The Netherlands (Holland and Dutch) Slavers

Netherlands--The Netherlands despite being a small country, lacking in natural resources, was able in the 17th Century to become the centre for European overseas trade, including the trade in human beings. This 'Dutch Miracle' was a product of numerous innovations in navigation, manufacturing and finance, which allowed for slaves and slave produce to be transported at greater capacity and at lower cost. The first recorded trader sold 20 Africans to the colony of Virginia in North America in 1619, but the Dutch trade only really took off in response to labour shortage in the newly conquered sugar plantations of Northern Brazil in 1630. Wars with Portugal (1620-1655) left the Dutch in control of many of the slave depots on the West African coast, centred on modern Ghana, which by 1650 had dispatched 30,000 slaves to Brazil alone. After the return of the Brazilian colonies to Portugal in 1654, the Dutch traders were able to draw upon their network of forts to supply other European powers, dominating the supply to Spain until the 1690s. However the near constant warfare the Netherlands were waged in with other European nations, such as Spain, France and Britain, by Imperial Spain, did eventually sap its strength, and Dutch involvement in the trade declined in the 18th Century, and effectively ceased in 1795. When the final abolition of the trade and institution of slavery formally occurred in 1863, Dutch agents had brought 540,000 Africans to the Americas and cast the spectre of slavery east, from the Cape of Good Hope to the Indonesian archipelago.

Elmina Castle was erected by the Portuguese in 1482 as São Jorge da Mina

The Dutch-Portuguese Wars --Between 1620 and 1655 the Netherlands and Portugal were at war, a struggle that became increasingly dictated by the needs of the slave trade. The Dutch were late comers to Africa, and their attempts to establish trading posts inevitably led to confrontation with the Portuguese. The Dutch were initially chasing African gold, but after they captured the sugar plantations in northern Brazil, they turned to slavery to help realize its full potential. Plans made to conquer the Portuguese headquarters on the gold coast, São Jorge da Mina, to ensure a steady flow of slaves, were successful and it fell in 1637. The newly renamed Elmina, proved disappointing, but it drove them on to Angola, and the island depot of São Tomé, and gave Dutch slavers a taste of the profit had at the expense of human beings. When Brazil fell in 1654 the trade continued at a pace, with colonies like Curacou emerging as vast slave markets open to the whole Caribbean.

Amsterdam -- Amsterdam was the capital of the Holland, the largest and most important of the Seven Provinces that comprised the Netherlands. The city was already prosperous, but when the southern city of Antwerp fell to the Spanish in 1585, it benefited from a stream of enterprising merchants and wealthy refugees. By the mid 1600s it was the most important trading center in the world, providing a vital supporting role to Caribbean slavery.

West-Indisch Huis (West Indies House) in the centre of Amsterdam was the former headquarters of the Dutch West-Indische Compagnie (West India Company or WIC), which was probably the largest single slave trader in history. The company was chartered in 1621, and provided with a monopoly on the African slave trade that lasted until 1730. This building was occupied from 1621-1647, a period which saw the first of 30,000 slaves arriving in Dutch Brazil, arranged through the WIC.

Runaway black slaves are attacked by dogs by Louise.  Sculpture in carramarmer (to a plaster model of 1869), Nov sculptor Louis Samain. Original model in 1894 by the Belgian State acquired and donated to city of Brussels. In 1895, also date of signature, placed on Avenue Louise. Natural stone octagonal plinth walls with vaulted arch November E. Le Graive. The poignant scene - a black slave with his child being attacked by two watchdogs - is inspired by the famous novel Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher-Stowe (1851).

The slave routes required bulk warehousing and transportation for slave produce once it arrived back in the 'Old World', and Amsterdam developed accordingly. Its historic centre retains many of the original tall, narrow and deep warehouses that as part of the colonial boom once bulged with sugar, cotton and tobacco.

In the 17th Century most traded commodities passed through Amsterdam's canals and rested in its warehouses before being traded on. The Commodity Exchange (Beurs, pictured below) was built from 1608-1613 with this fact in mind, becoming so influential that merchants came from all over Europe to set their prices, and to speculate on the goods newly arrived from the Caribbean. These prices would in turn help shape the demand for bonded labour in the various sectors of the slave economy.

Amsterdam ranks as a European capital of slavery. While its mills processed almost all the sugar from the Portuguese colonies, its financiers bankrolled the Danish, Swedish and Brandenburg slave trade, and in turn Scandinavian and German sailors made up half its slaving crews. As home to the world's most sophisticated banking and insurance system, it was the natural home for the expensive and potentially risky business of slaving, and for this reason alone as many as 10,000 vessels were associated with the port.

The Dutch Golden Age--The17th Century has been widely described as the Netherlands' 'Golden Age.' The period saw the flowering of the arts and sciences. The average Dutchman was wealthier than his counterparts in any other country in the world and lived in a relatively tolerant country. This progress was achieved in part at an appalling human cost, and several of era's great advances helped tighten the noose around the African continent.

Amsterdam's Town Hall is perhaps the most significant building from this period, built from 1648-65 and by design the most ambitious and indeed the largest home to any city government in Europe.

The elaborate freeze on the western façade depicts the basis of Amsterdam's wealth. The female personification of the city reaches out for the treasures of Europe (on the left), Asia (on the right), America (far right) and Africa (far left). A cargo ship is shown bring this bounty to the port, the centre of the world, and above the statue of Atlas makes the nation's claim to carrying the world on it shoulders. The Golden Age was the high water mark of Dutch influence, its power and culture a product of these patterns of exploitation.

Zeeland --The ports of Vlissingen and Middleburg in the south-western State of Zeeland became dependent on the slave trade to an unparalleled degree, beating even Amsterdam as the main departure point for slavers. Ships from Zeeland made 672 journeys to Africa, transporting 278,476 people into a life of slavery, compared to the 173 recorded voyages from Amsterdam, carrying 73,476. The two ports were practically slaving communities, and official reports indicated that by 1750 the only significant commercial activity in Vlissingen was the slave trade. 

Middleburg Drawbridge 

This marked quite a transformation for the province, which in 1596 had steadfastly rejected the opening of a slave market in Middleburg, on the basis that Dutch law did not countenance slavery. The momentum that drove slavery brought on a transformation in attitudes within the area, and saw Middleburg ... become host to the largest independent slaving company in the Netherlands. The Middleburg Commercial Company (MCC) transported 31,095 Africans to the Americas between 1732 and 1803, of whom 27,344 survived the crossing. This period map of Middleburg shows the familiar network of canals and docks that marked it out as an efficient and prolific slave port.

In the movie "Pirates of the Caribbean," the Flying Dutchman was a fluyt.

The Fluyt -- Dutch innovation transformed shipbuilding. The Netherlands had to import almost all of its wood from abroad, and to save money found ways of making fast and efficient ships from cheap materials. The Fluyt or 'fly boat' was one such design, based on low quality wood and easily pre fabricated parts, and requiring a much smaller crew than the ships of foreign competitors. This ship became a familiar site throughout Europe, Africa and the Caribbean, and its vast cargo hold and shallow draft made it ideally suited for slave voyages. The nation's talent for shipbuilding encouraged countries across the continent to either borrow Dutch designs, or simply commission fleets to be constructed in Dutch ports. Thanks to vessels like the Fluyt come 1670 the Netherlands had more ships than England, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain and Scotland put together, boasting the most 'efficient' slave ships afloat.

Maroons of Suriname

The Dutch captured the British colony of Suriname during the Second Anglo-Dutch War(1667), and under the WIC it was developed as a plantation slave society. It was a primary destination for the Dutch slave trade, yet unusually it never experienced a general slave rebellion. The regime was one of extreme and deliberate brutality, even by the standards of the time. Mortality was so high that although 300,000 slaves were imported between 1668 and 1823, the ravaged population was never able to grow beyond a figure of 50,000. 'Maroonage' emerged as the main method of resistance. 

Fugitive slaves, 'Maroons' fled inland, and formed permanent communities. There is nothing unusual about this in any slave society, except for its scope. The Suriname Maroons numbered between 25-47 thousand in the 18th and 19th Centuries, and engaged the Dutch in over 50 years of gureilla warfare. The resistance proved so strong that the colonial government acknowlged their virtual independence in the 1760s. The Scottish-Dutch soldier John Gabriel Stedman witnessed the oppression of the slaves during a campaign against the maroons in 1774. His book a Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, with vivid illustrations by William Blake and Francesco Bartolozzi was taken to heart by abolitionists, through Stedman's real sympathies are thought to have been with reform rather than abolition.

Armed Maroon, Surinam, 1770s, from Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam © The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record

Coffy

The domestic slave Coffy led a rebellion in the Dutch Colony of Berbice (now British Guyana) in February 1763. An outbreak of yellow fever had left the white slave owners weakened and vulnerable, and the slaves saw a chance to rise. Taking arms, they almost succeeded in their first aim of driving all whites from the colony. Coffy had opted for peaceful coexistence with the former slave masters, and planned to broker a treaty with the authorities like the maroons of Surinam. He fell out with his fellow rebel leaders and committed suicide three months into the rebellion, but his followers continued fighting Dutch forces until April 1764.

New Netherlands (New Netherlands is present day New Jersey and New Holland is present day New York)

In 1623 the WIC were granted permission to establish the province of New Netherland in North America. The Dutch were largely unwilling to become settlers (thanks in part to their relatively comfortable position at home), and the colony developed with large numbers of European workers, particularly from England, Germany and what is now Belgium. The shortage inevitably led the colonists to turn to the slave trade, and in 1625 the first group of 11 African males arrived on Manhattan Island at fort New Amsterdam (now New York). The WIC pinned its hopes on the New Netherland after the loss of Brazil in 1654, and shipments markedly increased. By the 1660s the company was the largest single slave owner in New Amsterdam, forcing their 'property' to build roads, houses and defences. The large wooden perimeter wall they constructed has long since disappeared, but the American financial district 'Wall Street' takes its name and location from these slave craftsmen.

With large numbers of white migrants already working the fields, the demand for slaves came largely from the rapidly urbanising townships. The system was light compared to the extremes of the plantations, and skilled slaves were able to exploit the labour shortage to achieve more freedom. Many had already been specialists in Caribbean colonies, and veterans were able to achieve a state of 'half-freedom' in return for payment to the WIC. This suited the authorities, who were quite happy not to have to clothe and feed the half slaves themselves, but more than prepared to demand their work when they needed them. Because of this relaxed arrangement slaves were more easily assimilated into the colonial culture than elsewhere, but still they preserved and adapted many rituals originating in West Africa. The annual Festival of 'Pinkster' (the Dutch word for Pentecost) blended African and Christian traditions to celebrate the coming of the spring. It was a rare holiday for slaves, an opportunity for African music, dance and storytelling, but also for mockery, as the crowds would mimic the European manners of their masters and elect a king for a day.

Sojourner Truth was enslaved by the Dutch in New York.

The province of New Netherland was captured by Britain in 1664, its slaves having laid the foundations for settlements that would emerge as great cities: New York (New Amstersdam), Philadelphia (Fort Beversrede) and New Jersey (Fort Nassau).

Cape Colony -- The Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) was set up in 1602 to trade with Asia, and became the world's most powerful company over the 17th Century. It fed an insatiable European demand for spices, textiles and porcelain, and developed trading posts from throughout Asia, including Japan, China, Iran, India, and Indonesia, again frequently at the expense of the Portugese. It was not directly involved in the transatlantic slave routes (the West India Company's monopoly), but it did own large numbers of slaves. The company's regional headquarters in Batavia (now Jakarta) and Colombo (in Sri Lanka) had about a thousand slaves, mainly from the bay of Bengal. 

Chinese, Indian and European traders provided most of the VOCs bonded labour, but occasionally it organised its own voyages to the East African island of Madagascar for slave raids. The voyage to Asia usually headed around the African coast, and VOC established a refreshment station at the Cape of Good Hope to supply these crews. In 1652 a group under Jan van Riebeeck established the Cape Colony at Table Bay, near Table Mountain in modern South Africa. The VOC were anxious to keep the local Khoi and San populations on friendly terms, and in a matter of weeks van Riebeeck requested slave labour. The administrator favoured Angolans, but the rival WIC made it clear that West Africa and its population was its prize, so the VOC turned east. Slave expeditions left Cape Town for Madagascar and Mozambique, but most headed for Asia, particularly to the Indian coast, Sumatra, Java, the Celebes, Ternate and Timor.

The Castle of Good Hope is the oldest surviving building in South Africa, and was built and used to occupy slaves from 1666 onwards.

VOC slaves sometimes retained a version of their original names (usually with spelling errors by company clerks), but surnames were regularly changed to indicate the country of origin. Hence names like Lisbeth van Bengelen (Lisbeth of Bengal), and Abraham van Batavia, the first slave in South Africa, who was taken from the VOC headquarters. Subsequent generations would bear the name Van de Kaap, 'of the Cape.'

The VOC commissioned a Slave Lodge in 1679 to house around 600 of its slaves, who were forced to share the building with prisoners and the mentally ill. The tree that stood outside the lodge was thought to have been the sight where people from across Africa and Asia were sold into a life of slavery, and a small section of it has been preserved. It is unlikely that this 'Slave Tree' was ever home to a slave market, and some even doubt the remains of the tree are genuine, but it remains a potent symbol. The city of Cape Town planted a new tree in its place in 2002 as a mark of remembrance. (source: Old Anti-Slavery)

Isabella, Sojourner Truth, and American Slavery By Nell Irvin Painter

Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol

By Nell Irvin Painter

Chapter One: Isabella, Sojourner Truth, and American Slavery

SOJOURNER TRUTH, born Isabella, is one of the two most famous African-American women of the nineteenth century. The other, Harriet Tubman, the "Moses" of her people, also came out of slavery. Many people confuse the two because both lived in an era shadowed by human bondage, but Truth and Tubman were contrasting figures. New York was Truth's Egypt; Tubman's was in Maryland, these respective places marking each woman with a regional identity that Truth, at least, later came very much to prize. Born in about 1797, Truth was a generation older than Tubman, born in about 1821. Tubman will walk these pages from time to time, but only as a guest.

A woman of remarkable intelligence despite her illiteracy, Truth had great presence. She was tall, some 5 feet 11 inches, of spare but solid frame. Her voice was low, so low that listeners sometimes termed it masculine, and her singing voice was beautifully powerful. Whenever she spoke in public, she also sang. No one ever forgot the power and pathos of Sojourner Truth's singing, just as her wit and originality of phrasing were also of lasting remembrance.

As an abolitionist and feminist, she put her body and her mind to a unique task, that of physically representing women who had been enslaved. At a time when most Americans thought of slaves as male and women as white, Truth embodied a fact that still bears repeating: Among the blacks are women; among the women, there are blacks.

We think of Truth as a natural, uncomplicated presence in our national life. Rather than a person in history, she works as a symbol. To appreciate the meaning of the symbol-Strong Black Woman-we need know almost nothing of the person. Because we are apt to assume that the mere experience of enslavement endowed Truth with the power to voice its evils, we may forget a shocking fact: No other woman who had been through the ordeal of slavery managed to survive with sufficient strength, poise, and self-confidence to become a public presence over the long term. Harriet Tubman spoke up occasionally at antislavery meetings, and the drama of her actions lent weight to her words. But she could not sustain appearance after appearance.

Only Truth had the ability to go on speaking, year after year for thirty years, to make herself into a force in several American reform movements. Even though the aims of her missions became increasingly secular after midcentury, Truth was first and last an itinerant preacher, stressing both itinerancy and preaching. From the late 1840s through the late 1870s, she traveled the American land, denouncing slavery and slavers, advocating freedom, women's rights, woman suffrage, and temperance.

Pentecostal that she was, Truth would have explained that the force that brought her from the soul murder of slavery into the authority of public advocacy was the power of the Holy Spirit. Her ability to call upon a supernatural power gave her a resource claimed by millions of black women and by disempowered people the world over. Without doubt, it was Truth's religious faith that transformed her from Isabella, a domestic servant, into Sojourner Truth, a hero for three centuries--at least.

SOJOURNER TRUTH was one born again, not only in the evangelical sense of the phrase and not merely because Isabella Van Wagenen rechristened herself Sojourner Truth. She was, all through, a self-made woman, and that was so much the case that beginning to write her biography becomes a challenge to definition as well as genealogy.

Biographies normally set the stage for the appearance of the protagonist by examining ancestors for portents of greatness. I will do what I can along those lines, though the track leading backward from Isabella quickly grows faint. Tracing the genealogy of any slave is a difficult thing to do. I know Isabella's parents' names but can go back no further into her family history with any certainty. The genealogical task is also complicated by the relationship between Isabella Van Wagenen and Sojourner Truth, each of whom has her own separate birth date. Isabella's is in the late 1790s on a day that cannot be designated exactly; Sojourner Truth's is 1 June 843.

We know that Isabella created Sojourner Truth by reinventing herself and leaving her old vocation and habitat, but Isabella is not all there is to Truth's ancestry. The symbols of American history come into play here, for Sojourner Truth presented herself as a former slave, and we still identify her with the movement to abolish slavery in the United States. The allegorical territory of American slavery is always situated somewhere--everywhere--in the South. Thus, to a great extent, Sojourner Truth appears to emerge out of a generalized southern setting. Here lies a conundrum--separating person from symbol and Isabella from Sojourner--for Isabella was a slave in New York State, one of tens of thousands of enslaved New Yorkers. The history and human geography of Isabella's New York were worlds away from the mythic South we associate with American slavery and with Sojourner Truth.

ISABELLA was born in the village of Hurley, in Ulster County, New York, about seven miles west of the Hudson River. Hurley (its first Dutch name was Niew Dorp) lies about ninety miles north of New York City and sixty miles south of Albany. The county's original inhabitants were Waroneck (Mohawk) Indians, who called a creek that empties into the Hudson River "Esopus," meaning small river. After much struggle in the mid-1610s that came to be known as the Esopus Wars, Dutch settlers overwhelmed the Indians without entirely displacing them. For more than a hundred years afterward, large numbers of Indians remained in a region that, with the arrival of Africans, would become tri-racial.

A hilly region of frigid, fast-running streams and rivers, Isabella's birthplace belongs to the New England upland of forested mountains, and lies west and slightly to the north of Hartford, Connecticut; Providence, Rhode Island; and Cape Cod, Massachusetts. A cold, rocky place of long winters and short summers, Ulster County is covered with northern flora: spruce, balsam fir, hemlock, red cedar, yellow birch, as well as the oak, hickory, and pine that are found throughout the eastern United States. If she stood in a field with time to enjoy the scenery to the west, Isabella would have been able to see the Catskill Mountains, whose highest peak, Slide Mountain, rises to 4,180 feet.

U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama applauds at the unveiling of the Sojourner Truth bronze bust in Emancipation Hall in Washington,  D.C., April 28, 2009 (Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta, AP)

Ulster County was one of New York's original counties, organized m 1683 and named after the Irish title of the Duke of York. At the turn of the nineteenth century it was overwhelmingly rural, producing wheat that was fair-to-middling in quality and lots of decent wool. When Isabella was born, before the advent of railroads and before New York City became a lucrative market, Ulster County was a backwater. Beautiful in a cold and craggy fashion akin to New England, it was not easy to traverse by road. Travelers used the river or bogged down trying to cross difficult terrain.

In rural counties like Ulster--in the Hudson Valley, on Long Island, and in New Jersey--the culture of local blacks was likely as not to be Afro-Dutch, although some blacks were Afro-Indian. They worked for Dutch farmers in areas where as many as 30 to 60 percent of white households owned slaves. At the turn of the nineteenth century Ulster County's total population was 29,554, of whom more than 10 percent, 3,220, were black people scattered widely across the countryside.

Thomas Jay Warren. Sojourner Truth Memorial Statue, 2002. Northampton Board of Public Works, Florence, Massachusetts.

Most slaveholding New York State households owned only one or two slaves; a large slaveowner, like Isabella's first master, might have six or seven at a time, but New Yorkers who owned more than twenty slaves could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In the late eighteenth century, of course, no stigma attached to the trafficker in people, and masters did not hesitate to break up slave families through sale. But all was on a much smaller scale than the southern system of slavery.

Several factors, including the wide distribution of slaves among white families, combined to give rural black New Yorkers a singular culture. The contrast was especially sharp in comparison with southern blacks, often living in much larger homogeneous communities, who developed a vibrant Anglo-African culture revolving around plantation slave quarters. Half of all black southerners lived in communities of twenty or more African Americans, large concentrations that allowed them to learn their culture from other blacks and to create a distinctive way of life.

In New York State, by contrast, there were large numbers of blacks only in New York City. On the farms of rural New York, where slaves like Isabella lived and worked, one or two Africans commonly lived with a Dutch family and remained too isolated and scattered to forge any but the most tentative separate culture. Surrounded by Dutch speakers, rural black New Yorkers grew up speaking the language of their community. A good 16 or so percent, perhaps more, of eighteenth-century black New Yorkers, like Isabella and her family, spoke Dutch as their first language.

Such sound from black folk astonished those who were not from New York. A southern slave, accompanying his owner on a trip to New York, grew frustrated trying to extract directions from an Afro-Dutch woman. To his query about the way to New York, she answered: "Yaw, mynheer," pointing toward the town, "cat is Yarikee." Isabella as a young woman would have spoken in just this way. Over her lifetime she learned to speak English fluently, but she lost neither the accent nor the earthy imagery of the Dutch language that made her English so remarkable.

It is not possible to know exactly how Sojourner Truth spoke, for no one from her generation and cultural background was recorded. Isabella was the slave of the Dumont family from about twelve until about thirty, and many years later the daughter, Gertrude Dumont, protested that Truth's speech was nothing like the mock-southern dialect that careless reporters used. Rather, it was "very similar to that of the unlettered white people of [New York in] her time." As an older woman, Truth took pride in speaking correct English and objected to accounts of her speeches in heavy southern dialect. This seemed to her to take "unfair advantage" of her race.

Living so closely with tigers, Afro-Dutch New Yorkers imbibed other aspects of Dutch culture. If Afro-Dutch New Yorkers went to church--and in the countryside most, like their poor white neighbors, did not--they might join churches that were Dutch Reformed (as did Isabella's oldest daughter, Diana) or Methodist (as did Isabella). In Ulster County in the very early nineteenth century, young Isabella learned the Lord's Prayer in Dutch from her mother, and she may have attended Reformed churches as a child and young woman. This Afro-Dutch world was distinct, first culturally, then economically, from the slaveholding South.

ISABELLA'S birth coincided with a climactic invention--the cotton gin--which made slave-grown, short-staple cotton the economic underpinning of the American South. During the antebellum era of cotton as king, the economic and political interests of elite southerners increasingly diverged from those of elite northerners. This polarization was as yet embryonic in the late 1790s, because the political tensions that finally led to civil war had not yet acquired the agonizing sharpness that would dominate the middle of the century and bring Sojourner Truth into the public eye. When Isabella was born, the American North as well as the American South was a land of bondage.

The effacement of the memory of northern slavery has skewed American regional identities by exonerating white northerners and blaming white southerners. This erasure complicates the task of situating Isabella's life history, for by the mid-nineteenth century, when Sojourner Truth was a familiar presence in antislavery circles, New York belonged to the metaphorical land of liberty. With southern slavery as the symbol of American slavery, Truth's early life automatically migrated into a vague, composite antebellum South, a Southern Nowhere that for all its lack of specificity is definitely south of the Mason-Dixon line.

This metaphorical slave South appears in c lassie form in Harriet Beecher Stowe's phenomenally popular 1851-52 novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Its types and themes had arisen in the antislavery press and slave narratives in the generation before Stowe published, supplying her with a stock of characters familiar in outline: the long-suffering, Christian slave, the cruel master with his whip and his mulatto concubine, the outraged slave mother, the slave trader, even the kind master and the jealous mistress. By the time Sojourner Truth became an antislavery speaker, this South had become a taken-for-granted setting antithetical to the free North.

Though foreign to northerners, the metaphorical slave South was at the same time familiar by dint of having so often been described. In this South, slavery was everlasting; slaves could not marry, own property, or learn to read or write. Their masters' powers were absolute, with the corruption that accompanies absolute power. Sex and violence suffused the entire institution. This slave South was a purgatory from which only the strongest, bravest, and most intelligent of slaves could flee, men and women like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Even these exceptional figures came from Maryland, right next door to the North. The Deep South was a hell that allowed no escape. In the far-away states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, unspeakable atrocities seemed to occur on a routine basis. Nothing was too awful to happen there.

The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago (Sojourner Truth place setting), 1974–79. Mixed media: ceramic, porcelain, textile. Brooklyn Museum [Photograph by Jook Leung Photography]

Such a facile symbolic opposition: slave South and free North. But realities in Isabella's time were not so neat.

Slavery was an important part of northern life before 1800, however latter-day historical symbolism may have erased its stigma from the North. When Isabella was born, only Charleston among American cities had a larger black population than New York, and New York City's 5,865 blacks (including five slaves owned by Founding Father John Jay) accounted for about 10 percent of the total population. Almost 1,000 of the 6,281 black people in Connecticut and 12,422 of the 16,824 black people in New Jersey were still enslaved; black people were scattered throughout the North, and former slaves were to be found even in Massachusetts.

In the nineteenth century--as in our own times, mutatis mutandis--northerners preened themselves in their moral superiority to the slave drivers of the South, as though their own section had remained innocent of involuntary servitude. Such self-righteous censure of the South exempts northerners from their own slaveholding legacy, for when Isabella was born a slave, a commonplace national institution bound her. (© 1996 Nell Irvin Painter, Norton)

Caged In The Human Zoo

From the Daily Mail, "Caged in the human zoo: The shocking story of the young pygmy warrior put on show in a monkey house - and how he fuelled Hitler's twisted beliefs," by Beth Hale, 31 October 2009

His ebony skin stood out in sharp contrast to the white crowd pressing to get a better view.

The young African boy bared his teeth at the men and women staring at him through the bars. They were sharpened into dagger-like points, making him appear all the more barbaric to the ignorant hordes.

Above the cage hung a sign proclaiming: 'The Missing Link.' A baby chimp sat disconsolately at the bottom of the enclosure, a single companion to the boy.

The year was 1906. This was a pygmy, brought to America as a novelty to be put on display in the monkey house.

The New York Times reported: 'There were 40,000 visitors to the park on Sunday. Nearly every man, woman and child of this crowd made for the monkey house to see the star attraction in the park - the wild man from Africa.

'They chased him about the grounds all day, howling, jeering, and yelling. Some of them poked him in the ribs, others tripped him up, all laughed at him.'

Suddenly, the boy turned. Taking the bow and arrow given to him as an ethnic accessory, he shot at the gawpers. His arrow did no harm, but he did scare the life out of the onlookers.

This was Ota Benga, a pygmy, brought from the Congo and put on display in a zoo as an example of what scientists at the time proclaimed to be an evolutionary inferior race.

His story would divide a nation, and is now told for the first time in a new documentary, The Human Zoo.

The programme lifts the lid on a dark period in history, where 'natives' were paraded as exhibits, fueling the spread of white supremacism and even contributing to the rise of Nazism.

Tragically, Benga became the victim of one of the most awful acts of exploitation ever seen and died a shadow of the proud young tribesman who arrived in America.

So just who was he, and how did this grotesque experiment help shape the 20th century view of race?

A hundred years ago, before television and mass tourism, a handful of enterprising adventurers, anthropologists and businessman decided to bring the far-flung glories of the world to life in one place.

Huge fairs were held in Paris, London and America, exhibiting everything from Italian gondolas to African elephants.

Having promised the world, there was pressure to deliver: people were the next quarry.

In 1904, the showman anthropologist William McGee conceived the idea of a human zoo, to be held in St Louis in the U.S. state of Missouri.

It was designed to be one of the largest scientific experiments ever undertaken and would be spectacular public entertainment.

McGee wanted the tallest people in the world, veritable giants from Patagonia, at the tip of South America. He wanted the Ainu, who lived on an island north of Japan and were supposedly the hairiest humans. He placed an order for 300 Filipinos - there is no record of why he wanted so many.

His grandson, Phillips Verner Bradford, says: 'If you told him that a place was dangerous, he'd say: "I want to go there!" He was that sort of guy.'

Verner took a boat from New York to London, down the European coast and around Africa to the Congo River.

Bradford says: 'He made his way up the Congo River with steamers as far as they would go. Once he arrived at the great waterfalls, he had to hire a crew of natives.'

They encountered crocodiles and hippopotamuses, and deadly whirlpools that could sink a boat.

Eventually, Verner made it into the jungle. He blithely walked into a village of cannibals, and found that they had captured a rival tribe who were being held in cages, ready to be eaten.

To his delight, the prisoners were pygmies, or Mbuti - just what he was looking for. He began negotiating. Talking to the pygmies in their native Chiluba, he established that they would rather be taken to America than eaten. He bought six pygmies from their captors for a roll of brass wire and some salt.

One pygmy stood out. He was Ota. Photos of him taken in the Congo show a playful, chubby young man, a broad smile revealing his sharpened teeth, which were filed in his youth.

He looks healthy, spirited and full of life, standing around 4ft 8in tall.

He had never seen a white man before. Verner realised that he had a hugely marketable proposition on his hands, and made the return trip across the Atlantic with his human treasure.

For their part, the pygmies were intrigued by everything they saw and were full of questions: how did the boat work? Was there a cage of hippopotamuses down beneath pedaling it along? Verner showed them how the steam engine functioned.

Docking at New Orleans in June 1904, the Africans caught their first glimpse of America. They were stunned by the tall buildings and wide streets.

The six pygmies were sent to St Louis by rail. There, they became McGee's most important exhibits, the centerpiece of the St Louis World Fair, feted by society and academics alike.

Adverts proclaimed: 'They live in forests, they are extremely shy. They eat the flesh of wild animals killed with poisoned arrows. They are cruel, finding delight in torturing animals.

'They have long heads, long narrow faces and little red eyes, set close together like those of ferrets. Their bodies are exceptionally hairy.

'A pygmy has been known to eat 60 bananas at one meal, in addition to other food, and then ask for more.

'They seem to be controlled by an impulse that makes them delight in wickedness. If caught young, they are said to make excellent servants.'

He wanted what he considered the most primitive American Indian tribe, the Cocopah in Mexico. He asked for Eskimos.

But most of all, he wanted the smallest people in the world. He needed pygmies. He had heard that they were very short and very black, and he had to have one.

Explorer Samuel Phillips Verner was dispatched by McGee to the Belgian Congo with a shopping list.

It read: 'One pygmy patriarch or chief. One adult woman, preferably his wife. One adult man, preferably his son. One adult woman, the wife of the last or daughter of the first. One female youth unmarried. Two infants. A priestess and a priest, or medicine doctors, preferably old. All of the above to be pygmies.'

Duly detailed, Verner set off for deepest Africa. He knew that this operation could be the making of him, putting him in the same league as Henry Stanley and Dr David Livingstone.

As the sales pitch shows, the human zoo played into the hands of white supremacists, teaching the public that there was a hierarchy of races, with the white man at the top and all others beneath.

McGee himself, in his book The Trend Of Human Progress, published in 1899, wrote: 'Those who know the races realise that the average white man is stronger of limb, fleeter of foot, clearer of eye, than the average yellow or red or black.'

Bastardising Darwin's theory of evolution, McGee saw each race as a stage in human evolution - with pygmies the least evolved of the species. With his rudimentary Victorian understanding of science, he believed they were the living missing link between apes and humans.

The human zoo was a fantastic success - and widely copied. Dr Sadiah Qureshi, a historian at the University of Cambridge, says: 'Millions of people went to see these shows at their peak. Originally you would get a show in a local theatre. By the late 19th century you would see hundreds, if not a couple of thousand people living on site, eating and on constant display.'

Indeed, some years later, in 1924, King George V and Queen Mary inspected the live exhibits at the British Empire Exhibition, at Wembley. Some Europeans' curiosity knew no bounds, however.

Qureshi says: 'The 1899 exhibition Savage South Africa held at Earl's Court in London caused quite a stir. At one point women were banned from going inside because they had supposedly been touching the natives.' For almost a year, Ota and the other pygmies lived in America as human exhibits. They were made to build native houses, perform traditional dance ceremonies, live partially naked and cook authentic food.

Ota was described in the press as 'a dwarfy, black specimen of sad-eyed humanity'. With his filed tribal teeth, he was the most celebrated pygmy and dubbed 'Lord of the savage world'. He posed for photographs for 25 cents.

In 1905, after they had been viewed by a total of 20 million people, Verner took the pygmies home to the Congo.

Ota had planned to rejoin his tribe - but discovered that they had been entirely wiped out by Belgian soldiers. He married a girl from the nearby Batwa tribe, and appeared to settle back into life in Africa.

Then his wife was bitten by a poisonous snake and died. The Batwa rejected him, believing he was cursed and responsible for the young woman's death. Ota was cast adrift, a stranger in his own land.

He begged his friend Verner to take him back to America. Verner was reluctant, but eventually acquiesced, taking him to New York.

The pair shared the 3,000-mile sea voyage with crates of live animals, parrots, monkeys, snakes and other exotic booty, which Verner planned to sell in America. On the ship, Ota discovered cigarettes and drink.

Arriving in New York, Verner - who had business to do - bade him farewell, arranging accommodation in a spare room - this time he was not on show - at the American Museum of Natural History. There, he thought Ota would be safe.

Soon, however, he came to the attention of William Hornaday, a conservationist and director of the Bronx Zoo.

Collaborating with one of America's most notorious racists, Madison Grant, he conceived a plan.

Grant wanted to promote 'scientific racism', talking in terms of 'purity of type', and the survival of the white master race.

In 1930, after his work The Passing Of The Great Race was translated into German, Grant received a letter from an aspiring politician, saying 'your book is my bible'.

The man was Adolf Hitler. He would indeed use 'scientific racism' as the foundation for the Third Reich, giving academic grounding to the Holocaust.

Together, Hornaday and Grant offered to take charge of Ota Benga, who initially believed he would be looking after the Bronx Zoo's elephants.

In fact, he was going to be put on public display as a living example of 'racial inferiority'. Immediately, the exhibition prompted criticism. The New York Times reported on September 9, 1906: 'The exhibition was that of a human being in a monkey cage. A human being. In a monkey cage.

'The human being happened to be a Bushman, one of a race that scientists do not rate high in the human scale, but to the average nonscientific person in the crowd of sightseers there was something about the display that was unpleasant.

'It is probably a good thing that Benga doesn't think very deeply. If he did it isn't likely that he was very proud of himself when he woke in the morning and found himself under the same roof with the orang-utans and monkeys, for that is where he really is.'

The exhibition was a sensation. On a single day, 40,000 people arrived to see Ota and his chimp. The show lasted only two weeks, however, due to a public outcry, and human zoos as a phenomenon died out by the Forties.

So what became of Ota Benga? After he was removed from the Bronx Zoo, there was great debate regarding his fate. African-American church ministers insisted he be released - not for his comfort, but because they wanted to convert the pygmy to Christianity.

He was eventually placed in an orphanage for black children, the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, to be 'civilised'. He was dressed in Western clothes and taught how to eat, talk and behave like an American.

He had his pointed teeth capped and attended a Baptist seminary, where he started to study English.

He was kept out of the public eye for four years. Eventually, he moved from New York to the backwater town of Lynchburg, Virginia, where he became a local curiosity and was known as Otto Bingo.

Forevermore haunted by his time in the monkey cage, he would repeatedly slap his chest, declaring: 'I am a man. I am a man.'

He began to save money to return to the Congo, working in a tobacco factory. With the outbreak of World War I, this became impossible and Ota sunk into depression.

He never did make it home. One evening, he went into a barn behind the village general store. He chipped off the caps hiding his teeth, restoring them to their filed-down glory, lit a small ceremonial campfire, and shot himself in the head, dying ten years after being put on display at the Bronx zoo. He was 32 years old.

His story now bears testament to the ignorance of those who believed themselves superior to him.

He was buried in an unmarked grave, but he left his mark on the world, exposing as moral pygmies the lesser men who would cage a human. (source: Daily Mail)

Human Zoos - Dirty Secrets of Science

New York Slave Laws

Ships flying the Dutch West India flag.

The Dutch West India Company introduced slavery to New York (known then as New Netherland) in 1625 with the importation of eleven black slaves. These early slaves were put to work as farmers, fur traders, and builders. Some were used to build a wall to protect white settlers from the Native American population at the site of today's Wall Street in downtown Manhattan. Although enslaved, the Africans owned by the Dutch enjoyed a few basic rights.

They could be admitted to the Dutch Reformed Church and married by its ministers. Their children could be baptized, and slave families were usually kept intact. Slaves could testify in court, sign legal documents, and bring civil actions against whites. Some slaves were permitted to work after hours earning wages equal to those paid to white workers. When the colony fell to the British in 1864, the Company freed all its slaves-thus establishing early on a nucleus of free African Americans in New York.

English slave laws in the colony were much harsher in comparison to Dutch slave laws. For one thing, slaves were considered chattel or property, and their enslavement ended only with their death or manumission. The earliest slave codes passed in 1664 defined slavery as an inherited racial status-meaning that the children of slaves were also slaves. New York slaveholders could inflict any punishment short of mutilation and death on their human property. Freed blacks were also denied most civil rights under English rule. Any crime committed by a black against a white was severely punished, while white crimes against blacks were largely ignored.

According to the first U.S. Census, the slave population in New York grew to 21,324 by 1790, making New York the largest slave-owning state north of the Mason Dixon line, a distinction it held throughout the two centuries the state practiced slavery. In New York City, a large percentage of the blacks were free-some 33 percent or 1,482 inhabitants by 1820. In the nearby rural area of King County, in what is present day Brooklyn, most of the blacks that lived there were slaves and worked as farm laborers.

In New York City, on the other hand, one third of the black population worked as skilled artisans. Not only did many enslaved Africans live and work in New York prior to the American Revolution, New York City prospered as a thriving center of the slave trade. New York slaving ships made over 150 trips to Africa between 1715 and 1776. Most of the enslaved people brought to Manhattan were transported from New York after a brief time in port to the Caribbean or else to Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia.

(source: New York Slave Law Summary and Record)

The English sweet tooth and the New York slave trade, 1690 - 1725