tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69718238354340592762024-03-18T13:39:16.248-07:00US SlaveThis site is for educational purposes. Slavery in the new world from Africa to the Americas.Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.comBlogger2175125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-68180299045738399712015-05-16T19:51:00.001-07:002015-05-16T19:51:29.844-07:00The US Civil War Coverage of 1865 from Great Britian<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://molcat1.bl.uk/PhotoImages/BLCD/big/C300/C3009-05.jpg" class="shrinkToFit" src="http://molcat1.bl.uk/PhotoImages/BLCD/big/C300/C3009-05.jpg" height="258" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
From the archives of<i> <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21648128-our-coverage-end-americas-civil-war-fall-richmond-and-its-effect-upon-english-commerce" target="_blank">The Economist (UK), "The fall of Richmond and its effect upon English commerce,</a>"</i> Our [The UK Economist] coverage of the end of America's civil war, on 22 April 1865 -- United States -- THE fall of Richmond is one of the most striking events of modern history. On the one side the great hopes of the Confederates, their equally great efforts, the sympathy they have gained in Europe: on the other side, the undaunted courage of the Federals, their refusal to admit, even to their imagination, the possibility of real failure,—their accumulating power, which for many weeks past has seemed to concentrate like a gathering cloud about the capital of their enemies, give to the real event the intense but melancholy interest that belongs to the catastrophe of a tragedy. It is impossible not to feel a sympathy with the Confederates. There is an attraction in vanquished gallantry which appeals to the good side of human nature. But every Englishman at least will feel a kind of personal sympathy with the victory of the Federals.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
They have won, as an Englishman would have won, by obstinacy. They would not admit the possibility of real defeat; they did not know that they were beaten; or, to speak more accurately, they knew that though they seemed to be beaten they were not: they felt that they had in them latent elements of conclusive vigour which, in the end, they should bring out, though they were awkward and slow in so doing. We may alter, perhaps, to suit this event, the terms which, in one of the greatest specimens of English narrative, the great English historian describes on a memorable occasion the conduct of Rome. "But there are moments when rashness is wisdom, and it may be that this was one of them; panic did not for a moment unnerve the iron courage of the American democracy, and their resolute will striving beyond. its present power created, as is the law of our nature, the power which it required."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
But leaving history to deal in a becoming manner with the imaginative aspect of this great event, let us look at its present aspect in a business-like manner. The details of it are yet uncertain, and any conclusive judgment on minute results would be absurd. But, as far as we know, what does it amount to, and what will be its result?</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.junipergallery.com/sites/default/files/styles/jumbo/public/03711u.jpg" src="http://www.junipergallery.com/sites/default/files/styles/jumbo/public/03711u.jpg" height="155" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
It used to be said that Richmond was not essential to the Confederacy; that it was a nominal and accidental capital; that it was not even the original capital; that Virginia was but an outside State in a Confederacy with a vast interior; that even if this superficial outwork was lost, the war could be indefinitely protracted; that the fall of this exterior fortification would have scarcely affected the resistance of the provinces, upon which everything depended, And at the outset of the war when these words were used, they were doubtless substantially true. Subsequent events have in many respects confirmed them, and have in few tended to contradict them.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
But now the case is altered. The loss of an outer fortification does not impair the resisting faculty, when it is lost early in the day—when its defenders have not spent upon it the resources which are needful to defend the citadel. It still appears to be true, that if sometime since when the Confederacy, had three armies unbroken—when no hostile army had penetrated their interior—when their organisation was as yet intact, its Government had retired from Richmond, the war would not have ceased on the evacuation. The task of pursuing three armies retiring in a vast and friendly country by converging lines would certainly have been difficult, and might not have been successful. Loose bodies of insurgents, if such there were, would then have had large armies upon which to support their accessory operations. But now the Confederacy have no such armies. What Lee may have saved, what Johnston may still command, we do not know; but we may say without fear that they are incalculably less than the armies of the Confederacy a year ago, that they cannot maintain as compact bodies even a defensive and retiring conflict with the eager armies of the North.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
But without organised armies, can the Confederates be defended by loose insurgents and guerilla warfare, acting alone and without support? We believe that history affords no countenance to such an idea. A guerilla warfare requires the aid either of disciplined forces or of inaccessible territory. The history of the Spanish war shows conclusively that the guerilla resistance of the nation would have been useless without the regular resistance of the English army under the Duke of Wellington; the Spaniards enabled him to effect more with fewer troops, but they did little themselves. A territory like Arabia, a mountain chain like the Caucasus, can be defended by a few bodies of men with little discipline as well as by many more with discipline. Nature does so much that any sort of human force is sufficient to complete it. But the territory of the Confederacy though vast is penetrable: it is not a fortress, it is only a battlefield : it is a country in which a martial population, aided by effective armies, may well resist an invading enemy; but it is also a country from which even the most martial population may be brushed off with ease by diffused and disciplined forces.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://40.media.tumblr.com/f0a3b697dc046b3e1f093ce5d22ce302/tumblr_n0hyywEnZg1rd3evlo1_500.jpg" src="http://40.media.tumblr.com/f0a3b697dc046b3e1f093ce5d22ce302/tumblr_n0hyywEnZg1rd3evlo1_500.jpg" height="220" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Even under the most favourable circumstances a guerilla warfare by a nation of slaveowners must have unusual difficulties. The slaves cannot be relied on as a native peasantry can be relied on. It is said that Sherman on his march through Georgia always had good information regularly brought by negroes. We do not vouch for this as a fact, but it illustrates our meaning as an example. It is impossible that the existence of a slave class, which is not a part of the nation, which requires to be kept down by the nation, should not always be an impediment to the rising of the nation; and especially so in this case, when the invading army proclaims liberty to those slaves. We cannot expect a protracted guerilla resistance from a nation which has neither an inaccessible territory, nor a regular army, nor an attached peasant population.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
But if the Confederacy cannot long defend itself, if the civil war must soon come to an end, what will be its effect on us? The war itself disturbed as much in its origin and much by its continuance, will it also disturb us much by its cessation?</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.history.org/Foundation/journal/Autumn07/images/Iron86.jpg" src="http://www.history.org/Foundation/journal/Autumn07/images/Iron86.jpg" height="258" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
It is undeniable that the fall of Richmond, such as we have ascertained it to be, would have been of disastrous consequences to several branches of English commerce if it had happened six months ago. When cotton and its substitutes were weakly held at extravagant prices, the sudden occurrence of so great a catastrophe must have caused of itself many failures. So many slow and steady agencies all tending to produce a fall of price were then operating, that the addition of a single one of a striking nature might have produced lamentable results. A great panic in one class of articles would in a sensitive stale of the commercial world have produced a semi-panic in other articles. But now the case is different. Prices have greatly fallen. Whether they may have reached their lowest point exactly may lie argued, but they have fallen so low that no great further drop is possible or likely. Many weak holders have been cleared away, and the nominal price in consequence is firmer and more real than the nominal price of six months since. The peculiar circumstances affecting cotton, we explained in an elaborate article last week. We showed that even on the assumption that "the civil war in America must be near its close," there was no ground for thinking that cotton would experience a further fall, but rather a probability that the present fall had been too great and too sudden to be permanent. In fact, as so often happens, the effect of the defeat of the South has been discounted; the result of the expectation has been as great, if not greater, than the result of the event.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
There is another circumstance of great importance. The world is getting "short of clothes," and especially of good clothes. When the war broke out great stores of cotton goods were found to be lying in warehouses at Manchester and elsewhere, and many persons were eager to raise the common cry of over-production: they fancied there was something anomalous and out of place in so vast an accumulation. But Mr Cobden, with that real perception of the facts of commerce which characterised his mind, immediately said, "No, there is no unnecessary accumulation, except in one or two particular markets, as India and China, and in other exceptional cases; we have not more goods on hand than we ought to have." In reality, a very considerable accumulation of stored manufactures is an attendant condition, an inevitable consequence, of the present vast and delicate division of labour. When everybody is working for everybody, everybody is injured by the mischances of everybody. An English middle class consumer is fed and clothed by an immense multiplicity of labourers; their numbers are considerable, and they are of several kinds. If any one important species of these labourers is impeded, we risk the loss of some article of prime necessity. But we insure against it. We keep a stock of each durable article so considerable that we have much to last for a long time, even if the means of producing it have by some casualty suddenly stopped. Some people say the world ought always to have "two years' stock" of clothes on hand, and now we bare nothing like it.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Virginia,_Richmond_and_Petersburg_Railroad_Bridge,_across_the_James,_Ruins_of._-_NARA_-_533361.jpg" class="shrinkToFit" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Virginia,_Richmond_and_Petersburg_Railroad_Bridge,_across_the_James,_Ruins_of._-_NARA_-_533361.jpg" height="245" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The effect of this will be very remarkable. When the American war broke out we had two years' stock on hand, and we lived on that till other sources of supply were opened and made effectual. The existence of that supply insured us then; its non-existence will insure us now. As we return to a usual and normal state of things, we shall tend to recur to our regular and habitual accumulation. We have not only now to clothe the world—we have to clothe it and something more. We have to make up our stock; to again create the guarantee fund, which shall insure us against any new calamities—against some deprivation of supply as sudden and as unlikely as an American civil war would have seemed five years ago. At that time any one who had prophesied the actual history of those five years would have been deemed a lunatic: our stored resources saved us then, and we must store them up again now to use them in like manner.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
And this additional demand will gradually carry off an additional supply—especially if, as is likely, the clothes made with cheap material be better than the clothes made with dear material. There will be a capital demand for cotton and other goods, if once it is understood that the end is attained, that the bottom is reached, that the trader nearest the consumer—the small shopkeeper—had better supply himself at once. The small shops of the world are now only half supplied; if they once take to supplying themselves, the demand will be great.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
As far, therefore, as the producing power of America is concerned, we do not think its revival, even if it should occur very rapidly, would derange our market, or affect us except beneficially. Nor, as far as its consuming power is concerned, can we cannot expect much from the conclusion of the war. Some sanguine persons fancy that we shall at once have a vast trade with the United States the moment they are reunited—the moment the war stops. But there is no ground for so thinking either as respects the South or the North. Some additional trade with both, of course, there will be, but not enough to affect Lombard street—to alter the demand for the capital of England. First, as to the North, its tariff cripples to an incredible extent all commerce with it. It has been spending largely and recklessly. It has been borrowing largely and recklessly. It has been misusing its currency. The repentance after these errors will be a time of strait and difficulty, and though under good management its splendid national resources are quite sufficient to cope with this difficulty, yet the difficulty is real and considerable. The additional immediate trade which we shall have with the North will not be of the first magnitude—will not affect the money market.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2008/10/21/gard460.jpg" src="http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2008/10/21/gard460.jpg" height="192" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Nor will the trade with the South. The South is disorganised, and must long be disorganised. What the fate of its peculiar civilisation may be we cannot yet say, for there are no data, and any conclusion is only "one guess among many," one notion a little better perhaps than others, but without any solid ground of evidence. But so much is evident that great changes are in store for the South,—that it must pass through a social revolution,—that during the revolution it will not buy as it used to buy,—that after the revolution tastes will have changed, and it will not buy what it used to buy.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
On the whole, therefore, the conclusion is, that though the catastrophe of the American war seems likely to happen more suddenly and more strikingly than could have been expected, yet its principal effect will have been already anticipated, and it will have less influence on prices and transactions than many events of less considerable magnitude. (source: <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21648128-our-coverage-end-americas-civil-war-fall-richmond-and-its-effect-upon-english-commerce" target="_blank"><i>The UK Economist</i></a>)</div>
<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aUg4Nz6VvVc" width="420"></iframe>Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com424tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-8541297038390555242015-05-16T18:39:00.003-07:002015-05-16T18:41:43.947-07:00River of Dark Dreams: The Mississippi Valley Cotton Kingdom<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://medias.photodeck.com/58707a52-3d7d-11e0-9d2d-a3808f320550/000537_xgaplus.jpg" class="shrinkToFit" src="http://medias.photodeck.com/58707a52-3d7d-11e0-9d2d-a3808f320550/000537_xgaplus.jpg" height="320" width="244" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
From the <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324880504578297992942894884" target="_blank"><i>Wall Street Journal Bookshelf,</i></a><i> "</i>When the South Was Flat: The brutal "slave-ocracy" along the Mississippi was far more integrated with the global economy than is often suggested," by Mark M. Smith, on 22 February 2013 -- Observers today speak breathlessly about the global economy and the flatness of the world's financial system as if those were recent trends. Such observations are at least a couple of centuries too late.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In the decades leading up to the American Civil War, the Mississippi Valley grew increasingly flat, physically as well as financially. Slaves there cut down a lot of trees. "Whole forests were literally dragged out by the roots," recalled one bondman. In the process of this radical deforestation, slaveholders literally flattened their world and, in a practical sense, accelerated a process of cotton production and capital accumulation that thoroughly embedded them in the transatlantic economy. The arduous work that slaves performed on the region's plantations, the cotton they grew and the capital they helped planters generate were intimately connected to the cotton traders (called "factors") in New Orleans, the merchant houses of New York and Liverpool, and the textile mills of Britain. As the planters surveyed their world from the banks of the mighty Mississippi, they understood fully their place in this Atlantic arc and began to dream of new connections, especially with Cuba and Nicaragua, links they hoped would secure the future of their slaveholding society.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51n1kUwcL%2BL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51n1kUwcL%2BL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" height="320" width="210" /> </div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom; By Walter Johnson</i></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
It was not supposed to happen this way. The Louisiana Purchase, all 828,000 square miles of it acquired in 1803 for a piddling $15 million, was supposed to protect and project liberty. Thomas Jefferson envisioned an empire populated with self-sufficient, non-commercial white men. In their stead, as Walter Johnson, a professor of history at Harvard University, shows in "River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom," came an exceptionally rapacious slaveocracy, which dominated the region's political economy and subordinated freedom to the irresistible imperatives of a robust, thriving and relentlessly exploitative system.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The Mississippi Valley (which runs through parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee and Missouri) emerged, Mr. Johnson writes, as the "credit-importing, cotton-exporting leading edge of the global economy of the nineteenth century." A rabidly speculative spirit drove the process, and the flush times of the 1830s gave rise to booms in the region's powerful economic triptych: cotton, land and slaves. Into this maelstrom of unabashed acquisitiveness stepped the speculators: the land grabbers, the merchants, the slave traders. Riverboat operators also figured prominently, with steamboats able to move considerable freight upriver, melting away barriers of time and space. By the eve of the Civil War, steamboats carried over $200 million of trade, mainly in cotton, and were a leading sector in the region's economy.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://philschatz.com/us-history-book/resources/CNX_History_12_01_Levee.jpg" src="http://philschatz.com/us-history-book/resources/CNX_History_12_01_Levee.jpg" height="228" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In Mr. Johnson's telling, the antebellum Mississippi Valley is an unexpectedly modern place, more technologically advanced than the mills of Massachusetts or Manchester and certainly just as connected to and driven by the dictates of the world economy. The technology powering steamboats, for example, was new, designed to overcome the river's mighty flow, pushing goods and people upstream at an impressive if not always safe speed. The textile mills of the North and Britain, by contrast, still relied on an ancient, riparian technology, one hostage to the force of gravity. As Mr. Johnson notes: "A mere handful of the steamboats docked along the levee in New Orleans on any given day could have run the entire factory at Lowell."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
A great deal of the capital underwriting this technology came directly from the North and Britain. New Orleans bankers managed the circulation of Northern and British capital in the region. With that capital, planters bought slaves, the human capital to cultivate cotton. The slave traders—there were as many as 20 establishments in New Orleans in the antebellum period whose sole business was the buying and selling of bondpeople—thus completed the dismal if highly profitable circuit in capital and labor.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The forces underwriting the region's feverish economic development were also making it a place where uncertainty prevailed. Numerous slaves in the Mississippi Valley were engaged in fomenting insurrection—hundreds of them, armed with axes and shovels, marched on New Orleans in 1811—or resisting the exploitation of their labor by running away or by taking from their masters the food and drink usually denied them. Paper currency could not always be trusted (it was frequently unbacked, and bills of exchange were often far removed from the original issuer). Steamboat travel was highly dangerous, and on land or river, no one was entirely sure of the true character or, indeed, the race of those they encountered in this booming region (was that a light-skinned slave or a free white man?). There was an imprecise, speculative air. But things got done, impressively if sordidly. By 1840, Mr. Johnson writes, there were "more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the United States." </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/37/3761/9TVZF00Z/posters/black-stevedores-loading-bales-on-the-cotton-wharf-in-charleston-south-carolina-1870s.jpg" src="http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/37/3761/9TVZF00Z/posters/black-stevedores-loading-bales-on-the-cotton-wharf-in-charleston-south-carolina-1870s.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Mr. Johnson's appreciation of the global and imperial aspirations of Mississippi Valley slaveholders helps us to make sense of the events leading up to the Civil War. These "full-throttle capitalists" were filled with expansionist zeal. Valley planters and politicians made dedicated efforts to overthrow Cuba's Spanish colonial government in the 1850s. They feared what might happen if the anti-slavery British gained control of Cuba. Emancipation there might inspire slave insurrections and even race wars in their own part of the world. More optimistically, they thought Cuba could be the key to further economic success, valley-style. "It is sufficient to look over the extensive valley of the Mississippi," wrote one supporter of annexation, "to understand that the natural direction of its growth, the point of connection of its prodigious European commerce and of its rational defense, is Cuba." So, too, with Nicaragua. If Cuba functioned as the imperial slaveholders' transatlantic connection, Nicaragua, at least in the conviction of William Walker (who invaded the country in 1855, proclaimed himself president and promptly reinstituted slavery), represented the slaveholders' ambitions to link to the Pacific. (Walker was overthrown by local troops and shot in Honduras in 1860 after another attempt to establish a colony.)</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Louisiana and Mississippi slaveholders were keen to reopen the African slave trade in the late 1850s, which, the thinking went, would allow more whites to own slaves and dilute the tensions from an emerging class of slaveless whites. (As slave prices spiked in the late antebellum period, fewer whites were able to move into the ranks of the small slaveholding class.) For the slaveholders and merchants of New Orleans and the Mississippi Valley, "the issues of Nicaragua and the Atlantic slave trade were more important than the question of Kansas (dismissed by many as a fight over a place where no real slaveholder would ever want to live anyway) and more important than what was happening in Congress."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://images.delcampe.com/img_large/auction/000/283/302/762_001.jpg" src="http://images.delcampe.com/img_large/auction/000/283/302/762_001.jpg" height="211" width="320" /></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The valley slaveholders do not fit the standard narrative of the coming of the Civil War, which tends to stress the centrality of expansion into western lands. Their sense of liberty was rooted less in expansion westward to places that seemed unlikely to support cotton culture and far more in efforts to repopulate the South with fresh slaves and to acquire territory outside of the United States where slavery would be more secure.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In this depiction, the coming of the Civil War assumes more of a regional flavor and less of a sectional one. Different imperatives operated in different regions of the South. Exporters of slaves in the upper South (roughly a million people were sold "down river" between 1820 and 1860) were reluctant to reopen the slave trade. Their overriding concern was maintaining their role as the South's exporter of slaves and, by extension, their own economic well-being. "Open the Slave Trade and what will our Negroes be worth?" asked one Virginia editor nervously.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Yet it is important to remember that Mr. Johnson is describing what did not happen rather than what did—what he calls "the history of alternative visions." The slave trade was not reopened, and expeditions in the Caribbean were largely bungled affairs involving relatively few people—more than half of whom, in the case of Walker's Nicaraguan adventure, were not from the valley or the South at all but were, rather, Northern adventurers. The fact that this particular vision of a pro-slavery future never came to pass only emphasizes that these same slaveholders did eventually secede and fight in a war, even if it was for what Mr. Johnson calls "a sort of lowest common dominator," a "politics of negation—of seceding from."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://steamboats.com/jpgs/HarperGoff%20SteamboatCalendarArtHalf%20Size.jpg" class="shrinkToFit" src="http://steamboats.com/jpgs/HarperGoff%20SteamboatCalendarArtHalf%20Size.jpg" height="248" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
And more than the politics of negation may have linked the Mississippi Valley slaveholders with others elsewhere in the South. Pro-slavery political economists (whom Mr. Johnson examines in detail) were harsh critics of free wage labor and liberal capitalism, but so were the influential pro-slavery divines and theologians (whom Mr. Johnson slights). They saw liberal capitalism as a profound threat to the social hierarchy, which was rooted in self-serving claims about paternalism, the enduring value and desirability of organic social and economic relations, and the intimate connection between slaveholding society writ large and the integrity of individual, patriarchal white households. The arguments developed and circulated by the pro-slavery theologians resonated with slaveholders and non-slaveholders throughout the South.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Recognizing such features of Southern society, as well as acknowledging the tortured way in which paternalism braided together the lives of the enslaved and the enslavers, goes some way toward "unflattening" the world Mr. Johnson describes. Nonetheless, "River of Dark Dreams" is an important, arguably seminal, book. If sometimes dense, it is always trenchant and learned. And in highly compelling fashion, it helps us more fully appreciate how thoroughly the slaveholding South was part of the capitalist transatlantic world of the first half of the 19th century. [source: <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324880504578297992942894884" target="_blank"><i>The Wall Street Journal</i></a>]</div>
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jvaRp9zxGho" width="420"></iframe><br />Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com436tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-35878244058364118062015-05-16T12:22:00.001-07:002015-05-16T12:22:34.649-07:00Between Slavery and Capitalism<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://press.princeton.edu/images/k10397.gif" src="http://press.princeton.edu/images/k10397.gif" height="320" width="211" /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Between Slavery and Capitalism: The Legacy of Emancipation in the American South; Martin Ruef</i></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10397.html" target="_blank"><i> Princeton University Press</i></a> -- At the center of the upheavals brought by emancipation in the American South was the economic and social transition from slavery to modern capitalism. In Between Slavery and Capitalism, Martin Ruef examines how this institutional change affected individuals, organizations, and communities in the late nineteenth century, as blacks and whites alike learned to navigate the shoals between two different economic worlds. Analyzing trajectories among average Southerners, this is perhaps the most extensive sociological treatment of the transition from slavery since W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In the aftermath of the Civil War, uncertainty was a pervasive feature of life in the South, affecting the economic behavior and social status of former slaves, Freedmen's Bureau agents, planters, merchants, and politicians, among others. Emancipation brought fundamental questions: How should emancipated slaves be reimbursed in wage contracts? What occupations and class positions would be open to blacks and whites? What forms of agricultural tenure could persist? And what paths to economic growth would be viable? To understand the escalating uncertainty of the postbellum era, Ruef draws on a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including several thousand interviews with former slaves, letters, labor contracts, memoirs, survey responses, census records, and credit reports.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Through a resolutely comparative approach, Between Slavery and Capitalism identifies profound changes between the economic institutions of the Old and New South and sheds new light on how the legacy of emancipation continues to affect political discourse and race and class relations today. (source:<a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10397.html" target="_blank"><i> Princeton University Press)</i></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sITuH6BZGZQ" width="420"></iframe>Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com207tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-58234947643246243142015-04-17T21:46:00.000-07:002015-04-17T22:28:19.892-07:00New Orleans Slavery Exhibit At The Williams Research Center<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.hnoc.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/1941.3.websitebigger.jpg" height="245" src="http://www.hnoc.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/1941.3.websitebigger.jpg" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
As reported in the <a href="http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/southcentral/2015/04/15/364482.htm" target="_blank"><i>Insurance Journal</i></a>, in an article entitled, "Insurance Policy Included in Harrowing New Orleans Slavery Exhibit," by John Pope, on 15 April 2015 -- The cool, soothing exhibit rooms at the Historic New Orleans Collection’s Williams Research Center are a stark contrast to what’s shown: every wall and exhibit case documents the horrors of slavery.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
There are inventories and illustrations of the auction of human beings, as well as reward notices for the return of slaves who escaped from plantations. An 1821 insurance policy taken out by William Kenner, the plantation owner whose family gave its name to the East Jefferson municipality, covered a shipment of slaves for the voyage from Savannah, Georgia, to New Orleans.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/new_orleans_detail_1920.jpg" src="http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/new_orleans_detail_1920.jpg" height="320" width="313" /> </div>
<br />
An 1849 map shows more than 50 slave markets all around the city. An engraving depicts a slave auction in the rotunda of the St. Louis Hotel, which occupied the French Quarter site where the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel stands.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Under this dome, in this atmosphere of grandeur, paintings, furniture, property and people were bought and sold,” said Erin Greenwald, the curator of “Purchased Lives: New Orleans and the Domestic Slave Trade,” on view at 410 Chartres St. through July 18. Admission is free.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://imgick.nola.com/home/nola-media/width960/img/tpphotos/photo/2015/03/20/-02bf31b3fa858146.jpg" src="http://imgick.nola.com/home/nola-media/width960/img/tpphotos/photo/2015/03/20/-02bf31b3fa858146.jpg" height="222" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Slave auctions were on the list of must-see sights,” she said.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Because the St. Louis Hotel wasn’t demolished until 1916, the auction block not only stood for a half-century after emancipation but attracted people who posed next to it in what Greenwald described as “fetishization.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The people who posed weren’t just tourists. Greenwald said a recently acquired postcard from 1914, destined for the exhibit once it was catalogued, shows a black woman who had been asked to stand on the block where she had been sold into slavery for $1,500.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://dsq-sds.org/article/viewFile/3267/3100/6708" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="http://dsq-sds.org/article/viewFile/3267/3100/6708" border="0" class="shrinkToFit" src="http://dsq-sds.org/article/viewFile/3267/3100/6708" height="239" width="320" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“It is deeply, deeply creepy,” Greenwald said.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
A ship’s manifest showing slaves bound for New Orleans includes Plat Hamilton, the slave name imposed on Solomon Northup after he was kidnapped and sold into bondage. His memoir, “12 Years a Slave,” was the basis of an Oscar-winning movie.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The exhibit also shows a page from the diary of the Marksville lawyer whom Northup’s family hired to sue for his freedom. On Jan. 4, 1853, three days after John Pamplin Waddill wrote that he had been hired, he said that Northup had been freed and that he had collected his fee: $50.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“That’s an extraordinary document,” Greenwald said.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
When Northup arrived in New Orleans, he had smallpox, Greenwald said, and was treated at Charity Hospital.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/OfaJDFEcBvPE1RGMtziB8arWNBl2CpBNBfYo-ETsAmOGOfT75smmnScPe0BJvyu5x5LpNPzR-vCzjfSvlTtLOPVVlBEjqwZSkT8qoWcJ2Mi-5gvk" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="http://www.touro.com/upload/assets/images/TouroInfirmary1906.jpg" border="0" src="http://www.touro.com/upload/assets/images/TouroInfirmary1906.jpg" height="193" width="320" /></a></div>
Treating slaves before they were sold was common, she said, adding that a Touro Infirmary patient register in the exhibit shows that about 45 percent of the hospital’s patients between 1855 and 1860 were slaves.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“They were trying to get their human property well so that they could sell them for a higher price,” Greenwald said. “They got a new set of clothes, they were fattened up, and they were made to exercise to build and tone muscles. They were given lessons on how to look lively so they didn’t look downcast or somber when buyers came in.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.hnoc.org/wp-content/gallery/purchasedlives/2013-0138.jpg" src="http://www.hnoc.org/wp-content/gallery/purchasedlives/2013-0138.jpg" height="320" width="186" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In the exhibit are a livery coat for a slave who worked indoors, and a greatcoat, designed for outdoor work such as driving carriages, that Dr. William Newton Mercer provided for his slaves. The garments, with his family crest on silver and pewter buttons, came from Brooks Brothers.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Mercer had plantations in Mississippi and a New Orleans town house, which, Greenwald said, is now the Boston Club.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“If you were a resident of the city of New Orleans in the 1840s, you couldn’t go anywhere without encountering slavery,” she said. “It was just a part of life _ the cooks in hotels, the waiters in hotels, carters and draymen bringing goods back and forth, seamstresses and market women. All these people were people who were enslaved.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.history.com/images/media/slideshow/slavery-slave-life/slave-punishment.jpg" src="http://www.history.com/images/media/slideshow/slavery-slave-life/slave-punishment.jpg" height="217" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
There’s more to the exhibit than paperwork, pictures and garments. One case holds an iron collar, just big enough to encircle someone’s neck, with two tall prongs, each hanging a bell at ear level.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The 4-pound collar would be clamped onto a slave who had tried to escape. It’s “possibly the most viscerally disturbing object in the exhibition,” Greenwald said.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“It was worn 24/7,” she said. “Overseers and plantation owners would use them as a method of punishing and tracking runaway slaves because every time you move, the bell rings.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Next to the collar is a classified advertisement asking the owners of a 20-year-old slave named William to take him home from the jail where he had been confined as an escapee.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“He is black and has a down look,” the advertisement reads. “When committed, he had around his neck an iron collar with three prongs extending upward; has many scars on his back and shoulders from the whip.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.cah.utexas.edu/db/dmr/image_lg/NTC_0305a_pub.jpg" src="http://www.cah.utexas.edu/db/dmr/image_lg/NTC_0305a_pub.jpg" height="229" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
While slavery was horrible, emancipation didn’t help much, aside from the fact that these men, women and children were no longer property, Greenwald said.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
They had nothing, she said, and often had to work as tenant farmers on the land where they had been enslaved. A stereopticon slide in the exhibit shows people wearing rags and, with a few exceptions, barefoot.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Although the Freedmen’s Bureau was established in 1865 to help the formerly enslaved adjust to their new status, it provided no money to people who wanted to reconnect with families that had been torn apart by sales to different slave-owners.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www4.print2webcorp.com/news/batonrouge/mkt/205684/img/205684.jpg" src="http://www4.print2webcorp.com/news/batonrouge/mkt/205684/img/205684.jpg" height="291" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Consequently, they resorted to placing classified advertisements seeking information. A wall is full of these heartbreaking appeals.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Jacob Stewart, who lived in Yazoo City, Miss., placed such an ad trying to find his mother, sister and brother. He hadn’t seen them since 1856, when he was sold in New Orleans.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
There is no way to tell how many of these appeals were successful, Greenwald said, but she didn’t offer much hope.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Some people found their families,” she said, “but the vast majority did not.” (source: <i>Insurance Journal; Copyright 2015 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.<a href="http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/southcentral/2015/04/15/364482.htm"></a></i>)</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xtp1/v/t1.0-9/11124716_10153146983693419_5210172484814019873_n.jpg?oh=a2460d7bbb5aac1636eb7c8d870e0041&oe=55DCF7C4&__gda__=1440483841_6d70ee7ec73ab8fe5879961cbe234f64" height="118" src="https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xtp1/v/t1.0-9/11124716_10153146983693419_5210172484814019873_n.jpg?oh=a2460d7bbb5aac1636eb7c8d870e0041&oe=55DCF7C4&__gda__=1440483841_6d70ee7ec73ab8fe5879961cbe234f64" width="320" /></div>
<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zU-uzeN_Q0Q" width="420"></iframe>
<!-- Blogger automated replacement: "https://images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.touro.com%2Fupload%2Fassets%2Fimages%2FTouroInfirmary1906.jpg&container=blogger&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image%2F*" with "https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/OfaJDFEcBvPE1RGMtziB8arWNBl2CpBNBfYo-ETsAmOGOfT75smmnScPe0BJvyu5x5LpNPzR-vCzjfSvlTtLOPVVlBEjqwZSkT8qoWcJ2Mi-5gvk" -->Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com199tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-87715730935489433562015-03-16T07:59:00.003-07:002015-03-16T07:59:31.004-07:00Freedom Summer in Mississippi 1964<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://freedom50.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/FreedomSummer.jpg" height="320" src="http://freedom50.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/FreedomSummer.jpg" width="248" /><br />
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
As reviewed in the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/24/arts/television/freedom-summer-on-pbs-looks-back-at-1964.html" target="_blank"><i>New York Times</i></a>, "A Few Hot Months of Solidarity and Violence: ‘Freedom Summer’ on PBS Looks Back at 1964," by Mike Hale, on 23 June 2014 -- The PBS documentary “Freedom Summer” won’t make many lists of the top television programs of the year, but it’s hard to imagine two hours better spent in front of a screen.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
It continues the filmmaker Stanley Nelson’s commemoration of crucial moments in the civil rights movement under the auspices of “American Experience,” which gives it its premiere Tuesday [June 2014]. Following his “Freedom Riders” in 2011, Mr. Nelson celebrates the 50th anniversary of what was known as the Mississippi Summer Project, another instance in which blacks and whites came together to battle racism.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Mr. Nelson works in the talking-heads-and-archival-film style of Ken Burns, but he uses the similar techniques to make films that are more alive, more propulsive, combining Mr. Burns’s Olympian authority with an insistent rhythm and a clear current of emotion. Staying within standard feature-film time limits, he tells big stories with coherent, seamless elegance.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://empathyeducates.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Lessons-Freedom-Summer-TUse.jpg" height="273" src="http://empathyeducates.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Lessons-Freedom-Summer-TUse.jpg" width="320" /></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Such is the case with “Freedom Summer,” a compressed, complex history of the campaign for voter registration and education in Mississippi led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The film lays out the unbelievable realities of black life in the state and the slow progress of SNCC toward the decision to bus in around 1,000 volunteers, many of them white college students, to generate attention and force a change.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
It’s an awe-inspiring story, but Mr. Nelson keeps his focus close up on the details of organization and crisis management, and he is resolutely cleareyed, dispelling any notions about romantic young firebrands boarding buses for adventure. Organizers speak of the care with which the student volunteers were chosen, and the many who were rejected; for the safety of everyone involved, the project needed people “as together as it was possible to be at 19.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/0c23e5d4dc10a696bc109f90bc9362f697e05832/c=150-0-1809-1252&r=x513&c=680x510/local/-/media/USATODAY/USATODAY/2014/01/31//1391195484008-Freedom09.jpg" height="240" src="http://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/0c23e5d4dc10a696bc109f90bc9362f697e05832/c=150-0-1809-1252&r=x513&c=680x510/local/-/media/USATODAY/USATODAY/2014/01/31//1391195484008-Freedom09.jpg" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
But there is romance and tremendous poignancy in the story, and Mr. Nelson evokes it quietly. Unlabeled cuts juxtapose black-and-white images of the young activists and residents and scenes of them now, talking about the greatest moment in their lives. Rita Schwerner, the widow of one of the three men murdered in the summer’s most notorious incident of violence, speaks calmly about her husband’s death.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
And the film quotes from a letter that Andrew Goodman, another of the victims, wrote to his parents, reassuring them upon his arrival in Mississippi, not far from where he would die: “I have arrived safely in Meridian, Miss. This is a wonderful town, and the weather is fine.” (source: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/24/arts/television/freedom-summer-on-pbs-looks-back-at-1964.html" target="_blank"><i>The New York Times)</i></a></div>
<br />
PBS American Experience: Freedom Summer<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tXsc-1Wur2w" width="420"></iframe><br />Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com110tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-76393221042701914052015-02-28T17:37:00.001-08:002015-03-01T13:08:50.830-08:00The Slave in the Dismal Swamp<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://hmcurrentevents.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/SNLEAN792200_89P_lg.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://hmcurrentevents.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/SNLEAN792200_89P_lg.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
The Slave in the Dismal Swamp<br />
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow</div>
<br />
In dark fens of the Dismal Swamp<br />
The hunted Negro lay;<br />
He saw the fire of the midnight camp,<br />
And heard at times a horse's tramp<br />
And a bloodhound's distant bay. <br />
<br />
Where will-o'-the-wisps and glow-worms shine,<br />
In bulrush and in brake;<br />
Where waving mosses shroud the pine,<br />
And the cedar grows, and the poisonous vine<br />
Is spotted like the snake; <br />
<br />
Where hardly a human foot could pass,<br />
Or a human heart would dare,<br />
On the quaking turf of the green morass<br />
He crouched in the rank and tangled grass,<br />
Like a wild beast in his lair.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://theconsigliori.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/exodus-old-style.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://theconsigliori.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/exodus-old-style.jpg" height="317" width="320" /></div>
<br />
A poor old slave, infirm and lame;<br />
Great scars deformed his face;<br />
On his forehead he bore the brand of shame,<br />
And the rags, that hid his mangled frame,<br />
Were the livery of disgrace. <br />
<br />
All things above were bright and fair,<br />
All things were glad and free;<br />
Lithe squirrels darted here and there,<br />
And wild birds filled the echoing air<br />
With songs of Liberty! <br />
<br />
On him alone was the doom of pain,<br />
From the morning of his birth;<br />
On him alone the curse of Cain<br />
Fell, like a flail on the garnered grain,<br />
And struck him to the earth! <br />
<br />
[Source: Longfellow, H.W. (1866) The Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Boston, Massachusetts: Ticknor & Fields]Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com111tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-41051560970410266252015-02-27T07:26:00.004-08:002015-02-27T07:26:59.836-08:00Unholy: The Slaves Bible by David Charles Mills<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51lhGN1vigL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51lhGN1vigL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" height="320" width="213" /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Unholy: The Slaves Bible by David Charles Mills</i></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Watch David Charles Mills, author of "Unholy: The Slaves Bible," read excerpts from his book 14 October 2009 at the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center at Vanderbilt University.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Mills book explores a relatively unknown work a more than 200-year-old Bible planned, prepared and published in London for the purpose of convincing slaves in the British West Indies that their status was ordained by God.</div>
<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5Fovp6DBt_0" width="420"></iframe>Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com41tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-20348090278605891952015-02-26T21:35:00.001-08:002015-02-26T21:35:33.352-08:00An Account of Post Civil War Reconstruction<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/1-freedmens-bureau-1868-granger.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/1-freedmens-bureau-1868-granger.jpg" height="217" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
A Book review from the <a href="http://www.providencejournal.com/article/20140406/Entertainment/304069944" target="_blank"><i>Providence Journal</i></a>, “'The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era,' by Douglas R. Egerton," reviewed by Erik J. Chaput, 6 April 2014 -- In early October 1864, a convention of more than 140 African-Americans from 18 states met in Syracuse, N.Y., to discuss the future of American freedom. The convention was chaired by Frederick Douglass.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
With the reelection of Abraham Lincoln secure, thanks in large part to the fall of Atlanta, the delegates turned to what postwar America would look like. They demanded the “complete abolition” of slavery and “political equality.” Shall “we toil with you to win the prize of free government, while you alone shall monopolize all its valued privileges?” asked the delegates of the war-torn country. In his magisterial new book, Douglas R. Egerton chronicles the Syracuse meeting, along with others that were organized throughout the South after the Civil War, in order “to establish a network of activism designed” to bring a reform agenda to the attention of Congress and a recalcitrant president.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51IBFzyKJFL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51IBFzyKJFL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" border="0" class="decoded" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51IBFzyKJFL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" height="320" width="210" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Egerton, the author of the definitive account of the election of 1860, “Year of Meteors,” has written the most important book on Reconstruction since the publication of Eric Foner’s 1988 classic, “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“The Wars of Reconstructions” tells the story of “black veterans, activists, ministers, assemblymen, registrars, poll workers, editors, and handful of dedicated white allies” who set out to make the decades after the Civil War the “most democratic” in the 19th century. They ultimately lost their fight due to the violence of white Southerners who were determined to restore the old order. Students of Rhode Island history will enjoy the treatment of Newport restaurateur George T. Downing, who helped to found the Colored National Labor Union.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Egerton provides a concise overview of the Freedmen’s Bureau, along with the American Missionary Association. The Freedmen’s Bureau was tapped with numerous tasks, including education and land distribution. Prior to 1865, no Southern state had a system of public education. As the editor of the “Anglo-African” newspaper wrote as early as November 1861, land owned by Southern slaveholders should be “immediately bestow[ed]” upon the “freedmen.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/1-va-freedmens-bureau-1866-granger.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/1-va-freedmens-bureau-1866-granger.jpg" height="198" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The freedmen, however, did not find an ally in President Andrew Johnson, who took office after Lincoln was assassinated and serves as the villain in Egerton’s narrative. Johnson’s racist policies allowed white supremacists to commit “arson and murder,” along with targeted “assassinations” of reformers such as Octavius Catto.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Though often a tragic story, Egerton convincingly argues that Reconstruction was a progressive period, with many policies, even if they resembled a flickering flame, surviving on. As Egerton notes, “black literacy increased four hundred percent in the thirty-five years after Appomattox.” Black churches continued to grow. The black conventions continued to meet in the 1870s and ’80s. Pushed by the efforts of Congressman James O’Hara, a black Republican from North Carolina, African-Americans filed lawsuits against railroads that denied them access and sometimes won.</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/va-freedmens-bureau-1866-granger.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/va-freedmens-bureau-1866-granger.jpg" height="197" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Clearly written, engaging, meticulously researched, and often moving, Egerton’s “The Wars of Reconstruction,” is simply a must-read for anyone looking to understand what is without a doubt the most misunderstood period in our nation’s history.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Erik J. Chaput teaches at Providence College and The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. He is the author of “The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion.” (source: <a href="http://www.providencejournal.com/article/20140406/Entertainment/304069944" target="_blank"><i>Providence Journal</i></a>)</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://images.c-spanvideo.org/Files/f02/20140209231023002_hd.jpg/Thumbs/height.630.no_border.width.1200.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://images.c-spanvideo.org/Files/f02/20140209231023002_hd.jpg/Thumbs/height.630.no_border.width.1200.jpg" height="168" width="320" /> </div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.c-span.org/video/?317520-1/book-discussion-wars-reconstruction" target="_blank"><i>CLICK HERE to watch Professor Douglas Egerton talked about his book The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era, in which he looks at politics in both northern and southern states following the Civil War, and argues that the early post-Civil War years saw major progressive reforms, on C-Span. </i></a></div>
Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com109tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-39654906378866059312015-02-25T08:54:00.002-08:002015-02-26T21:39:56.383-08:00Professor William Pettigrew: How to Place Slavery into British Identity <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OX0RmSnYyB0/VO3_kcV32mI/AAAAAAAAM5U/iWLInILjwLk/s1600/chains.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OX0RmSnYyB0/VO3_kcV32mI/AAAAAAAAM5U/iWLInILjwLk/s1600/chains.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
From <a href="http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/how-to-place-slavery-into-british-identity" target="_blank"><i>Gresham College on 14 May 2014, "How to Place Slavery into British Identity," by Professor William Pettigrew, University of Kent</i></a> -- In September 2013, at the G20 summit in St Petersburg, a rumour emerged of a Russian jibe about Britain. A Russian official was reported as dismissing Britain as a ‘small island that no one pays any attention to’. Thinking it a suitable response, David Cameron offered a menu of Britain’s historic achievements to bolster British national pride. Britain, so Cameron informed the audience of world leaders and diplomats, had invented sport, rid Europe of fascism, and abolished slavery and ought, therefore, to be taken more seriously as a nation. This certainly gathered some attention, but perhaps not in the way it was designed to. <br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
British Prime Ministers of recent years have turned with remarkable consistency to the abolition of slavery as a prop for Britain’s self-defined greatness. Cameron’s predecessor, Gordon Brown, also privileged the abolition of slavery in a speech as Chancellor of the Exchequer at the Labour party conference in 2005. Rather than being a source of national distinctiveness as it was for Cameron, Brown used the abolition as an example of how great nations overcome internal challenges. For Brown, the abolition of slavery was proof that good could conquer evil, and that the British people and the state could overcome the Tory pessimists, who Brown called ‘reactionaries’, to build a brighter future.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://cache1.asset-cache.net/xt/108310414.jpg?v=1&g=fs1%7C0%7CVTA%7C10%7C414&s=1" class="decoded" src="http://cache1.asset-cache.net/xt/108310414.jpg?v=1&g=fs1%7C0%7CVTA%7C10%7C414&s=1" height="320" width="212" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
It is hard to know where to start when pointing out the limitations of these observations. Let me start with four. First, the Russians, Britain is actually quite a big island as islands go and comes in at a respectable ninth in the world’s league table of islands listed by size. Second, the Russians are certainly the wrong nation to compete with when trying to monopolise responsibility for ridding Europe of fascism. Third, Britain cannot claim to be the pioneering and distinctive abolitionist nation – that honour belongs to Denmark. Fourth, much of the leadership of Britain’s abolitionist movement associated itself with the Tory party – a fact that Brown’s call to action against Tory reactionaries ignores. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
More important for present purposes, in neither Brown’s nor Cameron’s account of Britain’s relationship to slavery do we hear anything about Britain’s perfecting of slave trading and slavery prior to the abolition. Nor do we hear anything of the distinctive role slavery played in generating political and economic capital in Britain. The English (then the British) were late starters in the slave trade, but became its supreme contributors during the trade’s eighteenth century zenith, transporting more slaves during that century – almost three million – than all of the rest of the European competition prior to abolition. Slavery plays a more important part than abolition in forging British distinctiveness. Indeed, slavery and Britishness enjoy an intimate and mutually formative relationship in the British national story that belies contemporary fixation with abolition. Isolating abolition from slavery in the context of national chest beating is therefore profoundly problematic.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Binding the abolition to British identity was a tactical aim of the abolitionists themselves. It helped gather a national constituency for their cause. But it involved the collective forgetting of the importance of Britishness and Britain to the development of slavery. The abolitionists’ distortion of history confirms that in the eighteenth and nineteenth as much as in the twenty-first centuries, politics has been the greatest enemy of balanced story telling about the past. Skilful politicians and master propagandists, the abolitionist set about writing a history of the political movement to end the slave trade almost as soon as the ink was dry on the royal assent to the statute to end the trade. Chief among these was Thomas Clarkson. Clarkson was a leading light of the abolition struggle and its most committed and energetic organiser. In 1808 Clarkson published: the History of the rise, progress, and accomplishment of the abolition of the African slave-trade by the British parliament. This history argued that the abolition was the achievement of a herculean political struggle and a disinterested, compassionate Christian morality. Such a narrative needed to depict slavery itself as a formidable foe. But slavery also needed to be amorphous, ubiquitous, anonymous, and primordial and its rise needed to be obscured from the story to protect the abolitionists’ aims as nation builders.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://cache3.asset-cache.net/xt/184271502.jpg?v=1&g=fs1%7C0%7CEPL%7C71%7C502&s=1" class="decoded" src="http://cache3.asset-cache.net/xt/184271502.jpg?v=1&g=fs1%7C0%7CEPL%7C71%7C502&s=1" height="212" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The abolitionists history of their own movement depicted the campaign in such a way therefore, as to redeem and re-invigorate Britain’s political system, its political institutions, and its empire as part of an upsurge of morally restorative evangelical fervor within British Christianity. It proved that Britain’s politics and religion could rise above greed and avarice to lead the world in a bold crusade against inhumanity. These accounts left out the central ways in which the development of slavery expressed distinctive features of Britishness. They skipped over the political aspects of the development of slavery and its relationship to the development of Britain. We have no political account of the development of the transatlantic slave trade or of slavery. Unlike the story of abolition, there is no corresponding “intentionalist” account describing the protagonists, analyzing the ideas, the disputes, the compromises—in short, the politics—that established Britain’s involvement in and later dominance of the transatlantic slave trade. Nor do we have an account of the ways in which British identity emerged cheek-by-jowl with slavery.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
I offer you that account today. I do so not to downplay the admirable achievements of the abolitionists, but to qualify and challenge some of the ways in which abolition has been used as the purest expression of British identity. I also hope to show how slavery – broadly conceived – has a central explanatory role to play in the formulation of British identity throughout the centuries. This explains why slavery and freedom have been such important polarities for the British experience. Both slavery and the British have been mutually constitutive in a number of ignored or misunderstood ways. You need only listen to James Thomson’s Rule Britannia to appreciate how a national concern with being enslaved helped bind the British people together at precisely the same time (the early eighteenth century) as they were shipping more enslaved Africans across the Atlantic than any of their European rivals. For Thomson and for many others in this period – slavery provided a capacious metaphor to dramatize the contingency of national freedom. This freedom was not the fig leaf to obscure the embarrassing brutality of the nation’s involvement in slave trading on an unprecedented scale. It was - in multiple ways - the explanation for that scale and the cause of that brutality. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In telling this story, I hope to suggest that making the abolition of slavery the foundation stone of multi-cultural, multi-racial British identity, is therefore untenable bearing in mind how central slavery has been to the development of British identity, the British economy, British industry, and British politics. You might say that perfecting the slave trade makes Britain’s abolition all the more remarkable and laudable and a worthy platform for national pride. That view might be arguable if two things are true: first, if the hallmarks of British identity were not connected to the perfection of the trade and second: if the injustices of historic and modern slavery were not apparent in Britain at the present time. These criteria are not satisfied. For British freedom created the slave trade, as we shall see, and Britain is a multiracial society in which pockets of racial discrimination remain and in which human trafficking is rearing its ugly head again. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://loveyouafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/slave.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://loveyouafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/slave.jpg" height="259" width="320" /></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Sure enough, neither the coffee break at the G20 summit nor the labour party conference, are the best places to do justice to all the intricacies of Britain’s long and complex relationship with slavery. And detailed accounts of the horrors of slavery make unlikely resources for triumphal, rousing national narratives. But history (and the history of slavery especially) is too important to the present and future to be a pick and mix from which to select the inspirational at the expense of the very real lessons taught by history’s more depressing moments. If politicians are going to base national appeals on historic examples, they must do so in such a way that is sensitive to the contemporary ramifications of those histories.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Slavery is in one sense an historic problem. But it has an inherent connection with one of the main tasks which politicians expect history to perform – the formation of group (and especially national) identity. Slavery has occurred in most historical periods and all societies up to abolition and is sadly escalating around the world at the present time. You find slavery where and when three criteria are satisfied: first, where you find the prospect of material gain deriving from not paying people for their labour; second, where labour supplies are short, and third where there exists a population who are deemed to be culturally suitable for enslavement. The first of these two criteria can be satisfied in pretty much any time and place: people have always been motivated by material gain and the human population of the earth is not evenly scattered across its surface. The last of these criteria: cultural eligibility - is more historically contingent and has often been bound up with the determinants of national identity. The history of slavery is therefore conceptually similar to the history of identity formation. In the special case of Britain, cultural eligibility for slavery and national freedom are inextricably linked</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Why is Britain a special case? To answer this we need to look into the distant British past. Slavery and freedom are elastic opposites that run very deep in the British experience. This depth helps to explain their continued political resonance and utility as props for British identity. Their vitality in British history has, I think, much to do with the frequency of conquest early in British history and the frequency of conquering others later in our history. Some of the earliest descriptions of the British people depict them as defined by their enslavement (real and cultural) to the Roman Empire. For the Roman historian Tacitus, the British expressed their distinctiveness in their willingness to ape the cultural practices of their conquerors. In the process of submission to a larger, international, and imperial identity, the British people were born. As Tacitus saw it:</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
‘the Britons went astray into alluring vices: to the promenade, the bath, the well-appointed dinner table. The simple natives gave the name of 'culture' to this factor of their slavery.’</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.national-awareness-days.com/images/anti-slavery-day.jpg" class="decoded" height="320" src="http://www.national-awareness-days.com/images/anti-slavery-day.jpg" width="213" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
By the eleventh century, however, long after the decline of the Roman Empire, slavery within Europe had declined as an internal social structure and became the definition of what could only be done to religious outsiders. As such, freedom became associated with being Christian and, increasingly, with being European. Pope Gregory the VII set the scene for Urban II’s abolition of slavery within Christendom in the eleventh century. As such Europeans looked to the Eastern fringes of Europe – to the Slavic territories for new resources of slaves, - hence the word slave. And Europeans would often experience capture and sale into slavery by Barbary Muslim pirates or corsairs until the era of abolition. Being Christian and being European meant being free from slavery.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, historians depicted the Anglo-Saxon and then Norman conquests of Britain as enslavements of a native, free, Britain. The hope of emancipation through the legend of King Arthur was a device developed by Geoffrey of Monmouth and then co-opted by Gerald of Wales to resist the Norman encroachment upon Celtic peoples. The voice of the enslaved - and therefore instinctively free - British came from the Celtic peoples rather than from Saxon or Norman outsiders. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The switch from being a conquered enslaved people to becoming a conquering and free people presented an obvious challenge to slavery as a national metaphor. The conscious rebranding of the Norman rulers into a vernacular English in the thirteenth century came with attempts to blend the political traditions of the Norman and Anglo-Saxons. This involved revivifying (and inventing) pre-Norman and therefore ‘free’ political traditions and devices including the Common Law and establish new ones – like Magna Carta and Parliament - that expressed the free political traditions of the Anglo Saxons. Freedom began to have a constitutional definition. These processes occurred alongside the English conquest of Wales. The English constitution was tested and defined in the process of being exported to the peripheries of Britain. British freedom was therefore transmuted into English freedom as the English (who were actually Norman) conquered Britain. In the process of enslaving others, and not for the last time, the English would define themselves as free.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LV9-Pkh5eSk/TbnCDheUaQI/AAAAAAAAAGE/MvAuII6CjTI/s1600/P1000482.jpeg" class="shrinkToFit decoded" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LV9-Pkh5eSk/TbnCDheUaQI/AAAAAAAAAGE/MvAuII6CjTI/s320/P1000482.jpeg" height="320" width="240" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
This tradition of the conquering constitutional freedom of a pre-Norman provenance was taken up in the fifteenth century by Sir John Fortescue. Fortescue came to associate a supposedly indigenous legal tradition –the English Common Law – with freedom and saw rival, reified continental legal codes like the Roman or Civil Law as badges of slavery. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this nationalist rhetoric of slavery echoed through the reformation as Catholicism and European absolutism became joined in the English nation’s assessment of the causes of slavery. To be protestant was to be free and Catholic a slave. These distinctions mapped onto the constitutional and legal exceptionalisms of English freedom to allow John Locke to famously denounce slavery ‘as a vile and miserable state’ with reference to absolutist Catholic modes of government on the continent (at the same time, famously, as investing his own money in the Atlantic slave trade and writing slavery into the constitutions he authored for the English American colonies). </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
But just as slavery proper (as opposed to avoidance of slavery as a glue for national togetherness) retreated from Europe, it began to entrench in the Americas. The sixteenth and seventeenth century European penetration of the Americas initially intensified this confessional rhetoric of slavery as protestant nations claimed to develop less brutal societies in the Americas than their Catholic antecedents and associated the Spanish empires with the enslavement of indigenous peoples. The English Empire in Ireland and in the Americas would be, famously, empires of protestant liberty. But by the second half of the seventeenth century, the protestant alliance between the Dutch and English had fractured as economic competition in America and Asia intensified. Combined with population shortages in America and an expanding, labour-hungry economy at home, the English began to use enslaved Africans to people the American colonies. The home grown and long-established conception of a distinctively English liberty would now become conducive to enslavement on an unprecedented scale.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="https://pennsylvaniahistory.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/rac-logo.jpg" class="decoded" height="308" src="https://pennsylvaniahistory.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/rac-logo.jpg" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
There was a problem, though. The English initially relied on a state-sponsored monopolistic corporation – the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa – to develop the nation’s slave trade. Founded in 1660 (and renamed as the Royal African Company in 1672), this organisation helped to marginalise the Dutch and Portuguese in the slave trade. The company would become the largest human trafficking organisation during the period of the trade – shipping almost 150,000 enslaved Africans mostly to Barbados during the 1670s and 80s. From its headquarters on Leadenhall Street in the heart of the City of London, it managed a vast capital stock, a network of international trading posts around the Atlantic world, importing gold – to be minted into Guineas stamped with the profile of Charles II, redwood die for the British army uniforms, and ivory for English cutlery, and shipping large numbers of enslaved Africans to the new world. It did so as a national public utility with the support of the state, royal family, and the Royal Navy. But as a monopoly supported by the Crown and not the people, it appeared to offend aspects of the emerging English national identity I have been talking about: the right to trade, the portability of national birth rights and the indigenous constitutional traditions of old. Earlier in the century, this version of Englishness had targeted and executed Charles I. In the 1680s it began to turn on the company itself. The Royal African Company became the victim of a political campaign that used as its banner a distinctively British conception of freedom. This campaign succeeded in escalating the British slave trade to new greatly enlarged capacities. It did so on behalf of national freedom.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
This public campaign, known at the time as the Africa Trade debates lasted from 1689 to 1712. The results of the campaign clarified important features of Britishness but also provided the foundation for British slave trading supremacy. The formation of the British nation state in 1707 became embroiled in it. The Scots decided to join with England because of the failure of their own slave trading company and to enjoy access to England’s greatest public good – its enslaving empire overseas. The Scots therefore railed against a monopolistic organisation of the trade in England alongside many thousands of English men and women. By 1712, the African Company’s monopoly was dead in the water. Britain’s transatlantic slave trade had become supreme in capacity, increasing by three hundred per cent as a result of the deregulation. Its centre of gravity had shifted away from London and towards the provincial outports of Bristol and Liverpool. And the destinations for the slaves had shifted northwards from the Caribbean to mainland America, while embarkation points for the enslaved shifted West and South from the company’s heartlands at Cape Coast in modern day Ghana.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/news/2014/june/chains-article.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/news/2014/june/chains-article.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In these political disputes between the African Company and the independent slave traders – who were a motley crew of provincials, colonists, London grandees, and Huguenot social climbers, - an old version of Englishness was buttressed and Britishness itself – emergent alongside these debates – was forged. It is worth examining some of these connexions between the formation of Britishness and the development of slavery in greater depth. What was at stake in the debate? How did slavery depend on Britishness? How did these debates about slavery assist in the formulation of what it meant to be British? Answers to these questions can be discerned through examinations of the ways in which these debates about slavery disputed the following: first, the meaning of the national interest, second, the workings of the English constitution and the common law, and third, the role of parliament. All of these have been celebrated as distinctive features of Britishness at the time and since.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Both sides in the debates disagreed about the best way to manage the slave trade. But they agreed that it represented a national project of critical importance and expressed cherished British values. Both sides sought to satisfy the national interest. But differed on what that meant. For the African Company the national interest was the interest of the British state. For the independent slave traders, it was the interest of the British population at large. As such, the slave trade developed as the result of a national, popular will. And the British erected the slave system as part of a national project to eclipse their European rivals. In this, they succeeded. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/06/02/article-0-1A1081F6000005DC-224_964x502.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/06/02/article-0-1A1081F6000005DC-224_964x502.jpg" height="166" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The English constitution supported slave trade expansion. In the spring of 1689, during the constitutional shifts of the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’, a leading barrister in the court of King’s Bench, Bartholomew Shower, made a successful argument in favour of slave trade expansion before the famous liberal judge, Sir John Holt. Shower placed great importance upon the right of parliament to regulate the trade and viewed parliamentary approval as expressive of national consent. Shower formulated a common law manifesto for independent slave trading. In so doing he fastened a basic ingredient of national identity to the establishment of the slave trade. Shower explained why the parliamentary management of the trade was preferable to management by the monarchical company: “Each subject’s vote is included in whatsoever is there done: an Act of Parliament hath the consent of many men, both past, present, and to come”, he explained. English common law, as a result, “distinguishes between bondmen, whose estates are at their lord’s will and pleasure, and freemen, whose property none can invade, charge, or take away, but by their own consent.” Free from slavery themselves, so Shower reasoned, the English were protected in their right to develop their property in other human beings. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
There it was: the full scale, supreme British slave trade was the result of a national constitutional propensity for freedom. Without their consent, Englishmen could not be deprived of their freedom to prosper from slavery. The future of the slave trade would hinge on the will of the British majority. The right to trade in slaves, then, became equivalent with such sacred British rights as the right to political representation and the right to habeas corpus. A free trade in the enslaved became emblematic of the liberties of the people. Slave trade escalation, despite what abolitionists like Granville Sharp later claimed about the Common Law’s inherent antagonism to slavery, proved instrumental to the huge expansion of slavery. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Such arguments routinely appeared in Parliament, which became the great national institutional support for the expanded slave trade (as it would later be for the abolition and emancipation of slaves). The company’s opponents formed a highly effective lobby that marshaled more petitions, developed a more appealing ideology that celebrated the role of the public’s consent in deregulating the slave trade. They implemented a political strategy that reflected the effects that constitutional change had brought to the mechanics of regulating overseas trade especially Parliament’s monopoly over the state’s regulation of the national economy. These slave trade ‘escalationists’ also made use of the recently freed press by gathering the support of public opinion in their quest for a nationally constituted slave trade. They celebrated the right of the outports throughout Britain to participate in the slave trade to prevent the African Company from engrossing slave trading in London. They looked forward to a time when all social classes could enjoy the benefits of slave trading and not just the privileged plutocrats of the company. Here again, they connected an expanded slave trade to national need and to jingoistic conceptions of national birthrights.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.urbanmuseumcollaborative.org/griot/images/slaveship.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://www.urbanmuseumcollaborative.org/griot/images/slaveship.jpg" height="234" width="320" /></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
With supreme irony to our eyes, the campaign to liberalize the slave trade became a cause that championed British freedom over slavery. To rally their cause, slave traders celebrated the right to trade as an inherent feature of the national character. One wrote, “Freedoms of trade . . . [are] the fundamental point of English liberty.” More than a third of the parliamentary petitions seeking to deregulate the slave trade referred to the desire to have the trade “freed” or to the inherent right to “freedom” of trade. Independent slave traders depicted trading monopolies – like that of the Royal African Company, as a result, as stains on the national character. Without any appreciation of the irony of the language, one pamphlet asserted that monopolies are “the Badges of a slavish People. . . . If this so beneficial a Trade was but freed from that Nest of Drones, the African Company, and Industry left at liberty farther to improve it, the Nation would quickly be convinced that nothing hitherto but an English Freedom has been wanting to extend the Trade.” Few lobbies examined and used the connections between these various expressions of freedom at the beginning of the eighteenth century more than the slave traders. Fewer still deployed arguments for freedom with such sophistication to achieve an enlargement of unfreedom on this scale. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
All this appears replete with perverse irony to us. Only in the remit of national interest could such contradictions be sustained. It took the continued pressures of national jealousy to translate contradiction into hypocrisy and rebuild British identity around a freedom that could be extended to the enslaved Africans themselves for the first time. Half a century after the Africa trade debates, in the 1760s, an independence movement developed among the elite of the British American colonies – many of who were slave owners - including Thomas Jefferson – the author of the Declaration of Independence and George Washington, as well as James Madison – the father of the slavery-sustaining US constitution. These men and others like them characterized what the British Empire did to the Americans as a form of slavery. This inconsistency did not go unnoticed by perspicacious English observers – of whom few were more clear-sighted than Samuel Johnson: “Why is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroe slaves’, he famously quipped. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
A generation earlier, during the debates about the best way to manage the slave trade, not a single commentator had complained that slave traders cited their freedom to enslave as a point of national interest. But once the colonists sought their own slave-owning nation state, the British began to respond by rebuilding their national image with reference to a purer, more sincere liberty – a freedom that actually meant freedom for all – and then set about using precisely the same nationalist political and constitutional motifs to campaign to end slavery as they had used to establish it. The abolitionist movement owes much to this attempt at national redefinition. In this way, slavery, so the late eighteenth century nationalist mantra went, was something that happened in America and had nothing to do with Britain. This was, of course, a profound lie. Throughout the eighteenth century (and beyond), enslaved Africans had come to generate huge wealth for Britain, had helped to expand the Royal navy, and established capital for that other great bond of the British experience – the industrial revolution. No other subject of the period featured in the British DNA - rhetorically, constitutionally, materially, as much as slavery. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://image.slidesharecdn.com/hemispheresunitedpp-150107095237-conversion-gate02/95/hemispheres-united-and-columbian-exchange-23-638.jpg?cb=1420646000" class="decoded" src="http://image.slidesharecdn.com/hemispheresunitedpp-150107095237-conversion-gate02/95/hemispheres-united-and-columbian-exchange-23-638.jpg?cb=1420646000" height="240" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The abolition statutes of the early nineteenth century were profound national achievements. But the ways in which the same determinants of British identity: constitutional, parliamentary, common law, free press, free trade, social mobility, military victory, - all connected to freedom – were deployed in developing the slave system as were enacted to dismantle it makes both freedom and abolitionism inadequate calling cards for the British people. But these events – slavery and its abolition – as well as Britain’s proud history of correcting social injustice – are too important to national integrity to suppress from the national story. Important features of our own time would be gravely obscured by such suppression. Of course, the story of Britain’s involvement in slavery did not end with abolition. The compensation payments to slave owners at the time of emancipation in the early 1830s, which amounted to twenty per cent of the national budget, set new standards of state largesse and also allowed the wealth that so many accrued from the exploitation of enslaved Africans to endure through the generations. The bureaucracy required to assist in the suppression of other nation’s slave trades did much to help in the institutional development of the Foreign Office. Abolition also came to play an important part in softening the image of a rapacious empire – especially as it developed its territorial holdings in Africa and India. Abolitionists also helped to promote the reputation of new alternative forms of exploitation at home and abroad as the factory system placed unprecedented social burdens on large proportions of the British people.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
But the principal and more profoundly stubborn legacy of slavery is race. It was the creation of racial identities that justified the continued use of African peoples for enslavement by Europeans over almost four centuries. And abolition did remarkably little to end the racial prejudice that had been developed to justify the slave trade and slavery – either in America or Britain. The economic costs of being born black are considerable throughout many of the areas involved in slave trading in Europe and the Americas. Alongside the national amnesia about the role of freedom in establishing slavery, these are the principal challenges posed by the abolitionists’ legacy. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/collections/graphics/coffle-Cropped-654x400.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/collections/graphics/coffle-Cropped-654x400.jpg" height="195" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
With this in mind, I’d like to end by bringing the last of the three immediate past Prime Ministers into my discussion. In a much-anticipated speech to the House of Commons that was designed to set the tone for the British government’s celebration of the bicentennial of the abolition statute in 2007, Tony Blair expressed “deep sorrow” about British involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. Blair famously stopped short of a full apology for slavery to avoid accepting official responsibility and opening up the British state to a claim for reparations. He deployed, however, a modicum of reflection to begin the long process of atonement. He wondered why it was that the slave trade emerged at a time when “the capitals of Europe and America championed the enlightenment of man.” Rather than confront this well-posed conundrum head on, however, Blair was quick to retreat into a familiar truism and rush to the defense of modernity: “Racism, not the rights of man, drove the horrors of the triangular trade.” </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
But was this the case? Racism was as much an effect of slavery as it was a cause. And modernity and the liberal political institutions and ideologies that define it belie this defense as we have seen – especially those features of modernity connected to British self-definition. The “rights of man,” or their more elastic substitute “freedom,” contributed much to the escalation of the slave trade. And these, as we have seen, operated in a distinctive way within the project to develop British national identity. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://8fa6b8231be88af54352-1091780f292ed74c8a63cc6ff151398e.r22.cf3.rackcdn.com/00002589-95x90.jpeg" class="decoded" src="http://8fa6b8231be88af54352-1091780f292ed74c8a63cc6ff151398e.r22.cf3.rackcdn.com/00002589-95x90.jpeg" height="189" width="200" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Britain escalated and expanded the slave trade and slavery in the name of British liberty. With each new year of the political campaign to expand the slave trade, British people, ideals, institutions, and identity became more and more inseparable from the desire to celebrate the trafficking of enslaved Africans. The campaign’s length, the number of people involved, the scale of petitioning, the number of pamphlets, justifications, arguments, and counterarguments that derived from the campaign provide enough information to show that British society, values, and venerated political institutions promoted slavery long before the abolitionists began to criticize it. As much as Prime Minister Blair would have wished to deny it in 2007, the development of the slave trade and the establishment of American slavery cannot be separated from the development of modern British society, its creeds, and its institutions. The hallmarks of modern British society—representative democracy, civil society, and individual interests—all bear the responsibility for slavery. In helping to expand slavery, British freedom has incurred a debt. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
How can these acknowledgements of the selective national memory of slavery and the inconsistency of contemporary values help us reflect on a constructive view of the future? Freedom’s role in helping to end the slave trade and slavery is only the beginning of the long process of repaying freedom’s debt. That process continues and is not assisted by historically selective political celebrations of British identity that focus on the abolition of the slave trade. Placing freedom’s debt into the story of the emergence of modern liberal society represents another part of the continuing reconciliation and reckoning. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Understanding the selective application of liberty to slave traders, but not, until the late eighteenth century, to enslaved Africans, confirms the prevalence of what we would call racial thinking. It also offers a new means of connecting the intention to develop the slave trade and slavery to the precise workings of politics in this period and suggests ways to imagine how contemporary politicians ought to manage slavery’s legacy. The historic tendency for freedom to veneer the justification for victimising minorities and for democratic societies to bind themselves together by vilifying and often brutalising their national rivals ought also to be a pressing task for today’s politicians. Freedom is best rehabilitated from its racist history by confronting the racist legacies of slavery. The struggle to end racial inequality offers one of many pressing challenge for liberal institutions and ideas and represents the only way to establish the sincere appeal for ideas of liberty in the twenty first century – not only as a means to set the national historical record straight, not just as a matter of restorative justice, but also as a pressing requirement to do justice to the power and utility of such ideas into the future.</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://peic.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Freedoms-Debt-book-cover-image.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://peic.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Freedoms-Debt-book-cover-image.jpg" height="320" width="210" /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Dr William Pettigrew’s Freedom’s Debt : The Royal African Company and the Politices of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672-1752.</i></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Ideas serve different purposes in different historical contexts. But they – like states and like corporations - also have culpability across generations and ought to be invoked as processes that focus new movements to repair the contemporary damage their historic ancestors have caused. Politicians use history to build British identity. But triumphalist and misleading accounts of history prevent politics from forming an inspirational, hopeful bridge between the sins of the past and the restoration of the damaging legacies of those sins in the present. Freedom should be a part of British national pride, but before it can be so, it needs to pay the debt to the black victims of slavery by ensuring that racial discrimination has no part to play in British life. This is a contemporary political crusade for truth and reconciliation that is worthy of comparison with the abolitionists. The promotion and celebration of a multiracial, multicultural British future is surely the best celebrator of British identity on the international stage as the world continues to be beset by racial tension and ingrained prejudices of many other forms. It offers the chance for racial atonement as a step towards ending the significance of race in the world. As a contemporary work-in-progress rather than an incomplete and conflicted historic triumph, it also represents a better riposte to the Russian federation’s jibes about the British people than the one that David Cameron offered. (source: <a href="http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/how-to-place-slavery-into-british-identity" target="_blank"><i>Gresham College (UK) -- © Professor William Pettigrew, 2014, Transcript for "How to Place Slavery into British Identity</i></a>")</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/E_PI_nMW_3Y" width="420"></iframe></div>
Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com172tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-79981080047118560212015-02-22T10:05:00.007-08:002015-02-22T10:09:28.761-08:00Cotton's Global History<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.saleoilpaintings.com/paintings-image/william-aiken-walker/william-aiken-walker-negro-man-two-boys-and-dog-in-cotton-field.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="http://www.saleoilpaintings.com/paintings-image/william-aiken-walker/william-aiken-walker-negro-man-two-boys-and-dog-in-cotton-field.jpg" border="0" class="decoded" src="http://www.saleoilpaintings.com/paintings-image/william-aiken-walker/william-aiken-walker-negro-man-two-boys-and-dog-in-cotton-field.jpg" height="320" width="243" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Cotton Pickers</i>, oil painting on panel by William Aiken Walker</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Adam Hochschild reviewed Sven Beckert's new book entitled<i> The Empire of Cotton</i>, in the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/books/review/empire-of-cotton-by-sven-beckert.html?_r=0" target="_blank"><i>New York Times</i></a>, on 31 December 2014 -- The history of an era often seems defined by a particular commodity. The 18th century certainly belonged to sugar. The race to cultivate it in the West Indies was, in the words of the French Enlightenment writer Guillaume-Thomas de Raynal, “the principal cause of the rapid movement which stirs the Universe.” In the 20th century and beyond, the commodity has been oil: determining events from the Allied partitioning of the Middle East after World War I to Hitler’s drive for Balkan and Caspian wells to the forging of our own fateful ties to the regimes of the Persian Gulf.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In his important new book, the Harvard historian Sven Beckert makes the case that in the 19th century what most stirred the universe was cotton. “Empire of Cotton” is not casual airplane reading. Heavy going at times, it is crowded with many more details and statistics (a few of them repeated) than the nonspecialist needs. But it is a major work of scholarship that will not be soon surpassed as the definitive account of the product that was, as Beckert puts it, the Industrial Revolution’s “launching pad.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.saleoilpaintings.com/paintings-image/william-aiken-walker/william-aiken-walker-negro-workers-in-cotton-field-with-dog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="http://www.saleoilpaintings.com/paintings-image/william-aiken-walker/william-aiken-walker-negro-workers-in-cotton-field-with-dog.jpg" border="0" class="decoded" src="http://www.saleoilpaintings.com/paintings-image/william-aiken-walker/william-aiken-walker-negro-workers-in-cotton-field-with-dog.jpg" height="177" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Cotton Pickers</i>, oil painting on panel by William Aiken Walker</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
More than that, “Empire of Cotton” is laced with compassion for the millions of miserably treated slaves, sharecroppers and mill workers whose labors, over hundreds of years, have gone into the clothes we wear and the surprising variety of other products containing cotton, from coffee filters to gunpowder. Today some 350 million people are involved in growing, transporting, weaving, stitching or otherwise processing the fibers of this plant.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Until the 19th century,” Beckert explains, “the overwhelming bulk of raw cotton was spun and woven within a few miles from where it was grown.” Nothing changed that more dramatically than the slave plantations that spread across the American South, a form of outsourcing before the word was invented. These showed that cotton could be lucratively cultivated in bulk for consumers as far afield as another continent, and that realization turned the world upside down. Without slavery, he says, there would have been no Industrial Revolution.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="http://www.oceansbridge.co.uk/paintings/artists/2012/mar/small/William-Aiken-Walker-xx-Old-Negro-Man-with-Basket-of-Cotton-xx-Private-collection.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://www.oceansbridge.co.uk/paintings/artists/2012/mar/small/William-Aiken-Walker-xx-Old-Negro-Man-with-Basket-of-Cotton-xx-Private-collection.jpg" height="320" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="153" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Cotton Pickers</i>, oil painting on panel by William Aiken Walker</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Beckert’s most significant contribution is to show how every stage of the industrialization of cotton rested on violence. As soon as the profit potential of those Southern cotton fields became clear in the late 1780s, the transport of slaves across the Atlantic rapidly increased. Cotton cloth itself had become the most important merchandise European traders used to buy slaves in Africa. Then planters discovered that climate and rainfall made the Deep South better cotton territory than the border states. Nearly a million American slaves were forcibly moved to Georgia, Mississippi and elsewhere, shattering many families in the process.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The search for more good cotton-growing soil in areas that today are such states as Texas, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma was a powerful incentive to force Native Americans off their traditional lands and onto reservations, another form of violence by the “military-cotton complex.” Beckert’s coinage seems not far-fetched when he points out that by 1850, two-thirds of American cotton was grown on land that had been taken over by the United States since the beginning of the century. And who structured the bond deal for the Louisiana Purchase, which made so much of that possible? Thomas Baring of Britain, one of the world’s leading cotton merchants.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Beckert practices what is known as global or world history: the study of events not limited to one country or continent. The perspective serves him well. For it was not just in the United States that planters’ thirst to sow large tracts with cotton pushed indigenous peoples and self-sufficient farmers off their land; colonial armies did the same thing in India, West Africa and elsewhere. When he talks about the rise of late-19th-century American Populism (driven in part by the grievances of small cotton farmers), he also mentions parallel movements in India, Egypt and Mexico. And it was not only white Southerners who were responsible for the harsh regime of slave-grown cotton: merchants and bankers in the North and in Britain lent them money and were investors as well. With sons strategically stationed in cities on both sides of the Atlantic, the Brown family — patrons of the Museum of Natural History in New York and the corporate ancestors of Brown Brothers Harriman — owned more than a dozen Southern cotton plantations outright.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="http://www.askart.com/AskART/photos/SNY20110519_67210/95.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://www.askart.com/AskART/photos/SNY20110519_67210/95.jpg" height="200" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="320" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Cotton Pickers</i>, oil painting on panel by William Aiken Walker</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Beyond violence, another major theme of “Empire of Cotton” is that, contrary to the myth of untrammeled free enterprise, this expanding industry was fueled at every stage by government intervention. From Denmark to Mexico to Russia, states lent large sums to early clothing manufacturers. Whether it was canals and railways in Europe or levees on the Mississippi, governments jumped in to build or finance the infrastructure that big cotton growers and mills demanded. Britain forced Egypt and other territories to lower or eliminate their import duties on British cotton.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Beckert has a larger ambition, however, than just telling the story of cotton; he wants to use that commodity as a lens on the development of the modern world itself. This he divides into two overlapping phases: “war capitalism” for the stage when slavery and colonial conquest prepared the ground for the cotton industry, and “industrial capitalism” for the period when states intervened to protect and help the business in other ways. This makes “Empire of Cotton” read a bit like two books combined, with one of them incomplete. Cotton’s story Beckert more than fully tells, but his analysis of capitalism really requires a bigger-picture scrutiny of other industries as well. And here, his two categories are not so easily separated. For example, we no longer go to war over cotton, but would America have spent hundreds of billions of dollars fighting in Iraq if that country had no oil?</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="http://img.washingtonpost.com/rw/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2014/12/29/BookWorld/Images/Empire%20of%20Cotton.jpg?uuid=RC8UUo-DEeSkEktzXtxxdQ" class="shrinkToFit decoded" src="http://img.washingtonpost.com/rw/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2014/12/29/BookWorld/Images/Empire%20of%20Cotton.jpg?uuid=RC8UUo-DEeSkEktzXtxxdQ" height="320" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="210" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
About the history of cotton itself, Beckert is on firmer ground. Today, a “giant race to the bottom” by an industry always looking for cheaper labor has shifted most cotton growing and the work of turning it into clothing back to Asia, the continent where it was first widely used several centuries ago. And violence in different forms is still all too present. In Uzbekistan, up to two million children under 15 are put to work harvesting cotton each year — just as the mills of St. Petersburg, Manchester and Alsace once heavily depended on child labor from poorhouses and orphanages. In China, the Communist Party’s suppression of free trade unions keeps cotton workers’ wages down, just as British law in the early 1800s saw to it that men and women who abandoned their ill-paid jobs and ran away could be jailed for breach of contract. And in Bangladesh, the more than 1,100 people killed in the notorious collapse of the Rana Plaza building in 2013 were mostly female clothing workers, whose employers were as careless about their safety as those who enforced 14- or 16-hour workdays in German and Spanish weaving mills a century before. A long thread of tragedy is woven through the story of the puffy white substance that clothes us all. (source: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/books/review/empire-of-cotton-by-sven-beckert.html?_r=0" target="_blank"><i>The New York Times</i></a>)</div>
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/n05uSYp9wXQ" width="420"></iframe><br />Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com24tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-90381871267122275192015-02-22T05:52:00.003-08:002015-02-22T05:52:34.673-08:00A Rare 18th-Century Ship's Diary -- Up For Auction In Derbyshire, England<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img draggable="false" height="215" src="http://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/images/localworld/ugc-images/276308/Article/images/26046097/9507785-large.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="320" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A sketch of the ship in the diary</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
As reported by <a href="http://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/Ship-s-diary-1769-Glenfield-home-tells-scurvy/story-26046097-detail/story.html" target="_blank"><i>the Leicester Mercury</i></a>, "Ship's diary from 1769 found at Glenfield home tells of scurvy, lashings and drownings," by Tom_Mack, on 18 February 2015 --The 240-year-old diary of a ship’s captain has been unearthed in a dusty old box at a home in Glenfield.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The box had been destined for the skip when the owner realised the diary, charting a journey by the East Indies trade ship Bridgewater from London to China via India, might have some value.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
It contains insights about life on the seas, what the crew ate, how they were punished and various illnesses and accidents that struck the ship.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The diary was taken, along with some other books, to Hansons Auctioneers in Derbyshire.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
There, Charles Hanson, who is a regular valuer on the BBC’s Bargain Hunt, immediately realised its value.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
He said: “The book is incredibly special since it records the life and times on board the ship Bridgewater which set sail from London in 1769 to Madeira, Madras and China.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img draggable="false" height="215" src="http://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/images/localworld/ugc-images/276308/Article/images/26046097/9507787-large.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="320" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Book's Cover</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“We discovered the book amongst a collection of books which our client was going to throw out but I knew when I first saw the book it was important, since it was covered in pig skin and was well worn .</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“On opening the book it was like going back in time since each page is beautifully handwritten by the captain’s hand with entries for each day from December 1769 to July 1771.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The book is written by Captain Skottowes, who had previously worked in the slave trade.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Research by Charles has found that Bridgewater was launched in September 1769 - the year the diary begins - and saw service until 1781.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
It would have been used as a cargo vessel by the East India Company and it had three decks and weighed 840 tonnes.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Cargo noted in the diary includes cotton, tin, tar, red wood and pepper.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Charles said: “Essentially such an East Indies ship was responsible for carrying valuable cargo, returning from the East, richly laden with exotic goods which found a ready and profitable market in Europe such as tea and Chinese porcelain.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Life on board was certainly not plain sailing and Captain Skottowes diary makes plain the task faced by all those on board.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The diary will be sold by Hansons Auctioneers tomorrow and has a guide price of £300 to £500.</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="http://www.burtonmail.co.uk/images/localworld/ugc-images/276452/Article/images/26054624/9520530-large.jpg" class="decoded" height="215" src="http://www.burtonmail.co.uk/images/localworld/ugc-images/276452/Article/images/26054624/9520530-large.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="320" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Charles Hanson holding the diary.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Entries from the diary:</div>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
On December 20, 1769, a crew member called William Fisher was “in irons for being riotous”.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
On Janaury 5, 1770, wages were raised to 26 shillings a month.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
On the February 1, of the same year, supplies were taken on board including 20 pipes of wine, 16 hogsheads and one quarter cask of brandy.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
On Tuesday, February 27, “Thomas Hitchins run the gauntlet for stealing silk stockings, a beaver hat and several other things, the property of Major Grant”.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
On March 24 a crewmember received “150 lashes with a cat of nine tails upon his bare back”.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The following day seaman Joseph Simpson was confined for drunkeness, disobedience and “being very abusive”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
On November 25 "Vincent Smith and John Singeon fell overboard, the former was drowned, the latter got hold of a rope and was saved”.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
On May 29, 1771, Captain Skottowe noted “a very sickly ship in general” due to scurvy.</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Morale was lifted a few days later on June 4 when 21 guns were fired “it being his Majesty's birthday”, referring to George III. (source: <a href="http://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/Ship-s-diary-1769-Glenfield-home-tells-scurvy/story-26046097-detail/story.html" target="_blank"><i>The Leicester Mercury)</i></a></div>
Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-55715750178140757372015-02-21T21:54:00.000-08:002015-02-21T21:54:30.932-08:00New England Slavery<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://pgapworld.wikispaces.com/file/view/massbay.jpg/50385203/massbay.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://pgapworld.wikispaces.com/file/view/massbay.jpg/50385203/massbay.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
From the <a href="http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/01/18/new_englands_scarlet_s_for_slavery/?page=full" target="_blank"><i>Opinion Pages of the Boston Globe</i></a>, "New England’s scarlet ‘S’ for slavery," by C. S. Manegold, a former reporter with The New York Times, Newsweek, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, is the author of “Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North.’, published on 18 January 2010.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
ALMOST HALF a century ago, Martin Luther King Jr. captured a problem that still plagues us today. Cautioning his flock against the complacent embrace of incomplete knowledge, he warned: “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.’’</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
I have thought of those words often in the last few years as I worked to unearth the history of a century and a half of slavery on a Massachusetts farm first owned by the famous Puritan, Governor John Winthrop, whose “Model of Christian Charity’’ is often quoted even now.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="http://www.landofthebrave.info/images/john-winthrop.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://www.landofthebrave.info/images/john-winthrop.jpg" height="320" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="271" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Winthrop (1587-1649), The First Governor of Massachusetts </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In the several times I have presented these unpleasant truths in talks at major universities, I have inquired afterwards - who knew this history of slavery in the North? Usually only about three hands go up of 30. And most of these people are professors. Among non-professors the void is even deeper. Students, stumbling on this news, tend to ask with some aggression: “Why didn’t they teach us this?’’ Why didn’t I know?</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
I am older, and I grew up in a different time, but I said these words myself not long ago. Now that I know better, I realize there are many answers to the question. But the best perhaps are these: Easier not to. More comfortable not to.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Yet as King suggested, responsible dialogue can not move forward with half-truths and willful ignorance. In this regard, the North has work to do. It lags behind the South in stepping up to ugly truths.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.pathguy.com/pilgrm.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://www.pathguy.com/pilgrm.jpg" height="175" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Let me share a simple primer: The first men, women and children to be enslaved by whites in New England were Native American prisoners of war doled out as favors to other tribes who had allied themselves with the settlers’ cause, or to white soldiers who fought with some distinction in those wars. “There is a little Squa that Steward Calacot desireth,’’ wrote one hopeful recipient to Winthrop. “Lieutenant Damport also desireth one, to witt, a tall one with three strokes upon her stomach. . ..’’</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Among these enslaved Indians, some were shipped off to the Caribbean where they were traded for “cotton, and tobacco and Negroes,’’ as Winthrop noted in his famous journal. The year was 1638. On October 3, 1639, the Massachusetts Court of Assistants ruled “the Governor had leave to keep a Narragansett Indian and his wife.’’ Other Northern settlers had already chosen blacks; and those first African slaves to reach New England were followed by a constant and accelerating flow. The pattern would repeat until black slavery in the North became a common fact of life transcending social class.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Nor was this slavery somehow “soft.’’ One of the first published accounts of life in New England tells of a man who lived near what today is Logan Airport. That man, Samuel Maverick, ordered one slave to rape another, that he might have a “breed of Negroes.’’ Other tragic stories abound. Many more are lost forever.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Ona-Judge-Staines-washington.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Ona-Judge-Staines-washington.jpg" height="169" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Slavery, though, was legal. Winthrop, the author of the notion of America as a “city upon a hill,’’ helped to make it so. Three years after the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived on Massachusetts soil, he helped to write the first law in North America officially sanctioning the practice. The Massachusetts Body of Liberties in 1641 decreed there “shall never be any bond slavery’’ (good enough so far. . .) “unless it be lawful captives taken in just wars, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us.’’ [italics added]</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Who could this formulation possibly leave out?</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Follow the money. Find the families. Together they will tell the story. In the case of slavery in the North, they tell a story of enslavement stretching in a single weave from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut. . . to Barbados, Antigua, Surinam. . . to Africa. Today there is a Winthorp (sic) Bay in Antigua near the international airport. It is named for Winthrop’s son Samuel, who served as lieutenant governor and presided over a large plantation worked by slaves. Samuel’s brother, John Jr., the governor of Connecticut, owned black slaves on many properties, as did his siblings, heirs, and friends. On and on it went.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
On the same land Governor Winthrop first had farmed, other families would come. They were slave-owners, too, every one. Slavery did not end in Massachusetts until after the American Revolution when a series of “freedom suits’’ taken to the courts by slaves and free blacks impelled the legislators to live up to their grand rhetoric of freedom.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.ushistory.org/us/images/00005636.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://www.ushistory.org/us/images/00005636.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The end was neither swift nor definitive. Not a single newspaper article from the time made note of the end of a century and a half of bondage. Instead, the high court finally ruled, and then there were debates over semantics until, farm by farm, owner by owner, the practice sputtered, and then failed. But not before some of those enslaved had been sold back to the Caribbean so an owner could avoid a difficult financial loss.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Only Vermont explicitly outlawed slavery in its constitution in 1793. Article One: “Slavery prohibited.’’ That was the exception, not the rule.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Then we forgot.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
But the forgetting took time. Remnants of the truth remained in 1915 when, on what was left of Winthrop’s “Ten Hills Farm,’’ a three-day pageant celebrated America’s early history. Among the players were John Winthrop, George Washington, the slave Belinda, and a slave named George who killed himself rather than be sold. Newspapers crowed about the refreshing inclusivity of the event. But those accounts referred only to impoverished Irish and Italian immigrants who had followed the trolley tracks to move outside of Boston. George and Belinda were white folk dressed in blackface. The larger slave population (which counted at least 27 on that farm in the 1700s) sat huddled on a bench. Photographs still show them there - white boys from the Medford High School Glee Club, their faces rubbed with coal.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_585w/Boston/2011-2020/2014/01/29/BostonGlobe.com/Regional/Images/slavemuralinpostoffice.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_585w/Boston/2011-2020/2014/01/29/BostonGlobe.com/Regional/Images/slavemuralinpostoffice.jpg" height="202" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Perhaps in 1915 the memory was still too fresh to fade. Twenty-three years later, the same was true. That year, the WPA artist Henry Billings dipped his brush to paint an enormous mural for the Medford Post Office. His “Golden Triangle of Trade’’ shows a white sailor leaning up against a post. That man is watching another, a black man, working, cane upon his shoulder, manacles lying open in the tropical sand. The triangle above them - topped by a huge American eagle - sweeps from Africa, across the Caribbean, and then straight to Boston Harbor. That history was still perhaps too fresh to kill.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The North has surely done a good job since.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Think of the South, and slavery immediately comes to mind. Think of the North, and there march in the heroes and the Patriots, the stern-faced abolitionists, poets and philosophers. In time, the vanishing was almost total. Visitors who go to 105 Brattle Street in Cambridge today usually go there to visit Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s old house without realizing the slave past (Cuba, Tony, Darby. . .) that stretched way back inside those walls.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Did Barack Obama know, when he studied law at Harvard, that the basement apartment he rented in Somerville lay on ground that hosted slavery for 150 years? Did his dean welcome students with the information that the Law School was created out of money made partly from the work of and trade in men who never saw a day of freedom?</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://taylorstenevents.weebly.com/uploads/2/0/2/3/20232825/3639566.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://taylorstenevents.weebly.com/uploads/2/0/2/3/20232825/3639566.jpg" height="230" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
This void in general knowledge persists five years after the powerful exhibit in 2005 by the New York Historical Society, “Slavery in New York.’’ It persists as scholars strain and labor to uncover deeper aspects of this past. It persists though this is 150 years lost, not 10. And it persists despite the fact that statistics from the period of the American Revolution tell an abbreviated story of at least 10,000 souls enslaved across the North, not a handful of domestic “servants’’ afforded gentle treatment.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“We have memorized America,’’ the poet Miller Williams wrote.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
He was eloquent. But he was wrong.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The national dialogue has stalled on easy binaries: North/South. Abolitionists/slave owners. Blue states/red states. You know the drill. Miller Williams asks us to look forward to be true to values we have always held. It’s a lovely thought. But honestly, it would be better to heed King’s warning, and look backward at a past imperfectly remembered.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Then, just maybe, we can talk. (source: <a href="http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/01/18/new_englands_scarlet_s_for_slavery/?page=full" target="_blank"><i>The Boston Globe</i></a>)</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-i3eQdDEBQw" width="420"></iframe>Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-34725713351355264302015-02-20T17:36:00.002-08:002015-02-20T17:36:30.604-08:00The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad by Eric Foner<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2015/01/16/gateway-to-freedom_978-0-393-24407-6-bb738a832200cd815104ce751a9712ef96fb9d12.jpg?s=1400" class="shrinkToFit decoded" src="http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2015/01/16/gateway-to-freedom_978-0-393-24407-6-bb738a832200cd815104ce751a9712ef96fb9d12.jpg?s=1400" height="239" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
From <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/15/books/eric-foner-revisits-myths-of-the-underground-railroad.html?_r=0" target="_blank"><i>The New York Times</i></a>, "Words From the Past Illuminate a Station on the Way to Freedom: Eric Foner Revisits Myths of the Underground Railroad," by Jennifer Schuessler, on 14 January 2015 -- Eric Foner has won a place in the front rank of American historians with books that seem to vacuum up all available sources to produce bold new interpretations of the country’s reckoning with the big questions of slavery and freedom.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
But his latest grew from a modest beginning: a tip from his dog-walker.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In 2007, Madeline Lewis, an undergraduate history major who helped with the family cocker spaniel, had been looking at the papers of a little-known 19th-century abolitionist editor named Sydney Howard Gay, held at Columbia University, when she came upon a small notebook labeled Record of Fugitives.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517h98VOk8L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517h98VOk8L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" border="0" class="decoded" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517h98VOk8L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" height="320" width="211" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
She mentioned it to Mr. Foner, who was busy writing “The Fiery Trial,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning study of Abraham Lincoln’s shifting views of slavery. A few months later, he got around to looking at the notebook, which contained detailed records of Gay’s efforts to help more than 200 runaway slaves passing through New York City.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“I was amazed,” Mr. Foner said recently during an interview in his office at Columbia, where he has taught since 1982. “I had never heard of this document, or seen it cited.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
He added: “Normally, I start with a historical question and then go looking for documents that might help me answer it. This was the first time it happened the other way around.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In “Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad,” to be published next week by W. W. Norton, Mr. Foner uses Gay’s records as the spine of a story that traces antislavery efforts in New York City from the early 18th century to the years before the Civil War. The Underground Railroad, he argues, wasn’t just a noble humanitarian enterprise, but a movement that significantly fanned the flames of sectional conflict and helped set off the war itself.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dtK8nBu31pE/U95H3l534WI/AAAAAAAAAXw/YIheptX-5vA/s1600/The+Fugitive+Slave.jpg" class="shrinkToFit decoded" height="174" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dtK8nBu31pE/U95H3l534WI/AAAAAAAAAXw/YIheptX-5vA/s320/The+Fugitive+Slave.jpg" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Mr. Foner, 71, has certainly tackled a wildly popular subject. The Underground Railroad is enshrined in school curriculums and children’s books as an inspiring story of interracial cooperation, and celebrated in museums like the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, not to mention a growing number of local tourism sites.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Everybody in Ohio who has a potato cellar thinks it was an Underground Railroad site,” said Paul Finkelman, a professor at Albany Law School who is writing a book on fugitive slave laws.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
But the Underground Railroad has had a checkered past among professional historians, who have long questioned not just the more colorful elements of popular legend — like the notion that fugitives followed coded instructions sewn into quilts — but whether it existed at all.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The first scholarly study of the Underground Railroad, published by Wilbur Siebert in 1898, named some 3,200 “agents,” virtually all of them white men, who presided over an elaborate network of fixed routes, illustrated with maps that looked much like those of an ordinary railroad.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
That view largely held among scholars until 1961, when the historian Larry Gara published “The Liberty Line,” a slashing revisionist study that dismissed the Underground Railroad as a myth and argued that most fugitive slaves escaped at their own initiative, with little help from organized abolitionists. Scholarship on the topic all but dried up, as historians more generally emphasized the agency of African-Americans in claiming their own freedom.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/RV-AP361_BKRVga_JV_20150116111853.jpg" class="shrinkToFit decoded" height="320" src="http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/RV-AP361_BKRVga_JV_20150116111853.jpg" width="212" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
But over the past 15 years, aided by newly digitized records of obscure abolitionist newspapers and local archives, scholars have constructed a new picture of the Underground Railroad as a collection of loosely interlocking local networks of activists, both black and white, that waxed and waned over time but nevertheless helped a significant number reach freedom.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
There have been studies of the Underground Railroad in Washington, southern Pennsylvania and New Bedford, Mass., among other locations, as well as biographies of black abolitionists like David Ruggles, a member of New York City’s biracial Committee of Vigilance for the Protection of People of Color, founded in 1835.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In “Gateway to Freedom,” Mr. Foner ties much of that work together, while uncovering the history of the eastern corridor’s key gateway, New York City.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Great_Dismal_Swamp-Fugitive_Slaves.jpg" class="decoded" height="320" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Great_Dismal_Swamp-Fugitive_Slaves.jpg" width="262" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“This book is a capstone,” said Matthew Pinsker, a historian at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., who will be teaching it to K-12 educators at a workshop this summer. “The Underground Railroad was real, and Foner will help ordinary people understand that in a way that doesn’t rely on fiction or quilt stories, but on actual documents and records.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Chief among them is Gay’s Record of Fugitives, which Mr. Pinsker called “perhaps the most extraordinary” documentary discovery concerning the Underground Railroad in the past decade. Previously, historians had known little about the railroad in New York City, where strong pro-Southern sympathies, stemming from the city’s close ties to the cotton trade, and enforcement of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act had driven its activities further into secrecy.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
But in the Record, as well as on scraps of paper that Mr. Foner found elsewhere in the papers, Gay, the editor of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s newspaper, kept meticulous, vivid notes on his clandestine aid to fugitives, right down to the precise amounts of money spent.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/01/14/arts/20150115-RAILROAD-slide-6863/20150115-RAILROAD-slide-6863-jumbo.jpg" class="shrinkToFit decoded" height="213" src="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/01/14/arts/20150115-RAILROAD-slide-6863/20150115-RAILROAD-slide-6863-jumbo.jpg" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Some of the names in the notebook, which he kept in 1855 and 1856, are well known. “A party of four arrived from Phila.,” he wrote in one entry. “It was headed by Captain Harriet Tubman.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
To identify more obscure figures, Mr. Foner went hunting in census records, city directories, newspapers and other sources. Many fugitives in Gay’s notes were also mentioned in similar records, long known to scholars, kept by William Still, a black abolitionist in Philadelphia, suggesting a very real if loose coordination among locations.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Gara was quite right to take the story down a few pegs,” Mr. Foner said. “But to say there was no Underground Railroad is not correct.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Gateway to Freedom” does some debunking of its own. Instead of the popular image of a lone fugitive running through the woods, Mr. Foner’s analysis of Gay’s notes suggests a significant number escaped in groups, often traveling on trains or boats, helped along by blacks working in the maritime industry, including some in Southern ports like Norfolk, Va.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/books/wcqctm/picture6645312/ALTERNATES/FREE_960/On%20To%20Liberty.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/books/wcqctm/picture6645312/ALTERNATES/FREE_960/On%20To%20Liberty.jpg" border="0" class="decoded" height="204" src="http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/books/wcqctm/picture6645312/ALTERNATES/FREE_960/On%20To%20Liberty.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Mr. Foner also recovers the stories of forgotten black heroes like Louis Napoleon, a porter in Gay’s office who began scouring New York’s docks for runaways as early as the 1830s. Napoleon also played a role in some important legal cases, including Lemmon v. New York (1852), in which abolitionists challenged the right of slave owners to transport their property through a free state.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“He was illiterate, and yet went to court and got writs of habeas corpus,” Mr. Foner said. “He is an important link between the overt and clandestine sides of antislavery activism in New York.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The actual number of people involved in the Underground Railroad was tiny. Mr. Foner estimated that only a dozen were actively working in New York City at any given moment, with perhaps no more than 5,000 fugitives aided nationally each year between 1835 and 1860, out of a total slave population of about four million.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
But the railroad’s political impact, he argues, was enormous, helping to ignite the Civil War. The longest paragraph in South Carolina’s 1860 declaration of the “immediate causes” of secession, he notes, didn’t concern the much-debated westward expansion of slavery, but northern obstruction of the return of fugitives.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
And it wasn’t the Underground Railroad that forced the issue, but the fugitive slaves themselves. (source: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/15/books/eric-foner-revisits-myths-of-the-underground-railroad.html?_r=0" target="_blank"><i>The New York Times</i></a>)</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dvRc1_mYS74" width="420"></iframe></div>
Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-12117854834272254282015-02-19T08:29:00.000-08:002015-02-19T08:29:57.453-08:00African Americans and the Revolutionary War: Rough Crossings by Simon Schama<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51XftwNgbOL._SY300_.jpg" class="decoded" height="320" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51XftwNgbOL._SY300_.jpg" width="226" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
As reviewed in the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/books/review/04staples.html?pagewanted=print" target="_blank">New York Times</a>, by Brent Staples, on 4 June 2006, "'Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution,' by Simon Schama," in an article entitled, "Give Us Liberty" -- Imagine how history would have unfolded had we lost the Revolutionary War and been brought to heel by His Britannic Majesty, King George III. Instead of being revered as founders, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and their compatriots could well have been marched to the gallows and forgotten. British propagandists would have churned out a mythology much like the one American schoolchildren are force-fed today — but with the national roles reversed. The British monarchy would be depicted as the champion of liberty, with the rebels cast as agents of republican chaos and tyranny. The lesson would no doubt focus on the contradiction cited by Samuel Johnson, who inquired pithily of the Americans in 1775: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Simon Schama's "Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution" picks up where Dr. Johnson left off. It offers a stirringly ambitious reconsideration of the Revolution with the question of slavery set at the very heart of the matter. Schama follows on the heels of historians like Benjamin Quarles, Gary Nash, Sylvia R. Frey and Cassandra Pybus, who have already highlighted the paradox of a revolution initiated in the name of liberty for people who passionately defended slavery. Always a master storyteller, Schama — an Englishman who has long made his home in the United States — has woven the strands laid out by those who went before him into an epic work that gets the reader's blood rushing as it debunks the traditional American view of the Revolution. Schama throws more than a few bombs along the way, as when he writes of the Southern slave owners: "Theirs was a revolution, first and foremost, mobilized to protect slavery."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51IB6SltmXL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" class="decoded" height="320" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51IB6SltmXL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" width="204" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"Rough Crossings" focuses on the black American role in the Revolution and, most particularly, on the tens of thousands of slaves who fled to British lines after Lord Dunmore issued a proclamation in November 1775 offering slaves from rebel plantations freedom in return for service to the crown. It was for the most part a nightmare journey. Many runaway slaves were caught by their masters, savagely punished and returned to bondage. Of those who reached British protection, many died agonizing deaths from smallpox and other diseases. Those who survived worked as laborers, guides, spies and fighters. They often served valiantly — at one point wearing sashes that read "Liberty to Negroes" — and spilled the blood of their former masters with alacrity. If nothing else, Schama's portraits of black loyalist fighters should provide Hollywood with fresh ideas about how to depict this war. Screenwriters will find prime material, for example, in the black guerrilla fighter known as Colonel Tye, who escaped from his master in New Jersey, survived the epidemics that ravaged Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment in the Chesapeake and returned North to haunt the patriot outposts that were reachable from the British stronghold of New York.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
As the war wound down, thousands of black loyalists were bottled up with the British Army in New York, wondering with good reason if the crown intended to honor its commitments to them. Far away, across the ocean, the South Carolina slave owner (and former president of the Continental Congress) Henry Laurens had engineered an 11th-hour addition to the Treaty of Paris that forbade the British from "carrying away" American property, which included the Negroes who had served the British as comrades in arms. As Schama shows, the passage turned into a long-lasting bone of contention between the Americans and the British. It put the fledgling Republic in the position of arguing before God and the nations of the world that black persons were not persons at all but property. This debased position mortified John Jay, after he became the nation's first secretary of foreign affairs in 1784. After the war had technically come to an end, the issue also created a confrontation between the combustible George Washington and the British command in America that might easily have flared anew into warfare.</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="https://academicinexile.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/284613593_33f81b4dbc_o.jpg" class="decoded" height="320" src="https://academicinexile.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/284613593_33f81b4dbc_o.jpg" width="214" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In New York, black loyalists were justifiably fearful that the British would renege on the promise of freedom — and that their former masters would steal into the city and reclaim them. Among the terrified former slaves was Boston King, who had escaped his master in South Carolina and put as much distance as he could between his family and "the Americans." As he later wrote in his memoir: "Peace was restored between America and Great Britain which diffused universal joy among all parties except us, who had escaped slavery and taken refuge in the English Army; for a report prevailed at New-York that all the slaves . . . were to be delivered up to their masters, altho' some of them had been three or four years among the English. This dreadful rumour filled us with inexpressible anguish and terror, especially when we saw our old masters . . . seizing upon slaves in the streets of New-York, or even dragging them out of their beds."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The British response, Schama argues, far exceeded the strategic abolitionism exhibited earlier by English commanders who had found themselves desperately short of troops in the heat of war. In 1783, the British command in New York issued 3,000 certificates of freedom to King and other black people, entitling them to leave America for the British colony of Nova Scotia "or wherever else He/She may think proper." This was a "revolutionary moment in the lives of African-Americans," Schama writes. Another document, probably drawn up by the British commander in chief Sir Guy Carleton in late 1783, rendered free even black people who had come to British lines by the time the peace treaty took effect but as yet had "no regular protections or certificates." In contrast to Dunmore's "purely military opportunism," as Schama calls it, this document argued that black people within the British lines ought to be considered free because, it said, the British constitution was "not allowing of slavery, but holding out freedom and protection to all who came within."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="https://rhapsodyinbooks.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/rough_crossings.jpg?w=468" class="decoded" height="320" src="https://rhapsodyinbooks.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/rough_crossings.jpg?w=468" width="222" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
This assertion was morally correct but legally erroneous. Slavery was in fact still legal in the British Empire and would remain so until 1833, and the British slave trade would continue unabated until 1807. But the institution had been dealt a serious blow a decade earlier, in 1772, when a British court ruled in favor of James Somerset, an African-American slave who had escaped his master in England and was subsequently apprehended by slave catchers and put aboard a ship bound for the Caribbean. In a dramatic case watched as closely as any celebrity trial today, the court shied away from outlawing slavery in Britain but ruled in essence that no master could remove a slave from the country to be sold abroad.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
While the Somerset decision left slavery technically legal, it drove British intellectuals toward the view that slavery was inconsistent with British law and a stain on the national character. Indeed, the British abolitionist Granville Sharp would later suggest that the British defeat in America was divine retribution connected to the country's participation in the buying and selling of human beings. Meanwhile, as Schama points out, the decision was sometimes misunderstood. This was particularly true in America, where it scandalized the patriots and galvanized slaves who had already heard quite a bit about inalienable rights while serving — and sleeping with — their masters and mistresses. Schama believes that the "Somerset effect" — a misreading of the decision — was also operating among Carleton and his officers when the British commander ratified black freedom in New York. When confronted by Washington (who had himself lost slaves in the Revolution), Carleton famously replied that no interpretation could be put upon the Treaty of Paris that was "inconsistent with prior engagements binding the national honor which must be kept with all colors." Didactic to a fault — especially with Washington — Carleton may well have been trying to instruct the young Republic in a matter that would poison its civic relations and tarnish its founding ideals well into the future.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2tR_nQPZAD0/TZkVGycvQkI/AAAAAAAAEy0/u3nL2BKqwhk/s400/simon%2Bschama3.jpg" class="decoded" height="195" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2tR_nQPZAD0/TZkVGycvQkI/AAAAAAAAEy0/u3nL2BKqwhk/s320/simon%2Bschama3.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="320" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Historian Simon Schama</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The optimal arrangement for liberated slaves would have been to remain in British-occupied America, where the military could have backed the promise of freedom with force. When the black loyalists sailed away from America, they moved out of a militarized world and into a civil society that was not capable of fulfilling the debt owed to them. Britain had largely externalized slavery to its sugar colonies. It therefore seemed perfectly natural to externalize the black loyalists as well.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Those who landed in London were soon starving in the streets. Those who had gone to Nova Scotia were often exploited, denied the land they had been promised and trapped in destitution. Those who left England and Canada for the black colony in Sierra Leone dreamed up by abolitionists suffered terribly as a result of warfare, disease and mismanagement. Schama acknowledges this suffering, but insists that black loyalists were not dupes of the crown, as is sometimes asserted. They "knew exactly what they were doing," he writes, "even if they could never have anticipated the magnitude of the perils, misfortunes and deceits that would result from their decision." His point is that they found freedom and at least a measure of self-determination along the way. In Nova Scotia, Schama writes, the "loyalist diaspora" created some of the earliest free black Baptist and Methodist churches and perhaps the first school expressly built for free black children. When roughly a thousand of them later crossed the ocean to Sierra Leone, they did so as free persons, and enjoyed a brief exercise in self-government. Beyond that, the black loyalists managed to die as free men and women. And this was no mean feat for someone born black in America in the 18th century.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Brent Staples writes editorials on politics and culture for The Times and is the author of the memoir "Parallel Time." (source: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/books/review/04staples.html?pagewanted=print" target="_blank"><i>The New York Times</i></a>)</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/C9BV3T20GVE" width="420"></iframe></div>
Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-31786762311718584662015-02-19T07:26:00.002-08:002015-02-20T22:50:45.463-08:00The B.E.T. Mini-series: The Book of Negroes<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.wlu.ca/images/spotlights-features/spotlight-images/jan-2015/TBN%20poster%20web1.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://www.wlu.ca/images/spotlights-features/spotlight-images/jan-2015/TBN%20poster%20web1.jpg" height="320" width="320" /></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
From<a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/television/an-unknown-canadian-story-brings-book-of-negros-to-tv/article22275312/" target="_blank"><i> The Globe and Mail </i></a>[Canada], "How The Book of Negroes, a profound yet unknown Canadian story, became a miniseries," by Jane Taber, Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, Canada, on 2 January 2015 -- On a bitterly raw day last April, with the cold north wind whipping up the seas along the Atlantic coast of Cape Breton, Lawrence Hill watched his story, <i>The Book of Negroes</i>, come to life.</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
This was no Hollywood soundstage – Hill was bundled up against the almost hurricane-like winds blowing through the Fortress of Louisbourg, a national historic site and tourist destination in the summer, which on this day was dressed up to look like lower Manhattan in the late 18th century, when the victorious rebel Americans vanquished the occupying British.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.2114474!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/article_970/bet14tvf-1-web.jpg" class="shrinkToFit decoded" src="http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.2114474%21/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/article_970/bet14tvf-1-web.jpg" height="320" width="212" /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“It was kind of surreal and unbelievable,” Hill said in a recent interview about seeing his award-winning 2007 novel transformed into a six-part miniseries.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The Book of Negroes chronicles the dramatic journey and life of Aminata Diallo, a young West African girl, abducted from her village and sold into slavery in America. Eventually, she registers her name in the Book of Negroes, the British ledger of 3,000 Black Loyalists who declared their allegiance to the King and were allowed to leave America for Nova Scotia – and what they believed was the promised land. She lives her final years in England.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The $10-million miniseries premieres on CBC Television on Jan. 7 at 9 p.m. (9:30 in Newfoundland) and continues on consecutive Wednesdays; in February, it will air in the United States on BET (Black Entertainment Television).</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.cbc.ca/bookofnegroes/content/images/people/cuba-main.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://www.cbc.ca/bookofnegroes/content/images/people/cuba-main.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Academy Award-winning actor Cuba Gooding Jr. is one of the stars and key characters, playing the role of Sam Fraunces, a tavern-owner and freed slave, while Canadian actor Lyriq Bent plays the male lead, Chekura, Aminata’s husband.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Louis Gossett Jr., who won an Oscar for his part in the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman, was also in Nova Scotia in the spring, shooting scenes as Daddy Moses, a partially blind, elderly preacher who is a father figure to Aminata.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“It’s a natural, it’s a no-brainer,” Gossett said in an interview about taking on the role. “It’s just perfect, it’s historically right …”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Gossett has done a number of projects in Canada and considers it “my second home.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
He was a co-star in the groundbreaking 1977 television miniseries Roots, and narrated the 2013 audiobook of 12 Years a Slave; he says this project continues the story of “atrocities and slavery.” He doesn’t want the storytelling to stop: “There are some great stories now to tell both through Canada and North America about the African contribution,” he says.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://postmediacanadadotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/gossett-bon_louisgossettjr1-highres.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="https://postmediacanadadotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/gossett-bon_louisgossettjr1-highres.jpg" border="0" class="shrinkToFit decoded" height="213" src="https://postmediacanadadotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/gossett-bon_louisgossettjr1-highres.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The Book of Negroes is an ambitious production – filmed in two countries, South Africa and Canada, on two continents, with an international cast of 120 and more than 400 crew members – but Hill, 57, who co-wrote the screenplay, says it is “very profoundly a Canadian story, but a very unknown Canadian story.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
That his book has even come to life on TV is a feat – almost as much creative energy went into financing it as writing it. It’s been a four-year process.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“It is a beast,” says Damon D’Oliveira, the producer. “We have 18 different partners that are helping finance this.” A typical Canadian production would have six to eight separate sources, he says.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
This is the biggest production and first miniseries that D’Oliveira – who with Clement Virgo runs Canadian production company Conquering Lion Pictures – has done. Virgo co-wrote and directed the miniseries.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://i.cbc.ca/1.2935162.1422472537!/fileImage/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/16x9_460/clement-virgo-on-set-the-book-of-negroes.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://i.cbc.ca/1.2935162.1422472537%21/fileImage/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/16x9_460/clement-virgo-on-set-the-book-of-negroes.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
At first, the two men wanted to make the book into a feature-length film – but felt, given its scope, that a miniseries made more sense creatively and financially.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“We realized the story was bursting out of the seams and needed a longer format,” says the Jamaican-born Virgo, who was initially put off by the book’s title.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“It felt like it would have been medicine. Good for me – a kind of story that you’re supposed to watch or read,” he says. “That was my first real prejudice against it.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
But that changed after a chance encounter with Molly Johnson, the Canadian jazz singer and songwriter, at a bookstore in Toronto’s Kensington Market. She insisted he read it – and pulled his wallet out of his pocket for him to buy it.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“I left it on my coffee table for about a month,” he says. “Then finally I had some time, I picked it up and … read it in about three days. I fell in love with the story. I fell in love with Aminata.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.bet.com/shows/the-book-of-negroes/news/2014/11/learn-more-about-the-book-of-negroes/_jcr_content/featuredMedia/newsitemimage.newsimage.dimg/120214-shows-book-of-negroes-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="http://www.bet.com/shows/the-book-of-negroes/news/2014/11/learn-more-about-the-book-of-negroes/_jcr_content/featuredMedia/newsitemimage.newsimage.dimg/120214-shows-book-of-negroes-1.jpg" border="0" class="decoded" src="http://www.bet.com/shows/the-book-of-negroes/news/2014/11/learn-more-about-the-book-of-negroes/_jcr_content/featuredMedia/newsitemimage.newsimage.dimg/120214-shows-book-of-negroes-1.jpg" height="179" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Finding Aminata, however, was one of the most crucial elements to telling their story. She is a strong female lead and heroine – and they needed an actress who could age credibly over 30 years. (As a girl, Aminata is played by Canadian actress Shailyn Pierre-Dixon.) They found Aunjanue Ellis, a U.S. actress best known for her role as a maid in the movie The Help.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“She just blew us away,” recalls D’Oliveira of her audition. “She embodies the spirit of Aminata.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
For Hill it was also important that the Aminata character look right: “There is a trend to feature light-skinned black women in black roles,” he said. “I didn’t feel it was appropriate for a movie depicting an 18th-century woman from Mali. …</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.bet.com/shows/the-book-of-negroes/_jcr_content/leftupper/herocarousel/topcarousel_image.herocarousel.dimg/__1424306666026/013015-shows-bon-Aminata-Diallo-1.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://www.bet.com/shows/the-book-of-negroes/_jcr_content/leftupper/herocarousel/topcarousel_image.herocarousel.dimg/__1424306666026/013015-shows-bon-Aminata-Diallo-1.jpg" height="179" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Aunjanue is great and I’m glad that she looks right for the role, too,” he says. “Black women … would have had reason to be really offended if this role were cast … as a person who really looked white.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Hill grew up as a multiracial kid – the middle child of a white mother and black father, both human-rights activists – in the unlikely but picture-perfect and predominantly white Toronto suburb of Don Mills in the sixties and seventies.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“It was a stifling place racially, and it wasn’t a place I felt comfortable in,” he said. Still, he gives Don Mills top billing for making him an author: “Coming to terms with growing up mixed-race in Canada … that ambiguity probably was the crucible for a writer. … I feel thankful that I grew up in a background that was sometimes confusing.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
It’s been eight years since Hill wrote <i>The Book of Negroes</i> – and 30 years since he discovered historian James Walker’s book The Black Loyalists on his parents’ bookshelf.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://media.philly.com/images/LibrosdosNegros_600.jpg" class="decoded" height="240" src="http://media.philly.com/images/LibrosdosNegros_600.jpg" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“I was blown away,” he recalled. The Walker book is a scholarly tome, which dealt with the exodus back to Africa and also mentioned the Book of Negroes. “It sat with me for 15 years before I actually turned to it actively.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Instead he wrote six other books before finding the confidence to write The Book of Negroes.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Writing a screenplay is a new genre for Hill. It is collaborative as opposed to being a solo act, he notes. He says the story has been changed to adapt to television – but it still honours his book.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
And it is a Canadian story, he reiterates. “It’s a Canadian story that has not been dramatized before … the story of the Black Loyalists. That’s the problem with Canada – we have a very limited notion of what constitutes Canadian history.” (source: <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/television/an-unknown-canadian-story-brings-book-of-negros-to-tv/article22275312/" target="_blank"><i>The Globe and Mail</i></a>)</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/g17i3sOzD2w" width="420"></iframe></div>
Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-50318542600073346292015-02-19T03:50:00.001-08:002015-02-19T03:50:22.005-08:00Lawrencce Hill on Language<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="https://nationalpostcom.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/lawrence-hill1.jpg?w=620" class="decoded" height="240" src="https://nationalpostcom.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/lawrence-hill1.jpg?w=620" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="320" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Lawrence Hill is the author of nine books. He co-wrote the screenplay for the TV miniseries The Book of Negroes, appearing in February on BET.</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
From <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2015/02/13/negro_may_not_be_pc_but_the_book_of_negroes_is_the_best_name_for_my_novel.html" target="_blank"><i>Slate Magazine</i></a>, "What I Learned About Language When I Titled My Novel The Book of Negroes," by Lawrence Hill, on 13 February 2015 --<i> </i>The title of my novel, The Book of Negroes, has undergone a series of changes since HarperCollins Canada published it eight years ago. The original name resurrects a long-forgotten British naval ledger used to document the exodus of 3,000 African Americans from Manhattan. These African Americans—their stories also form the subject of my novel—became known as the Black Loyalists because they served the British in Manhattan on the losing side of the American Revolutionary War. The Tories had enticed slaves to throw off their shackles and fight, promising freedom to any man or woman who would take refuge behind British military lines. But the British lost the war, so they rewarded the 3,000 Black Loyalists with free passage by ship from Manhattan to Nova Scotia (on the Atlantic coast of Canada) in 1783.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In 2007, shortly before the first printing of the novel in the United States, my American publisher (W.W. Norton & Co.) changed the title to Someone Knows My Name. I was told that American bookstores were reluctant to order a book with the word Negroes on the cover. In the Netherlands, meanwhile, where the Canadian title was translated quite literally to Het Negerboek, a small group of protesters of Dutch Surinamese descent was so outraged that they burned copies of the book cover in an Amsterdam park. When, back in the States, BET bought a six-part miniseries adaptation of the story (the first episode airs Monday), the network opted to use my original title, which persuaded Norton to re-release the book as The Book of Negroes. This back-and-forth made me wonder: What is it with the word Negroes? How has it come to be so incendiary?</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://boekenz.nl/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Het-negerboek.jpg" class="decoded" height="320" src="http://boekenz.nl/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Het-negerboek.jpg" width="205" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The word Nigger—traditionally pitched with such venom that my father ordered me as a boy to ball up my fists and start fighting the instant I heard anyone use it—has made a comeback. It’s the title of comedian Dick Gregory’s autobiography, which sold more than a million copies, and a history tome by Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy. Hip-hop artists have ushered it back into near-respectability.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Negro, on the other hand, has moved from respectable to despised. The U.S. government removed the word from its census forms in 2014. For many, it suggests that the person so designated is a weak-kneed Uncle Tom with no self-respect as a black person.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
It wasn’t always thus. For most of the 20th century, Negro was a neutral, respectful way to designate Americans of African descent. (Martin Luther King Jr. used it repeatedly.) Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1917. Three years later, Langston Hughes wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” In 1928, W.E.B. DuBois received a letter from a high school sophomore who argued that “ ‘Negro’, or ‘nigger’ is a white man’s word to make us feel inferior.” He replied: “ ‘Negro’ is a fine word. Etymologically and phonetically it is much better and more logical than ‘African’ or ‘colored’ or any of the various hyphenated circumlocutions … a Negro by any other name would be just as black and just as white; just as ashamed of himself and just as shamed by others as today.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51n1lLMf2wL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" class="decoded" height="320" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51n1lLMf2wL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" width="213" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In my own family, I saw and heard the word Negro used many times. My father’s Ph.D. dissertation, completed in 1960, was entitled Negroes in Toronto: A Sociological Study of a Minority Group. When he was named chairman of the Ontario Human Rights Commission in 1971, the Globe and Mail newspaper ran a headline with these words: “Negro appointed chairman of human rights board.” However, by 1978, when my mother and father co-founded the Ontario Black History Society, the word Negro had quietly fallen to the wayside.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
According to University of Baltimore law professor Michael Higginbotham, the beginning of the end of Negro coincided with the rise of the Black Power movement. (Think James Brown’s 1968 song “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.”) As civil rights advanced, fewer and fewer people wanted to use a term coined by slave traders. As Higginbotham argues, Negro fails to establish parity between the people it connotes and other groups. “Black” and “African-American” are analogous to “White” or “Italian-American,” “but Negro” lacks specificity and stands apart.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Delivering the eulogy at the funeral of Malcolm X in 1965, the actor and playwright Ossie Davis said: “Nobody knew better than he the power words have over the minds of men. Malcolm had stopped being a ‘Negro’ years ago. It had become too small, too puny, too weak a word for him. Malcolm was bigger than that. Malcolm had become an Afro-American …”</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://smithsonianapa.org/bookdragon/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2014/06/Forna-Hill-covers.jpg" class="decoded" height="155" src="http://smithsonianapa.org/bookdragon/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2014/06/Forna-Hill-covers.jpg" width="320" /> </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
It is never satisfying to define a person by race, and terms that purport to do so are bound to fail. This is because race itself is an absurd construct that places people of African heritage at the bottom of a social hierarchy. Yet we continue to innovate with language. We run in circles trying to do the impossible and find a term that will work: Nigger, Negro, colored, Black, Afro-American, African-American …</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
As we lurch forward, grappling with new terms in new contexts, we should at least be inspired by history.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The Book of Negroes is the best title for a novel and television miniseries about 3,000 people whose names and autobiographical details were entered into a British naval ledger by the same name. The document itself embraces the history of peoples of African descent as they moved from Africa to the Americas in slavery, and then threw off their chains to serve the British wartime effort in every capacity imaginable.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B9LMYA0CYAE0A6O.jpg:large" class="decoded" height="180" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B9LMYA0CYAE0A6O.jpg:large" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The story of the Black Loyalists is one of survival in the face of betrayal. Men and women, children in tow, came to live for years in ragged canvas tents on the southern tip of Manhattan. After being evacuated to Nova Scotia in 1783, some were enslaved or indentured in Canada. In Nova Scotia, many were never given the land they had been promised and were left to freeze or starve to death or to be hanged for trifling offenses such as stealing potatoes. The oppression in what should have been Canaan was too much to stomach: A decade after arriving in Nova Scotia, 1,200 Black Loyalists accepted a voluntary offer from British abolitionists to sail once more across the Atlantic, this time traveling free in a flotilla of 15 ships to found the colony of Freetown in Sierra Leone in West Africa.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
As it turns out, many of these so-called adventurers were not merely going to Africa: They were returning to the homeland from which they had been stolen at a much younger age. This astounding narrative of resilience is precisely the sort of story that we need to remember and lean on, in times good and bad. Largely absent from American and Canadian history books and classrooms, it deserves study. It deserves resurrection. Negro may well be an outdated word in contemporary speech, but it and “The Book of Negroes” have a central role in history and the fashioning of the narrative of peoples of the African diaspora who came to America in chains and chose to leave it, free. (source: <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2015/02/13/negro_may_not_be_pc_but_the_book_of_negroes_is_the_best_name_for_my_novel.html" target="_blank">Slate Magazine)</a></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ml4b4z65j0s" width="420"></iframe></div>
Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-25637691698238354482015-01-15T07:42:00.003-08:002015-01-15T07:42:26.709-08:00Selma to Montgomery March<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="http://clccrul.raceandpoverty.org/files/imgcore/John%20Lewis.jpg" height="179" width="320" /></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
From the<a href="http://nvrmi.com/?page_id=43" target="_blank"> </a><i><a href="http://nvrmi.com/?page_id=43" target="_blank">National Voting Rights Museum and Institute</a> </i>-- The Alabama Voting Rights Project (AVRP), centered on Selma, Alabama and Dallas County, was a major campaign to secure effective federal protection of voting rights. That protection had been compromised out of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Three of Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) main organizers-Director of Direct Action and Nonviolent Education James Bevel, Diane Nash, and James Orange had been working with AVRP since late 1963.<br />
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In 1963, the Dallas County Voters League (DCVL) and organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began voter registration work. When white resistance to African American voter registration proved intractable, the DCVL requested the assistance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), who brought many prominent civil rights and civic leaders to support voting rights.<br />
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/FGIg01PGyUTbQJYWIp4uj9fMMafzuozcBOwNzrB6YrEF1wSMorD3HqIXEDKHyVl71EppzgPzbhN4FLx9wcm7fmbd5Ku6wGh_4yWH03EL0NU" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://lintvwala.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/selma.jpg?w=650" height="182" width="320" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
On February 18, 1965, an Alabama State Trooper, Corporal James Bonard Fowler, shot Jimmie Lee Jackson at point –blank range, as he tried to protect his mother and grandfather in a café to which hey had fled while being attacked by troopers during a nighttime civil rights demonstration in Marion, the county seat of Perry County. Jackson died eight days later, of an infection resulting from the gunshot wound, at Selma’s Good Samaritan. His murder was the catalyst for the movement, the Selma to Montgomery March. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In response, James Bevel called for a march from Selma to Montgomery. At a memorial service for Jackson on Sunday, February 1965, Rev. James Bevel floated his idea at the end of a fiery sermon. His text was from the Book of Esther, where Esther is charged to “go unto the king, to make supplication unto him, and to make request before him for her people.” ”I must go to see the king!” Bevel shouted, “We must go to Montgomery and see the king!” Several days later Martin Luther King, Jr. confirmed that, a march from Selma to Montgomery would take place. He met with President Lyndon B. Johnson in Washington D. C., on March 5, outlining is views on the proposed voting rights legislation.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/NpyPGBQMt7mziTFHbW2ph-bmxIc_ardQp3SwBVD22p-9HvRPwIaurjAxziRtpTirZWHdjDMB_VsSe_BTfepv_K_PJsm4G-XUUJnoxzddFiNWh18FNXDBdst-o_J9FXphvAR2OvLF" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.atlantamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2009/10/Lewis_Selma.jpg" height="227" width="320" /></a></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The Selma to Montgomery March consisted of three different marches in 1965 that marked the political and emotional peak of the American Civil Rights Movement. These three marches grew out of the voting rights movement in Selma, Alabama, launched by local African Americans who formed the Dallas County Voters League. The first march took place on Sunday, March 7, when 600 civil rights marchers, assembled on Brown Chapel. The mood was somber. This day became known as “Bloody Sunday”-when the civil rights marchers were attacked by state and local police with billy clubs and tear gas. The second march took place on March 9; it was know as “Turn Around Tuesday.” Only the third march, which began on March 21 and lasted five days, made it to Montgomery, 51 mile (82km) away. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The marchers averaged 10 miles (16km) a day along U.S. Route 80, known in Alabama today as “Jefferson Davis Highway.” Protected by 2, 000 soldiers of the U.S. Army, 1,900 members of the Alabama National Guard under Federal command, and many FBI agents and Federal Marshals, they arrived in Montgomery on March 24, and at the Alabama Capital building on March 25, 1965.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
National and international attention of the march highlighted the struggle, the adversity, the violence as well as the determination of the Selma protestors. As a result of the media coverage worldwide, Congress rushed to enact legislation that would guarantee voting rights for all Americans. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://timeswampland.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/0293071973747_209148100.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://timeswampland.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/0293071973747_209148100.jpeg" height="211" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
“BLOODY Sunday”, 1965</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., James Bevel and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), in partial collaboration with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), attempted to organize a march from Selma, Alabama to the state capital of Montgomery on March 7, 1965. The first attempt to march on March 7 was aborted because of mob and police violence against the demonstrators. This day has since become known as “Bloody Sunday”. “Bloody Sunday” was a major turning point in the effort to gain public support for the Civil Rights Movement, the clearest demonstration up to that time of the dramatic potential of King’s nonviolence strategy. King, however, was not present. After meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson, he decided not to endorse the march, but it was carried out against his wishes and without his presence on March 7 by the director of the Selma Movement, James Bevel, and by local Civil Rights Leaders. King’s next attempt to organize a march was set for March 9, it was known as “Turn Around Tuesday.” The SCLC petitioned for an injunction in Federal Court against the State of Alabama; this injunction was denied and the judge issued an order blocking the march until after a prayer session, before turning the marchers around and asking them to disperse so as not to violate the court order. The unexpected ending of this second march aroused the surprise and anger of many within the local movement. The march finally went ahead fully on March 25, 1965. At the conclusion of the march and on the steps of the state capitol, King delivered a speech that has become known as “How Long, not Long”. (source: <a href="http://nvrmi.com/?page_id=43" target="_blank"><i>National Voting Rights Museum and Institute)</i></a></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/gM-tfj6lp6w" width="420"></iframe>
<!-- Blogger automated replacement: "https://images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http%3A%2F%2Flintvwala.files.wordpress.com%2F2014%2F05%2Fselma.jpg%3Fw%3D650&container=blogger&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image%2F*" with "https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/FGIg01PGyUTbQJYWIp4uj9fMMafzuozcBOwNzrB6YrEF1wSMorD3HqIXEDKHyVl71EppzgPzbhN4FLx9wcm7fmbd5Ku6wGh_4yWH03EL0NU" --><!-- Blogger automated replacement: "https://images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.atlantamagazine.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F12%2F2009%2F10%2FLewis_Selma.jpg&container=blogger&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image%2F*" with "https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/NpyPGBQMt7mziTFHbW2ph-bmxIc_ardQp3SwBVD22p-9HvRPwIaurjAxziRtpTirZWHdjDMB_VsSe_BTfepv_K_PJsm4G-XUUJnoxzddFiNWh18FNXDBdst-o_J9FXphvAR2OvLF" -->Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-71325587022850592192015-01-15T05:20:00.001-08:002015-01-15T05:20:14.092-08:00Bridge to Freedom, 1965: Selma, Alabama<div style="text-align: center;">
<img height="215" src="http://www.beetlesandhuxley.com/sites/default/files/stock-images/ALONG-THE-SELMA-MARCH-SELMA-ALABAMA-1965-2-C30630.jpg" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize" target="_blank">Eyes On The Prize Transcript: Bridge To Freedom (1965)</a></i></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
NARRATOR: Selma, Alabama, 1965.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
C. T. VIVIAN: I don't want to ... (inaudible) leave. We have come to register to vote.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
RACHEL WEST NELSON: If we can't vote, you ain't free. If you ain't free, well then you're slaves.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
C. T. VIVIAN: We're willing to be beaten for democracy.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
NARRATOR: Years of struggle came down to this climactic battle for voting rights. Before it ended, black and white Americans gave their lives. But would that be enough?</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
C. T. VIVIAN: You people beat people bloody in order that they will not have the privilege to vote.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
MALCOLM X: In the areas of the country where the government has proven itself unable or unwilling to defend the Negroes when they are being brutally and unjustly attacked, then the Negroes themselves should take whatever steps necessary to defend themselves.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img height="238" src="http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/media_content/m-2481.jpg" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
NARRATOR: To many Americans, black and white, this was their worst nightmare. Race riots in northern cities during the summer of 1964. The civil rights movement was ten years old, nonviolence had been the strategy. But could nonviolence work in a society which grew angrier each day?</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
GUNNAR JAHN: On behalf of the Nobel Committee --</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
NARRATOR: To the world, Martin Luther King, Jr., had come to symbolize the success of nonviolent strategy. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in December, 1964.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
GUNNAR JAHN: -- and the gold medal.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
NARRATOR: But in America, young militants were beginning to challenge King's leadership. Dallas County, Selma, Alabama. For more than a year, organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, had worked with local residents in waging a voter registration campaign. They met some resistance.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
By the end of 1964, SNCC was exhausted, with little money to continue. Selma's black leaders turned to Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for help.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR: Today marks the beginning of a determined, organized, mobilized campaign.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
NARRATOR: King's presence reopened an old rivalry between the ministers of SCLC and the young organizers of SNCC.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
JAMES FORMAN: We felt that there should be a projection and an organization of indigenous leadership and leadership from the community. Whereas the Southern Christian Leadership Conference took the position that Martin was a charismatic leader who was mainly responsible for raising money and they raised most money off of his leadership. But this differences in leadership then led to differences in style of work. We wanted a movement that would survive the loss of our lives; therefore, the necessity to build a broad based movement and not just a charismatic leader.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
NARRATOR: SNCC and SCLC put aside their differences and launched a combined effort on January 18th, 1965. The Dallas County courthouse steps became a dramatic stage as prospective voters lined up for the registrar's office in Selma. The key actor was Sheriff Jim Clark. Movement leaders counted on Clark to draw media attention, the kind of attention that would interest Washington and win voting rights legislation.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img height="201" src="http://www.thebuddhasaidiamawake.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/apMLC15_SMITHERMAN_BA_2Y20B.jpg" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
MAYOR SMITHERMAN: I am a segregationist. I do not believe in biracial committees.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
NARRATOR: Selma's political leaders understood the movement's tactics and were desperate not to get caught in the middle. Mayor Joseph Smitherman and his public safety director, Wilson Baker, hoped to restrain the volatile Sheriff Clark as he dealt with the demonstrators.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
JOSEPH SMITHERMAN: They picked Selma just like a movie producer would pick a set. You had the right ingredients. I mean, you'd had to have seen Clark in his day. He had a helmet on like General Patton, he had the clothes, the Eisenhower jacket and a swagger stick, and then Baker was very impressive and I guess I was the least of all. I was 145 pounds and a crew cut and big ears. So you had a young mayor with no background or experience.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
MAYOR SMITHERMAN: Our city and our county has been subjected to the greatest pressures I think any community in the country has had to withstand. We've had in our area here outside agitation groups of all levels. We've had Martin Luther Coon -- Pardon me, sir, Martin Luther King, we have had people of the Nazi Party, the States Rights Party, both of these groups have come in, they have continually harassed and agitated us for approximately three or four weeks.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img height="219" src="http://media1.s-nbcnews.com/j/msnbc/Components/Slideshows/_production/ss_050304_selmamarch/050304_selmamarch_ss03.grid-7x2.jpg" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
NARRATOR: More than half of Dallas County's citizens were black, but less than one percent were registered by 1965. Throughout much of the South, custom and law had long prevented blacks from registering. In Selma, the registrar's office was open only two days a month. Registrars would arrive late, leave early, and take long lunch hours. Few blacks who lined up would get in. And getting in was no guarantee of being registered.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
President Johnson knew the problem, and now having soundly defeated conservative Barry Goldwater in the recent election, he set this goal.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON: I propose that we eliminate every remaining obstacle to the right and the opportunity to vote.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
NARRATOR: But Johnson's staff had doubts about pushing for more legislation.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
NICHOLAS KATZENBACH: I think those of us who had been involved day in and day out in civil rights legislation, in getting the 1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress were the people who were dragging our feet and wanted breathing room. The President didn't want that. He said, "Get it and get it now because we'll never have a better opportunity to get legislation on any subject including civil rights than we have right now in 1965. We have the majority to do it, we can do it."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img height="320" src="http://e08595.medialib.glogster.com/media/32/32568318c9f6701fbbdd530fbe5fb2a781167b1ec87d27bce8f8a2c95f9625d6/spacer.gif" width="212" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
NARRATOR: Although Sheriff Clark tried to control his temper, the strain began to show. In mid-January, he arrested Mrs. Amelia Boynton, a highly respected community leader. Angered by Mrs. Boynton's arrest, 105 local teachers marched to the courthouse in protest, knowing they might be fired by the white school board.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
SHERIFF CLARK: This court house is a serious place of business and you seem to think you can take it just to be, uh, Disneyland or something on parade. Do you have business in the court house?</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
TEACHER: We just, we just want to pass through.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
SHERIFF CLARK: Do you have any business in the court house?</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
TEACHER: The only business we have is to come by the Board of Registrars to register...</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
SHERIFF CLARK: The Board of Registrars is not in session this afternoon as you were informed. You came down to make a mockery out of this court house and we're not going to have it.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img height="207" src="http://latimesphoto.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/la-me-mlk05.jpg" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
REV. FREDERICK D. REESE: So I saw then that he was not going to arrest us, as I really wanted him to do. Therefore, we asked the teachers then to regroup and we marched back, not to the school but to the Brown Chapel Church, at which time there was a rally held.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
NARRATOR: The teachers march was the first black middle class demonstration in Selma. Sheyann Webb and Rachel West were schoolchildren at the time.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
SHEYANN WEBB: And it was a amazing to see how many teachers had participated. I remember vividly on that day when I saw my teachers marching with me, you know, just for the right to vote.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
RACHEL WEST NELSON: Teachers there was somewhat like up in the upper class, you know. People looked up to teachers then, they looked up to preachers. They were somewhat like leaders for back then.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
REV. FREDERICK D. REESE: Then the undertakers got a group and they marched. The beauticians got a group, they marched. Everybody marched after the teachers marched because teachers had more influence than they ever dreamed in the community.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
C. T. VIVIAN: And we want you to know, gentlemen, that every one of you, we know your badge numbers, we know your names.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
NARRATOR: In mid-February, Reverend C. T. Vivian, an SCLC organizer, confronted Sheriff Clark and his deputies on the courthouse steps.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img height="214" src="http://www.corbisimages.com/images/Corbis-OUT18740490.jpg?size=67&uid=895eed14-3fb5-451c-937b-23a55c09f653" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="320" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">C.T. Vivian</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
C. T. VIVIAN: But believe me, there were those that followed Hitler, like you blindly follow this Sheriff Clark who didn't think their day was coming. But they also were pulled into courtrooms and they were also given their death sentences. You're not this bad a racist, but you're a racist in the same way Hitler was a racist. And you're blindly following a man that's leading you down a road that's going to bring you into federal court. Now, I'm representing people in Dallas County and I have that right to do so. Now, and as I represent them and they can speak for themselves, is what I'm saying true? Is it what you think and what you believe? For this is not a local problem, gentlemen. This is a national problem. You can't keep anyone in the United States from voting without hurting the rights of all other citizens. Democracy is built on this. This is why every man has the right to vote, regardless.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
JIM CLARK: And he started shouting at me that I was a Hitler, I was a brute, I was a Nazi. I don't remember everything he called me. And I did lose my temper then.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
C. T. VIVIAN: We have come to be here because they are registering at this time.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
SHERIFF CLARK: Turn that light out. You're blinding me and I can't enforce the law with the light in my face.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
C. T. VIVIAN: We have come to register and this is our reason for being here. We're not --</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
SHERIFF CLARK: You're blinding me with that light. Move back.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
C. T. VIVIAN: You can arrest us. You can arrest us, Sheriff Clark. You don't have to beat us.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img height="239" src="http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/media_content/m-2540.jpg" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
JIM CLARK: I don't remember even hitting him, but I went to the doctor, got an x-ray and found out I had a linear fracture on my finger on my left hand.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
C. T. VIVIAN: With Jim Clark, it was a clear engagement between the forces and movements and the forces of the structure that would destroy movement. It was a clear engagement between those who wished the fullness of their personalities to be met and those that would destroy us physically and psychologically. You do not walk away from that. This is what movement meant. Movement meant that finally we were encountering on a mass scale the evil that had been destroying us on a mass scale. You do not walk away from that, you continue to answer it.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
C. T. VIVIAN: If we're wrong, why don't you arrest us?</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
POLICEMAN: Why don't you get out of in front of the camera and go on. Go on.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
C. T. VIVIAN: It's not a matter of being in front of the camera. It's a matter of facing your sheriff and facing your judge. We're willing to be beaten for democracy, and you misuse democracy in this street. You beat people bloody in order that they will not have the privilege to vote. You beat me in the side and then hide your blows. We have come to register to vote.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR: I'm here to tell you tonight that the businessmen, the mayor of this city, the police commissioner of this city, and everybody in the white power structure of this city must take a responsibility for everything that Jim Clark does and has created. It's time for us to say to these men that if you don't do something about it, we will have no alternative but to engage in broader and more drastic forms of civil disobedience in order to bring the attention of a nation to this whole issue in Selma, Alabama. (Transcript: <i><a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize" target="_blank">Eyes On The Prize, Bridge To Freedom, 1965</a>)</i></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/h7HnkIVyGD0" width="420"></iframe></div>
Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-44960087925001193012015-01-09T07:09:00.001-08:002015-01-09T07:09:51.687-08:00 Anne Farrow: The Enduring Scars of Slavery<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/53a9a88e6bb3f717338173ee-480/swat-team-police.jpg" height="218" width="320" /></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
From the <a href="http://www.courant.com/opinion/op-ed/hc-op-farrow-americans-must-understand-slavery-1221-20141219-story.html" target="_blank"><i>Hartford Courant,</i></a> "Recognize Enduring Scars Of Slavery's Shackles," by Anne Farrow of Haddam (the author of "The Logbooks: Connecticut's Slave Ships and Human Memory" and co-author of "Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery."), on 19 December 2014</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
We may never know what happened between black teenager Michael Brown and white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo., but if we knew our history with slavery, we would know all that we need to about what happened during their 90-second fatal encounter and its devastating aftermath.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img height="213" src="https://thelibdotcom1.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/img_0149.jpg" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
I am 63 years old, a white woman and in the odd and probably fortunate position of having written a newly published book on America's memory of slavery just at the moment when black anger over continuing racial injustice has captured national attention. Nine years ago, when I spoke about a book I co-wrote on connections to slavery in the antebellum North, anguished audiences asked: Why don't we know about this?</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Now, the questions are about Ferguson, and the gulf between the way white and black Americans view and experience our justice system. The questions are about rage. There is a continuum between the questions a decade ago and the ones I hear now.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="http://www.policestateusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/ferguson-mo-2-1024x696.jpg" height="217" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Slavery in America was not a footnote, not "the sad chapter" of our history but the cornerstone of our making. Three generations of eminent historians have documented the astonishing scope, duration, economic importance and savagery of bondage in America, but this key piece of our past still is not prominent in the narrative of our nation.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In studying a set of 18th-century ships' logs linking Connecticut and the slave trade, I saw that when we made stolen black labor our national bedrock and created a system where inferiority was identifiable by color, we doomed ourselves to the present day and a nation where justice and parity for black people have not been achieved.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img height="180" src="https://assets-news.vice.com/images/articles/meta/2014/08/20/untitled-article-1408556132.jpg?crop=1xw:0.9260450160771704xh;0xw,0.0707395498392283xh&resize=700:*&output-format=image/jpeg&output-quality=90" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The Connecticut seamen and commanders in these ships' logs did not regard their suffering African cargo as human. When they shoved them onto the English Caribbean islands, where the captives suffered and died in an agricultural system infamous for its cruelty, notions of kidnap and murder did not cross their minds. These black men, women and children were not seen as innocent people; they were a business opportunity, part of a supply-and-demand chain that separated an estimated 12.5 million Africans from their homes and changed a hemisphere.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Several hundred thousand in that involuntary migration came to the American colonies, and their palpable humanity didn't really pose a problem for most settlers here, either. The most pressing exigency of this brave new world was labor, and these valuable workers were the key to America's early success. Their stolen, uncompensated labor gave us our running start.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="http://caravantomidnight.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/ferguson.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The best and most educated people owned slaves, promulgated its benefits and enjoyed the wealth slavery created — the keeper of my Connecticut logbooks was not an obscure mariner but a Saltonstall and the scion of an aristocratic family. This comfort level with the omnipresence of human bondage became a cascading series of accepted and pathological untruths: Black people were designed for slavery; they didn't mind being enslaved; they weren't really human; and they didn't recognize degradation and injustice.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Scholar Arna Alexander Bontemps documented the way captives in the South became invisible. Their labor was essential to their captors, but because they were not regarded as human beings, their emotions, their lives and their grief as exiles were not part of the record. They appeared as purchases, or as laborers. These one-name possessions appear in many Northern records as well.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
By the time of the Civil War, 4 million black people were held in slavery in the U.S. The suffering of those millions — the majority of whom were born here — has never been adequately addressed and explored by Americans. The emancipation that ended legal slavery did not end racial prejudice, and those Americans who believe that it did need only look at the most recent statistics on African-American poverty, access to education, housing and health care. African-Americans are poorer than they were nine years ago.</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="http://www.pubtheo.com/images/ferguson.jpg" height="192" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Americans still do not have a shared and meaningful body of knowledge about a labor system that held those millions in bondage. The hard question of how a post-Enlightenment nation, founded on principles of personal liberty, became the largest holder of slaves in the Western world is still waiting to be answered.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
If, as a country, we truly understood the extraordinary human catastrophe we created when we became economically dependent on the oppression of black people, if we took this in all its terrible dimensions into our hearts and then our history, we would not be scratching our heads over Ferguson. We would understand exactly why the legacy of enslavement is raging through our cities and begin to do something about it. (source: <i><a href="http://www.courant.com/opinion/op-ed/hc-op-farrow-americans-must-understand-slavery-1221-20141219-story.html" target="_blank">Hartford Courant OP Ed</a></i>)</div>
<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/LEvrRcACAAw" width="420"></iframe>Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com211tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-49635350193288861532015-01-03T17:55:00.003-08:002015-01-03T17:55:51.937-08:00The Cotton Empire<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://sfbayview.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Enslaved-Blacks-picking-cotton.png" class="decoded" height="233" src="http://sfbayview.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Enslaved-Blacks-picking-cotton.png" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
From the <a href="http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/books/article5235702.html" target="_blank"><i>Kansas City Star</i></a>, "‘Land of cotton’ was — and is — not such a happy place," by Kevin Canfield, in a Special to The Kansas City Star, on 3 January 2015 -- It plays a part in nearly everything we do. Not only is cotton found in clothes, bedding and books, Sven Beckert reminds us — it’s also “in the banknotes we use, the coffee filters that help us awaken in the morning, the vegetable oil we use for cooking, the soap we wash with, and the gunpowder that fights our wars.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
On one level, Berkert’s “Empire of Cotton: A Global History” is about the omnipresence of a single, extremely versatile plant. But more than that, it’s a comprehensive look at the ways in which cotton has shaped life in America and in countries all over the world — sometimes for the better, yet all too frequently for the worse.</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41nSvaFHz-L.jpg" class="decoded" height="320" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41nSvaFHz-L.jpg" width="210" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert </div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Though Beckert, a Harvard history professor, offers an overview of 5,000 years of cotton-growing, he devotes most of his energy to a smaller block of time.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In his formulation, the economic system that would fuel the modern cotton trade took root in the 16th century. “War capitalism,” as Beckert terms the era’s ruthless network of international commerce, was built on the sale of human beings, and on the theft of land and natural resources from native people.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/sites/default/files/styles/article-top/public/m-3345.jpg?itok=MaOZT-rv" class="decoded" height="240" src="http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/sites/default/files/styles/article-top/public/m-3345.jpg?itok=MaOZT-rv" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In the years after European explorers landed on these shores, they grabbed as much gold as they could get their hands on. Later, the newcomers turned to sugar and tobacco farming — and then, to the cultivation of cotton. This necessitated lots of laborers. The slave trade exploded.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“In the three centuries after 1500, more than 8 million slaves were transported from Africa to the Americas,” Beckert writes.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://monroelabor.org/drupal/sites/default/files/sweeper-and-doffer-boys-Lancaster-Mills.jpg" class="decoded" height="228" src="http://monroelabor.org/drupal/sites/default/files/sweeper-and-doffer-boys-Lancaster-Mills.jpg" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Cotton raised by slaves on this side of the ocean was shipped to England and mainland Europe. There it was processed in sweatshops where impoverished laborers — adults and children alike — logged 85-hour workweeks.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
This arrangement was nearly upended in 1791, when slaves in Saint-Dominique (present-day Haiti) rebelled against the country’s French regime. As they won their freedom, Saint-Dominique’s ex-slaves also shook the global cotton trade. The island had been producing nearly a quarter of the cotton imported into Britain, according to Beckert, but after the uprising that figure plummeted to less than 5 percent.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
To make up for the shortage, Beckert writes, European cotton magnates sought increased output from America. A series of technological breakthroughs — foremost Eli Whitney’s seed-removing cotton gin — sped the growth of the stateside cotton industry. More and more slaves were needed on Southern plantations.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/education/hist/abolition/images/content/tri_trade/britain.jpg" class="decoded" height="163" src="http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/education/hist/abolition/images/content/tri_trade/britain.jpg" width="320" /></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
How prevalent was slave holding among American cotton producers? On the eve of the Civil War, Beckert tells us, “85 percent of all cotton picked in the South in 1860 was grown on units larger than a hundred acres; the planters who owned those farms owned 91.2 percent of all slaves.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Cotton demanded quite literally a hunt for labor and a perpetual struggle for its control. Slave traders, slave pens, slave auctions, and the attendant physical and psychological violence of holding millions in bondage were of central importance to the expansion of cotton production in the United States and of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The scope of slavery in America remains shocking, no matter how often the story is told. But the degree to which Europeans supported it well into the 19th century is often underplayed. In 1807, Britain outlawed the sale of slaves, but some English traders continued to aid American slaveholders until the Civil War.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/exhibitions/cotton/graphics/small/lcaarbitration.jpg" class="decoded" height="265" src="http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/exhibitions/cotton/graphics/small/lcaarbitration.jpg" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Liverpool, the world’s largest cotton port, was the most pro-Confederate place in the world outside the Confederacy itself,” he writes. “Liverpool merchants helped bring out cotton from ports blockaded by the Union navy, built warships for the Confederacy, and supplied the South with military equipment and credit.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Empire of Cotton” also features a host of edifying — and largely untold — stories about the destruction wrought by the fluctuating cotton market. In the middle of the 19th century, encouraged by English traders looking to make up production lost to the Civil War, some farmers in India switched from food crops to cotton. India began to import more food. But cotton prices fell, food costs spiked in the 1870s, and many poor workers couldn’t afford to eat.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“In India alone,” Beckert writes, “between 6 and 10 million people died in the famines of the late 1870s.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/attachement/jpg/site1/20100917/00221917e13e0dfcf2ed11.jpg" class="decoded" height="222" src="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/attachement/jpg/site1/20100917/00221917e13e0dfcf2ed11.jpg" width="320" /></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Today the cotton industry is dominated by China and other countries where labor is extremely cheap. According to 2012 figures cited by Beckert, 29 percent of the world’s cotton is grown in China and 21 percent in India. Uzbekistan, a country with 0.004 percent of the global population, accounts for 4 percent of the world’s cotton — in part, Beckert writes, because child agricultural labor is legal.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Virtually every piece of clothing now sold in America — 98 percent, Beckert says — is manufactured beyond our borders.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Workers in Bangladesh stitch together clothing under absurdly dangerous conditions for very low wages,” he writes, “while consumers in the United States and Europe can purchase those pieces with abandon, at prices that often seem impossibly low.” (source: <a href="http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/books/article5235702.html" target="_blank"><i>The Kansas City Star</i></a>)</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-52469680418241685722015-01-03T11:56:00.001-08:002015-01-03T11:56:14.221-08:00 A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/slaves-gathering-sugar-cane-granger.jpg" class="shrinkToFit decoded" height="320" src="http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/slaves-gathering-sugar-cane-granger.jpg" width="286" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
As reported in the<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/books/review/a-tale-of-two-plantations-by-richard-s-dunn.html?_r=0" target="_blank"><i> New York Times</i></a>, "‘A Tale of Two Plantations,’ by Richard S. Dunn," reviewed by Greg Grandin, on 2 January 2015 -- For enslaved peoples in the New World, it was always the worst of times. Whether captured in Africa or born into bondage in the Americas, slaves suffered unimaginable torments and indignities. Yet the specific form their miseries took, as the historian Richard S. Dunn shows in his painstakingly researched “A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia,” depended on whether one was a slave in the British Caribbean or in the United States. The contrasts between the two slave societies were many, covering family life, religious beliefs and labor practices. But one difference overrode all others. In the Caribbean, white masters treated the slaves like “disposable cogs in a machine,” working them to death on sugar plantations and then replacing them with fresh stock from Africa. In the United States, white masters treated their slaves like the machine itself — a breeding machine.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Dunn began working on this comparative study in the 1970s, around the time historians like Winthrop D. Jordan, Edmund S. Morgan and Eugene D. Genovese were revolutionizing the study of American slavery. Drawing on Freud, Marx and other social theorists, these scholars painted what Dunn calls the “big picture,” capturing the psychosexual terror, economic exploitation, resistance, and emotional and social dependency inherent in the master-slave relation.</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Va0WLmTuL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" class="decoded" height="320" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Va0WLmTuL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="210" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A Tale Of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia, By Richard S. Dunn</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Decades of extensive research led Dunn, a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, in a different direction, away from making large historical claims or speculating about the “interiority” of slavery’s victims. Instead, he’s opted to stay close to the facts, using demographic methods to reconstruct “the individual lives and collective experiences of some 2,000 slaves on two large plantations” — Mesopotamia, which grew sugar on the western coastal plain of Jamaica, and Mount Airy, a tobacco and grain estate on the Rappahannock River in Virginia’s Northern Neck region — “during the final three generations of slavery in both places.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In Jamaica, Joseph Foster Barham I and his son Joseph Foster Barham II presided over Mesopotamia during its most profitable decades. Absentee but involved masters, they supervised the plantation’s progress from their homes in England, approving new planting fields, reviewing the amount of sugar boiled and rum distilled, and auditing the ledger books. The one thing they believed they had no control over was life and death. During the seven decades Dunn studies (1762 to 1833, the year Britain abolished slavery), Mesopotamia recorded 420 births and 751 deaths, figures that do not include abortions, miscarriages or, for the most part, stillbirths. At a time of rising production, the data “show twice as many deaths as births, and a high proportion of the slaves who died during these years were children, teenagers or young adults.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/tobacco-plantation-granger.jpg" class="shrinkToFit decoded" height="320" src="http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/tobacco-plantation-granger.jpg" width="289" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The younger Barham said he took seriously his responsibility to improve the material and moral condition of his slaves. And his agents in Jamaica told him they did everything they could to increase the survival rate of newborns, including lightening the work burdens of expecting women. Nothing helped. As the ratio of deaths to births remained high, slaves themselves were held to blame. “The Negro race,” Barham wrote, “is so averse to labor that without force we have hardly anywhere been able to obtain it.” He is referring to the labor of sugar production. But the sentiment covered white opinions regarding the labor of slave reproduction. Women were punished for miscarrying, sent to the workhouse or to solitary confinement. Yet despite the death rate, the plantation’s population increased, replenished by new captives purchased from slave ships or other Jamaican estates.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In Virginia, John Tayloe III, master of Mount Airy from 1792 to 1828, bred horses and slaves. The horses he raced, earning him the reputation “as the leading Virginia turfman of his generation.” The slaves he worked and sold. “There were,” Dunn counts, “252 recorded slave births and 142 slave deaths at Mount Airy between 1809 and 1828, providing John III with 110 extra slaves.” Tayloe, a fourth-generation enslaver, moved some of these surplus people around his other Virginia holdings and transferred others to his sons. The rest he sold, providing Tayloe with both needed capital and an opportunity to cull unproductive workers, keeping his labor force fit and young.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="http://web3.encyclopediavirginia.org/resourcespace/filestore/2/2/2/1_7a2fb5cc086f0e4/2221pre_c67b8786f2f09ff.jpg" class="decoded" height="257" src="http://web3.encyclopediavirginia.org/resourcespace/filestore/2/2/2/1_7a2fb5cc086f0e4/2221pre_c67b8786f2f09ff.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="320" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Colonial Virginia</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Tayloe’s son William Henry took over Mount Airy in 1828, and its slave population continued to increase, even as depleted soil led to crop shortfalls and declining profits. So where the Barhams responded to their demographic crisis by buying more slaves and intensifying production, the new master of Mount Airy opted for expansion. He struck out west with his brothers, acquiring cotton fields in Alabama. Between 1833 and 1862, William Henry moved a total of 218 slaves from white-fenced Virginia to the Cotton South’s slave frontier, a distance of 800 miles. Many of these captives were teenagers, “of the right age to learn how to pick cotton.” By this point, with the Atlantic slave trade closed, Virginia had become a net slave exporter; in the early 1800s, there were fewer than a million enslaved people in the United States, mostly concentrated in the coastal and piedmont South. Four decades later, there were four times as many, spread from Charleston to Texas, from Mount Airy to west-central Alabama, where William Henry Tayloe established his new estates.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Dunn identifies three reasons Mesopotamia’s slaves couldn’t reproduce themselves: deadly body-wasting diseases, a poor diet and an onerous work regime. He is careful, though, to highlight the brutality of both plantations, especially the casualness with which the Tayloes broke up the families of slaves, either as punishment or to maximize the effectiveness of their labor. Dunn’s prose can be bracing in its understatement: “The extraordinarily large number of deaths,” he writes, “strongly suggests that the managers of Mesopotamia had been overtaxing their workers.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="http://abolition.e2bn.org/library/0711/0000/0060/MollTheIslandofJamaica_360.jpg" class="decoded" height="231" src="http://abolition.e2bn.org/library/0711/0000/0060/MollTheIslandofJamaica_360.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="320" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jamaica</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Dunn’s restraint extends to a reluctance to engage in current debates concerning the relationship of slavery to capitalist development, which dilutes the power of his research and leads to some imprecision. It is unclear whether he believes antebellum slavery was inherently expansionist, as Walter Johnson and others have recently argued, or if the Tayloe family was merely making the most of the opportunities afforded by a growing slave population to diversify into Alabama.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Likewise, Dunn’s discussion of interracial sex seems tone deaf to decades of scholarship on the subject. Forty years ago, Winthrop D. Jordan wrote about the libidinal foundations of white supremacy in America. More recently, the historians Jennifer L. Morgan and Diana Paton have explored the linkages between ideology, law and sexual domination in slave societies. Dunn devotes a chapter each to two slave women, empathetically tracing their family history and considering the many hardships they endured. He mentions rape and “predatory” whites and discusses the sharp differences in the way mixed-race offspring were treated on the two plantations. Yet at times he plays down the varieties of sexual coercion that enslaved women lived under. At one point, he calls the relationship between a white overseer, his black “mistress” and his distraught wife a “ménage à trois.” Still, “A Tale of Two Plantations” is a substantial achievement. That it is the product of four decades of exacting research and deliberation comes through in each of its many details. (source: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/books/review/a-tale-of-two-plantations-by-richard-s-dunn.html?_r=0" target="_blank"><i>New York Times</i></a>)</div>
Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-9597993122570975652015-01-02T09:02:00.002-08:002015-01-02T09:02:26.737-08:00<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="http://yalepress.yale.edu/images/full13/9780300124606.jpg" height="320" width="248" /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, by David Eltis and David Richardson</i></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
A Brief Overview of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
David Eltis (Emory University)</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Early Slaving Voyages</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
From <i><a href="http://slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/essays-intro-04.faces" target="_blank">The Trans Atlantic Slave Trade Database Voyages</a>,</i> "A Brief Overview of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade," by David Eltis (2007)<i>-- </i>With the key forces shaping the traffic briefly described, we can now turn to a short narrative of the slave trade. The first Africans forced to work in the New World left from Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century, not from Africa. There were few vessels that carried only slaves on this early route, so that most would have crossed the Atlantic in smaller groups on vessels carrying many other commodities, rather than dedicated slave ships. Such a slave route was possible because an extensive traffic in African slaves from Africa to Europe and the Atlantic islands had existed for half a century before Columbian contact, such that ten percent of the population of Lisbon was black in 1455,(2) and black slaves were common on large estates in the Portuguese Algarve. The first slave voyage direct from Africa to the Americas probably sailed in 1526. Before mid-century, all trans-Atlantic slave ships sold their slaves in the Spanish Caribbean, with the gold mines in Cibao on Hispaniola emerging as a major purchaser. Cartagena, in modern Columbia, appears as the first mainland Spanish American destination for a slave vessel - in the year 1549. On the African side, the great majority of people entering the early slave trade came from the Upper Guinea coast, and moved through Portuguese factories initially in Arguim, and later the Cape Verde islands. Nevertheless, the 1526 voyage set out from the other major Portuguese factory in West Africa - Sao Tome in the Bight of Biafra – though the slaves almost certainly originated in the Congo.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="http://media.npr.org/assets/artslife/books/2010/12/atlas/cover-a0de4f65b6c4fa19b07c49f1f3a2d2bea6fcc453.jpg?s=6" height="240" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The slave traffic to Brazil, eventually accounting for about forty percent of the trade, got underway around 1560. Sugar drove this traffic, as Africans gradually replaced the Amerindian labor force on which the early sugar mills (called engenhos) had drawn over the period 1560 to 1620. By the time the Dutch invaded Brazil in 1630, Pernambuco, Bahia, and Rio de Janeiro were supplying almost all of the sugar consumed in Europe, and almost all the slaves producing it were African. Consistent with the earlier discussion of Atlantic wind and ocean currents, there were by 1640 two major branches of the trans-Atlantic slave trade operating, one to Brazil, and the other to the mainland Spanish Americas, but together they accounted for less 7,500 departures a year from the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, almost all of them by 1600 from west-central Africa. The sugar complex spread to the eastern Caribbean from the beginning of the 1640s. Sugar consumption steadily increased in Europe, and the slave system began two centuries of westward expansion across tropical and sub-tropical North America. At the end of the seventeenth century, gold discoveries in first Minas Gerais, and later in Goias and other parts of Brazil, began a transformation of the slave trade which triggered further expansion of the business. In Africa, the Bights of Benin and Biafra became major sources of supply, in addition to Angola, and were joined later by the more marginal provenance zones of Sierra Leone, the Windward Coast, and South-east Africa. The volume of slaves carried off reached thirty thousand per annum in the 1690s and eighty-five thousand a century later. More than eight out of ten Africans pulled into the traffic in the era of the slave trade made their journeys in the century and a half after 1700. (source: <i><a href="http://slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/essays-intro-04.faces" target="_blank">The Trans Atlantic Slave Trade Database Voyages</a></i>)</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Lbf1COddno0" width="420"></iframe>Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-88769938911372391742014-12-31T14:07:00.000-08:002014-12-31T14:07:55.410-08:00Happy 2015 From The US Slave Blog!!<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1537702/thumbs/o-NEW-YEARS-facebook.jpg" height="200" width="400" /><br />
This year let's resolve to make better bad decisions.</div>
Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-53455175498835791812014-12-31T12:49:00.000-08:002014-12-31T14:06:01.835-08:00"What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?" <div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="http://prod3.agileticketing.net/images/user/mcgjazz/MCGJ1008.jpg" height="320" width="320" /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
"What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?" -- Nancy Wilson</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Written By Frank Loesser (1947)</div>
<br />
Maybe its much too early in the game<br />
Ah, but I thought Id ask you just the same<br />
What are you doing New Years<br />
New Years Eve?<br />
<br />
Wonder whose arms will hold you good and tight<br />
When its exactly twelve oclock that night<br />
Welcoming in the New Year<br />
New Years Eve<br />
<br />
Maybe I'm crazy to suppose<br />
Id ever be the one you chose<br />
Out of the thousand invitations<br />
You receive<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img height="320" src="http://cache3.asset-cache.net/gc/74301151-photo-of-nancy-wilson-photo-by-michael-ochs-gettyimages.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=X7WJLa88Cweo9HktRLaNXmetlB34KfPOd%2Bb5n3zCziFoI5jganTNRAh5WU6wCPrv" width="252" /></div>
Ah, but in case I stand one little chance<br />
Here comes the jackpot question in advance<br />
What are you doing New Years<br />
New Years Eve?<br />
<br />
Maybe I'm crazy to suppose<br />
Id ever be the one you chose<br />
Out of the thousand invitations<br />
You receive<br />
<br />
Ah, but in case I stand one little chance<br />
Here comes the jackpot question in advance<br />
What are you doing New Years<br />
New Years Eve?<br />
<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/G1YbfCQmr4o" width="420"></iframe>Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6971823835434059276.post-14745394093534014272014-12-30T02:49:00.000-08:002014-12-30T02:49:00.577-08:00Slave Hunt, Dismal Swamp, Virginia by Thomas Moran, 1862<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="http://jubiloemancipationcentury.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/moran-slave_hunt_dismal_swamp2.jpg" class="decoded" src="http://jubiloemancipationcentury.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/moran-slave_hunt_dismal_swamp2.jpg" height="307" width="400" /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Slave Hunt, Dismal Swamp, Virginia by Thomas Moran, 1862.</div>
Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10711403108940797592noreply@blogger.com4