quarters and workers ginning and sorting cotton. This image depicts slaves who were in the process of being made free by the federal government. The white soldier, who was likely a Union soldier, is standing in the front as though he is overseer or master. Details of the slaves’ clothing and accessories can be seen in this picture. The women, who are all sitting in a lower position, relative to the men, are wearing wraps or kerchiefs on their heads. This African style was perpetuated in the United States by descendants of the original slaves from Africa. Although some garments worn by slaves could be bought ready-made, much of the clothing on a plantation was tailored by enslaved seamstresses. (source: J. Paul Getty Museum Education Department)

Confederate General Thomas Drayton

From the Washington Times, on 7 November 2010, "Two brothers, two flags and one battle in Port Royal," - The Civil War by Martha M. Boltz: VIENNA, VA.— November 8, 2010 — Two brothers went to war, one with the Confederate Army, the other a Union naval officer. One went north, one went south; both were involved in a naval battle of Port Royal, South Carolina, with which few are familiar, which resulted in a Union victory. Even in death they lie on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.

The problem with Fort Royal was that the larger Union troops came into the battle with a significant edge over their Confederate opponents who manned two forts, one on either side of the Sound. Fort Walker on the south near Hilton Head, had 23 guns, with 18 of them directed toward the ocean and a fort with as many as 255 men.

On the north, Fort Beauregard on Phillips Island, had 19 guns and a garrison of almost 150 men. Blockading Union ships had patrolled the area throughout the war; it was difficult for the Confederate forces to come into the Sound to refuel or take on coal.

The Union naval forces who attacked them on November 7, 1861 came ‘loaded for bear,’ as they say. The seamen, under the leadership of Flag Officer Samuel duPont, had a total fleet of 75 warships, and several thousand Marines on board, augmented by an Army of 12,000. The only equalizer was the prevailing opinion that naval forces could not outman and outgun land forces. Probably no one really expected that duPont’s men would actually attempt an attack on two forts simultaneously, which was considered to be a project for ground troops.

Still the original battle plan on November 1 had to be abandoned when typical bad Atlantic coastal weather set in. As anyone who has been on more than one Caribbean cruise can attest, the likelihood of strong winds and stronger seas is very likely as one passes Cape Hatteras. On this particular day, the storm was a good strong one, resulting in the naval fleet being scattered with several transport ships being sunk. There would be no attacking the two forts for the time being, and it would be up to duPont to find a way to make it work or face a failure.

He was aware that Cape Hatteras had been successfully attacked three months earlier, and felt that by using the force and flexibility of the steam powered ships, he could better take down the fort. DuPont directed his ships to not stop for the actual attack, but to continue moving in such a way that they literally formed an elliptical shape at the mouth of the Sound. In this manner they could attack both Fort Wagner and Fort Beauregard almost simultaneously. This provided the ships the ability to bombard the land forts in a continual barrage, continuing this method as long as was needed. It would be harder for the defenders in the fort to hit moving targets!

On November 7, his plan went into effect and the constant firing continued from 9:30 a.m. until 1:15 p.m. as duPont led his squadron into the Sound. The Rebels met this large force with four ships, a rather uneven match. It was not that much later that the Union sailors saw that the garrison troops appeared to be retreating from Fort Walker, a facet later substantiated when it was found that only three of the guns facing the attackers were still operable.

The losses were light on the Union side, only 31 had been killed or wounded. For the Southerners the figures were not as good since they counted 66 casualties. DuPont’s strategy had worked, Fort Walker was a shell of its former self and the Union Navy still had all of its ships. Shortly thereafter, Fort Beauregard was abandoned. There was now no hope that the Confederacy could prevent Union forces from coming into Port Royal Bay.

Port Royal Ferry

The net result was that the Union ended up with an invaluable asset – readily accessible stations for coal and other supplies to keep the blockaders operating. It was a doubly essential area, being located between Charleston, SC and Savannah, GA. And the Union troops had verified their opinion that these two garrisons were always low on ammunition and not staffed adequately.

They had been easy targets.center; "

Confederate Brigadier General Thomas F. Drayton and brother Union Naval Commander Percival Drayton

As to our two young brothers, Brig. Gen. Thomas F. Drayton of the 50th Georgia was a West Point graduate, part of General James Longstreet’s troops, in charge of Fort Royal. Thomas was the eldest, and after the war he went to Mecklenburg County, North Carolina where he died in 1891 and is buried.

His brother, Commodore Percival Drayton, a midshipman, was Captain of the U.S.S. Pocahontas, which was one of the Union fleet. in fact it was to him that Admiral Farragut uttered his famous order, "Damn the torpedoes,full speed ahead!" He, too, survived the war but only barely, dying in August of 1865.

He was buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. There stands today a historical marker in Beaufort County, SC, near the gated community of Port Royal Plantation, which reads as follows:

“To honor the memory of two gallant gentlemen of South Carolina. Thomas Fenwick Drayton; Brigadier General, C.S.A. and his brother Commodore Percival Drayton, U.S.N., Captain of U.S.S. Hartford, and later the first Chief of Naval Operations.

The brothers met at the outbreak of hostilities, shook hands, and Each went the way his conscience directed.

Thomas elected to defend his State. Percival to follow his flag.

On November 7, 1861 the brothers met in battle. Commander Percival Drayton, on the gunboat Pocahontas, attacked Fort Walker, on which General Thomas Drayton was in command.” (source: The Washington Times)

South Carolina's Magnolia Plantation & Gardens

2012-02-25T00:39:00.000-08:00

The Magnolia Plantation House, Charleston, South Carolina, U.S.A.

From The National Trust for Historic Preservation: Plantation and Gardens in Charleston, S.C., may be famous for its gardens, but it's also notable as one of the few places in America where black people have been living and working for more than three centuries. From 1679 until the 1990s, African Americans have been living in cabins there, tending Magnolia's grounds.

Now, for the first time ever, the five remaining cabins, built between 1850 and 1900, have been restored. On Feb. 28, the plantation will hold a grand opening, and tours of the new exhibit, called "From Slavery to Freedom," will begin the following day.

"It just seemed like the kind of thing whose time had come," says Taylor Nelson, whose family founded Magnolia Plantation in the 1600s. "What sparked the idea to actually [restore the cabins] is that I was working for a couple of years with my grandfather at Magnolia for a couple years, and he passed away. We thought it was an appropriate time to tell that story."

Nelson organized a luncheon last year with the descendants of slaves and freedmen who had lived in the cabins. "We all got together to talk about how their input could be taken into this project, and the lunch ended with everyone holding hands and singing 'Amazing Grace'."

Three of the five cabins had no foundations, and all had water and termite damage before the restoration. (Credit: Rock Creek Craftsmen)

The cabins "were in pretty bad shape. They were in danger of falling to pieces," says DJ Tucker, senior project contractor at The Living History Group, based in Charleston, the exhibit's designers. In January 2007, before the work began, archaeologists conducted a six-month survey of the area.

"We were just gobsmacked about the number of Colonial artifacts we were finding," Tucker says: a cup, a candlestick, a button from a British uniform sold to slaves, and pieces of Colono Ware, early pottery made by African slaves. "It was tremendous."

Last February, workers focused on the cabins. "Once we got past the [1980s] additions, we found the craftsmanship was excellent," says Kevin Meek, CEO of Charleston-based Rock Creek Craftsmen. "We recycled all the materials we could; preservation is the ultimate green."

The Living History Group restored each of the cabins to a different time period: an 1850 slave cabin, an 1870 freedmen's home, a 1900 gardener's home, a 1930 gardener's home, and the 1969 Civil rights-era home of the Leech Family, third-generation residents of Magnolia, who lived in the cabin without running water until the 1970s.

On a tour, visitors will listen to an interpreter highlight the cabins' histories as well as parts of the preservation project. Then they'll be able to wander through the structures, including the oldest cabin, where half of the two-family dwelling has been left unrestored as a time capsule.

(source: http://www.preservationnation.org/magazine/2009/todays-news/sc-plantation-to-open.html)

The Magnolia Plantation and Garden's website offers this selection "From Slavery to Freedom: The Magnolia Cabin Project"

Magnolia's Cabin Project began more than four years ago in an effort to preserve five historic structures that date back to 1850. These former slave dwellings now serve as the focal point for an award-winning 45-minute program in African-American history.

Magnolia recognizes the importance of acknowledging the vital role that Gullah people and culture plays in any interpretation of Lowcountry history. By addressing this often overlooked part of the region's narrative, Magnolia seeks to respectfully afford credit where credit is due.

Visitors have the option to take a shuttle to the cabins, where they will experience an engaging and interactive discussion of the dynamic issues that shape this delicate inquiry. Afterward, time is given to allow everyone the opportunity to explore each cabin to appreciate the lengthy period in which the buildings were actively occupied - from the 1850s to the late-1990s. This arc of history conveys the tumultuous times continuously challenging African-American families from slavery, the Jim Crow/segregation era and through the modern Civil Rights period.

Magnolia promises visitors will leave with a newfound perspective rooted in cutting-edge historical and archaeological studies that consistently serve to inform and astonish all who visit.

Cabin A - Circa 1850's Slave Cabin

Built sometime in the early 1850's, this pine-framed duplex was designed to hold two separate families with as many as six people per room. Enslaved African-Americans lived here until Charleston fell to Union forces in February 1865.

Cabin B - 1926 Gardener's Home

Built in the 1850's, this cabin was restored to reflect the mid 1920's era when it was the home of one of Magnolia's gardeners. The Hastie family often brought newspapers with them from Charleston and New York, which were used for cabin insulation and are recreated here.

Cabin C - 1969 Leach Family Home

Also erected in the 1850's, this cabin was later inhabited by free African-Americans working at Magnolia. The Leach family boasted a long lineage of prestigious gardeners dating back to the early 1930's, and Johnnie Leach resided here from 1946 until 1969.

Cabin D - 1870 Freedmen's House

African-American workers resided in this cabin off and on into the 1980's, making extensive alterations over the years. Magnolia Plantation restored this 1850's structure to its 1870's condition to illustrate a time when many former slaves became gardeners, porters and guides to the many visitors who traveled to Charleston aboard steamboats once tourism began its rise after the Civil War.

Cabin E - Circa 1900 Gardener's Home

This is the only cabin on this street not built during slavery. All indicators point to the building's completion occurring around 1900, and would have provided shelter for an individual or couple without children. The last person to inhabit this cabin was groundskeeper Allen Hinge, who left in 1999. (source: Magnolia Plantation & Gardens)

Albion Tourgee: Citizenship Rights For ALL!

2012-02-24T05:16:00.004-08:00

From North Carolina's News and Record's Opinion Page, "THE SIT-INS: Albion Tourgee a pioneer for rights," on 31 January 2010, by Professor Frank Woods:

After much hesitation and anticipation, the International Civil Rights Center & Museum will soon open its doors. A broad spotlight will be cast on Greensboro in recognition of its activist spirit in the quest for equality, one that reaches deep into the past and beyond the transformative day of Feb. 1, 1960.

Woolworth's Luncheon Counter located at the International Civil Rights Center & Museum (Greensboro, NC)

The city’s history is, in fact, steeped with courageous individuals who have lobbied intensely for positive change in the midst of racial injustice and, sometimes, sacrificed body and soul to secure for all the precious guarantees found in the 14th and 15th amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

Across the street from the museum, is an informational marker that honors a former resident of Greensboro who made it his primary mission to secure basic rights of freedom for newly emancipated slaves and to see that when the new state constitution was framed, it was favorable to black advancement.

Albion Winegar Tourgee

The same man is also honored by a historical marker on Lee Street near the ramp leading up to Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, citing the location where his home once stood. Obviously, he left a mark on the city but the city hardly knows of him today. His name was Albion Winegar Tourgee, the most “infamous” carpetbagger to set foot in North Carolina.

Map of Greensboro, North Carolina, U.S.A.

Born in Williamsfield, Ohio, in 1838, Tourgee grew up in Kingsfield, Ohio, an area of strong abolitionist sentiment. He later joined the Union army at the outbreak of the Civil War and sustained a severe wound to his spine. After the war, Tourgee’s injury left him in poor health. In an attempt to recoup his strength, he decided to try the warmer climate of the South, and Greensboro was his destination.

Tourgee’s early years in the city during Reconstruction were filled with righteous outrage as he continually witnessed the mistreatment of “freedmen.” He soon drifted into a personal crusade for social justice and became increasingly vocal on behalf of African American rights. This, in turn, caused him to be vilified and ostracized by whites in the state who wished to see the old social and political order preserved.

Tourgee took an active part in the N.C. State Constitutional Convention held in Raleigh in 1868, and served as one of the chief framers on the new constitution. He pushed for a progressive document that called for the inclusion of blacks in the creation of a “New South.” For his efforts, Tourgee was branded a derisive figure in North Carolina politics and a “contemptible friend of the Negro.”

North Carolina Ku Klux Klansmen, 1870

Wearing that label like a badge of honor, Tourgee continued to be an outspoken champion of African American rights and liberties. He was elected a judge of the Superior Court, Seventh Judicial District of North Carolina — a position that gave him the authority to enforce his ideals throughout the Piedmont. Judge Tourgee continued to lobby against those who opposed African American progress, even though his life was threatened by the newly formed Ku Klux Klan.

Undaunted, Tourgee attacked that organization with a scathing expose titled “The Invisible Empire.” This material was later incorporated into a best-selling novel, “A Fool’s Errand” (1879).

Tourgee left the state in the waning years of Reconstruction as the “Old South” was being redeemed.

Living outside of the South did not dampen Tourgee’s efforts at racial redemption. He continued to write and speak on matters of race.

More importantly, he founded a national civil rights group in 1891, the National Citizens’ Rights Association, to deal with mounting racial injustices throughout the country caused by restrictive “Jim Crow” laws and lynchings.

Homer Plessy, the man who set the standard for the American Apartheid system called "Jim Crow," was only 1/8 African American and 7/8 white. In 1896 Homer Plessy became the standard bearer of how black is black, hence the "one drop rule" has been in full effect in the United States since 1896.

But Tourgee’s greatest battle against the forces of oppression came in a showdown before the Supreme Court in 1896 as the chief counsel for Homer Plessy in his case against the Louisiana railroad company that forced him into a segregated car (Plessy v. Ferguson). Unfortunately, Tourgee’s eloquence and fervor were not enough to sway a majority of the high court justices and the floodgates of discrimination were thrown open in America. Now that he was a beaten man, Tourgee’s activism shortly ground to a halt.

As local, state and national officials, along with the curious public, descend on the new civil rights museum, many will walk the same street that Tourgee trod long ago. In a way, they will follow in his footsteps to a “sacred place” in the struggle for equal rights. Had Judge Tourgee been alive on Feb. 1, 1960, there is little doubt that he would have been at the Woolworth building, lending his support to the Greensboro Four as they accelerated the cause he championed. (source: Professor Frank Woods, UNCG, published in The News & Record).

Low Country Rice Fields: A Feat as Great as Building the Pyramids

2012-02-21T13:02:00.000-08:00

The black swamp, lily pads and cypress trees on a one time rice plantation.

A Feat as Great as Building the Pyramids

Rice cultivation is dirty, hard, dangerous work. Contemporaries compared the work of converting 150,000 acres of virgin land into tidal plantations as an undertaking comparable to building the Pyramids or re-channeling the Euphrates River.

An acre of mud flats would be measured into a rectangular field. Slaves would clear the land, chopping down and burning or removing any trees. Oxen were the only draft animals that might be used to assist, but they had to wear a special boot or else they would sink in the muck. Using only picks and shovels, slaves excavated a five-by-five foot ditch through the clearing that would serve both as the canal that brought tidal waters to the field and its main drain. The slaves used the muddy soil they had excavated to form a levee as high as six feet tall around the field. Slaves constructed sluice gates (first of cypress plug trunks and later hanging floodgates) to drain the water from the field for sowing and flood it for cultivation. Typically the following season, the field would be divided into four ¼-acre sections. Slaves added quarter drains (secondary canals) and cleared stumps. With the extra weight of water-laden soil, the danger of snakes and alligators that had been stranded behind the levee, mosquitoes and hot summer temperatures, the slave's work was dangerous and exhausting.

The cultivation of the rice began in late spring, around April, with the seed being sown. Ploughs were dragged through the wet soil to create furrows about three inches deep spaced 18 inches apart. Then, the slaves planted the rice in rows called drills. Slaves' daily work included operating the sluice gates with the tides. They flooded the fields following their planting of the seeds to the time of sprouting. After three weeks, they weeded and flooded the plants to cover the top of the young plant, gradually draining it halfway down the stem after a few days. The fields were drained and weeded, and the ground around the plants "hilled up" (hoed). Around mid-June or early July, the plants were gradually flooded and remained underwater for two months. Slaves freshened the water in the fields to keep it from stagnating. Tidal water is where fresh, inland water meets the salt water of the ocean. Fresh water rises on top of salt water, so the rice fields would be sown below the level of the high tide. A slave would open a sluice gate to skim off the fresh water floating on the top of the tidal waters to irrigate the crop, shutting it off before the salt water could intrude and kill the plants. At low tide, the gates were reopened to drain the fresh water out. A slave would be expected to weed a 105 foot square plot (¼-acre) in one day. Charles Ball, a runaway slave reported:

Watering and weeding the rice is considered one of the most unhealthy occupations on a southern plantation, as the people are obliged to live for several weeks in the mud and water, subject to all the unwholesome vapours that arise from stagnant pools, under the rays of a summer sun, as well as the chilly autumnal dews of night.

At harvest time, slaves with iron sickles reaped the rice stalks, bound them into sheaves (bundles), and stacked them in mule-drawn wagons. The slaves would unload the sheaves on a piece of hard ground or a barn's threshing floor and allow it to dry before threshing it with flails. (Treading the grain with mules was easier but resulted in more damage to the rice, so slave labor was used rather than animal labor.)

Rice must be processed to be the familiar white grain we see at the grocery store. The seed shell has to be removed, and then the brown coat of bran polished off the grain. Slaves used wooden mortars and pestles to mill the rice, separating the hulls from the grain with hand-sewn black rush winnowing baskets. An account from 1775 reported, "When winnowed it is ground, to free the rice from the husk; this is winnowed again, and put into a mortar large enough to hold half a bushel, in which it is beat with a pestle by negroes to free it from its thick skin; this is very laborious work." Following the pounding, the grain was sifted to remove the flour and dust produced in the process, and finally the rice was run through a market sieve, which separated the whole grains from the broken grains. Grains that were damaged in the process were called "little rice" and brought a lower price than whole grains. When the rice was clean, it would be placed in barrels that held roughly 600 pounds each. Rice mills appeared in the late 19th century, first operated by oxen, then by water (Jonathan Lucas, 1787), and finally tide-operated (1792). Although much of the work was back-breaking, unskilled labor, skilled slave artisans, such as carpenters, coopers, millwrights, and surveyors, contributed a great deal to the engineering, construction, and maintenance of the rice plantations.

Rather than the "gang system," where overseers or drivers directly supervised a group of workers, most rice plantations used the "task system," a specific amount of work that an average hard-working slave could complete in ten hours. When the slave completed the work to the driver's satisfaction, he or she could use the remaining hours of the day for their own purposes. Typically work began at dawn to avoid the worst heat of the day.

On rice plantations, a daily task might be the excavation of 24 linear feet of main drain excavation (the ditch dug five-by-five feet for each linear foot) or 133 feet of quarter-drain excavation (three feet by 18 inches). Sam Polite, a freedman, explained:

Every slave have task to do, sometime one task, sometime two, and sometime three. You have for work till task through. Have to cut cord of marsh grass maybe. Task of marsh been eight feet long and four feet high...If slave don't do task, they get licking with lash on naked back.

Fugitive slave Charles Ball reported one overseer's method of controlling slaves:

I gave them a hundred lashes more than a dozen times; but they never quit running away, till I chained them together, with iron collars round their necks, and chained them to spades, and made them do nothing but dig ditches to drain the rice swamps. They could not run away then, unless they went together, and carried their chains and spades with them. I kept them in this way two years....

Deadly Work

The mortality of slaves working in the rice fields was extremely high. One 18th-century writer declared:

If a work could be imagined peculiarly unwholesome and even fatal to health, it must be that of standing like the negroes, ankle and mid-leg deep in water which floats an ouzy mud, and exposed all the while to a burning sun which makes the air they breathe hotter than the human blood; these poor wretches are then in a furness of stinking putrid effluvia.

Up to a third of Low Country slaves died within a year of their arrival. Records from Somerset Place Plantation in North Carolina indicate that 80 Africans were brought to the site in June 1786 to transform the land into a rice plantation. By 1803, only 15 of the original 80 slaves were still alive. At Gowrie Plantation in South Carolina during an eight-year period between 1846 and 1854, 92 more slaves died than were born; 90 percent of the infants who survived birth died before they were 16 years old.

Part of the problem was poor health. The environment in which rice is cultivated is the perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes. Both malaria and yellow fever may have been introduced from Africa to the rice cultivation regions by the slave trade. Slaves suffering from malaria may have brought the disease to the New World, where it infected Anopheles mosquitoes. Yellow fever victims would not have survived the Middle Passage, but Aedes (Stegiomyia) aegypti mosquitoes could have bred in the slave ships' open-water barrels. A sickle cell genetic defect provided protection from malaria to some slaves, while yellow fever survivors had a lifelong immunity to the disease. Nonetheless, malaria and yellow fever claimed the lives of many slaves working the rice plantations. Zamba, an African king brought as a slave to South Carolina, reported, "Under the influence of a powerful sun, this practice naturally produces what is called marsh miasma, which engenders fevers of a dangerous nature: fatal, indeed to white men in most cases; and even negroes, in some seasons, suffer greatly from it."

Slaves' nutrition, clothing, and shelter typically were poor. A pint of boiled rice, a pint of cornmeal, and either a couple of pounds of butter or fat rendered from bacon were a slave's typical daily ration, supplemented by salt and molasses. Those slaves who completed task work might grow vegetable gardens with beans or yams or fish, if near the water, to improve their diet. Although high in carbohydrates, it was a low-protein, low-calorie diet for persons involved in heavy physical labor, and the resulting malnutrition contributed to slaves' early deaths. Slave quarters consisted of wooden frame buildings in which a family or a group of individuals lived. They were inexpensive to build, Johann Bolzius explained, because "One buys only a few nails for them." They were also flimsy and prone to fire. Most plantation owners provided their slaves with five yards of heavy, coarse cloth from which to make winter clothing each year and a pair of shoes. Slaves might spin their own summer clothing, although some provided linen pants or skirts, and a cap or kerchief for head cover. Some plantations had sick rooms or slave hospitals, but since doctors didn't know the cause of fevers and resorted to blood-letting and purging medicines, slaves may have fared as well (or as poorly) remaining in the slave quarters and taking home remedies.

Working in the kitchen at the old rice plantation

As rice plantations expanded, the demand on slaves and their labor increased. Modern economists have noted that, unlike virtually every other slave-produced commodity, the output per slave in the rice industry grew from 2,250 pounds around 1750 to over 3,000 pounds by 1800. In human terms, this represented an enormous amount of physical hardship and arduous labor.

Gold Mines of Grain

The cultivation of rice required not only a large initial investment of labor, but also required money. In the late 18th century, it cost £2,500 to establish a 200-acre rice plantation. Most of the money was required for the purchase of slaves (an estimated cost of £1,800). In 1710, Thomas Nairne estimated that it was necessary to have 30 slaves to start a rice plantation; contemporaries calculated that a field hand should produce a ton (2,000 pounds) of rice each year working on two to three acres of old rice fields or five acres of new rice fields.

Based on average prices for rice between 1768 and 1772, the average slave generated five-six barrels of rice worth £15 ($975). Between 1722 and 1770, slave prices averaged around $150; from 1780-1809 they were substantially higher, averaging $305 per slave. By 1850, prices averaged $480 per slave. In the 1760s and 1770s, prices for women slaves grew more quickly than for men and sometimes exceeded them. Since African women (rather than men) milled rice on a daily basis and broke less grain than inexperienced male slaves, this may have been a case of price responding to demand for an important skill. A contemporary remarked, "Rice is raised so as to buy more Negroes, and Negroes are bought so as to get more rice."

Consequently, rice plantations could produce profits of up to 26 percent, prompting one Savannah River planter to describe his rice fields as "gold mines." For example a Charles Manigault invested $49,500 in Gowrie Plantation in 1833, and, by 1861, the plantation was worth $266,000.

(source: http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_rice.htm)

Slavery in the South Carolina Rice Fields

2012-02-21T09:13:00.000-08:00

From Slavery in America, "Rice and Slavery: A Fatal Gold Seede," by Jean M. West: -- On New Year's Day, many Americans, especially those with southern origins, eat a dish combining black-eyed peas and rice called "Hoppin' John." It's supposed to bring good luck since people who "eat poor New Year's Day, eat rich the rest of the year." Most would be surprised to learn that rice is not a plant native to the New World. They would be even more surprised to learn that the dish has roots in tragedy rather than in luck. In Alexander Falconbridge's 1788 narrative, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa, he describes food served during the Middle Passage and reports, "The diet of the negroes, while on board, consists chiefly of horse-beans, boiled to the consistence of pulp; boiled yams and rice, and sometimes a small quantity of beef or pork." How did rice come to the New World, and why is its New World history intertwined with slavery?

Ghana West African Rice Fields

Rice of the Old World

Rice is a tall annual grass that grows in a variety of conditions although it flourishes in wet, warm tropical climates. It is an ancient plant whose origins go back over 130 million years, hypothetically when South America, Africa, India, Australia, and India were joined in the southern hemisphere super-continent of Gondwanaland. When the continents broke up, a red rice of the species oryza glaberrima evolved in Africa, while today's dominant crop species, oryza sativa, evolved in Asia. People living along the Niger, Sine-Saloum, and Casamance Rivers began cultivating African wet rice around 2,000 to 3,000 years ago; archaeologists have discovered Asian rice grain imprints dating between 5,200 and 4,000 years ago in northern China, while Asian rice cultivation may have begun several thousand years earlier. It is believed that members of Alexander the Great's army brought the Asian variety of rice back from India, leading to its cultivation in the Mediterranean region, including Spain and Portugal.

Rice Growers in Sierra Leone, West Africa

Portuguese explorers reported African rice fields south of Cape Verde, probably along the Gambia River, as early as 1446. In the 1590s, André Alvares d'Almada reported that West African rice farmers, "construct dikes of earth for fear of the tide, but despite them the river breaks them frequently, flooding the rice fields. Once the rice has sprouted, they pull it out and transplant it...." West Africans learned to grow rice in the Niger River Delta and, from modern Senegal to Liberia, adapted different methods of production to different climatic conditions including tidal floodplains, inland wetlands, rain-fed Guinea uplands, and mangrove swamps along the Atlantic coast. Although different tribal groups divided rice cultivation work differently, women typically sowed the rice (covering the grains with clay before planting), milled rice using mortar and pestle, created coiled-grass fanner baskets to winnow rice as well as storage baskets for the cleaned rice, and cooked rice for their families. The Portuguese introduced Asian rice to Africa around the middle of the 16th century; by the height of the slave trade many Africans were familiar with the techniques of cultivating both the African and Asian species of rice.

South Carolina Low Country Rice Fields

Rice Comes to the New World

Early Spanish explorers introduced Asian rice to the Caribbean and South America; rice first arrived in Mexico in the 1520s at Veracruz, which was selected for its warm, wet, Gulf climate. Portuguese colonizers and their African slaves introduced Asian rice at about the same time to Brazil.

Tradition says that rice arrived in South Carolina around 1685 when sea captain John Thurber's ship was being repaired in Charleston. Thurber gave a sack of "Gold Seede" rice from Madagascar, a great rice-producing island off the east coast of Africa, either to Dr. Henry Woodward or Thomas Smith, who was a landgrave (governor of a major land grant). However, a bushel of rice had been sent to the colony on the supply ship William and Ralph as early as spring1672. By September 26, 1691, the General Assembly of South Carolina passed an act permitting colonists to pay their taxes in rice, as well as other commodities. According to Edward Randolph, the collector of customs, planters exported 330 tons of rice from Charles Town (Charleston) to England and English Caribbean colonies in 1700; the governor complained that they had produced more rice than there were ships on which to export the grain. While some of the red-colored rice in early South Carolina was the African oryza glaberrima and may have arrived on slave ships, planters quickly adopted two varieties of the Asian oryza sativa, "Carolina White" and the prized, high-yield "Carolina Gold." Rice cultivation was centered in the Low Country of South Carolina, with the Georgetown District emerging as a major production zone. North Carolina's Lower Cape Fear Region (from the 1720s onward), northeastern Spanish Florida, and coastal Georgia (after the 1750 repeal of the Trustee's ban on slavery) also produced rice throughout the colonial and antebellum eras.

Many of early settlers of the Carolinas (both the Cape Fear settlers of 1663 and the Ashley River emigrants of 1670) came from Barbados. These experienced sugar planters were offered land incentives to bring slaves; for example, contracts from 1664 guaranteed emigrants from Barbados a bonus of 20 acres for every male slave and ten acres for every female slave they brought to the new colony. However, the Carolinas were too cold for the cultivation of sugar, and the exports of lumber, cattle, and deerskins provided slim profits.

Slavery in the Rice Fields

The English settlers began to enslave the region's Native Americans in large numbers, selling them in the slave trade and using them as laborers. African slaves were imported from the earliest days, as well. In 1671, Sir John Yeamans arrived at the Ashley River settlement (the future Charleston) with 200 African slaves. According to South Carolina's 1708 census, there were 3,000 African slaves and 1,400 Native American slaves in a total population of 9,500. However, smallpox and yellow fever killed many Native Americans and it was impossible to get enough European indentured slaves to provide the colony with adequate labor. Indeed, Charleston merchant Samuel Eveleigh asserted in 1735, "I am positive that the Commodity can't be produced by white people. Because the work is too laborious, the heat very intent, and the whites can't work in the wett at that season as Negrs do to week rice." By the 1730s Carolinian slavery was predominantly African.

From early on there was a close relationship between African slavery and rice cultivation. Planters buying slaves showed some preference for West Africans from the Gold Coast. In An Account on Life in the Carolinas in 1750, Johann Martin Bolzius claimed, "The best Negroes come from the Gold Coast in Africa, namely Gambia and Angolo." In the 1730s, roughly 12 percent of South Carolina's slaves were from the centers of rice-production (the Upper Guinea Coast, Senegambia, and the Windward Coast), but that number rose to 54 percent by mid-century, and 64 percent in the 1770s before receding in the 1780s; averaging 43 percent for the 18th century. Some slave brokers in coastal Africa apparently trained captives in African rice fields prior to selling them to slave traders bound for the Carolinas; the Charleston Evening Gazette of July 11, 1785, advertised "a choice cargo of Windward and Gold Coast Negroes, who have been accustomed to the planting of rice." These African slaves brought knowledge from their homelands of different modes of rice cultivation, soil and water management and milling, which they adapted to the rice plantations of the Southeast, such as using hollow cypress log "trunks" to control the flow of water from levees (embankments) into fields. (source: http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_rice.htm)

Revisiting The Human Zoo Phenomena in Paris

2012-02-17T08:05:00.000-08:00

From the BBC News Paris, " Human zoos: When real people were exhibits," on 27 December 2011, by Hugh Schofield--An exhibition in Paris looks at the history of so-called human zoos, that put inhabitants from foreign lands, mostly African countries, on display as article of curiosity.

Over four centuries from the first voyages of discovery, European societies developed an appetite for exhibiting exotic human "specimens" shipped back to Paris, London or Berlin for the interest and delectation of the crowd.

What started as wide-eyed curiosity on the part of observers turned into ghoulish pseudo-science in the mid-1800s, as researchers sought out physical evidence for their theory of races.

Finally, in high colonial times, hundreds of thousands of people visited "human zoos" created as part of the great international trade fairs.

Here they could watch whole villages of Kanaks or Senegalese, with real-life inhabitants paid to act out war dances or religious rituals before their colonial masters.

The story is told at the Quai Branly museum in Paris until June 2012, mainly through the display of paintings, old photographs, archive film, posters and postcards.

The aim of the exhibition is explicit - to teach how Western societies created a sense of "the other" in regard to foreign peoples, thus legitimizing their eventual domination.

The information allows people to understand why there are still fault-lines in society based on the colour of our skins."”

Ex-footballer Liliane Thuram

"What we tried to do is conduct a kind of archaeology of the stereotype," says curator Nanette Snoep.

The display, entitled "Inventing the Savage", was the inspiration of the Caribbean-born former international footballer Liliane Thuram, who today heads his own anti-racism foundation.

"I have long been interested in slavery because of the way my own family was affected by it," says Thuram.

"It became clear to me that racism was above all an intellectual construction. And as such, it was also susceptible to de-construction.

"That's what we are trying to do with the exhibition: putting on display the information that allows people to understand why there are still faultlines in society based on the colour of our skins."

At the start, all was relatively innocent. One of the first paintings is of four Greenlanders brought to the Danish court in 1664 by a Dutch sailor. They stare out with a look as bewildered as those that must have been on the faces of their captors.

"What is fascinating is that on top of the painting are written their names. In other words, at this early stage they are seen as individuals. Exotic yes, but people," says Snoep. "It is later when the names disappear that the relationship deteriorates."

Another early portrait is of the Tahitian man called Omai, who was brought to the court of King George III in London by the explorer Joseph Banks.

In his book The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes describes Omai as "quick-witted, charming and astute. His exotic good looks… were much admired in society, especially among the more racy of the aristocratic ladies."

But describing this same portrait, Holmes adds: "It is not clear if [Omai] is Banks's companion or his trophy."

Guest or specimen? If there was room for ambiguity in the early days - when explorers and explored often found each other mutually intriguing - this disappeared with the new certainties of the colonial epoch.

The saddest emblem of the coming era was the South African Saartjie Baartman, later to be known as the Hottentot Venus. Born around 1780, she was brought to London in 1810 and put on display.

She had the genetic characteristic known as steatopygia - extremely protuberant buttocks and elongated labia - which evidently delighted the cabaret-goers of the British capital.

Can it teach us anything about modern attitudes to race?

Later she came to Paris, and was analysed by the budding racial anthropologists. According to the exhibition catalogue, one scientist described her as having the "buttocks of a mandrill".

When she died in poverty, her skeleton was put on display. It remained on show in the Museum of Mankind in Paris until 1974. In 2002, her remains were repatriated and buried in South Africa.

"Baartman marks the start of the period of description, measurement and classification, which soon leads us to hierarchisation - the idea that there are lesser and greater races," says Snoep.

The climax of the story comes with the imperialist high noon of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

A European public fed on notions of Christian evangelism and cultural superiority was titillated by re-enactments of life in the colonies which became a regular part of international trade fairs.

Entrepreneurs put on travelling stage shows featuring Hindu rope-dancers, Arabian camel-herders, Zulu warriors or hunters from New Caledonia. Whole African villages were recreated to allow Europeans a glimpse of "primitive" living.

The most famous impresario was "Buffalo Bill" Cody whose Wild West shows - according to the exhibition organisers - were another example of racial stereotyping.

Some 35,000 people are reckoned to have taken part in the displays. Most were paid.

"They were shows. Public entertainment. The villagers from Africa or India were acting out a role. Significantly there were barriers between the public and the performers, to reinforce the notion of separateness," says Snoep.

These ethnographic displays died out after World War II. Oddly it was Hitler who first banned them. The last was in Belgium in 1958.

The organizers of Inventing the Savage claim that these "human zoos" were seen by 1.4 billion people overall - and that they therefore played an important, and so far unacknowledged, part in the development of modern racism.

"What is left of this incredible story today?" intones the voice-over on a film which is part of the exhibition.

"A view of Africa and its people that is still contemptuous. A certain way in the West of believing oneself superior. Above all the story helps explain how millions of westerners were manipulated into a belief in the inequality of races."

Inventing the Savage provides plenty of food for thought, and there is no-one alive today who would for a minute defend the practice of human ethnographic exhibitions.

The show has been well-received but has come into some criticism for what some see as its heavy-handed didacticisim - as well as a kind of historical cherry-picking that leaves out what does not fit the message.

There is no mention for example of what the human "exhibits" themselves thought when brought to Europe. They are presented as victims, nothing more. Nor are the reactions of the audience explored. Maybe these were more complex than mere colonial self-satisfaction.

Writing in the left-wing newspaper Libération, columnist Marcela Iacub detects in the show "the frankly conservative role… of militant anti-racists and the consensus that they seek to create."

The spirit of the exhibition, she says, is a kind of "censorship, accompanied by the promotion of pedagogical, uplifting messages that will eradicate in us all those dangerous ideas that survive."

Iacub says it is ironic that it was just that kind of misguided moral superiority - the need to improve the unenlightened - that led to Europeans colonizing Africa in the first place.

"In the eyes of the militant anti-racist, we are all violent, easily manipulated, barbarous, bloodthirsty, and incapable of thinking without the aid of people to teach us. In fact just like the 'savage' of old!" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16295827)

SLAVES AND SMALLPOX

2012-02-16T10:39:00.000-08:00

SLAVES AND SMALLPOX

by John H. Lienhard

Today, African servants teach medicine to Colonial America. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.

We know Cotton Mather as a famous preacher in Colonial Boston. We hear much less about his interest in science and medicine. Yet he pressed the case for smallpox inoculation long before 19th-century science understood it.

Mather preached a sermon in 1712. He said:

... the Practice of ... preventing ... Smallpox [by] Inoculation has [not] been introduced into our nation, where ... so many ... would give Great Sums, to have their Lives insur'd from the dangers of this dreadful Distemper. ... I cannot but move that it be WARILY proceeded in.

That year, a ship had reached Boston from Barbados. It had one case of smallpox on board. Soon, an epidemic swept the city. It wasn't the first. Years before, smallpox almost killed three of Mather's children. He cared deeply about fighting it. But where did he learn about inoculation?

He'd seen it first hand in his African servant (slave). The man showed Mather his smallpox scar and told him that you

... take the Juice of the Small Pox, and Cut the Skin and put in a drop: then by 'nd by a little Sick, then a few Small Pox; and no body dye of it; no body have Small Pox any more.

Boston ignored Mather until one physician began doing inoculations. That unleashed a firestorm. One man asked if we should trust patients to the "groundless Contrivances of Men" instead of the "all-wise providence of God Almighty." Another threw a bomb through Mather's window. It didn't go off, so Mather got to read the note on it. It said, "... you Dog, Dam you, I'l inoculate you with this ..."

A 15-year-old printer named Ben Franklin was working on his older brother's newspaper. They also took up the case against Mather. But inoculation went on. After, all, when you look down the barrel at death, you take some chances to preserve life.

By the time the epidemic had passed, smallpox had hit half the population. It killed one in twelve. Doctors had inoculated only 300 people. The treatment killed one in fifty of them, but none caught the disease again. The people who'd gambled on crude inoculation did twice as well as the rest. They did four times better than the ones who'd been sick.

So, by the time science okayed inoculation, New England had seen it working for more than a century. In America, we were prepared to take up this strange practice.

In 1721 we knew people who had used inoculation for a long, long time. We learned it from African slaves -- from a far more advanced people than we thought. We learned it from an old civilization that we still know too little about, even today.

I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work. (http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi518.htm)