US Slave

Texas Textbook Controversy

2013-05-25T20:46:00.002-07:00

As reported in the Christian Science Monitor, on 19 May 2010, by Amanda Paulson, Staff writer, "Texas textbook war: 'Slavery' or 'Atlantic triangular trade'? Changes to social studies textbooks in Texas proposed by conservatives have resulted in a partisan uproar and generated interest far beyond the Lone Star State." --- CHICAGO -- Thomas Jefferson out, Phyllis Schlafly in?

While the proposed changes to Texas social studies standards aren’t quite so simple (and contrary to some reports, Thomas Jefferson would still be part of the curriculum), the debate over the standards pushed by a conservative majority of the Texas Board of Education – which will be voted on this week – has resulted in a partisan uproar and generated interest far beyond the Lone Star State.

Conservatives say that the changes are a long-overdue correction to a curriculum that too often deemphasizes religion and caters to liberal views. Critics are dismayed at what they see as an attempt to push conservative ideology – even if it flies in the face of scholarship – into textbooks. And with a textbook industry that is often influenced by the standards in the largest states, there is a chance that the changes have influence beyond Texas.

“Decisions that are made in Texas have a ripple effect across the country,” says Phillip VanFossen, head of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and a professor of social studies education at Purdue University.

Still, he notes, as the pendulum swings toward national standards – which have yet to be developed for social studies – that influence might wane. Just in case, California this week passed a bill out of a Senate committee that would ensure no California textbooks contain any Texas-driven changes.

Conservatives dominate Texas Board of Education

The root of the uproar is a regular process in which the Texas Board of Education revises the state’s standards. Far more than in most states, the elected board is entrusted to write standards itself, rather than merely approve them. With a 10-5 Republican majority, including a coalition of seven social conservatives, the board has pushed what some see as a particularly partisan agenda.

Among the changes: Students would be required to learn about the “unintended consequences” of Title IX, affirmative action, and the Great Society, and would need to study conservative icons like Phyllis Schlafly, the Heritage Foundation, and the Moral Majority.

The slave trade would be renamed the “Atlantic triangular trade,” American “imperialism” changed to “expansionism,” and all references to “capitalism” have been replaced with “free enterprise.”

The role of Thomas Jefferson – who argued for the separation of church and state – is minimized in several places, and the standards would emphasize the degree to which the Founding Fathers were driven by Christian principles.

“In the 18 months that the state board has worked on these standards, they’ve struck a balance that our members feel will give public school students a fuller and stronger appreciation of the religious and cultural roots of American history,” says Brent Connett, a policy analyst with the Texas Conservative Coalition, which released a letter this week calling on the board to approve the standards and to ignore calls for delay.

But others say they are dismayed at the degree to which the standards seem to have been written without regard for scholarship

Professor VanFossen, for instance, was bothered by a new requirement that students analyze the decline in value of the US dollar and abandonment of the gold standard, without input from economists, and by amendments that would try to cast a more positive spin on Sen. Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunt.

“It’s ideologically driven,” he says, adding that he’s also bothered that many of the most important skills students need to learn – debate and discussion, constructing arguments, reconciling different perspectives – are being lost amid the highly proscriptive and detailed content.

Others say that whether or not national textbooks are ultimately influenced by Texas (the textbook industry has sought to downplay that fear), the furor that this has caused will be detrimental to future attempts to create standards.

'No one wants to touch social studies'

“No one wants to touch social studies,” says Peggy Altoff, past president of the National Council for the Social Studies and co-chair of the committee that set social studies standards in Colorado.

Ms. Altoff says it doesn’t have to be such a political, partisan process, and cites Colorado’s experience as an example. Since often what stokes peoples’ anger the most is who is included for study – Cesar Chavez or Newt Gingrich; Thurgood Marshall or Thomas Aquinas – she suggests standards that offer examples, but don’t limit curricula to those figures.

“It doesn’t have to be the Texas debacle,” she says.

Whatever the vote is this week, the conservative influence on the board may be waning.

Don McLeroy, the author of many of the most contentious amendments and a leader of the conservative coalition, was defeated in March in a primary by an opponent who was critical of his approach. Another key social conservative, Cynthia Dunbar, is not seeking reelection, and a more moderate candidate won the GOP primary in her district. (source: Christian Science Monitor)

Watch Texas Textbook Controversy on PBS. See more from Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

Texas The Slave State

2013-05-24T06:02:00.002-07:00

"An Act," Civilian and Galveston Gazette, November 4, 1840

Summary: Printed the text of a new law forbidding any free blacks from living in Texas. It stated that any free black caught entering Texas would be fined a thousand dollars; if he couldn't pay the sum, he would be sold into slavery for one year and then, if he still couldn't pay off the fine, be a slave for life. Also said that anyone helping a free black get into Texas would be fined as much as $10,000. Finally, the Texas Congress ordered all free blacks then living in the Republic to move out within two years or face enslavement.

Concerning Free Persons of Color.

SEC. I. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the Republic of Texas, in Congress assembled: That from and after the passage of this act, it shall not be lawful for any free persons of color to emigrate to this Republic.

SEC. 2. Be it further enacted, That if any free person of color shall emigrate to this Republic, it shall be the duty of the sheriff, or any one of the constables of the county to which such emigration shall be made, to arrest such free person of color, after giving him ten days notice, and bring him before the Chief Justice of the county, or Judge of the District; and it shall be the duty of the Chief Justice, or Judge of the district, before whom such free person of color may be brought, to receive the bond of such free person of color in the sum of one thousand dollars, with the security of a citizen, to be approved by him, condemned for the removal of such free person of color out of the limits of the Republic.

SEC 3. Be it further enacted, That if any free person of color should be brought before any Chief Justice of any county, or District Judge, and shall not be able to give the bond as prescribed in the second section of this act, such Chief Justice, or district judge shall commit such free person of color to the public jail, with an, order to the sheriff to expose him to public sale, to the highest bidder, at the court house door of his county, after giving four weeks notice of the same, in the nearest public journal, and at least four public places in his county; and the said purchaser shall and may exercise all the rights of ownership over said free person of color for one year from such sale.

SEC. 4. Be it further enacted, And if any such free person of color shall, during the year of such slavery, be able to give his bounte contemplated in the second section of this act, to take effect the end of his slavery, he shall be permitted to do so; but if he [illegible word] fail to render the bond, until after the expiration of his slavery shall be the duty of the purchaser to return him into the hands the sheriff.

SEC. 5. Be it further enacted, It shall be the duty of the sheriff, upon the return of any such free person of color, upon giving six weeks notice in some public journal, and at least four public places in his county, to expose the free person of color so returned at public sale, to the highest bidder; and such free person of color so sold shall remain a slave for life: provided, that if any person of color so sold should be the property of any individual, he shall have his right of recovery by due course of law.

SEC. 6. Be it further enacted, All monies arising from the sale of such free person of color, shall be paid into the county treasury, subject to appropriation by the district court, for public purposes.

SEC. 7. Be it further enacted, Upon the forfeiture of the bond of any free person of color, the same shall be placed in the hands of the District attorney for collection, who shall prosecute the same against the securities only; and the amount of sale, if such shall have been made, of the free person of color, shall, in all cases, be subtracted from the amount adjudged against the securities, and the remainder only shall be recovered of them.

SEC. 8. Be it further enacted, That two years shall be allowed from and after the passage of this act, to all free persons of color who now are in this Republic, to remove out of the same; and all those who shall be found here after that time, without the permission of Congress shall be arrested and sold as provided in this act.

SEC. 9. Be it further enacted, That it shall not be lawful for any master of a vessel, or owner thereof, nor for any other person or persons whatsoever, to bring, import, induce, or aid or assist in the bringing, importing, or inducing any free person of color within the limits of Texas, directly or indirectly; and any person so offending shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and or conviction shall be fined in a sum of not less than one nor more than ten thousand dollars: provided, that cooks and other hands employed on board of vessels shall not be considered as coming within the provision of this act.

SEC. 10. Be it further enacted, That the President of the Republic do issue his proclamation, commanding all free persons of color who now are in the Republic, to remove from the same before the first of January, 1842, and the Secretary of State publish this act a number of times in all the journals of this Republic.

SEC. 11. Be it further enacted, That all laws contrary to the meaning and spirit of this act, are hereby repealed.

DAVID S KAUFMAN,

Speaker of the House of Representatives.

DAVID G. BURNET.

Approved, 5th February 1840. President of the Senate.

(source: Texas Slavery Project)

JP Morgan Chase Links To Slavery

2013-05-23T15:22:00.006-07:00

As reported by the BBC, on 21 January 2005, "JP Morgan admits US slavery links," -- Thousands of slaves were accepted as collateral for loans by two banks that later became part of JP Morgan Chase.

The admission is part of an apology sent to JP Morgan staff after the bank researched its links to slavery in order to meet legislation in Chicago.

Citizens Bank and Canal Bank are the two lenders that were identified. They are now closed, but were linked to Bank One, which JP Morgan bought last year.

About 13,000 slaves were used as loan collateral between 1831 and 1865.

'No excuse'

Important dates

1831 Canal Bank formed
1833 Citizens Bank formed
1924 Citizens and Canal join to form Canal Commercial Trust & Savings Bank (CCTSB)
1931 Chase Bank takes control of Canal
1933 CCTSB fails during Great Depression and goes into liquidation
1933 National Bank of Commerce in New Orleans (NBCNO) formed with some Canal Bank deposits and loans
1971 NBCNO becomes First National Bank of Commerce
1998 First National Bank of Commerce merged into Bank One Louisiana
2004 Bank One merged with JP Morgan Chase & Co.
Because of defaults by plantation owners, Citizens and Canal ended up owning about 1,250 slaves.

"We all know slavery existed in our country, but it is quite different to see how our history and the institution of slavery were intertwined," JP Morgan chief executive William Harrison and chief operating officer James Dimon said in the letter.

"Slavery was tragically ingrained in American society, but that is no excuse."

"We apologise to the African-American community, particularly those who are descendants of slaves, and to the rest of the American public for the role that Citizens Bank and Canal Bank played."

"The slavery era was a tragic time in US history and in our company's history."

JP Morgan said that it was setting up a $5m scholarship programme for students living in Louisiana, the state where the events took place.

The bank said that it is a "very different company than the Citizens and Canal Banks of the 1800s". (source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4193797.stm)

Canal Commercial Trust & Savings Bank

Slavery And Modern Capitalism

2013-05-23T07:41:00.002-07:00

As reported in Bloomberg, "How Slavery Led to Modern Capitalism: Echoes," by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, on 24 January 2012 -- When the New York City banker James Brown tallied his wealth in 1842, he had to look far below Wall Street to trace its origins. His investments in the American South exceeded $1.5 million, a quarter of which was directly bound up in the ownership of slave plantations.

Brown was among the world's most powerful dealers in raw cotton, and his family’s firm, Brown Brothers & Co., served as one of the most important sources of capital and foreign exchange to the U.S. economy. Still, no small amount of his time was devoted to managing slaves from the study of his Leonard Street brownstone in Lower Manhattan.

Nicholas Biddle

Brown was hardly unusual among the capitalists of the North. Nicholas Biddle's United States Bank of Philadelphia funded banks in Mississippi to promote the expansion of plantation lands. Biddle recognized that slave-grown cotton was the only thing made in the U.S. that had the capacity to bring gold and silver into the vaults of the nation's banks. Likewise, the architects of New England's industrial revolution watched the price of cotton with rapt attention, for their textile mills would have been silent without the labor of slaves on distant plantations.

The story we tell about slavery is almost always regional, rather than national. We remember it as a cruel institution of the southern states that would later secede from the Union. Slavery, in this telling, appears limited in scope, an unfortunate detour on the nation's march to modernity, and certainly not the engine of American economic prosperity.

Yet to understand slavery's centrality to the rise of American capitalism, just consider the history of an antebellum Alabama dry-goods outfit called Lehman Brothers or a Rhode Island textile manufacturer that would become the antecedent firm of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Reparations lawsuits (since dismissed) generated evidence of slave insurance policies by Aetna and put Brown University and other elite educational institutions on notice that the slave-trade enterprises of their early benefactors were potential legal liabilities. Recent state and municipal disclosure ordinances have forced firms such as J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Wachovia Corp. to confront unsettling ancestors on their corporate family trees.

Such revelations are hardly surprising in light of slavery’s role in spurring the nation’s economic development. America's "take-off" in the 19th century wasn't in spite of slavery; it was largely thanks to it. And recent research in economic history goes further: It highlights the role that commodified human beings played in the emergence of modern capitalism itself.

The U.S. won its independence from Britain just as it was becoming possible to imagine a liberal alternative to the mercantilist policies of the colonial era. Those best situated to take advantage of these new opportunities -- those who would soon be called "capitalists" -- rarely started from scratch, but instead drew on wealth generated earlier in the robust Atlantic economy of slaves, sugar and tobacco. Fathers who made their fortunes outfitting ships for distant voyages begat sons who built factories, chartered banks, incorporated canal and railroad enterprises, invested in government securities, and speculated in new financial instruments.

This recognizably modern capitalist economy was no less reliant on slavery than the mercantilist economy of the preceding century. Rather, it offered a wider range of opportunities to profit from the remote labor of slaves, especially as cotton emerged as the indispensable commodity of the age of industry.

In the North, where slavery had been abolished and cotton failed to grow, the enterprising might transform slave-grown cotton into clothing; market other manufactured goods, such as hoes and hats, to plantation owners; or invest in securities tied to next year's crop prices in places such as Liverpool and Le Havre. This network linked Mississippi planters and Massachusetts manufacturers to the era's great financial firms: the Barings, Browns and Rothschilds.

A major financial crisis in 1837 revealed the interdependence of cotton planters, manufacturers and investors, and their collective dependence on the labor of slaves. Leveraged cotton -- pledged but not yet picked -- led overseers to whip their slaves to pick more, and prodded auctioneers to liquidate slave families to cover the debts of the overextended.

The plantation didn't just produce the commodities that fueled the broader economy, it also generated innovative business practices that would come to typify modern management. As some of the most heavily capitalized enterprises in antebellum America, plantations offered early examples of time-motion studies and regimentation through clocks and bells. Seeking ever-greater efficiencies in cotton picking, slaveholders reorganized their fields, regimented the workday, and implemented a system of vertical reporting that made overseers into managers answerable to those above for the labor of those below.

The perverse reality of a capitalized labor force led to new accounting methods that incorporated (human) property depreciation in the bottom line as slaves aged, as well as new actuarial techniques to indemnify slaveholders from loss or damage to the men and women they owned. Property rights in human beings also created a lengthy set of judicial opinions that would influence the broader sanctity of private property in U.S. law.

So important was slavery to the American economy that on the eve of the Civil War, many commentators predicted that the North would kill "its golden goose." That prediction didn't come to pass, and as a result, slavery's importance to American economic development has been obscured.

But as scholars delve deeper into corporate archives and think more critically about coerced labor and capitalism -- perhaps informed by the current scale of human trafficking -- the importance of slavery to American economic history will become inescapable. (source: Bloomberg)

Slave Insurance Policies

2013-05-23T07:07:00.000-07:00

As reported in the New York Times, "Slave Policies," by Virginia Groark, on 5 May 2002 -- IN 1856, just five years before the outbreak of the Civil War, the Charter Oak Life Insurance Company printed a pamphlet offering slave owners in six Southern states the option of insuring the lives of their slaves.

For just $2, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee residents, for example, could purchase a 12-month policy from the Hartford-based insurer on a 10-year-old domestic servant that would yield $100 if the slave died. Policies for older slaves, like a 45-year-old, were more expensive, costing the slave owner $5.50 a year.

Though the company no longer exists, these policies are drawing increasing attention nearly 150 years later because of a lawsuit that was filed in United States District Court in Brooklyn, in late March against Aetna Inc. and two other companies, claiming that they profited from the slave trade.

In Connecticut, where insurance has long been a principal industry, the documents exhibit a painful reminder of the past, especially in a Northern state that is proud of its abolitionist ancestors like John Brown.

''It's not pleasant to talk about it today, to put it mildly, but slaves were insured just like any other thing that the farmers owned, that the slave owners owned,'' said Tom Baker, director of the Insurance Law Center at the University of Connecticut School of Law. ''If you were selling insurance in slave states to people who had plantations, that was one of the things that you sold.

''It was very common,'' he added. ''Basically, insurance and slavery go all the way back as far as American history.''

Aetna, which in 2000 apologized for its involvement in slavery, is the only insurance company to be named in the slave reparations lawsuit, though one of the plaintiff's lawyers, Roger S. Wareham, said he expected that other insurance companies would be sued.

A brief examination of documents demonstrates that Aetna was hardly the only company that engaged in the practice.

''It wasn't just the Aetna company,'' said Charles L. Blockson, curator of the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University. ''A lot of the old insurance companies, especially the ones that handled shipping in the Newport, R.I., area and New London.''

The problem for the plaintiffs, experts said, is that many firms are defunct, have changed names, destroyed old records, or have been absorbed by other companies. In addition, it is sometimes difficult to document ties to the slave trade.

In the case of slave ships, for example, 19th-century marine insurance policies often didn't identify the cargo on board. Instead, the policy simply stated that it insured ''goods'' on board.

''What strikes me from what I know already is that the records do not say clearly that slaves were insured,'' said Ugo Nwokeji, assistant professor of history at UConn. ''We cannot say that we know it was widespread, although it is well possible that it would have been widespread.''

The insurance industry's connection to slavery is not a new revelation. It has been written about in publications like Mr. Blockson's 1977 book, ''Black Genealogy.'' Even on eBay, the Internet auction site, copies of slave life insurance polices are for sale. And the tale of the slave ship Zong, in which 133 sick slaves were thrown overboard in 1781 so the ship's owners could collect insurance, has been studied for years.

The connection has gained greater attention in recent years because of the research of Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, the lead plaintiff in the federal lawsuit that was filed on March 26 against Aetna, the FleetBoston Financial Corporation and the CSX Corporation. Ms. Farmer-Paellmann first stumbled across slave insurance policies in 1997 while researching a slave reparations paper for a law school class. After reviewing different courses of action, she decided to focus on corporations and private estates that had been involved in slavery.

''And that's how I came into Aetna,'' she said.

Ms. Farmer-Paellmann, who said she is a descendant of slaves, continued to pursue the issue long after her class ended. In 2000, she called Aetna and requested that they send her copies of their policies. She said she received two.

''I was really moved when I saw the policies,'' she said. ''It's one thing to read about it and it's another thing to actually see a copy of the policy, and it really caused me to pause. I have to say it was a very emotional experience.''

So, she decided, it would be appropriate if Aetna apologized and paid retributions.

In March 2000, Aetna expressed ''deep regret'' that for a few years after its founding in 1853, Aetna Life Insurance insured the lives of slaves. Calling it a ''sad'' and ''disappointing chapter'' in the company's history, Aetna has said it only issued a ''small number'' of such policies. To date, the company has records of five policies on 16 lives and is aware of two policies that appeared in books, according to a company spokesman, who, because of the pending litigation, referred additional questions to a statement on the company's Web site.

In one policy, a woman named Mary Raby purchased a 12-month policy for $17.25 from Aetna's New Orleans office in October 1853. If the insured slave or slaves died, Ms. Raby would receive $600, according to a copy of the policy that appears in Dee Parmer Woodtor's book ''Finding a Place Called Home: A Guide to African-American Genealogy and Historical Identity'' (Random House, 1999).

Shortly after Aetna issued its apology, the California State Legislature passed a bill requiring all insurance companies that do business in the state to submit records of any slaveholder insurance policies.

To date, eight companies have submitted information, said Nancy Cramer, deputy press secretary for the California Department of Insurance. Five sent policies and the other three sent information on ships they may have insured, she said. The documents were released to the public last Wednesday.

The California law has prompted companies like Ace Ltd., a Bermuda-based insurance company, to search through archives looking for connections to the slave trade. The company hired a law firm to review its archives, including the records of Aetna Fire and Insurance Company and the Insurance Company of North America. Those companies later became part of Cigna's property and casualty holdings that Ace acquired in 1999. Ace did not find any evidence of slave life insurance policies written by Aetna Fire or the Insurance Company of North America, according to Lisa Fleishman-Hicks, a spokeswoman for Ace.

And though the Insurance Company of North America is one of the oldest insurance companies in the country, Ace compared its marine insurance records against those of known slave vessels and did not find that it had written or carried any policies on known slave vessels, Ms. Fleishman-Hicks said.

For companies that engaged in the practice, it was not necessarily a profitable business. In fact, the Hartford Life Insurance Company went out of business, in part, because of its practice of insuring slaves, according to P. Henry Woodward's 1897 book, ''Insurance in Connecticut.'' The business, which is not related to the current company of the same name, ''tried the experiment'' with insuring slaves ''by shiploads,'' according to the book.

''Although premiums were very high, they were still far from remunerative,'' he wrote. ''As a rule, the worst masters took out policies. Negroes were described as Caesar or Cato, Jim or Tom, and identification was so difficult that if any of a gang died, names in the proofs of loss were easily fitted to them.''

In addition, he wrote, the shippers knew the average percentage of loss ''and hence had every advantage in arranging terms.''

And even though Charter Oak Life Insurance offered policies on slaves, it was not necessarily a business it wanted to encourage, according to the 1856 pamphlet.

''The company is by no means solicitous of securing a large Negro insurance business unless the owners are careful and judicial men,'' Matthew Magill, a Kentucky-based general agent for Charter Oak Life Insurance, wrote in the 1856 pamphlet.

With documents showing that other companies engaged in the practice, is it right that Aetna, which said it has spent $36.5 million in the past 20 years on health initiatives and scholarships, among other things, for African-Americans , bear the burden of the insurance industry's involvement in the slave trade?

Mr. Baker of UConn, for one, doesn't think so.

''I just have a sense that it's unfair that a few companies have been singled out when the slave economy was something that the whole society bears some responsibility for,'' Mr. Baker said.

''My concern,'' he added, ''is more that to the extent that there is some moral responsibility, it should not be targeted to just a few people.''

Ms. Farmer-Paellmann said companies like Aetna are being held accountable for their past practices. Other businesses, she said, will be singled out in the future.

''This is, like I said, the first step,'' Ms. Farmer-Paellmann said. ''They have played a role and they should be held responsible, and later on down the road there will be more companies.'' (source: The New York Times)

The Other Side of Suez

2013-05-22T07:30:00.002-07:00

As reported in the Economist, "The Suez crisis: An affair to remember. The Suez crisis of 50 years ago marked the end of an era, and the start of another, for Europe, America and the Middle East," from the July 27th 2006 print edition, by -- ON JULY 26th 1956 Gamal Abdul Nasser, president of Egypt, addressed a huge crowd in the city of Alexandria. Broad-shouldered, handsome and passionate, Nasser stunned even this gathering of enthusiastic supporters with the vehemence of his diatribe against British imperialism. Britain had ruled Egypt, one way or another, from 1882 to 1922, when the protectorate gained nominal independence, and continued to influence Egyptian affairs thereafter, maintaining troops there and propping up the decadent monarchy overthrown by Nasser in 1952.

In that speech in Alexandria, though, Nasser chose to delve back even further into history, in a long digression on the building of the Suez canal a century earlier. That gave him the chance to mention the name of the Frenchman who had built the canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps. This he did at least 13 times. “De Lesseps”, it turned out, was the codeword for the Egyptian army to start the seizure, and nationalisation, of the canal. It also launched the start of a new era in the politics of Europe, the Middle East and America.

The Suez crisis, as the events of the following months came to be called, marked the humiliating end of imperial influence for two European countries, Britain and France. It cost the British prime minister, Anthony Eden, his job and, by showing up the shortcomings of the Fourth Republic in France, hastened the arrival of the Fifth Republic under Charles de Gaulle. It made unambiguous, even to the most nostalgic blimps, America's supremacy over its Western allies. It thereby strengthened the resolve of many Europeans to create what is now the European Union. It promoted pan-Arab nationalism and completed the transformation of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute into an Israeli-Arab one. And it provided a distraction that encouraged the Soviet Union to put down an uprising in Hungary in the same year.

It also divided families and friends, at least in Britain and France, with a degree of bitterness that would not be seen in a foreign-policy dispute until the invasion of Iraq in 2003. If that is difficult to understand, remember that the world was a different place then. Many European politicians still believed their countries had a right to run the affairs of others. Many were also scarred by memories of appeasement in the 1930s. Faced with a provocation, even an entirely legal one involving the nationalisation of a foreign-owned asset like the Suez canal, the instinct of such Europeans was to go to war. They and their Israeli partners-in-invasion were restrained, eventually, by the United States, led by a Republican president and war hero, Dwight Eisenhower. The venture involved intrigue, lies, nemesis—and no end of a lesson. How did it come about?

The road to collusion

In Egypt, the British had become so resented for their racist, arrogant ways that by the early 1950s even Winston Churchill, the grand old imperialist who had returned as prime minister in 1951, felt he could resist the tide of nationalism no more. After 1951 the British were confined to the Suez canal zone, harassed by Egyptian irregulars who wanted them out altogether. By June 1956 the last British soldiers had left even the canal zone.

Yet Anglo-Egyptian relations did not improve. Nasser was enraged by America's withdrawal of its offer of loans to help pay for the building of a dam on the Nile at Aswan. This project was central to his ambitions to modernise Egypt. But John Foster Dulles, the American secretary of state, thought the dam would place too much strain on the resources of newly independent Egypt.

For their part, the British, mistrustful of Nasser and feeling the pinch, were also ready to withdraw their loan offer. So, thought Dulles, best to let the Russians take on the dam, as he knew they would if the West backed out. He did not, however, bargain for Nasser's immediate response—the nationalisation of the Suez canal, whose revenues, Nasser argued, Egypt now needed to replace the loans promised by Britain and America for the dam.

The reaction in Britain was unanimous in condemning “Grabber Nasser”, as the Daily Mirror put it. Comparisons were immediately made to Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s: if he got away with this, where would he—and other emboldened post-colonial leaders—stop? Eden, who had succeeded Churchill as prime minister the year before, argued that the canal was Britain's “great imperial lifeline”, especially for oil. Nasser could not be allowed to have his hand “on our windpipe”.

The French reacted just as strongly, but for different reasons. First, they had a stake in the Paris-based company that ran the canal. Second, they were fighting an increasingly nasty little colonial war in Algeria. The new government of Guy Mollet was resolved to put down an Arab uprising there with all the force that the Fourth Republic could muster. By the summer of 1956 France had about 400,000 soldiers in Algiers. Nasser backed the Arab insurgents, so the French were as eager as the British to see the back of him. Accordingly, Britain and France started to co-ordinate plans for a military invasion of Egypt and a reoccupation of the canal zone.

But their bellicosity was matched by the scepticism of the Americans, and of Eisenhower in particular, who from the beginning was against the use of force by his two main allies. One concern for him was the presidential election due that November, which he intended to win as the incumbent “peace” president. He knew that the voters would not thank him for taking them into a foreign imbroglio in which America had no direct interest.

Eisenhower was also motivated by an anti-imperialism rooted in the attitudes that had made Americans break free from the British empire. Intensifying his scepticism was a fear that, in the new cold war, any British and French bullying of Egypt would alienate Arabs, Asians and Africans and drive them towards the communist camp. To head off Anglo-French military action, Eisenhower and his secretary of state ensnared the Europeans in a fruitless round of talks and conferences.

Aware that they were on shaky legal ground for an invasion, the British and French reluctantly played along. But they were losing the momentum for military action, which was the American intention. The increasingly histrionic Eden, in particular, wanted not only the reversal of the canal's nationalisation but also regime change: he wanted Nasser “destroyed”.

The Israelis provided a way out. On September 30th a delegation secretly presented the French with a fabricated casus belli: Israel would invade Egypt and race to the canal. The French and British could then invade, posing as peacekeepers to separate the two sides, and occupy the canal, ostensibly to guarantee the free passage of shipping. When this plan was presented to Eden, he jumped at it. Thus was collusion born. The details were agreed on at a secret meeting in Sèvres, outside Paris. Not for nothing is the Suez crisis known in Egypt as the “tripartite aggression”.

The British and French forces now had a pretext to invade. For the Israelis, it would punish Egypt for its escalating incursions into Israel from Gaza. It would also hitch the major European powers to the cause of Israel: up to that point, the French had tried to be even-handed between Israel and its neighbours; the British had leaned towards the Arab states.

A complete mess and botch

Only a handful of people were let in on the collusion. Most of them thought it was mad from the start, arguing, quite correctly, that the cover for the invasion was so flimsy it would soon be blown. To disguise what was going on, the British, in particular, were drawn ever deeper into a bog of lies and deception, particularly with the Americans. Parliament was also deceived. Both Eden and Selwyn Lloyd, his foreign secretary, told the House of Commons that, as Lloyd put it, “there was no prior agreement” with Israel.

On October 29th, Israeli paratroopers, led by a zealous officer called Ariel Sharon, were dropped into Sinai to fulfil their side of the bargain. Feigning surprise, the British and French issued an ultimatum to both sides to cease fire. When the Egyptians rejected this, British planes started bombing the Egyptian air force on the ground and on November 5th Anglo-French troops went ashore to begin the invasion of the canal zone and, it was hoped, topple Nasser.

Eisenhower, kept completely in the dark, felt utterly betrayed by his erstwhile allies. “I've just never seen great powers make such a complete mess and botch of things,” he told his aides. He determined to put a stop to the whole enterprise.

America struck at Britain's fragile economy. It refused to allow the IMF to give emergency loans to Britain unless it called off the invasion. Faced by imminent financial collapse, as the British Treasury saw it, on November 7th Eden surrendered to American demands and stopped the operation, with his troops stranded half way down the canal. The French were furious, but obliged to agree; their troops were under British command.

America also proved adept at working through the UN. On November 2nd an American resolution demanding a ceasefire was passed by a majority of 64 to five, the Russians voting with the United States. And to sidestep Anglo-French vetoes at the Security Council, for the first time the General Assembly met in emergency session (where no country held a veto) and took up a Canadian suggestion to assemble an international emergency force to go to the canal and monitor the ceasefire. These were to be the first “blue hat” UN peacekeepers. The organisation was one of the clear winners of the crisis, gaining an enhanced role in the world. For the other participants in the drama, the consequences were more mixed.

The French drew the clearest lessons. Suez showed that they could never rely on perfide Albion. Britain, then Europe's strongest power, would, it seemed, always put its “special” relationship with America above its European interests. And the Americans, to the French, were both unreliable and annoyingly superior.

So the French would have to look elsewhere for more durable allies—a search that was, by one account, short. The story goes that on the evening of November 6th, when Mollet got the call from Eden that he was aborting the invasion, he happened to be with the German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. The French foreign minister, Christian Pineau, records Adenauer as saying that “France and England will never be powers comparable to the United States...Not Germany either. There remains to them only one way of playing a decisive role in the world: that is to unite Europe...We have no time to waste; Europe will be your revenge.”

Thus was born the six-country European common market, which has now become the 25-country European Union. The founding Treaty of Rome was signed the very next year, in 1957. And the French, particularly Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, kept the British, America's Trojan horse, out of it for as long as they could, until 1973. France had by then made itself truly independent of American military power (unlike the British) by building its own nuclear deterrent from scratch and, in 1966, leaving NATO's integrated command structure.

It should have been no surprise, then, that in the months before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it was the French who played the American role of 1956, though Jacques Chirac could hardly deliver the coup de grâce, as Eisenhower had done in 1956. In reaction to Suez, France had constructed a new identity as the ostensible leader of Europe, upholding a set of universal values in competition with the Americans.

The British were hurt most by Suez. Eden resigned soon afterwards, his health wrecked, his reputation in tatters, his lies and evasions damaging the country's always tendentious reputation for fair play. The crisis exploded Britain's lingering imperial pretensions, and hastened the independence of its colonies.

Some talked of a “Suez syndrome”, where, in Margaret Thatcher's words, Britain's rulers “went from believing that Britain could do anything to an almost neurotic belief that Britain could do nothing”. Certainly, much of Mrs Thatcher's prime ministership, particularly the retaking of the Falklands in 1982, was an essay in exorcising the demons of Suez. Tony Blair has not been afraid to take advantage of her success, by deploying British power in Sierra Leone, the Balkans and Iraq.

But never without the Americans' support. The major lesson of Suez for the British was that the country would never be able to act independently of America again. Unlike the French, who have sought to lead Europe, most British politicians have been content to play second fiddle to America.

Eden recuperated from the crisis in Ian Fleming's house, Goldeneye, in Jamaica. It was an appropriate choice, as it was Fleming who was to mythologise the new relationship in his James Bond novels. The first, “Casino Royale”, was published to little attention in 1953, but the series took off in the years after the Suez crisis, offering some sort of literary consolation to a country coming to terms with its new, humbler status. The partnership between Bond and Felix Leiter, a CIA agent, reflected the way the British now liked to see things, the one suave, smart and endlessly resourceful, the other with a lot of money and a slightly plodding manner.

Eisenhower won his election in America. The crisis affirmed the country's new status as the global superpower, challenged only by the Soviet Union. Suez was also to be the last incident in which America was to take strong action against Israel. As Eisenhower had feared, the Russians moved into the Middle East to fill the gap left by the disorderly retreat of the British, so the Americans felt compelled to get in as well. Thus the cold war spread to north Africa and Egypt (the Russians duly stepped in to finance the Aswan dam, and much else), and Israel became ever more closely tied to the United States.

Before 1956, Israel had been militarily vulnerable, but, beyond the Arab world, morally and politically unassailable. The Israeli occupation of Sinai (and Gaza) in 1956 began the gradual inversion of this state of affairs, as it marked the first expansion of Israel beyond its original borders, with all the subsequent criticisms of its occupation of Arab or Palestinian land. In 1956 the Israelis were quickly forced to withdraw from Sinai by American (and Russian) pressure. Never again, however, would an American president face down Israel as Eisenhower had done at Suez.

The rise of Nasserism

The chief victor of Suez, in the short term, was Nasser. Before the crisis he had faced lingering opposition in Egypt, not only from the former ruling class but also from communists and the radical Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood. “Pulling the Lion's tail”, and getting away with it, proved wildly popular. As dissidents fled, fell silent or filled its jails, Nasser's Egypt projected itself as the vanguard of Arab nationalism and a beacon to liberation movements across the third world.

Puffed up by his own success, Nasser launched misguided adventures such as a short-lived political union with Syria and disastrous nationalisations of Egyptian industry. And the Nasserist dream inspired a wave of pan-Arab nationalism that helped install lookalike leaderships, with similar flags, propaganda and secret police, across much of the Arab world. Saddam Hussein was one who drew inspiration. Nasser himself was largely discredited by Israel's crushing victory in the 1967 war, but the institutions of Nasserism still lived on, in Egypt and elsewhere, as effective systems of political control.

Nasser's 1956 triumph endured in Arab memory as a moment of cathartic liberation. It inspired, to some extent, Saddam's dramatic moves, such as invading Iran and later Kuwait. A famous Egyptian film, “Nasser 56”, lingers nostalgically over the Egyptian leader. Amid rousing music, he is portrayed in black and white, shrouded in pensive solitude by a swirl of cigarette smoke, reaching his momentous decision to nationalise the canal. But the film jumps to the happy outcome, ignoring the fact that Nasser's victory was not won by this new Arab superman, but delivered by superpower intervention.

A wider lesson lies in the interpretation of history. Eden, who had honourably resigned as foreign secretary in 1938 in disapproval of the appeasement of Hitler and, especially, Mussolini, was nonetheless haunted by Neville Chamberlain's readiness to yield to tyrants. His impulses at Suez were surely complex. Eden was far from anti-American or indifferent to American concerns. He had resigned in 1938 partly because he thought his prime minister, Chamberlain, had treated Roosevelt shabbily. Yet he saw Nasser as a “Mussolini” and was plainly determined to avoid any charge of appeasement, even though the essential features of Munich and Suez were wholly different. Instead of saying that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, George Santayana might have better said that those who misinterpret the past are condemned to bungle the present. (source: The Economist)

The Other Side of Suez (BBC Documentary)

How The West Was Lost

2013-05-22T06:10:00.000-07:00

From The American Renaissance, on November 23, 2012, "How the West Was Lost by Native Americans," by Serena Dai, Atlantic Wire, July 19, 2012 -- Everybody knows that Europeans took a lot of land from Native Americans, but this animated GIF by Tumblr user sunisup gives a great sense of just how fast the people living in North America were pushed west after Christopher Columbus “discovered” the continent.

She turned an old graphic by Louisiana State professor Sam B. Hillard into a mini-movie that viscerally demonstrates the gradual chopping away of Native American land through cessions, or a surrender of territory to another entity. The green represents Native American land, and any part that turns white was ceded. {snip} Numbers wise, the amount of green land shown after 1895 is about 2.3 percent of the original size.

Hillard got his information from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of American Ethnology. The history of Native Americans is complicated, so the graphic only documents land that was ceded. Any land that was ceded but then later turned into a reservation may shop up again later in the time lapse. Whatever the in-between negotiations, it’s clear the land disappeared quickly. (source: The American Renaissance)

Freedom for California’s Indians

2013-05-22T05:13:00.000-07:00

As reported in the New York Times Opinion Pages, "Freedom for California’s Indians," by Stacey L. Smith, on April 29, 2013 -- CALIFORNIA, CIVIL WAR (US) (1861-65), NATIVE AMERICANS, REPUBLICAN PARTY, SLAVERY

On April 27, 1863, nearly five months after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, California abolished its system of forced apprenticeship for American Indians. Under the apprenticeship provisions of the state’s Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, several thousand California Indians, mostly children, had suffered kidnapping, sale and involuntary servitude for over a decade.

Newly elected California Republicans, eager to bring California in line with the national march toward emancipation, agitated for two years in the early 1860s to repeal Indian apprenticeship. And yet those Republicans’ limited vision of Indian freedom — one in which Indians would be free to reap the fruits of their labor, but not free from the duty to labor altogether — made for an incomplete Indian Emancipation Proclamation. Although California was distant from the battlefields of the Civil War, the state endured its own struggle over freedom that paralleled that of the North and the South.

The Republican campaign to abolish Indian servitude ran up against nearly a century of coerced Indian labor in California. Under Spanish and Mexican rule, thousands of California Indians worked on missions and ranches, bound to their employment through a combination of economic necessity, captivity, physical compulsion and debt.

With the United States’ conquest of California in 1847, the discovery of gold in 1848 and the formation of a state government in 1849, new American lawmakers expanded and formalized Indian servitude to meet growing demands for labor. The 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians authorized whites to hold Indian children as wards until they reached adulthood. Indian adults convicted of vagrancy or other crimes could be forced to work for whites who paid their bail.

Skyrocketing demand for farmworkers and domestic servants, combined with violence between Indians and invading whites in the northwestern part of the state, left Democrats in war-torn counties clamoring for the expansion of the 1850 Indian act. A “general system of peonage or apprenticeship” was the only way to quell Indian wars, one Democrat argued. A stint of involuntary labor would civilize Indians, establish them in “permanent and comfortable homes,” and provide white settlers with “profitable and convenient servants.” In 1860, Democrats proposed new amendments to the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians that allowed whites to bind Indian children as apprentices until they reached their mid-20s. Indian adults accused of being vagrants without steady employment, or taken as captives of war, could be apprenticed for 10-year terms. The amendments passed with little debate.

As the nation hurtled toward a war over slavery, Californians watched as their own state became a battleground over the future of human bondage. Apprenticeship laws aimed at “civilizing” the state’s Indians encouraged a robust and horrific slave trade in the northwestern counties. Frontier whites eagerly paid from $50 to $100 for Indian children to apprentice. Groups of kidnappers, dubbed “baby hunters” in the California press, supplied this market by attacking isolated Indian villages and snatching up children in the chaos of battle. Some assailants murdered Indian parents who refused to give up their children.

Once deposited in white homes, captive apprentices often suffered abuse and neglect. The death of Rosa, a 10-year-old apprentice from either the Yuki or Pomo tribes, provides a grim case in point. Just two weeks before the repeal of Indian apprenticeship, the Mendocino County coroner found the dead girl “nearly naked, lying in a box out of doors” next to the home of her mistress, a Mrs. Bassett of Ukiah. Neighbors testified that the child was sick and restless and that Basset shut her out of the house in the middle of a raging snowstorm. Huge bruises on Rosa’s abdomen suggested that Bassett had mercilessly beaten the ill child before tossing her out into the blizzard. Mendocino officials never brought charges in the case.

The horrors of kidnapping and apprenticeship filled the state’s newspapers just as antislavery California Republicans swept into power in 1861-2. Republicans assailed the apprentice system and blamed Democrats for the “abominable system of Indian apprenticeship, which has been used as a means of introducing actual slavery into our free State.” George Hanson, an Illinois Republican whose close relationship with Abraham Lincoln earned him an appointment as Northern California’s superintendent of Indian affairs, vowed to eliminate the state’s “unholy traffic in human blood and souls.” He tracked down and prosecuted kidnappers in the northwestern counties (with mixed success) and petitioned the State Legislature to abolish the apprenticeship system.

In 1862, Republican legislators proposed two new measures to overturn the 1860 apprenticeship amendments. Democrats blocked these bills and insisted that apprenticeship “embodied one of the most important measures” for Indians’ “improvement and civilization.” Indian servitude lived on.

By the time the legislature met again in the spring of 1863, however, all signs pointed to the destruction of the apprenticeship system. Republicans won firm majorities in both houses of the State Legislature, and in January California became the first state to endorse Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Republicans again proposed to repeal the apprenticeship amendments, and this time they achieved their goal with no debate or dissent. Involuntary labor for American Indians died quietly.

Or did it? Republicans had eliminated all the 1860 amendments authorizing the forced apprenticeship of American Indians. But they had left intact sections of the original 1850 act that mandated the forcible binding out of Indian convicts and vagrants. Moreover, repeal only prevented future apprenticeships; Republican legislation did not liberate Indians already legally apprenticed. After repeal, as many as 6,000 Indian children remained servants in white homes.

The incomplete nature of Indian emancipation in California reflected Republicans’ own ambivalence toward Indian freedom. Most Republicans opposed the kidnapping and enslavement of Indians. They believed that Indians, like former African-American slaves, should be entitled to reap the economic rewards of their own work. On the other hand, they asserted that the key to “civilizing” Indians was to force them to participate in the California labor market. They could not be free to support themselves through traditional mobile hunting and gathering practices that removed their labor from white supervision and tied up valuable natural resources. Such a lifestyle was, in Republicans’ minds, little more than idle vagrancy. Just as their Republican colleagues on the East Coast argued that ex-slaves should be schooled to labor by being bound to plantation wage work through long-term contracts, California Republicans began to advocate compulsory labor as the only way to cure Indian vagrancy.

The Republican vision for Indian freedom quickly took shape after the Civil War. Republican appointees who oversaw California’s Indian reservations compelled all able-bodied Indians to work on the reservation farms. Those who refused, or who pursued native food-gathering practices, forfeited the meager federal rations allotted to reservation Indians. By 1867, one Republican agent declared that “the hoe and the broadaxe will sooner civilize and Christianize than the spelling book and the Bible.” He advocated forcing Indians to work until they had been “humanized by systematic labor.” These policies persisted long after the war. At Round Valley Reservation, one critic observed in 1874 that “compulsion is used to keep the Indians and to drive them to work.” Indian workers received no payment for “labor and no opportunity to accumulate individual property.”

The ambiguous postwar liberty of California Indians reveals that the Civil War was a transcontinental conflict that reached west to the Pacific. The freedoms won in wartime, and the unfulfilled promises of emancipation, encompassed not only black and white, free and slave, but also American Indian peoples who suffered from distinctly Western systems of unfree labor. The Civil War and Reconstruction are best understood as truly national struggles over the meaning and limits of freedom, north, south and west.

Sources: “An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, April 22, 1850”; Michael Magliari, “Free Soil, Unfree Labor,” Pacific Historical Review 73 (August 2004); “Minority Report of the Special Joint Committee on the Mendocino War,” in Appendix to the Journals of the California Senate (1860); “An Act Amendatory of an Act entitled ‘An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians,’ April 16, 1860”; Mendocino Herald, April 10, 1863; George Hanson to William P. Dole, July 15, 1861, Office of Indian Affairs, Letters Received; Sacramento Union, May 5 – 12, 1862; Brendan C. Lindsay, “Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846 – 1873”; Elijah Steele to William P. Dole, Oct. 30, 1863, Office of Indian Affairs, Letters Received; Report of the Commissioner for Indian Affairs, 1867; Alta California, June 8, 1874.

[Stacey L. Smith is an assistant professor of history at Oregon State University and author of the forthcoming book “Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction.” (source: © 2013 The New York Times Company)]

Madeline Anderson's Film: The Integration Report, 1960

2013-05-21T21:16:00.001-07:00

Filmmaker Madeline Anderson

From the book, Reel Black Talk: A Sourcebook of 50 American Filmmakers, by Spencer Moon -- Being a pioneer is never easy. Madeline Anderson thought in her days of growing up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that she would be a filmmaker--a surprise to her family and friends. "People equated film-making with Hollywood, and everyone knew a Black girl couldn't aspire to be a Hollywood producer." She was encouraged to pursue another interest -- teaching.

Anderson has put the two together and is the first African American female independent filmmaker in the United States to produce a television series and have it air nationally. She became executive producer of the Infinity Factory (1978), which aired on PBS. It taught 8- to 12- year olds the everyday usage of mathematics. Anderson worked for four years as an in-house producer and director for the Children's Television Workshop (CTW). She produced a dozen or more short films and two half-hour documentary-style teaching films for parents and teachers. For The Infinity Factory (in addition to being executive producer), Anderson produced twenty-three 3-minute films, and produced and directed eithteen magazine-lenght (7-8 minute long) documentaries, ten of which she edited. She started making films as a civil rights activist to inform and encourage people to act. (source: Reel Black Talk: A Sourcebook of 50 American Filmmakers, by Spencer Moon)

The Integration Report

INDEPENDENT PRODUCTION -- Anderson's first independent film was Integration Report, One (1960). She described what it was like to make Integration Report, One:

This film taught me that you can't be an independent filmmaker unless you know how to do it. To do all of it. From making that film, I got into editing as a career path in filmmaking. (source: Reel Black Talk: A Sourcebook of 50 American Filmmakers, by Spencer Moon)

Integration Report, Part One: Madeline Anderson's documentary on the use of organized resistance as a force of social change in Montgomery, Alabama, Brooklyn and Washington, D.C. Features 1959 and 1960 footage of demonstrations, marches, sit-ins and boycotts. Producer, Madeline Anderson. 1960. 20 min

Carolina Planters on the Alabama Frontiers

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

Carolina Planters on the Alabama Frontiers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lost In History: Alexander Clark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gouverneur Morris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

African Slavery In America by Thomas Paine (1774)

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

Thomas Paine: African Slavery In America (1774)

To Americans:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are the sentiments of JUSTICE AND HUMANITY.

The Massacre at New Orleans

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

The Massacre at New Orleans.

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

New England Slavery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slavery American Family Business in the North

The Fortunes of Four Slave Ships

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

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

The Prince of Orange

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

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

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

The Marlborough

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Slave Ship "Juba"

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

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

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

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

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

The African Queen

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

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

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

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

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

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

The First Black Britons

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

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

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

The Value Of The Slave Trade

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slavery And Thomas Jefferson

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

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

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

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

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

Master of the Mountain; By Henry Wiencek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE CAPTIVE AFRICANS OF THE SLAVE SHIP "WILDFIRE"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE ONLY BABY AMONG THE AFRICANS

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

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

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

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

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

THE BARRACOON AT KEY WEST, WHERE THE AFRICANS ARE CONFINED

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

Blood & Treasure by Ted Maris-Wolf

The Amistad Rebellion by Marcus Rediker

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

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

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

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

By Marcus Rediker. Viking Press.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ira Berlin: Many Thousands Gone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slavery and the Supreme Court: Prigg v. Pennsylvania

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Racist New Deal Policies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toni Morrison: "Home"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toni Morrison: "Home"