Complicity: How The North Profited From Slavery

Complicity' Explores Hypocrisy Of North's Virtue, book review, on 26 September 2005, by WALTER W. WOODWARD; Special to The Courant Walter W.. Woodward is Connecticut State Historian and an assistant professor of history at the University of Connecticut.

Here is a book you may not want to pick up but won't be able to put down. It is history written with the urgency of breaking news, a journalist's ear for the perfect quotation and an unflinching sensitivity to the human dimensions of a most intentionally inhuman institution.

It addresses an ugly historical reality to which readers of The Courant have already been partially exposed through two special issues of its Northeast magazine. What those publications began, the book completes.

``Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited From Slavery'' is a powerful indictment of the American North for its pervasive racism both before and after the Civil War and for its full complicity in profiting from and practicing enslavement.

``Complicity,'' by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang and Jenifer Frank (Ballantine Books, 288 pp., $25.95), explodes the myth of moral superiority with which Northerners have mantled themselves since the Civil War. In 10 image-rich chapters, the North's profound engagement with slavery from the 1600s to the 1900s -- yes, the 1900s -- is told through stories that will surprise and disturb.

The authors begin with the 1861 declaration by Mayor Fernando Wood that New York City should secede from the United States. His reasoning was simple. Southern cotton -- slave-picked, -ginned and -baled -- was the lifeblood of New York's economy.

The fulcrum of an international cotton trade, New York merchants scrambled to supply Southern planters with luxury goods while the city's shipwrights built vessels to transport cotton and sometimes human merchandise. Wood believed New York's best interests lay in following the money -- right out of the Union.

The slave-based profits made by the South's Lords of the Lash were matched in New England by those of the Lords of the Loom, northern industrialists whose mills in 1850 consumed 150 million pounds of cotton a year. Ironically, America's first power-driven mill was funded by a Providence abolitionist, Moses Brown, whose brother John tried to succeed in the slave trade. Cotton indeed became, as Emerson said, ``The thread that holds the union together,''

New England's economic dependence on slavery did not begin with Eli Whitney's cotton gin. ``Complicity'' looks back to the 17th-century Puritan trade with the West Indies, when Yankee food, horses and wood sustained a Caribbean sugar industry that consumed slaves by the tens of thousands.

Slave plantations in Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York supported that trade. So did the slave traders of Newport and Bristol, R.I., who in the 18th century carried rum distilled from West Indies molasses to Africa to trade for slaves at 150 gallons per man. Rhode Island slavers transported more human cargo across the Middle Passage than any other American state. Even after slave trading was made a capital crime in 1820, a contraband trade continued out of New York until the Civil War.

The North never had the slave populations the South did. But was Northern captivity -- in which slaves were raised ``family style''-- more benign than its Southern counterparts? Chapters on the life of the Connecticut captive Venture Smith and the 1741 slave uprising in New York that led to 13 slaves' being burned at the stake help convey the cruelty embedded in the Northern slave experience as well as the many forms of resistance employed by captive people.

Northerners still take pride in their participation in the Underground Railroad. Few mention its counterpart, the kidnapping of free blacks from the North into slavery. This practice was rampant, especially in the mid-Atlantic states, where gangs of kidnappers made being free uncertain and insecure. ``Complicity'' documents this as another form of slave trade, sanctioned by racism, fugitive slave laws and onerous Supreme Court decisions. It also documents the Northern hatred that greeted abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Prudence Crandall. Particularly moving are the stories of Elijah Lovejoy, assassinated while defending his printing press from a mob in Alton, Ill., and the brief but powerful recounting of the life and death of John Brown.

Belief in white supremacy lay at the heart of Northern tolerance for slavery and racism. ``Complicity'' documents how 19th-century Northern intellectuals provided a scientific foundation for the most extreme forms of racism. The Philadelphia physician Samuel George Morton's study of skull sizes led him to argue that whites and blacks were permanently different. His colleague Josiah Nott and Harvard's Louis Agassiz went further, saying whites and blacks were different species, blacks permanently inferior.

The most powerful chapter of ``Complicity'' may be the last, which tells of the late-19th-century rise to prominence of the towns of Ivoryton and Deep River. Their wealth came from producing a product essential for that staple of Victorian refinement, the parlor piano. This product, ivory veneer for piano keys, was cut from the heavy elephants' tusks carried by slaves from deep in the African interior to the coast for shipment to Connecticut.

Two businesses, one owned by abolitionists, the other by a utopian industrialist, controlled 75 percent of the ivory production in America. Yet neither had a problem growing rich through a trade that led -- through their purchases alone -- to the deaths or enslavement of 2 million Africans. This ability to separate profit from human rights is a characteristic of so many of the Northern whites who figure in ``Complicity.''

``What kinds of people were these?'' I wonder indignantly. Only later, when I slip on my Malaysia-manufactured shoes and Mexico-manufactured slacks and shirt and sit in my bargain-priced Thailand-manufactured chair, do I realize the truth: They were people like me.

Professional historians may find a number of things to quibble about in ``Complicity.'' It makes a huge argument by selectively surveying moments that emphasize Northern racism and slavery. The authors make no effort to explain why, for instance, New York City did not secede, and why hundreds of thousands of Northerners abandoned the cotton economy to battle the South.

There is, I think, an element of special pleading in this book. But it is an effort to counter-balance a myth about Northern virtue that itself has been based on special pleading of the most tenuous kind.

For that reason, and because of the quality of its writing, the power of its narrative and the clarity of its voice, you should read this book -- and get others to do so, too.  (source: Hartford Courant)

Lord Mansfield's Slave Neice Named Dido

From the UK Telegraph, "Slave girl who changed history," by Anita Singh, Arts and Entertainment Editor, on 26 April 2014  -- The remarkable relationship between an 18th century English judge and his cousin's illegitimate black daughter that lay at the heart of the abolition of slavery is to be turned into a film

Earlier this year, the film 12 Years A Slave — a searingly brutal account of the helplessness of 19th-century slaves in America’s Deep South — swept the “best picture” category at the leading Hollywood award ceremonies.

Now, a new film made in Britain will tell the story of the remarkable relationship that may have lain at the heart of the abolition of slavery on this side of the Atlantic.

It centres on the 1st Earl of Mansfield, the most influential Lord Chief Justice of the 18th century, and the woman he helped to raise — Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of a black slave woman.

The film was inspired by a portrait of Dido that shows her with her playmate, Lady Elizabeth Murray, a great-niece who was also in the care of Lord Mansfield.

At first glance, the picture, which hangs in the Mansfield family seat of Scone Palace in Scotland, appears simply to show a young English lady and her slave.

Yet it is the fine taffeta gown and jewels of the dark-skinned girl that tell a different tale and provide the merest glimpse of Dido’s extraordinary role in history.

Dido was born in 1761 as the illegitimate daughter of a Royal Navy captain, John Lindsay, and a black slave woman brought to England on board his ship.

When Lindsay returned to sea, he placed the little girl in the care of his childless uncle, Lord Mansfield.

Dido was raised amid the splendour of Kenwood House in Hampstead, north London, Lord Mansfield’s weekend retreat. Remarkably for the times, when Georgian England was dominated by rules on class and colour, Dido was treated almost as one of the family.

The film, Belle, makes the striking claim that Lord Mansfield’s fondness for Dido helped to shape both his views on race and legal rulings that paved the way for the abolition of slavery.

The director, Amma Asante, said: “I think it would be disingenuous to believe her presence in the house didn’t have some impact on him. It makes for a fascinating story to think that his love for this child opened his eyes.” Belle stars Tom Wilkinson and Emily Watson as Lord and Lady Mansfield. Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who played Ophelia opposite Jude Law in an acclaimed production of Hamlet, has her first starring role, as Dido.

“When people think of ‘dual heritage’ they think it’s a modern concept, but really it’s not. Dido’s story needs to be known,” the actress said.

Dido was taken in as a playmate for Lady Elizabeth Murray after her mother’s death. The girls were constant companions and received a similar education, but Dido’s position in the household was complex. She was dressed in the same fine silks as Elizabeth but not allowed to eat with the family at formal occasions.

Nevertheless, her presence at Kenwood shocked society. One visitor, Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts, noted in his diary: “A Black came in after dinner and sat with the ladies, and after coffee, walked with the company in the gardens, one of the young ladies having her arm within the other.

“[Lord Mansfield] calls her Dido, which I suppose is all the name she has. He knows he has been reproached for shewing [sic] a fondness for her.”

Lord Mansfield commissioned the portrait of Dido and Elizabeth, attributed to Johann Zoffany, the royal artist, in 1779.

The screenwriter Misan Sagay was inspired by the painting when she came across it in Scone Palace. It came to the attention of the producer, Damian Jones, who was fascinated by the subject matter. “I was astonished to see this completely ambiguous portrait,” he recalled. “Were they friends? Were they sisters? Was one a servant? You couldn’t tell.

“I think it’s fair to say most portraits of the period do not feature black people, unless they’re obviously servants or slaves.”

Lord Mansfield ruled on two landmark cases that were to change history.

In 1772, when Dido was 11, he ruled that it was illegal for a British owner to forcibly take his slave abroad as “property”. Thomas Hutchinson wrote that slave owners believed Lord Mansfield was determined to set slaves free because “he keeps a Black in his house which governs him and the whole family”.

Nine years later, he ruled on one of the darkest episodes in Britain’s colonial history. The crew of the Zong slave ship threw more than 100 African slaves overboard in order to claim insurance for “jettisoned cargo”. But in a blow to the slave traders, Lord Mansfield threw out the claim.

The case provided fuel for the anti-abolitionist cause, which succeeded in ending Britain’s slave trade in 1807. It was abolished in 1833.

Dido married her father’s legal apprentice, and moved to Pimlico.

Lord Mansfield’s will contained the note: “I confirm to Dido Elizabeth Belle her freedom.”

Dido’s last traceable descendant, Harold Davinier, died in 1975 — a white South African living in the era of apartheid. (source: UK Telegraph)

"Slaves to Prejudice" by Maureen Dowd

From the New York Times, "Slaves to Prejudice," by Maureen Dowd, on 26 April 2014 -- WASHINGTON — WHEN a cranky anarchist in a cowboy hat starts a sentence saying “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” you can be dang sure it’s going downhill from there.

The unsettling thing about Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s ugly rant on the Virgin River on Saturday, The Times’s Adam Nagourney told me, was that there was no negative reaction from the semicircle of gun-toting and conspiracy-minded supporters who had gathered round to hear it. The oblivious 67-year-old Bundy, who has refused for 20 years to pay for his cattle to graze on our land, offered a nostalgic ode to slavery.

Recalling that he saw African-Americans sitting on the porch of a public-housing project in North Las Vegas who seemed to have “nothing to do,” Bundy declaimed: “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy?”

The man hailed as a “savior” and “folk hero” by Fox News doubled down Thursday, declaring: “Cliven Bundy’s a-wondering” if the black community was happier during slave days when “they was in the South in front of their homes with their chickens and their gardens and their children around them and their men having something to do.”

By Friday, he was saying that all Americans are slaves to the government and comparing himself to Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Just another dark-ages bigot who goes nuts at the idea that whites are losing clout in an America run by a New Age black president. What’s the use of being white, after all, if you can’t be king of the hill — even if the hill really belongs to the government?

Conservatives saw no hypocrisy in rallying around Bundy for breaking the law, refusing to pay between $1 and $2 a month per cow to graze on federal land, while they refuse to consider amnesty for illegal immigrants committing Acts of Love.

Rand Paul, the libertarian senator from Kentucky who wants to be the Republican presidential nominee, took almost a day to distance himself from the self-immolating Bundy. Paul was so worried about alienating the segment of the party that will decide the nomination, he couldn’t even respond quickly to say the most simple thing on earth: Racism is bad.

As BuzzFeed reported, Chris McDaniel, a G.O.P. state senator mounting a strong challenge to Thad Cochran in the Mississippi Republican primary, has written blog posts blaming the “welfare dependent citizens of New Orleans” for not finding higher ground during Katrina, charging that “Mexicans” entering the country are hurting “our culture” and calling racial profiling of Muslims a “victory for common sense.”

From cockfighting rallies to online gun sweepstakes to cracks about “wetbacks” to waxing nostalgic about slavery, the Republican fringe has gone mainstream. When the younger stars of the G.O.P. race to embrace a racist anarchist lionized by Sean Hannity, it underscores the party’s lack of leadership or direction.

After making noise about reaching out to women (even as Senate Republicans unanimously blocked a vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act and Republican legislatures around the country pass more abortion restrictions), the G.O.P. now has the delightful Det Bowers out there doing marital counseling. Politico reported that the wacky 62-year-old evangelical minister, who is challenging Lindsey Graham in the South Carolina G.O.P. Senate primary, once asserted that 95 percent of broken marriages are caused by women giving more attention to their children than to their husbands. “He did run off with some other woman, and you packed his bags,” Bowers said, adding: “You just ran him off. You paid more attention to your children than you did to him. ‘Oh, he doesn’t need me?’ He needs you more than they do. He chose you, they didn’t. An abominable idolatry.”

It’s a measure of how hallucinogenic conservatives are that they are trying to re-litigate slavery during the second term of the first African-American president.

Earlier this month, Jim DeMint, Tea-Party godfather and president of the Heritage Foundation, bizarrely told a Christian radio station that it was not “big government” that freed the slaves, but “the conscience of the American people” and Abraham Lincoln, a Republican. (Umm, wasn’t he big government along with his hundreds of thousands of troops?)

In another case of inexplicable foot-dragging, Rand Paul was reluctant to cut loose Jack Hunter, his social media director and co-author on a Tea Party book, after the media wrote about his past life as a shock jock named the Southern Avenger who advocated secession, wore a Confederate flag mask, toasted John Wilkes Booth, and complained that whites are “not afforded the same right to celebrate their own cultural identity” because anything “that is considered ‘too white’ is immediately suspect.”

At Harvard’s Institute of Politics on Friday, Paul said that “The Republican Party will adapt, evolve or die.”

He might want to listen to his own advice. (source: The New York Times)

Slave Rebellion in the Age of Liberty

As reviewed in the UK Guardian, in an article entitled, "The Empire of Necessity: The Untold History of a Slave Rebellion in the Age of Liberty; Michael Moorcock on a tale of revolt on board a slave ship that explores the interdependency of liberty and slavery in the US," by Michael Moorcock, on 16 April 2014 --  On 20 February 1805 in the remote bay of an uninhabited island off the Chilean coast, Captain Amasa Delano from Massachusetts, reduced to seal-hunting for a bad living, anchored his ship the Perseverance to take on fresh supplies of water and fish. Suddenly another ship, the Tryal, flying the Spanish flag, lumbered out of the morning mist. She was in desperate condition, her rigging ragged, boats missing, her complement reduced to a handful of half-starved sailors and with a cargo of unchained west African slaves.

The Empire of Necessity: The Untold History of a Slave Rebellion in the Age of Liberty

by Greg Grandin

When Delano boarded the Tryal he found her half-mad captain, Benito Cerreño, supported on the arms of his Muslim body-slaves Babo and Mori. The Spaniard sobbed out a fragmented story of losing hands, boats, passengers and cargo to sickness and the elements. He appealed to the good-hearted American for help. Astonished by the lack of discipline aboard, which he attributed to Cerreño's poor health and seamanship, Delano swiftly sent his longboat back to the Perseverance for supplies. An abolitionist, Delano was nonetheless impressed by the apparent devotion of the two slaves, father and son, who refused to be separated for a moment from their master.

Only as Delano left the ship did the charade collapse. Stumbling to the rail Cerraño leapt recklessly into the American's departing boat babbling of his capture and torture by the Africans. The slaves had revolted, killing most whites aboard, including the trader who owned them. Under threat of death, Cerreño and the others were forced to play out a charade for Delano. As soon as he returned to his own ship the Yankee organised pursuit of the rebels. Ultimately they were caught, and the ringleaders hideously punished. The main cargo of salvaged slaves were put up for sale, whereupon they and the ship became subject to a prolonged legal battle between the two captains as to their ownership. All this was recorded in Delano's memoirs, published in 1817 after his return to Boston and relative poverty. Soon after the publication (and commercial failure) of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville used Delano's account as the substance of his powerful novella "Benito Cereno", published in Putnam's Magazine in 1855. The story almost certainly appealed to the author as a parable examining the extraordinary relationship between slavery and liberty. As Greg Grandin points out in this remarkable book, the Age of Liberty and the Age of Slavery were the same. One simply could not have existed without the other.

The interdependency of apparent opposites fascinated Melville as it did a number of 19th-century American writers, including the superbly civilised transcendentalists (such as Emerson and Thoreau). The lives of settlers revealed this tangled truth on a daily basis and reflected their fascination with nature in the raw. Perhaps not entirely consciously, Melville understood Delano's story to be a metaphor for his young nation.

The American conscience has always been troubled by its relationship to genocide and slavery and, as Grandin points out, Melville throughout his writing life examined the anomalies by which people lived, dependent on death to sustain life and on slavery to sustain freedom. The American revolution was financed in great part by slavery and the young American state probably could not have continued without it. Of all the chief South and North American nations, only Canada remained attached to the original colonial power, and only Canada's economy did not depend on slavery. Indeed, the relatively small number of slaves in that country were mostly natives, captured and owned by other natives in the pursuit of inter-tribal war. By remaining attached to the mother country, Canada also seems to have resisted anything like mass genocide and remains the most equitable of the North American nations.

Melville took Delano's account and increased its narrative tensions, changing it only a little, but building up a dark, terrifying atmosphere as Delano gradually begins to realise something is wrong, and yet is unable, through his natural Yankee amiability, to determine what makes him so uneasy as black mothers sing a sinister dirge and west African carpenters clash axes they are apparently cleaning. His questions are answered mysteriously by Captain Cereno, so that the American suspects rudeness and social inadequacy in the Spaniard. Only in the dramatically improved ending, with Cereno and his men risking their lives in the sea and the enraged slaves pursuing them, does it dawn on him that those "rude blacks" he believed incapable of such subterfuge were actually the masters, and that his own prejudices allowed him to play into the hands of Babo and his rebels.

In a superbly argued and richly detailed account of the interdependencies of slavery and revolution throughout the Americas, as well as the religious traditions of Protestantism, Catholicism and Islam (many of the west Africans were educated Muslims), Grandin brings to vivid life the realities of the period, pointing out that, of the estimated 12,500,000 Africans carried to the Americas between 1514 and 1866, at least half were boarded after 4 July 1776. Many slaves were expert craftspeople; many, educated in madrasas, were literate; and some even owned or traded in slaves themselves. The slave trade boomed when it was liberalised by the Spanish crown after Spain failed to control the smuggling of black Africans. Numbers increased after 1800 as the US economy became increasingly reliant on slavery. The butchery of fur- and oil-bearing mammals on land and sea supplied the money to buy the slaves working the mines and fields of the New World, just as genocide of indigenous people supplied the land and precious metals. One person's freedom was all but impossible without another's servitude.

Melville, coming from a New England abolitionist tradition, did not make an obvious allegory out of Delano's account, and his black slaves are not shown to be particularly sophisticated or subtle – with the exception of Babo who, in a tense and sinister scene, insists on shaving the man he pretends is his master while Cereno, terrified, submits to his ministrations. When the truth is revealed the Africans become the savage, insensate force shown in DW Griffiths's film Birth of a Nation, but even here we can imagine that such a howling, furious mob can easily represent the form the guilt-ridden white unconscious most expects retribution to take.

Terrified by the Haitian revolution, republican France did all it could to suppress the first black state in the Americas. That revolution affected the imaginations of other imperial powers, as well as those beginning to emerge from under the European heel. Events on the Tryal symbolised a great deal to even the most liberal whites, and continued to offer subject matter to writers other than Melville. Both Pablo Neruda and the Uruquayan experimental novelist Tomás de Mattos were attracted to the topic, depicting Babo as far more of a hero than did Melville. Grandin's skill is that, as in his recent Fordlandia, a study of American utopianism through the dreams of Henry Ford, he can find metaphors that subtly reflect the vital dichotomies that pervade the American psyche.  (source: The UK Guardian)

Benguela in the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Benguela [Angola] in the Transatlantic Slave Trade

A 27-year civil war ruined Angola's transport infrastructure

Once a major slave-trading port linking Africa to Brazil, in the 20th Century Benguela became the terminus for the Benguela railway.

In its heyday the railway stretched 1,370km from the nearby port town Lobito to Luau on the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. (source: BBC)

An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and its Hinterland, by Mariana Candido

From the University of Chicago International Studies, "Rethinking How Slavery Changed Africa," by Claire Withycombe, on 5 December 2012  --  African Studies Distinguished Lecturer Mariana Candido says the transatlantic slave trade is more important in the history of West Africa than previously thought.

In the coastal city of Benguela, Angola, a stack of concrete triangles is oriented upright, so that the edge of the largest pierces the sky, a stiff geometric contrast to an infinite blue expanse. The assemblage forms a monument to the 1617 arrival of the founder of the Portuguese colony of Benguela, Manuel Ceveira Pereira. Today, it is the only deliberate reminder of the city’s colonial past.

A photograph of the monument figured prominently in Princeton University history professor Mariana Candido’s presentation on the role of Benguela in the transatlantic network, which sought to re-evaluate the popular assertion that the region’s colonial and slave trading past was peripheral to developments in the Atlantic world.

Candido was invited to the University to deliver the first African Studies Distinguished Lecture on November 27th, sponsored by the Committee on African Studies and the Center for International Studies. Her lecture was titled, "Reevaluating the 'Marginal Institution': The Role of Benguela, Angola in the Transatlantic Slave Trade."

In Candido’s view, the Pereira monument denotes a critical gap in the historiography of West Central Africa. “The history of slavery is central to understanding the history of this region,” she said.

While past scholars and contemporary colleagues have emphasized continuity and stability in the period extending from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Candido argued that documents from Benguela demonstrate that the slave trade undeniably and irreversibly changed many dimensions of life in West Central Africa.

Candido explained that because of the “pressures of the Atlantic economy...people migrated from the coast into the interior.” The growing commerce in slaves “shifted the trade roots, affected agricultural production and the local diet, and favored the spread of slave routes, as well as led to the collapse of old states and emergence of new ones,” she said.

Documentation that Candido unearthed regarding slaves in the U.S., Brazil, and elsewhere further connects the city to developments beyond its shores, she said, and demonstrates the “importance of incorporating research on the African diaspora to understand changes that took place in the African continent before the twentieth century.”

Okay, this photo has NOTHING to do with the subject, but I found it to be a very humorous image from Benguela, Angola. (source:  MARIÁ F. MARTINS - PRONTO PARA FAZER UM CABRITE EM BENGUELA - ANGOLA)

Portuguese colonizers introduced a variety of important transformative measures, including creation of colonial bureaucracy, religious conversions, and the forced signage of vassalage treaties which required African rulers to accept “a series of obligations such as payment of tribute and adoption of Christianity,” Candido said.

In a question-and-answer session that followed the lecture, Candido addressed audience members’s questions about gender relations during the colonial period, the significance of road construction under colonial rule, and the broader theological justification of Portuguese colonization.  (source:  University of Chicago International Studies)

The Slave Angélique and The Burning of Montreal

This is an French to English translation from the Africa Record's Nerrati-Press Network, in an article entitled, "Angelica: The Killing Of A Black Slave In New France (Currently Quebec, Canada)," by Lencrenoir, on 4 June 2013 --  Angélique was born in Portugal, which was a major player in the lucrative Atlantic slave trade, and was then sold to a man named Flemish Block Nichus or Nicolas Bleeker which led to the New World. She lived in New England before being sold in 1725 to a major French businessman Montreal named François Poulin de Francheville , and after his death in 1733 , it belonged to his wife Teresa of Couagne .

Slavery in New England and New France was essentially domestic, as opposed to the southern part of what became the United States economy n 'was not based on the work of large-scale planting. Angélique has therefore worked at home Francheville in Montreal, and sometimes helped the small family farm on the island of Montreal, which was mainly used to produce goods for commercial expeditions family Francheville.

Angélique had three children in Montreal: A boy born in 1731 who lived only a month and a twin in 1732 , both died within five months after their births. Recorded in official documents Baptism father was Jacques César , a black slave who belonged to Madagascar Ignace Gamelin , a friend of Francheville. It is not known if Angelique and Jacques were lovers by choice or if their owners were forced to reproduce.

During the year preceding the fire and the trial, Angélique became involved in a relationship with Claude Thibault , a white indentured servant, who was employed by the Francheville . Following the death of Mr. Francheville in November 1733 , the operation of its business and succession occupy much time Ms. Francheville . In early 1734 , being taken by real estate business in Trois-Rivières, the widow asked his brother Alexis Monière keep his slave and servant for her until her return.

On 22 February 1734 , while the widow was still far away, Angelique and Claude tried to flee to New England, the frozen St. Lawrence River. They stopped to retrieve a bread Claude Thibault had hidden in a barn in Longueuil in preparation for their getaway. However, the cold Canadian forced the two men to take refuge in Châteauguay, near the road to Chambly up that the weather improves. They were captured a few weeks later and returned to Montreal by three militiamen . Thibault was jailed on 05 March 1734 and released on 08 April 1734 , the day of the fire that burned down a large part of the young city of Montreal. Angelica visited him several times while he was in prison and he brought something to eat.

The Hanging of Angélique

As for the latter, it was simply given to Madame de Francheville without being disciplined in any manner whatsoever, for his attempt to escape. Maybe because that was already expected to sell. As mentioned at the trial, Thérèse Francheville found itself unable to control Angélique and intention to accept an offer made ​​by one of the partners of her late husband, François-Étienne Cugnet : 600 pounds of gunpowder cannon. The offer was conditional upon the widow covers shipping 's Angélique to Quebec, where Cugnet lived. The fear of being sold and eventually end up in the Caribbean was perhaps the reason for the attempted escape.

Tensions were high between the slave and his mistress. Widow Francheville fired a free maid, Louise Poirier , due to quarrels and discord between the slave and servant. Angelica promised her that she could possibly do the job better than Louise Poirier, hoping that a good performance on his part would bend and keep his mistress. The widow agreed, but promised Louise that she would contact her from the start 'of Angélique to Quebec City. After his release, Thibault , visited Madame de Couagne to claim his salary. The woman called and warned Thibault never set foot in his house. Angry, she also confirmed it that Angelica had been sold and would be sent to Quebec as soon as the ice would base.

Claude Thibault ignore this order and Angélique visits several times during the absence of the widow Couagne. It was the beginning of April 1734 . They both knew that the St. Lawrence River would soon again passable for ships, and that Angélique would no longer be in Montreal for a long time. Angelica promises to be a servant to his intention to run again. It is possible that they conspired to set fire to cover their escape. On the evening of April 10, 1734 , while slavery was to the Church, Angelica shouts " Fire ! "Heard the neighbors try to extinguish the fire, but it spread rapidly and within three hours, 46 buildings were destroyed, including a large part of the market sector, along the Rue St. Paul, as well as hospital and convent of Hotel-Dieu. No one was injured in the fire. As Angélique and Thibault helped save property houses burned, rumors began circulating accusing fired.

The origin of the word seems to have been the observations made ​​by Marie-Manon , a slave owned by the neighbors of Mrs. De Couagne the Berey of Essars . When the fire was extinguished, the popular opinion was that Angelica had fired. She was arrested the next morning. An arrest warrant was also issued later Thibault , but although it was seen again on Tuesday morning after the fire ( two days later ), when bailiffs set out its mandate to arrest, he had disappeared and has never been seen in New France.

Angélique was charged and tried. French law at the time allowed a suspect to be arrested on " rumor "when the community decided that a suspect is guilty. Over the next six weeks, the prosecution called a number of witnesses. No witnesses saw Angélique fire, but they all said that they were certain that it did.

They testified at length the character 'of Angélique . They say it is a slave who misbehaves, who often meets his mistress. However, no solid evidence has been presented as to his guilt. Frustrated by the lack of evidence to convict Angélique, further considering applying torture before making the final judgment, which was rarely allowed in very unusual procedure . New France Unfortunately, Angelica , an eyewitness suddenly tip: A girl of five years , named Amable. The child's testimony that she saw Angelique , carrying a shovelful of coal in the attic of the house in the afternoon when the fire started.

This is all you need as proof to allow the prosecutor to close his business. The judge and four commissioners asked to take part in the award, all agreed that Angelica was guilty. Ms. Denyse Beaugrand-Champagne , author says that nobody wondered why it took so long for the small Amable occurs in a city where the fire and the trial were known. She attributes this sudden willingness of the girl the fact that too many people had lost much in the fire and a scapegoat was needed.  (source: text TRANSLATED French to English from the website: Africa Record, Nerrati-Press Network)  

Canada’s Forgotten Slaves

From the Globe and Mail, "200 years a slave: the dark history of captivity in Canada," by Robert Everett-Green, on 28 February 2014 -- Canadians appalled by the violence in the Oscar-nominated film 12 Years a Slave probably also feel proud that the carpenter who helps Solomon Northup regain his freedom is Canadian (and played by Brad Pitt). We’ve all heard that Canada’s only role in the slave trade was to hasten its end; but long before the underground railroad got started, colonial Canada was a safe place to buy, sell and own slaves.

For about two centuries, slavery was legal in New France, and in Lower Canada under British rule. Captive human beings were owned by people from almost every level of society, including governors, bishops, military officers, merchants, priests, blacksmiths and tailors. James McGill, founder of McGill University, had slaves. So did Marguerite d’Youville, the Grey Nuns founder who was canonized in 1990.

Canada’s Forgotten Slaves: Two Hundred Years of Bondage; by Quebec historian Marcel Trudel 

The shocking details are all laid out in a book by Quebec historian Marcel Trudel that has just appeared in an English-language paperback as Canada’s Forgotten Slaves: Two Hundred Years of Bondage. Mr. Trudel, who died in 2011, shreds our national myth about slavery by naming hundreds of eminent and ordinary Quebeckers who were eager to get slaves and proud to flaunt them before their neighbours. People went into debt to buy them.

“Slavery in Quebec was not some economic imperative, but rather a form of public extravagance which conferred prestige,” Mr. Trudel writes. In 18th-century Quebec, whose boundaries reached into parts of what is now the United States, a slave was a status symbol, more often found in town than in the country, more likely to be a domestic servant than a field labourer.

Mr. Trudel provoked a scandal in Quebec in 1960 when he first published his revelations as L’esclavage au Canada français. Generations of historians and church leaders had nurtured the myth that slavery, if it had existed at all, had been imported into the province by the English after the conquest of 1760. In fact, 85 per cent of Mr. Trudel’s confirmed owners were francophones, and the Quebec slave trade was well established before Wolfe met Montcalm. Nobody could refute Mr. Trudel’s careful research, so he was ostracized professionally, and in 1965 left his post at the University of Laval for a less frosty berth at the University of Ottawa.

The number of slaves Mr. Trudel could confirm from archival records was relatively small – about 4,200 in all, compared with the 250,000 who toiled in the French West Indies in the mid-1700s. Canadians never knew slavery on an industrial scale, only because they never convinced big-time slave traders that it was worth sending African slaves on the longer shipping route to Montreal or Quebec City.

Many in Quebec had to be content with captives stolen or bought from indigenous peoples, some of whom practiced slavery before the Europeans arrived. About two-thirds of the slaves in Quebec were native people, mostly from the Pawnee nations of modern-day Nebraska, whose French Canadian name – Panis – became a synonym for an indigenous slave of any origin. Black slaves were known as bois d’ébène (ebony wood), or pièce d’Inde if they were in prime condition. Blacks, being harder to get, were about double the cost of indigenous merchandise. Slaves of all kinds were sold at auctions and advertised in newspapers, including the Montreal Gazette, which had slaves in its print shop.

The legal and religious basis of the enterprise was conflicted. Louis XIV granted a petition to permit slave ownership in New France in 1689, even though it was not allowed in France. The church insisted on baptism and Christian burial for slaves, but ignored Pope Paul III’s 1537 decree that indigenous peoples in the Americas should not be enslaved “in any way.” Many major religious orders in colonial Quebec, including the Jesuits, owned slaves. Marguerite d’Youville was even taken to court by a Montreal doctor who claimed she had, in the night, spirited away a Panis that belonged to him (the trial’s outcome was not recorded).

The House of Assembly in Lower Canada dithered for years in the late 1700s over motions to abolish slavery, probably because several members would have been directly inconvenienced. But the last recorded slave sale in Quebec occurred in 1797, and Britain abolished slavery in most of its empire in 1833, just as traffic on the underground railroad to Canada was nearing its peak.

In the decades since Mr. Trudel’s book first appeared, a secular form of Quebec nationalism has found its own reasons to forget the province’s slave-trading history. Montreal historian and journalist George Tombs, translator of the revised edition of Mr. Trudel’s book into English, got a good demonstration of the new amnesia when he mentioned his project to an acquaintance who happened to be a former Parti Québécois cabinet minister.

“He got quite annoyed, and said ‘You shouldn’t be translating that book!’” Mr. Tombs recalls. “His problem basically was that it would give a bad image of Quebec. Pauline Marois has been saying that we have to make sure that everyone knows national history, but there’s a big part of national history they’re not going to learn.”

That doesn’t explain why Mr. Trudel’s pioneering book had to wait more than 50 years to become available in English. Mr. Tombs says it’s partly because Canadians are accustomed to getting our history “in little bits and pieces, depending on which region the historian is from and which political agenda the historian is pursuing.”

Several historians have written more recent papers and books that focus narrowly on slavery in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island or Upper Canada, where loyalists from the American colonies often arrived with their human chattels. What’s still needed, Mr. Tombs says, is a broader telling of the Canadian slavery story that we can all come to grips with. If, as Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said, Canadians need to know their history better, they should know the bad bits, too. (source: The Canadian Globe and Mail)

Freedom For The Stallion

Freedom For The Stallion

(Lyrics by: Allen Toussaint)

Freedom for the stallion

Freedom for the mare and her colt

Freedom for the baby child

Who has not grown old enough to vote.

Lord, have mercy, what you gonna do about the people who are praying to you?

They got men making laws that destroy other men,

They've made money "God"

It's a doggone sin,

Oh, Lord, you got to help us find the way.

Big ship's a-sailing, slaves all chained and bound,

Heading for a brand new land that some cat said he upped and found.

Lord, have mercy, what you gonna do about the people who are praying to you?

They got men making laws that destroy other men,

They've made money "God"

It's a doggone sin.

Oh, Lord, you got to help us find the way.

Some sing a sad song

Some got to moan the blues

Trying to make the best of a home

That the man didn't even get to choose

Lord, have mercy, how you gonna be with people like John and me

They've got men building fences to keep other men out

Ignore him if he whispers and kill him if he shouts

Oh, Lord, you got to help us find the way

Oh, Lord, you got to help them find the way

Oh, Lord, you got to help us find the way.

"I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free"

NINA SIMONE 

"I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free"
( Lyrics by: Billy Taylor and Dick Dallas)

I wish I knew how

It would feel to be free

I wish I could break

All the chains holding me

I wish I could say

All the things that I should to say

Say 'em loud say 'em clear

For the whole round world to hear

I wish I could share

All the love that's in my heart

Remove all the bars

That keep us apart

I wish you could know

What it means to be me

Then you'd see and agree

Everyone should be free

I wish I could give

All I'm longin' to give

I wish I could live

Like I'm longin' to live

I wish I could do

All the things that I can do

Though I'm way overdue

I'd be starting anew.

I wish I could be like a bird in the sky

How sweet it would be

If I found out I could fly

I'd soar to the sun

And look down at the sea

And I sing 'cause I know

{{"I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" is a gospel/jazz song written by Billy Taylor and Dick Dallas, best known for the recording by Nina Simone in 1967 on her Silk & Soul album. }}

Mrs. Dred Scott

From the Washington Post, "Invisible Woman," by Martha A. Sandweiss, on 5 April 2009 -- In 1857, the Supreme Court ruled in Scott v. Sandford that African Americans -- whether free or enslaved -- could not be citizens of the United States. The plaintiff, Dred Scott, an enslaved resident of St. Louis, had sued for his freedom 11 years earlier on the grounds that he once lived in a territory where Congress had prohibited slavery. The Supreme Court not only denied Scott any and all rights within the American legal system, it also declared that Congress could not prohibit slavery in an American territory. In negating the limits on the expansion of slavery established by the Northwest Ordinance and the Missouri Compromise, the infamous Supreme Court ruling exacerbated the tensions between North and South that led, a few years later, to civil war.

Previous historians have examined the life of Dred Scott for clues that might explain the timing of his lawsuit and his stubborn perseverance in the courts. A Virginia-born slave, he was sold to an Army doctor who took him to the free state of Illinois and to Wisconsin Territory; eventually master and slave returned to St. Louis. Along the way, Scott likely gained some medical expertise and a taste of relative independence. He may also have had the temperament and resilience for a tough legal fight. But in "Mrs. Dred Scott," University of Iowa law professor Lea VanderVelde argues that the real impetus for the legal case came from Dred's wife, Harriet, a woman heretofore all but unknown. Originally a co-plaintiff with her husband, Harriet watched her case become subordinated to his as the lawsuit moved through the appellate process. But, VanderVelde insists, she probably instigated the court battle.

Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery's Frontier – By Lea VanderVelde

In a remarkable act of historical recovery, VanderVelde resurrects the life of Harriet Scott. As a woman, a slave, an illiterate person and a resident of a frontier community, Harriet left few traces in the historical records. But drawing largely on the diary of Lawrence Taliaferro, the Indian agent and slave owner who brought the teenaged Harriet with him from Pennsylvania to Fort Snelling in Wisconsin (later Minnesota) Territory in 1835, VanderVelde recreates the world in which Harriet lived before her marriage to Dred in 1837.

And what a remarkable world it was. In the remote outpost where her master engaged in diplomatic negotiations with Indian tribes, Harriet likely encountered the painter George Catlin, the French geographer Joseph Nicollet and the future president Zachary Taylor, and she probably observed the Ojibwa treaty negotiations of 1837. Drawing inferences from the experiences of others, VanderVelde paints a compelling picture of Harriet's everyday life -- where she slept, what she ate, how she stayed warm through frigid winters.

When she turns to Harriet and Dred's later married life in St. Louis, VanderVelde again relies largely on the experiences of others -- particularly of other enslaved people who came to public attention through freedom suits of their own -- to infer the shape of the Scotts' daily life. The detail is rich and suggestive, but keeping Harriet Scott at the center of the story proves challenging. The reader often loses sight of Scott amid all the events that transpired around her. And for all we learn about the circumstances of Harriet's life, her inner thoughts remain unknown. VanderVelde tries to argue that Harriet acquired her passion for justice from watching her master be fair to Indian tribes. But it remains difficult to understand how a young woman might learn about justice from the man who owned her.

Harriet Scott's practical concerns seem more compelling than her philosophical beliefs. The Scotts created an acceptable life for themselves in St. Louis in the early 1840s. "Having a nominal master who left one alone," VanderVelde notes, "may have, in certain circumstances, been more secure than being free and subject to the random persecutions to which free blacks were sometimes exposed." But when Dred's mistress declined his offer to purchase his freedom, Harriet came to understand that the family's value as property lay not in her aging husband but in herself and her two daughters, the eldest of whom was now old enough to be hired out or sold away. The evidence presented here suggests that her decision to press for legal freedom stemmed not from some abstract desire for justice but from a very immediate desire to protect her family.

After the Scotts lost their appeal to the Supreme Court in 1857, a benefactor purchased their freedom. Dred died a free man in 1858. Harriet lived until 1876, supporting herself as a washerwoman. She had little interest in talking about her life or explaining what motivated her to go to court. But rescued here from the dustbin of history, she becomes the face of an infamous trial and a reminder of how immediate personal concerns can compel one to take extraordinary risks.  (source: The Washington Post)

HAPPY 2014!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Best Blaxploitation Music Soundtracks: "Theme from Shaft"

Theme from Shaft

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia  --  "Theme from Shaft," written and recorded by Isaac Hayes in 1971, is the soul and funk-styled theme song to the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film, Shaft.[1] The theme was released as a single (shortened and edited from the longer album version) two months after the movie's soundtrack by Stax Records' Enterprise label. "Theme from Shaft" went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States in November 1971. The song was also well received by adult audiences, reaching number six on Billboard's Easy Listening (later Adult Contemporary) chart.

The following year, "Theme from Shaft" won the Academy Award for Best Original Song,[1] with Hayes becoming the first African American to win that honor (or any Academy Award in a non-acting category), as well as the first recipient of the award to both write and perform the winning song. Since then, the song has appeared in numerous television shows, commercials, and other movies, including the 2000 sequel Shaft, for which Hayes re-recorded the song.

Shaft (1971) - Opening Credit

Curtis Mayfield's "Super Fly" Soundtrack

As reviewed by Bob Donat, in the Rolling Stone Magazine, on 9 November 1972 -- This soundtrack to the flash and clever Super Fly is as pleasing and pretty in your living room as it is mingled with the images that it aurally represents. In fact the anti-drug message on the record is far stronger and more definite than in the film, which was diluted by schizoid cross purposes. Super Fly, the film, glamorizes machismo-cocaine consciousness while making a political moralization about the process that keeps drugs illegal yet sees that they are supplied in quantity to the ghetto. The only way that black political consciousness is treated is to make it seem impotent and trivial.

Yet the implied "plot" in Curtis Mayfield's music and lyrics closely follows the line of the film; each song is readily identifiable with various scenes; the many attitudes and poses that Curtis adopts in his music, whether it be the tough-yet-sensitive persona or a sort of narrative third person, all point to rejection of dope control and self-liberation, the most positive themes of what will be a heavily influential film.

But the greatest quality of any soundtrack is that it can stand alone. Super Fly is not only a superior, imaginative soundtrack, but fine funky music as well and the best of Curtis Mayfield's four albums made since he left the Impressions. Equal credit of course goes to arranger — orchestrator and long-time Mayfield collaborator Johnny Pate, who's written charts for Curtis and the Impressions since the "Gypsy Woman" days. The Mayfield-Pate team dipped into three distinct musical satchels to pull out this lovely and energetic song cycle — the established Shaft system of dramatic, heaving chords and souped-up, insectine guitar and synthesizer chops devised by Isaac Hayes; the lyrical power of the song style and orchestration of Marvin Gaye and David Van de-Pitte; and, certainly not least, the amazing emotive skill of Curtis Mayfield, whose technique is honed and carried to strange extremes. "Pusherman," the major vocal theme of the film, identifying the protagonist ("a man of odd circumstance, a victim of ghetto demands"), is almost scary and perverse, given Curtis' manner: He kisses the word "pusherman" rather than sings it. The implications are so heavy that this truly amazing song, with its metallic percussion and hypnotic, drugged tone, couldn't possibly be released as a single. The more conservative "Freddie's Dead," which deals with the demise of a sad fat stooge, was doled out instead to a faunching public and is now at the top of everyone's Hot Hundred.

"Little Child Runnin' Wild" sets the tone of the whole record — episodic, tragic, hungry and telling tales of psychic misery. The story is that the coke dealer wants to split the scene, leave it clean and is all pent up with conflicts of values. Mayfield's soothing falsetto purr transforms into an anxious cry during climactic moments in the song/stories — he is a tremendous vocal actor: "Pusherman," "Freddie's Dead" and "Eddie You Should Know Better" are crawling with tension; "Nothing On Me" and "Super Fly" are triumphant and wailing, and "Give Me Your Love" is fine accompaniment for the slippery bathtub-fuck scene that makes the whole picture worthwhile for many of its patrons. The moral is that ol' Super Fly is still badass stuff even if the cops are behind it, and also that this record is currently selling as well as good coke and deserves to do so.  (source: Rolling Stone Magazine)




Curtis Mayfield - I'm Your Pusherman by bebepanda

Best Blaxploitation Music Soundtracks: Curtis Mayfield's "Super Fly"

Greg Boraman (2002) reviews Curtis Mayfield's soundtrack Super Fly for BBC Music -- Curtis Mayfield was a rare American poet, one of the few social commentators who was equally capable of delivering well aimed jibes at the US authorities or, more controversially, often asking difficult, probing questions of his own community. From his 'doo-wop' work in the 1950s through to the spiritual, message laden soul of 60s both as part of the wonderful quartet called The Impressions, Curtis established a reputation for well crafted music laden with meaningful lyrics no matter what the framework or situation.

Superfly was the vehicle for Mayfield to make more of his acutely observed, incisively written, and gently phrased observations on black life in the early 1970s. Aside from the poetry and social commentary, there is obviously the music to accompany the film, one of the better-made and received 'blaxploition' movies of the time.

The original Superfly soundtrack was lauded as a huge step forward for black music by the white music press, as to them, it seemed to equal the maturity of rock concept albums prevalent at the time (even though Marvin Gaye's' Whats Going On? and other similar projects were streets ahead of what noodling prog-rock was offering up in terms of realism)

This special edition of the album is a must for collectors as it contains not only the original track-listing but an entire second CD of demo cuts, different mixes, and instrumental versions of the classic songs therein.

The gems contained include a curious version of the classic tale of street life - "Pusherman" that initially doesn't strike the listener as different - until some meandering horns weave their previously unheard lines into this well known classic. In this particular version it's easy to understand how this version ended up unreleased, especially when a frantic, warbling trombone tries to steal the limelight from Curtis in the breakdown section.

FULL LP: Superfly by Curtis Mayfield (1972)

That said the second CD gives those listeners a little over exposed to this classic LP another chance to appreciate it from a slightly different perspective all over again. Curtis' music was always punchy and rhythm driven, which often made his plaintive, falsetto voice even more startling and urgent in its appeal, and his message of black pride and spiritual awareness amidst the troubled times of the early 1970s.

Perhaps the most curious additions are the two 'radio spots' where to instrumental backing Curtis urges listeners to 'stay clean, away from drugs, remember Freddy's dead' - a message repeated by many black stars of the time but rarely lived up to...only Curtis walked it like he talked it.

This special edition CD allows a glimpse to a soul/funk classic from a slightly different angle...and it is a great view too. (source: BBC Music)

CURTIS MAYFIELD - SUPERFLY (LIVE) by hushhush112

Kwanzaa Day Four: Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics)

Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together.