As reported in the The New York Times "What the History of Memorial Day Teaches About Honoring the War Dead," by Adam Cohen, on 28 May 2007 -- Memorial Day got its start after the Civil War, when freed slaves and abolitionists gathered in Charleston, S.C., to honor Union soldiers who gave their lives to battle slavery. The holiday was so closely associated with the Union side, and with the fight for emancipation, that Southern states quickly established their own rival Confederate Memorial Day.
Over the next 50 years, though, Memorial Day changed. It became a tribute to the dead on both sides, and to the reunion of the North and the South after the war. This new holiday was more inclusive, and more useful to a forward-looking nation eager to put its differences behind it. But something important was lost: the recognition that the Civil War had been a moral battle to free black Americans from slavery.
In “Race and Reunion,” his masterful book about historical memory, David Blight, a professor at Yale, tells the wistful story of Memorial Day’s transformation — and what has been lost as a result. War commemorations, he makes clear, do not just pay tribute to the war dead. They also reflect a nation’s understanding of particular wars, and they are edited for political reasons. Memorial Day is a day not only of remembering, but also of selective forgetting — a point to keep in mind as the Iraq war moves uneasily into the history books.
Many of the early Memorial Day commemorations, Professor Blight notes, were like Charleston’s, paying tribute both to the fallen Union soldiers and to the emancipationist cause. At a ceremony in Maine in 1869, one fiery orator declared that “the black stain of slavery has been effaced from the bosom of this fair land by martyr blood.”
Less than a decade later in 1877 — when Reconstruction ended in the South — at New York City’s enormous Memorial Day celebration, there was much talk of union, and almost none of slavery or race. The New York Herald declared that “all the issues on which the war of rebellion was fought seem dead,” and noted approvingly that “American eyes have a characteristic tendency to look forward.”
There were dissenting voices. Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist leader, continued to insist that Memorial Day should be about the battle between “slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization.” But the drive to make the holiday a generic commemoration of the Civil War dead won out.
The new Memorial Day made it easier for Northern and Southern whites to come together, and it kept the focus where political and business leaders wanted it: on national progress. But it came at the expense of American blacks, whose status at the end of Reconstruction was precarious. If the Civil War was not a battle to determine whether a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” could “long endure,” as Lincoln declared in the Gettysburg Address, but a mere regional dispute, there was no need to continue fighting for equal rights.
And increasingly the nation did not. When Woodrow Wilson spoke at Gettysburg on the 50th anniversary of the battle, in a Memorial Day-like ceremony, he avoided the subject of slavery, Professor Blight notes, and declared “the quarrel” between North and South “forgotten.” The ceremony was segregated, and a week later Wilson’s administration created separate white and black bathrooms in the Treasury Department. It would be another 50 years before the nation seriously took up the cause of racial equality again.
Since 1913, Memorial Day has changed even more. It has expanded — after World War I, it became a tribute to the dead of all the nation’s wars — while at the same time fading. Today, Memorial Day is little more than the start of summer, a time for barbecues and department store sales. Much would be gained, though, by going back to the holiday’s original meanings.
When Memorial Day began, the war dead were placed front and center. The holiday’s original name, Decoration Day, came from the day’s main activity: leaving flowers at cemeteries. Today, though, we are fighting a war in which great pains have been taken to hide the nearly 3,500 Americans who have died from sight. The Defense Department has banned the photographing of returning caskets, and the president refuses to attend soldiers’ funerals.
Memorial Day also began with the conviction that to properly honor the war dead, it is necessary to honestly contemplate the cause for which they fought. Today we are fighting a war sold on false pretenses, and the Bush administration stands by its false stories. Memorial Day’s history, and its devolution, demonstrates that the instinct to prettify war and create myths about it is hardly new.
But as the founders of the original Memorial Day understood, the only honorable way to remember those who have lost their lives is to commemorate them out in the open, and to insist on a true account. [source: The New York Times, Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company]
Historian Eric Foner reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, on 4 March 2001, "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory: By David W. Blight" -- Nearly a century and a half after it ended, the Civil War remains the central event in American history and an enduring source of public controversy. The past few years have witnessed disputes over the flying of the Confederate battle flag above the South Carolina state house, the National Parks Service's decision to devote more attention to slavery at its battlefield sites, and, most recently, statements by newly-appointed cabinet members John Ashcroft and Gail Norton that celebrate the Lost Cause. Clearly, as the historian Barbara Fields trenchantly remarked toward the end of Ken Burns' much-praised television documentary, the Civil War is not over.
In “Race and Reunion,” David Blight demonstrates that as soon the guns fell silent debate over how to remember the Civil War began. In recent years, the study of historical memory has become something of a scholarly cottage industry. The memory of World War I reflected in monuments, novels, and popular culture has been examined by numerous European historians. A book on how New Englanders remembered King Philip's War against local Indians won the Bancroft prize a few years ago.
What unites these studies is the conviction that memory is a product of history. Rather than being straightforward and unproblematic, it is “constructed,” battled over, and in many ways political. Moreover, forgetting some aspects of the past is as much a part of historical understanding as remembering others. Blight's study of how Americans remembered the Civil War in the fifty years after Appomattox exemplifies these themes. “Race and Reunion” is the most comprehensive and insightful study of the memory of the Civil War yet to appear.
Blight touches on a wide range of subjects, including how political battles over Reconstruction contributed to conflicting attitudes toward the war's legacy, the origins of Memorial Day, and the rise of the “reminiscence industry” (173) through which published memoirs by former soldiers helped lay the groundwork for sectional reconciliation. He gives black Americans a voice they are often denied in works on memory, scouring the black press for accounts of emancipation celebrations and articles about the war's meaning. As his title suggests, Blight believes that how we think about the Civil War has everything to do with how we think about race and its history in American life.
Two understandings of how the Civil War should be remembered collided in post-bellum America. One was the “emancipationist” vision hinted at by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address when he spoke of the war as bringing a rebirth of the republic in the name of freedom and equality. The other was a “reconciliationist” memory that emphasized what the two sides shared in common, particularly the valor of individual soldiers, and suppressed thoughts of the war's causes and the unfinished legacy of emancipation. By the end of the century, in a segregated society where blacks' subordination was taken for granted North and South, “the forces of reconciliation” had “overwhelmed the emancipationist vision.” (2) Another way of putting it is that the Confederacy lost the war on the battlefield but won the war over memory.
The origins of the reconciliationist memory, Blight argues, can be traced to debates during Reconstruction, when Republicans made a commitment to legal and political equality for the former slaves and then abandoned it in the face of violent opposition from the white South and a Northern retreat from the ideal of equality. Horace Greeley's campaign for president in 1872 at the head of a coalition of Democrats and dissident Republicans focused on the need to “clasp hands across the bloody chasm” (126) and return control of the South to its “best men” (that is, the former slaveholders). Despite his defeat, Greeley's campaign convinced many Northerners to view their former enemies more sympathetically and to abandon the idea of federal intervention on behalf of the former slaves.
Meanwhile, Southerners were mobilizing in what the Virginia editor Edward A. Pollard called “the war of ideas.” (51) During the 1870s, Southern publications like The Land We Love and works issued by the new Southern Historical Society promoted a memory of a war in which slavery played no part and blacks participated only as faithful servants who protected their masters' property. Old-time “mammies” and loyal slaves were celebrated in memoirs, tributes, and statues. In this highly selective, not to say grossly misleading, memory, the legions of African-Americans who fled the plantations to seek freedom behind Union lines and the 200,000 who fought for the Union were forgotten. Even today, of the thousands of Civil War monuments throughout the country only a handful contain an image of a black soldier.
By the 1880s, as mass-market magazines like The Century bombarded readers with veterans' reminiscences and the construction of Civil War monuments began in earnest, the nation's memory came to focus more and more on the soldiers' heroism, “immunized,” Blight writes, “from motive.” (96) Ironies abounded in the triumph of the reconciliationist outlook. Gettysburg, site of the greatest Northern victory, was transformed into a shrine to the Confederacy centered on Pickett's charge, the “high tide” of the Southern cause. Even Memorial Day, which had begun in 1865 when thousands of black South Carolinians laid flowers on the graves of Union soldiers, soon became an occasion for expressions of white nationalism and reconciliation.
Rather than the crisis of a nation divided by antagonistic labor systems and ideologies, the war became a tragic conflict that nonetheless accomplished the task of solidifying the nation. With Reconstruction having ended in 1877, another invented memory – how the South had suffered under what was called Negro rule – was widely accepted among Northern and Southern whites. The abandonment of the nation's commitment to equal rights for the former slaves was the basis on which former white antagonists could unite in the romance of reunion.
Blacks were not the only ones “forgotten” in this story. Confederate general James Longstreet, who had the temerity to support the rights of African-Americans after the war, was excised from the pantheon of Southern heroes. No monuments to Longstreet graced the Southern landscape – indeed not until 1998 was a statue erected at Gettysburg, where he served with distinction.
The reconciliationist vision of the war did not go unchallenged. On the margins of national memory, black communities celebrated the anniversary of emancipation and the service of black troops. The unveiling in Boston in 1897 of Augustus Saint Gaudens' magnificent monument to the black soldiers of the 54th and 55th Massachusetts for a time rekindled a more inclusive memory of the war. The most unusual dissenter discussed by Blight was former cavalry officer John Mosby, the “Gray Ghost” of the Confederacy. Mosby declined invitations to memorial events where speakers claimed that slavery had nothing to do with the conflict. “The South was my country,” Mosby wrote, and he was not ashamed that he had fought to defend it. But, he pointed out with refreshing candor, “the South went to war on account of slavery.” (297-98)
Blight begins and ends with the 1913 Gettysburg reunion, a “festival of national reconciliation” (9) attended by over 53,000 veterans, all of them white. Presiding over the occasion was Woodrow Wilson, the first elected president born in the South since Zachary Taylor. Wilson had recently dismissed many of the black employees of the federal government and imposed rigid segregation on the reminder. Three years later, he would allow the film “Birth of a Nation,” which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and presented white supremacy as the underpinning of national unity, at the White House. “A segregated society,” Blight comments, “demanded a segregated historical memory.” (361)
Blight tells this story in a lucid style and with an entirely appropriate measure of indignation. He does not explain why, if “reconciliation” triumphed so completely, Northern Republicans long reaped political windfalls by “waving the bloody shirt” -- reminding voters of the war -- during election campaigns. But the book is so persuasive overall that one regrets that Blight did not try to bring it up to the present.
Today, nearly all historians view slavery as the war's fundamental cause, emancipation as central to its meaning and consequences, and Reconstruction as a praiseworthy effort to establish the principle of racial justice in America. As current controversies reveal, however, the reconciliationist vision of the war retains a powerful hold on many Americans' imaginations. Burns concluded his series with a loving depiction of the Gettysburg reunion as a moment of brotherly forgiveness, while failing to note that the betrayal of the dream of racial justice was essential to the process of white reconciliation. Even though it stops in 1913, “Race and Reunion” demonstrates forcefully that in the year 2001, it still matters very much how we remember the Civil War. [source: Eric Foner.com ; Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, is the author, most recently, of “The Story of American Freedom” (W. W. Norton).]
As reported in the Christian Science Monitor, on 19 May 2010, by Amanda Paulson, Staff writer, "Texas textbook war: 'Slavery' or 'Atlantic triangular trade'? Changes to social studies textbooks in Texas proposed by conservatives have resulted in a partisan uproar and generated interest far beyond the Lone Star State." --- CHICAGO -- Thomas Jefferson out, Phyllis Schlafly in?
While the proposed changes to Texas social studies standards aren’t quite so simple (and contrary to some reports, Thomas Jefferson would still be part of the curriculum), the debate over the standards pushed by a conservative majority of the Texas Board of Education – which will be voted on this week – has resulted in a partisan uproar and generated interest far beyond the Lone Star State.
Conservatives say that the changes are a long-overdue correction to a curriculum that too often deemphasizes religion and caters to liberal views. Critics are dismayed at what they see as an attempt to push conservative ideology – even if it flies in the face of scholarship – into textbooks. And with a textbook industry that is often influenced by the standards in the largest states, there is a chance that the changes have influence beyond Texas.
“Decisions that are made in Texas have a ripple effect across the country,” says Phillip VanFossen, head of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and a professor of social studies education at Purdue University.
Still, he notes, as the pendulum swings toward national standards – which have yet to be developed for social studies – that influence might wane. Just in case, California this week passed a bill out of a Senate committee that would ensure no California textbooks contain any Texas-driven changes.
Conservatives dominate Texas Board of Education
The root of the uproar is a regular process in which the Texas Board of Education revises the state’s standards. Far more than in most states, the elected board is entrusted to write standards itself, rather than merely approve them. With a 10-5 Republican majority, including a coalition of seven social conservatives, the board has pushed what some see as a particularly partisan agenda.
Among the changes: Students would be required to learn about the “unintended consequences” of Title IX, affirmative action, and the Great Society, and would need to study conservative icons like Phyllis Schlafly, the Heritage Foundation, and the Moral Majority.
The slave trade would be renamed the “Atlantic triangular trade,” American “imperialism” changed to “expansionism,” and all references to “capitalism” have been replaced with “free enterprise.”
The role of Thomas Jefferson – who argued for the separation of church and state – is minimized in several places, and the standards would emphasize the degree to which the Founding Fathers were driven by Christian principles.
“In the 18 months that the state board has worked on these standards, they’ve struck a balance that our members feel will give public school students a fuller and stronger appreciation of the religious and cultural roots of American history,” says Brent Connett, a policy analyst with the Texas Conservative Coalition, which released a letter this week calling on the board to approve the standards and to ignore calls for delay.
But others say they are dismayed at the degree to which the standards seem to have been written without regard for scholarship
Professor VanFossen, for instance, was bothered by a new requirement that students analyze the decline in value of the US dollar and abandonment of the gold standard, without input from economists, and by amendments that would try to cast a more positive spin on Sen. Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunt.
“It’s ideologically driven,” he says, adding that he’s also bothered that many of the most important skills students need to learn – debate and discussion, constructing arguments, reconciling different perspectives – are being lost amid the highly proscriptive and detailed content.
Others say that whether or not national textbooks are ultimately influenced by Texas (the textbook industry has sought to downplay that fear), the furor that this has caused will be detrimental to future attempts to create standards.
'No one wants to touch social studies'
“No one wants to touch social studies,” says Peggy Altoff, past president of the National Council for the Social Studies and co-chair of the committee that set social studies standards in Colorado.
Ms. Altoff says it doesn’t have to be such a political, partisan process, and cites Colorado’s experience as an example. Since often what stokes peoples’ anger the most is who is included for study – Cesar Chavez or Newt Gingrich; Thurgood Marshall or Thomas Aquinas – she suggests standards that offer examples, but don’t limit curricula to those figures.
“It doesn’t have to be the Texas debacle,” she says.
Whatever the vote is this week, the conservative influence on the board may be waning.
Don McLeroy, the author of many of the most contentious amendments and a leader of the conservative coalition, was defeated in March in a primary by an opponent who was critical of his approach. Another key social conservative, Cynthia Dunbar, is not seeking reelection, and a more moderate candidate won the GOP primary in her district. (source: Christian Science Monitor)
"An Act," Civilian and Galveston Gazette, November 4, 1840
Summary: Printed the text of a new law forbidding any free blacks from living in Texas. It stated that any free black caught entering Texas would be fined a thousand dollars; if he couldn't pay the sum, he would be sold into slavery for one year and then, if he still couldn't pay off the fine, be a slave for life. Also said that anyone helping a free black get into Texas would be fined as much as $10,000. Finally, the Texas Congress ordered all free blacks then living in the Republic to move out within two years or face enslavement.
Concerning Free Persons of Color.
SEC. I. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the Republic of Texas, in Congress assembled: That from and after the passage of this act, it shall not be lawful for any free persons of color to emigrate to this Republic.
SEC. 2. Be it further enacted, That if any free person of color shall emigrate to this Republic, it shall be the duty of the sheriff, or any one of the constables of the county to which such emigration shall be made, to arrest such free person of color, after giving him ten days notice, and bring him before the Chief Justice of the county, or Judge of the District; and it shall be the duty of the Chief Justice, or Judge of the district, before whom such free person of color may be brought, to receive the bond of such free person of color in the sum of one thousand dollars, with the security of a citizen, to be approved by him, condemned for the removal of such free person of color out of the limits of the Republic.
SEC 3. Be it further enacted, That if any free person of color should be brought before any Chief Justice of any county, or District Judge, and shall not be able to give the bond as prescribed in the second section of this act, such Chief Justice, or district judge shall commit such free person of color to the public jail, with an, order to the sheriff to expose him to public sale, to the highest bidder, at the court house door of his county, after giving four weeks notice of the same, in the nearest public journal, and at least four public places in his county; and the said purchaser shall and may exercise all the rights of ownership over said free person of color for one year from such sale.
SEC. 4. Be it further enacted, And if any such free person of color shall, during the year of such slavery, be able to give his bounte contemplated in the second section of this act, to take effect the end of his slavery, he shall be permitted to do so; but if he [illegible word] fail to render the bond, until after the expiration of his slavery shall be the duty of the purchaser to return him into the hands the sheriff.
SEC. 5. Be it further enacted, It shall be the duty of the sheriff, upon the return of any such free person of color, upon giving six weeks notice in some public journal, and at least four public places in his county, to expose the free person of color so returned at public sale, to the highest bidder; and such free person of color so sold shall remain a slave for life: provided, that if any person of color so sold should be the property of any individual, he shall have his right of recovery by due course of law.
SEC. 6. Be it further enacted, All monies arising from the sale of such free person of color, shall be paid into the county treasury, subject to appropriation by the district court, for public purposes.
SEC. 7. Be it further enacted, Upon the forfeiture of the bond of any free person of color, the same shall be placed in the hands of the District attorney for collection, who shall prosecute the same against the securities only; and the amount of sale, if such shall have been made, of the free person of color, shall, in all cases, be subtracted from the amount adjudged against the securities, and the remainder only shall be recovered of them.
SEC. 8. Be it further enacted, That two years shall be allowed from and after the passage of this act, to all free persons of color who now are in this Republic, to remove out of the same; and all those who shall be found here after that time, without the permission of Congress shall be arrested and sold as provided in this act.
SEC. 9. Be it further enacted, That it shall not be lawful for any master of a vessel, or owner thereof, nor for any other person or persons whatsoever, to bring, import, induce, or aid or assist in the bringing, importing, or inducing any free person of color within the limits of Texas, directly or indirectly; and any person so offending shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and or conviction shall be fined in a sum of not less than one nor more than ten thousand dollars: provided, that cooks and other hands employed on board of vessels shall not be considered as coming within the provision of this act.
SEC. 10. Be it further enacted, That the President of the Republic do issue his proclamation, commanding all free persons of color who now are in the Republic, to remove from the same before the first of January, 1842, and the Secretary of State publish this act a number of times in all the journals of this Republic.
SEC. 11. Be it further enacted, That all laws contrary to the meaning and spirit of this act, are hereby repealed.
DAVID S KAUFMAN,
Speaker of the House of Representatives.
DAVID G. BURNET.
Approved, 5th February 1840. President of the Senate.
As reported by the BBC, on 21 January 2005, "JP Morgan admits US slavery links," -- Thousands of slaves were accepted as collateral for loans by two banks that later became part of JP Morgan Chase.
The admission is part of an apology sent to JP Morgan staff after the bank researched its links to slavery in order to meet legislation in Chicago.
Citizens Bank and Canal Bank are the two lenders that were identified. They are now closed, but were linked to Bank One, which JP Morgan bought last year.
About 13,000 slaves were used as loan collateral between 1831 and 1865.
'No excuse'
Important dates
1831 Canal Bank formed
1833 Citizens Bank formed
1924 Citizens and Canal join to form Canal Commercial Trust & Savings Bank (CCTSB)
1931 Chase Bank takes control of Canal
1933 CCTSB fails during Great Depression and goes into liquidation
1933 National Bank of Commerce in New Orleans (NBCNO) formed with some Canal Bank deposits and loans
1971 NBCNO becomes First National Bank of Commerce
1998 First National Bank of Commerce merged into Bank One Louisiana
2004 Bank One merged with JP Morgan Chase & Co.
Because of defaults by plantation owners, Citizens and Canal ended up owning about 1,250 slaves.
"We all know slavery existed in our country, but it is quite different to see how our history and the institution of slavery were intertwined," JP Morgan chief executive William Harrison and chief operating officer James Dimon said in the letter.
"Slavery was tragically ingrained in American society, but that is no excuse."
"We apologise to the African-American community, particularly those who are descendants of slaves, and to the rest of the American public for the role that Citizens Bank and Canal Bank played."
"The slavery era was a tragic time in US history and in our company's history."
JP Morgan said that it was setting up a $5m scholarship programme for students living in Louisiana, the state where the events took place.
As reported in Bloomberg, "How Slavery Led to Modern Capitalism: Echoes," by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, on 24 January 2012 -- When the New York City banker James Brown tallied his wealth in 1842, he had to look far below Wall Street to trace its origins. His investments in the American South exceeded $1.5 million, a quarter of which was directly bound up in the ownership of slave plantations.
Brown was among the world's most powerful dealers in raw cotton, and his family’s firm, Brown Brothers & Co., served as one of the most important sources of capital and foreign exchange to the U.S. economy. Still, no small amount of his time was devoted to managing slaves from the study of his Leonard Street brownstone in Lower Manhattan.
Nicholas Biddle
Brown was hardly unusual among the capitalists of the North. Nicholas Biddle's United States Bank of Philadelphia funded banks in Mississippi to promote the expansion of plantation lands. Biddle recognized that slave-grown cotton was the only thing made in the U.S. that had the capacity to bring gold and silver into the vaults of the nation's banks. Likewise, the architects of New England's industrial revolution watched the price of cotton with rapt attention, for their textile mills would have been silent without the labor of slaves on distant plantations.
The story we tell about slavery is almost always regional, rather than national. We remember it as a cruel institution of the southern states that would later secede from the Union. Slavery, in this telling, appears limited in scope, an unfortunate detour on the nation's march to modernity, and certainly not the engine of American economic prosperity.
Yet to understand slavery's centrality to the rise of American capitalism, just consider the history of an antebellum Alabama dry-goods outfit called Lehman Brothers or a Rhode Island textile manufacturer that would become the antecedent firm of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
Reparations lawsuits (since dismissed) generated evidence of slave insurance policies by Aetna and put Brown University and other elite educational institutions on notice that the slave-trade enterprises of their early benefactors were potential legal liabilities. Recent state and municipal disclosure ordinances have forced firms such as J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Wachovia Corp. to confront unsettling ancestors on their corporate family trees.
Such revelations are hardly surprising in light of slavery’s role in spurring the nation’s economic development. America's "take-off" in the 19th century wasn't in spite of slavery; it was largely thanks to it. And recent research in economic history goes further: It highlights the role that commodified human beings played in the emergence of modern capitalism itself.
The U.S. won its independence from Britain just as it was becoming possible to imagine a liberal alternative to the mercantilist policies of the colonial era. Those best situated to take advantage of these new opportunities -- those who would soon be called "capitalists" -- rarely started from scratch, but instead drew on wealth generated earlier in the robust Atlantic economy of slaves, sugar and tobacco. Fathers who made their fortunes outfitting ships for distant voyages begat sons who built factories, chartered banks, incorporated canal and railroad enterprises, invested in government securities, and speculated in new financial instruments.
This recognizably modern capitalist economy was no less reliant on slavery than the mercantilist economy of the preceding century. Rather, it offered a wider range of opportunities to profit from the remote labor of slaves, especially as cotton emerged as the indispensable commodity of the age of industry.
In the North, where slavery had been abolished and cotton failed to grow, the enterprising might transform slave-grown cotton into clothing; market other manufactured goods, such as hoes and hats, to plantation owners; or invest in securities tied to next year's crop prices in places such as Liverpool and Le Havre. This network linked Mississippi planters and Massachusetts manufacturers to the era's great financial firms: the Barings, Browns and Rothschilds.
A major financial crisis in 1837 revealed the interdependence of cotton planters, manufacturers and investors, and their collective dependence on the labor of slaves. Leveraged cotton -- pledged but not yet picked -- led overseers to whip their slaves to pick more, and prodded auctioneers to liquidate slave families to cover the debts of the overextended.
The plantation didn't just produce the commodities that fueled the broader economy, it also generated innovative business practices that would come to typify modern management. As some of the most heavily capitalized enterprises in antebellum America, plantations offered early examples of time-motion studies and regimentation through clocks and bells. Seeking ever-greater efficiencies in cotton picking, slaveholders reorganized their fields, regimented the workday, and implemented a system of vertical reporting that made overseers into managers answerable to those above for the labor of those below.
The perverse reality of a capitalized labor force led to new accounting methods that incorporated (human) property depreciation in the bottom line as slaves aged, as well as new actuarial techniques to indemnify slaveholders from loss or damage to the men and women they owned. Property rights in human beings also created a lengthy set of judicial opinions that would influence the broader sanctity of private property in U.S. law.
So important was slavery to the American economy that on the eve of the Civil War, many commentators predicted that the North would kill "its golden goose." That prediction didn't come to pass, and as a result, slavery's importance to American economic development has been obscured.
But as scholars delve deeper into corporate archives and think more critically about coerced labor and capitalism -- perhaps informed by the current scale of human trafficking -- the importance of slavery to American economic history will become inescapable. (source: Bloomberg)
As reported in the New York Times, "Slave Policies," by Virginia Groark, on 5 May 2002 -- IN 1856, just five years before the outbreak of the Civil War, the Charter Oak Life Insurance Company printed a pamphlet offering slave owners in six Southern states the option of insuring the lives of their slaves.
For just $2, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee residents, for example, could purchase a 12-month policy from the Hartford-based insurer on a 10-year-old domestic servant that would yield $100 if the slave died. Policies for older slaves, like a 45-year-old, were more expensive, costing the slave owner $5.50 a year.
Though the company no longer exists, these policies are drawing increasing attention nearly 150 years later because of a lawsuit that was filed in United States District Court in Brooklyn, in late March against Aetna Inc. and two other companies, claiming that they profited from the slave trade.
In Connecticut, where insurance has long been a principal industry, the documents exhibit a painful reminder of the past, especially in a Northern state that is proud of its abolitionist ancestors like John Brown.
''It's not pleasant to talk about it today, to put it mildly, but slaves were insured just like any other thing that the farmers owned, that the slave owners owned,'' said Tom Baker, director of the Insurance Law Center at the University of Connecticut School of Law. ''If you were selling insurance in slave states to people who had plantations, that was one of the things that you sold.
''It was very common,'' he added. ''Basically, insurance and slavery go all the way back as far as American history.''
Aetna, which in 2000 apologized for its involvement in slavery, is the only insurance company to be named in the slave reparations lawsuit, though one of the plaintiff's lawyers, Roger S. Wareham, said he expected that other insurance companies would be sued.
A brief examination of documents demonstrates that Aetna was hardly the only company that engaged in the practice.
''It wasn't just the Aetna company,'' said Charles L. Blockson, curator of the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University. ''A lot of the old insurance companies, especially the ones that handled shipping in the Newport, R.I., area and New London.''
The problem for the plaintiffs, experts said, is that many firms are defunct, have changed names, destroyed old records, or have been absorbed by other companies. In addition, it is sometimes difficult to document ties to the slave trade.
In the case of slave ships, for example, 19th-century marine insurance policies often didn't identify the cargo on board. Instead, the policy simply stated that it insured ''goods'' on board.
''What strikes me from what I know already is that the records do not say clearly that slaves were insured,'' said Ugo Nwokeji, assistant professor of history at UConn. ''We cannot say that we know it was widespread, although it is well possible that it would have been widespread.''
The insurance industry's connection to slavery is not a new revelation. It has been written about in publications like Mr. Blockson's 1977 book, ''Black Genealogy.'' Even on eBay, the Internet auction site, copies of slave life insurance polices are for sale. And the tale of the slave ship Zong, in which 133 sick slaves were thrown overboard in 1781 so the ship's owners could collect insurance, has been studied for years.
The connection has gained greater attention in recent years because of the research of Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, the lead plaintiff in the federal lawsuit that was filed on March 26 against Aetna, the FleetBoston Financial Corporation and the CSX Corporation. Ms. Farmer-Paellmann first stumbled across slave insurance policies in 1997 while researching a slave reparations paper for a law school class. After reviewing different courses of action, she decided to focus on corporations and private estates that had been involved in slavery.
''And that's how I came into Aetna,'' she said.
Ms. Farmer-Paellmann, who said she is a descendant of slaves, continued to pursue the issue long after her class ended. In 2000, she called Aetna and requested that they send her copies of their policies. She said she received two.
''I was really moved when I saw the policies,'' she said. ''It's one thing to read about it and it's another thing to actually see a copy of the policy, and it really caused me to pause. I have to say it was a very emotional experience.''
So, she decided, it would be appropriate if Aetna apologized and paid retributions.
In March 2000, Aetna expressed ''deep regret'' that for a few years after its founding in 1853, Aetna Life Insurance insured the lives of slaves. Calling it a ''sad'' and ''disappointing chapter'' in the company's history, Aetna has said it only issued a ''small number'' of such policies. To date, the company has records of five policies on 16 lives and is aware of two policies that appeared in books, according to a company spokesman, who, because of the pending litigation, referred additional questions to a statement on the company's Web site.
In one policy, a woman named Mary Raby purchased a 12-month policy for $17.25 from Aetna's New Orleans office in October 1853. If the insured slave or slaves died, Ms. Raby would receive $600, according to a copy of the policy that appears in Dee Parmer Woodtor's book ''Finding a Place Called Home: A Guide to African-American Genealogy and Historical Identity'' (Random House, 1999).
Shortly after Aetna issued its apology, the California State Legislature passed a bill requiring all insurance companies that do business in the state to submit records of any slaveholder insurance policies.
To date, eight companies have submitted information, said Nancy Cramer, deputy press secretary for the California Department of Insurance. Five sent policies and the other three sent information on ships they may have insured, she said. The documents were released to the public last Wednesday.
The California law has prompted companies like Ace Ltd., a Bermuda-based insurance company, to search through archives looking for connections to the slave trade. The company hired a law firm to review its archives, including the records of Aetna Fire and Insurance Company and the Insurance Company of North America. Those companies later became part of Cigna's property and casualty holdings that Ace acquired in 1999. Ace did not find any evidence of slave life insurance policies written by Aetna Fire or the Insurance Company of North America, according to Lisa Fleishman-Hicks, a spokeswoman for Ace.
And though the Insurance Company of North America is one of the oldest insurance companies in the country, Ace compared its marine insurance records against those of known slave vessels and did not find that it had written or carried any policies on known slave vessels, Ms. Fleishman-Hicks said.
For companies that engaged in the practice, it was not necessarily a profitable business. In fact, the Hartford Life Insurance Company went out of business, in part, because of its practice of insuring slaves, according to P. Henry Woodward's 1897 book, ''Insurance in Connecticut.'' The business, which is not related to the current company of the same name, ''tried the experiment'' with insuring slaves ''by shiploads,'' according to the book.
''Although premiums were very high, they were still far from remunerative,'' he wrote. ''As a rule, the worst masters took out policies. Negroes were described as Caesar or Cato, Jim or Tom, and identification was so difficult that if any of a gang died, names in the proofs of loss were easily fitted to them.''
In addition, he wrote, the shippers knew the average percentage of loss ''and hence had every advantage in arranging terms.''
And even though Charter Oak Life Insurance offered policies on slaves, it was not necessarily a business it wanted to encourage, according to the 1856 pamphlet.
''The company is by no means solicitous of securing a large Negro insurance business unless the owners are careful and judicial men,'' Matthew Magill, a Kentucky-based general agent for Charter Oak Life Insurance, wrote in the 1856 pamphlet.
With documents showing that other companies engaged in the practice, is it right that Aetna, which said it has spent $36.5 million in the past 20 years on health initiatives and scholarships, among other things, for African-Americans , bear the burden of the insurance industry's involvement in the slave trade?
Mr. Baker of UConn, for one, doesn't think so.
''I just have a sense that it's unfair that a few companies have been singled out when the slave economy was something that the whole society bears some responsibility for,'' Mr. Baker said.
''My concern,'' he added, ''is more that to the extent that there is some moral responsibility, it should not be targeted to just a few people.''
Ms. Farmer-Paellmann said companies like Aetna are being held accountable for their past practices. Other businesses, she said, will be singled out in the future.
''This is, like I said, the first step,'' Ms. Farmer-Paellmann said. ''They have played a role and they should be held responsible, and later on down the road there will be more companies.'' (source: The New York Times)
As reported in the Economist, "The Suez crisis: An affair to remember. The Suez crisis of 50 years ago marked the end of an era, and the start of another, for Europe, America and the Middle East," from the July 27th 2006 print edition, by -- ON JULY 26th 1956 Gamal Abdul Nasser, president of Egypt, addressed a huge crowd in the city of Alexandria. Broad-shouldered, handsome and passionate, Nasser stunned even this gathering of enthusiastic supporters with the vehemence of his diatribe against British imperialism. Britain had ruled Egypt, one way or another, from 1882 to 1922, when the protectorate gained nominal independence, and continued to influence Egyptian affairs thereafter, maintaining troops there and propping up the decadent monarchy overthrown by Nasser in 1952.
In that speech in Alexandria, though, Nasser chose to delve back even further into history, in a long digression on the building of the Suez canal a century earlier. That gave him the chance to mention the name of the Frenchman who had built the canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps. This he did at least 13 times. “De Lesseps”, it turned out, was the codeword for the Egyptian army to start the seizure, and nationalisation, of the canal. It also launched the start of a new era in the politics of Europe, the Middle East and America.
The Suez crisis, as the events of the following months came to be called, marked the humiliating end of imperial influence for two European countries, Britain and France. It cost the British prime minister, Anthony Eden, his job and, by showing up the shortcomings of the Fourth Republic in France, hastened the arrival of the Fifth Republic under Charles de Gaulle. It made unambiguous, even to the most nostalgic blimps, America's supremacy over its Western allies. It thereby strengthened the resolve of many Europeans to create what is now the European Union. It promoted pan-Arab nationalism and completed the transformation of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute into an Israeli-Arab one. And it provided a distraction that encouraged the Soviet Union to put down an uprising in Hungary in the same year.
It also divided families and friends, at least in Britain and France, with a degree of bitterness that would not be seen in a foreign-policy dispute until the invasion of Iraq in 2003. If that is difficult to understand, remember that the world was a different place then. Many European politicians still believed their countries had a right to run the affairs of others. Many were also scarred by memories of appeasement in the 1930s. Faced with a provocation, even an entirely legal one involving the nationalisation of a foreign-owned asset like the Suez canal, the instinct of such Europeans was to go to war. They and their Israeli partners-in-invasion were restrained, eventually, by the United States, led by a Republican president and war hero, Dwight Eisenhower. The venture involved intrigue, lies, nemesis—and no end of a lesson. How did it come about?
The road to collusion
In Egypt, the British had become so resented for their racist, arrogant ways that by the early 1950s even Winston Churchill, the grand old imperialist who had returned as prime minister in 1951, felt he could resist the tide of nationalism no more. After 1951 the British were confined to the Suez canal zone, harassed by Egyptian irregulars who wanted them out altogether. By June 1956 the last British soldiers had left even the canal zone.
Yet Anglo-Egyptian relations did not improve. Nasser was enraged by America's withdrawal of its offer of loans to help pay for the building of a dam on the Nile at Aswan. This project was central to his ambitions to modernise Egypt. But John Foster Dulles, the American secretary of state, thought the dam would place too much strain on the resources of newly independent Egypt.
For their part, the British, mistrustful of Nasser and feeling the pinch, were also ready to withdraw their loan offer. So, thought Dulles, best to let the Russians take on the dam, as he knew they would if the West backed out. He did not, however, bargain for Nasser's immediate response—the nationalisation of the Suez canal, whose revenues, Nasser argued, Egypt now needed to replace the loans promised by Britain and America for the dam.
The reaction in Britain was unanimous in condemning “Grabber Nasser”, as the Daily Mirror put it. Comparisons were immediately made to Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s: if he got away with this, where would he—and other emboldened post-colonial leaders—stop? Eden, who had succeeded Churchill as prime minister the year before, argued that the canal was Britain's “great imperial lifeline”, especially for oil. Nasser could not be allowed to have his hand “on our windpipe”.
The French reacted just as strongly, but for different reasons. First, they had a stake in the Paris-based company that ran the canal. Second, they were fighting an increasingly nasty little colonial war in Algeria. The new government of Guy Mollet was resolved to put down an Arab uprising there with all the force that the Fourth Republic could muster. By the summer of 1956 France had about 400,000 soldiers in Algiers. Nasser backed the Arab insurgents, so the French were as eager as the British to see the back of him. Accordingly, Britain and France started to co-ordinate plans for a military invasion of Egypt and a reoccupation of the canal zone.
But their bellicosity was matched by the scepticism of the Americans, and of Eisenhower in particular, who from the beginning was against the use of force by his two main allies. One concern for him was the presidential election due that November, which he intended to win as the incumbent “peace” president. He knew that the voters would not thank him for taking them into a foreign imbroglio in which America had no direct interest.
Eisenhower was also motivated by an anti-imperialism rooted in the attitudes that had made Americans break free from the British empire. Intensifying his scepticism was a fear that, in the new cold war, any British and French bullying of Egypt would alienate Arabs, Asians and Africans and drive them towards the communist camp. To head off Anglo-French military action, Eisenhower and his secretary of state ensnared the Europeans in a fruitless round of talks and conferences.
Aware that they were on shaky legal ground for an invasion, the British and French reluctantly played along. But they were losing the momentum for military action, which was the American intention. The increasingly histrionic Eden, in particular, wanted not only the reversal of the canal's nationalisation but also regime change: he wanted Nasser “destroyed”.
The Israelis provided a way out. On September 30th a delegation secretly presented the French with a fabricated casus belli: Israel would invade Egypt and race to the canal. The French and British could then invade, posing as peacekeepers to separate the two sides, and occupy the canal, ostensibly to guarantee the free passage of shipping. When this plan was presented to Eden, he jumped at it. Thus was collusion born. The details were agreed on at a secret meeting in Sèvres, outside Paris. Not for nothing is the Suez crisis known in Egypt as the “tripartite aggression”.
The British and French forces now had a pretext to invade. For the Israelis, it would punish Egypt for its escalating incursions into Israel from Gaza. It would also hitch the major European powers to the cause of Israel: up to that point, the French had tried to be even-handed between Israel and its neighbours; the British had leaned towards the Arab states.
A complete mess and botch
Only a handful of people were let in on the collusion. Most of them thought it was mad from the start, arguing, quite correctly, that the cover for the invasion was so flimsy it would soon be blown. To disguise what was going on, the British, in particular, were drawn ever deeper into a bog of lies and deception, particularly with the Americans. Parliament was also deceived. Both Eden and Selwyn Lloyd, his foreign secretary, told the House of Commons that, as Lloyd put it, “there was no prior agreement” with Israel.
On October 29th, Israeli paratroopers, led by a zealous officer called Ariel Sharon, were dropped into Sinai to fulfil their side of the bargain. Feigning surprise, the British and French issued an ultimatum to both sides to cease fire. When the Egyptians rejected this, British planes started bombing the Egyptian air force on the ground and on November 5th Anglo-French troops went ashore to begin the invasion of the canal zone and, it was hoped, topple Nasser.
Eisenhower, kept completely in the dark, felt utterly betrayed by his erstwhile allies. “I've just never seen great powers make such a complete mess and botch of things,” he told his aides. He determined to put a stop to the whole enterprise.
America struck at Britain's fragile economy. It refused to allow the IMF to give emergency loans to Britain unless it called off the invasion. Faced by imminent financial collapse, as the British Treasury saw it, on November 7th Eden surrendered to American demands and stopped the operation, with his troops stranded half way down the canal. The French were furious, but obliged to agree; their troops were under British command.
America also proved adept at working through the UN. On November 2nd an American resolution demanding a ceasefire was passed by a majority of 64 to five, the Russians voting with the United States. And to sidestep Anglo-French vetoes at the Security Council, for the first time the General Assembly met in emergency session (where no country held a veto) and took up a Canadian suggestion to assemble an international emergency force to go to the canal and monitor the ceasefire. These were to be the first “blue hat” UN peacekeepers. The organisation was one of the clear winners of the crisis, gaining an enhanced role in the world. For the other participants in the drama, the consequences were more mixed.
The French drew the clearest lessons. Suez showed that they could never rely on perfide Albion. Britain, then Europe's strongest power, would, it seemed, always put its “special” relationship with America above its European interests. And the Americans, to the French, were both unreliable and annoyingly superior.
So the French would have to look elsewhere for more durable allies—a search that was, by one account, short. The story goes that on the evening of November 6th, when Mollet got the call from Eden that he was aborting the invasion, he happened to be with the German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. The French foreign minister, Christian Pineau, records Adenauer as saying that “France and England will never be powers comparable to the United States...Not Germany either. There remains to them only one way of playing a decisive role in the world: that is to unite Europe...We have no time to waste; Europe will be your revenge.”
Thus was born the six-country European common market, which has now become the 25-country European Union. The founding Treaty of Rome was signed the very next year, in 1957. And the French, particularly Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, kept the British, America's Trojan horse, out of it for as long as they could, until 1973. France had by then made itself truly independent of American military power (unlike the British) by building its own nuclear deterrent from scratch and, in 1966, leaving NATO's integrated command structure.
It should have been no surprise, then, that in the months before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it was the French who played the American role of 1956, though Jacques Chirac could hardly deliver the coup de grâce, as Eisenhower had done in 1956. In reaction to Suez, France had constructed a new identity as the ostensible leader of Europe, upholding a set of universal values in competition with the Americans.
The British were hurt most by Suez. Eden resigned soon afterwards, his health wrecked, his reputation in tatters, his lies and evasions damaging the country's always tendentious reputation for fair play. The crisis exploded Britain's lingering imperial pretensions, and hastened the independence of its colonies.
Some talked of a “Suez syndrome”, where, in Margaret Thatcher's words, Britain's rulers “went from believing that Britain could do anything to an almost neurotic belief that Britain could do nothing”. Certainly, much of Mrs Thatcher's prime ministership, particularly the retaking of the Falklands in 1982, was an essay in exorcising the demons of Suez. Tony Blair has not been afraid to take advantage of her success, by deploying British power in Sierra Leone, the Balkans and Iraq.
But never without the Americans' support. The major lesson of Suez for the British was that the country would never be able to act independently of America again. Unlike the French, who have sought to lead Europe, most British politicians have been content to play second fiddle to America.
Eden recuperated from the crisis in Ian Fleming's house, Goldeneye, in Jamaica. It was an appropriate choice, as it was Fleming who was to mythologise the new relationship in his James Bond novels. The first, “Casino Royale”, was published to little attention in 1953, but the series took off in the years after the Suez crisis, offering some sort of literary consolation to a country coming to terms with its new, humbler status. The partnership between Bond and Felix Leiter, a CIA agent, reflected the way the British now liked to see things, the one suave, smart and endlessly resourceful, the other with a lot of money and a slightly plodding manner.
Eisenhower won his election in America. The crisis affirmed the country's new status as the global superpower, challenged only by the Soviet Union. Suez was also to be the last incident in which America was to take strong action against Israel. As Eisenhower had feared, the Russians moved into the Middle East to fill the gap left by the disorderly retreat of the British, so the Americans felt compelled to get in as well. Thus the cold war spread to north Africa and Egypt (the Russians duly stepped in to finance the Aswan dam, and much else), and Israel became ever more closely tied to the United States.
Before 1956, Israel had been militarily vulnerable, but, beyond the Arab world, morally and politically unassailable. The Israeli occupation of Sinai (and Gaza) in 1956 began the gradual inversion of this state of affairs, as it marked the first expansion of Israel beyond its original borders, with all the subsequent criticisms of its occupation of Arab or Palestinian land. In 1956 the Israelis were quickly forced to withdraw from Sinai by American (and Russian) pressure. Never again, however, would an American president face down Israel as Eisenhower had done at Suez.
The rise of Nasserism
The chief victor of Suez, in the short term, was Nasser. Before the crisis he had faced lingering opposition in Egypt, not only from the former ruling class but also from communists and the radical Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood. “Pulling the Lion's tail”, and getting away with it, proved wildly popular. As dissidents fled, fell silent or filled its jails, Nasser's Egypt projected itself as the vanguard of Arab nationalism and a beacon to liberation movements across the third world.
Puffed up by his own success, Nasser launched misguided adventures such as a short-lived political union with Syria and disastrous nationalisations of Egyptian industry. And the Nasserist dream inspired a wave of pan-Arab nationalism that helped install lookalike leaderships, with similar flags, propaganda and secret police, across much of the Arab world. Saddam Hussein was one who drew inspiration. Nasser himself was largely discredited by Israel's crushing victory in the 1967 war, but the institutions of Nasserism still lived on, in Egypt and elsewhere, as effective systems of political control.
Nasser's 1956 triumph endured in Arab memory as a moment of cathartic liberation. It inspired, to some extent, Saddam's dramatic moves, such as invading Iran and later Kuwait. A famous Egyptian film, “Nasser 56”, lingers nostalgically over the Egyptian leader. Amid rousing music, he is portrayed in black and white, shrouded in pensive solitude by a swirl of cigarette smoke, reaching his momentous decision to nationalise the canal. But the film jumps to the happy outcome, ignoring the fact that Nasser's victory was not won by this new Arab superman, but delivered by superpower intervention.
A wider lesson lies in the interpretation of history. Eden, who had honourably resigned as foreign secretary in 1938 in disapproval of the appeasement of Hitler and, especially, Mussolini, was nonetheless haunted by Neville Chamberlain's readiness to yield to tyrants. His impulses at Suez were surely complex. Eden was far from anti-American or indifferent to American concerns. He had resigned in 1938 partly because he thought his prime minister, Chamberlain, had treated Roosevelt shabbily. Yet he saw Nasser as a “Mussolini” and was plainly determined to avoid any charge of appeasement, even though the essential features of Munich and Suez were wholly different. Instead of saying that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, George Santayana might have better said that those who misinterpret the past are condemned to bungle the present. (source: The Economist)
