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:
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
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)
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)
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)
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)
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
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)
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 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.
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])
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.
