USA Slave Ports: Baltimore City Inner Harbor

As reported by the Baltimore Sun, "A bitter Inner Harbor legacy: the slave trade: City Diary," by Ralph Clayton on 12 July 2000 -- THOUSANDS of NAACP members descended on Baltimore for their convention this week, prompting visits to the major tourist attractions that line the Pratt Street corridor.

What most of the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit the Inner Harbor each year don't realize is that they are walking on sacred ground, where countless thousands of men, women, and children suffered during Baltimore's darkest hour.

Between 1815 and 1860, traders in Baltimore made the port one of the leading disembarkation points for ships carrying slaves to New Orleans and other ports in the deep South. Interstate traders in the domestic coast slave trade found Baltimore's excellent harbor, central location and position in the midst of a developing "selling market" attractive incentives in which to build their slave pens and base their operations near the bustling port.

The major slave dealers, who came from Kentucky, Georgia, Virginia and Tennessee built their slave pens near Pratt Street, the major east-west connection to the wharves in the Inner Harbor and Fells Point.

One of the first major pens was built behind a white frame house near the corner of Cove and Pratt streets, near the intersection of what is today Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The pen belonged to Tennessee native Austin Woolfolk, whose reign in Baltimore ran from 1818 to 1841.

Georgia native Hope Hull Slatter constructed his pen in 1838, several doors east of Howard and Pratt streets. During his 14-year stay, Slatter was ably assisted by his male slave, a jail steward.

By the late 1850s, Joseph Donovan, who had used pens on Pratt Street and Camden Street near Light Street, had a new pen constructed on the southwest corner of Camden and Eutaw streets, near where the Babe Ruth statue now stands at Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

Many other traders made their mark in Baltimore during the height of the slave trade: James Franklin Purvis, whose pen was on Harford Road near Aisquith; Bernard M. and Walter L. Campbell, whose pen was on the south side of Conway Street, near Hanover Street. (He would later buy Slatter's pen after Slatter's departure for Mobile, Ala., in 1848); William Harker, several doors south of Baltimore Street, on the west side of Calvert Street; and John Denning, on Frederick Street, several hundred feet behind the current site of the Holocaust memorial.

The "travelling traders" like George Kephart of Maryland, David Anderson of Kentucky, and Barthalomew Accinelly of Virginia came to town, gathered purchased slaves, and shipped them on packets that regularly made the run from Baltimore to New Orleans.

Although numerous wharves at Fells Point were used by the packet ships, so were the Pratt Street wharves that lined the north side of the Inner Harbor. The site of the current Pratt Street Pavilion, once underwater, was the home to numerous such packets as well as the docks that housed their agents' offices.

The methods for moving the slaves down Pratt Street differed, depending on the trader. Woolfolk preferred to march his slaves in the middle of the night, chained together and on foot. Slatter often used carriages and omnibuses to convey his slaves to the packet ships.

Ships with names like Agent, Architect, Hyperion, General Pinckney, Intelligence, Kirkwood, Tippecanoe and Victorine made their runs from wharves along the Inner Harbor as well as Fells Point.

Greed made for strange bedfellows. Many of Baltimore's slave dealers shipped together on the same brigs, barks, ships and schooners making their cyclical runs to New Orleans. In October 1845, Campbell, Donovan and Slatter shipped 117 souls aboard the Kirkwood from the Frederick Street dock. The Tippecanoe sailed from Chase's wharf in January 1842 with 114 souls shipped by Purvis, Slatter and others.

For 45 years, thousands of families and individuals were sent south on their final passage. For most on board, this meant a death that came when families and loved ones were separated and "sold South" -- a separation from which few returned. It also signified almost certain separation from one another in New Orleans; large families were rarely sold to the same buyer.

Tourists who go to the attractions of the harbor area this summer should take time to remember the price that so many paid in blood and broken hearts on Pratt Street.

Remember the young woman who took her and her child's life in Woolfolk's pen in the spring of 1826, rather than go south; the man who, in 1821, upon learning that he had been sold to a trader, slit his own throat at one of Baltimore's wharves; or the unsuccessful attempt in1846 of a female slave to drown herself at the Light Street dock rather than live another day in slavery.

Remember.

Today's writer:  Ralph Clayton is a research assistant at the Enoch Pratt Free Library and has written several books and numerous articles on pre-Civil War black Baltimore. He is working on a book that chronicles the domestic slave trade in Baltimore.

City Diary provides a forum for examining issues of concern to Baltimore's neighborhoods. (source: The Baltimore Sun)

"The First Decoration Day" or Memorial Day

For the Newark Star Ledger, "The First Decoration Day" by David W. Blight of Yale University -- Americans understand that Memorial Day, or "Decoration Day," as my parents called it, has something to do with honoring the nation's war dead. It is also a day devoted to picnics, road races, commencements, and double-headers. But where did it begin, who created it, and why?

As a nation we are at war now, but for most Americans the scale of death and suffering in this seemingly endless wartime belongs to other people far away, or to people in other neighborhoods. Collectively, we are not even allowed to see our war dead today. That was not the case in 1865.

At the end of the Civil War the dead were everywhere, some in half buried coffins and some visible only as unidentified bones strewn on the killing fields of Virginia or Georgia. Americans, north and south, faced an enormous spiritual and logistical challenge of memorialization. The dead were visible by their massive absence. Approximately 620,000 soldiers died in the war. American deaths in all other wars combined through the Korean conflict totaled 606,000. If the same number of Americans per capita had died in Vietnam as died in the Civil War, 4 million names would be on the Vietnam Memorial. The most immediate legacy of the Civil War was its slaughter and how remember it.

War kills people and destroys human creation; but as though mocking war's devastation, flowers inevitably bloom through its ruins. After a long siege, a prolonged bombardment for months from all around the harbor, and numerous fires, the beautiful port city of Charleston, South Carolina, where the war had begun in April, 1861, lay in ruin by the spring of 1865. The city was largely abandoned by white residents by late February. Among the first troops to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the Twenty First U. S. Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the formal surrender of the city.

Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events, and unknown until some extraordinary luck in my recent research, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters' horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, "Martyrs of the Race Course."

Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders' race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy's horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing "a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before."

At 9 am on May 1, the procession stepped off led by three thousand black schoolchildren carrying arm loads of roses and singing "John Brown's Body." The children were followed by several hundred black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black and white citizens. As many as possible gathering in the cemetery enclosure; a childrens' choir sang "We'll Rally around the Flag," the "Star-Spangled Banner," and several spirituals before several black ministers read from scripture. No record survives of which biblical passages rung out in the warm spring air, but the spirit of Leviticus 25 was surely present at those burial rites: "for it is the jubilee; it shall be holy unto you… in the year of this jubilee he shall return every man unto his own possession."

Following the solemn dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: they enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches, and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantry participating was the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th U.S. Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite. The war was over, and Decoration Day had been founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been all about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders' republic, and not about state rights, defense of home, nor merely soldiers' valor and sacrifice.

According to a reminiscence written long after the fact, "several slight disturbances" occurred during the ceremonies on this first Decoration Day, as well as "much harsh talk about the event locally afterward." But a measure of how white Charlestonians suppressed from memory this founding in favor of their own creation of the practice later came fifty-one years afterward, when the president of the Ladies Memorial Association of Charleston received an inquiry about the May 1, 1865 parade. A United Daughters of the Confederacy official from New Orleans wanted to know if it was true that blacks had engaged in such a burial rite. Mrs. S. C. Beckwith responded tersely: "I regret that I was unable to gather any official information in answer to this." In the struggle over memory and meaning in any society, some stories just get lost while others attain mainstream dominance.

Officially, as a national holiday, Memorial Day emerged in 1868 when General John A. Logan, commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans organization, called on all former northern soldiers and their communities to conduct ceremonies and decorate graves of their dead comrades. On May 30, 1868, when flowers were plentiful, funereal ceremonies were attended by thousands of people in 183 cemeteries in twenty-seven states. The following year, some 336 cities and towns in thirty-one states, including the South, arranged parades and orations. The observance grew manifold with time. In the South Confederate Memorial Day took shape on three different dates: on April 26 in many deep South states, the anniversary of General Joseph Johnston's final surrender to General William T. Sherman; on May 10 in South and North Carolina, the birthday of Stonewall Jackson; and on June 3 in Virginia, the birthday of Jefferson Davis.

Over time several American towns, north and south, claimed to be the birthplace of Memorial Day. But all of them commemorate cemetery decoration events from 1866. Pride of place as the first large scale ritual of Decoration Day, therefore, goes to African Americans in Charleston. By their labor, their words, their songs, and their solemn parade of flowers and marching feet on their former owners' race course, they created for themselves, and for us, the Independence Day of the Second American Revolution.

The old race track is still there — an oval roadway in Hampton Park in Charleston, named for Wade Hampton, former Confederate general and the white supremacist Redeemer governor of South Carolina after the end of Reconstruction. The lovely park sits adjacent to the Citadel, the military academy of South Carolina, and cadets can be seen jogging on the old track any day of the week. The old gravesite dedicated to the "Martyrs of the Race Course" is gone; those Union dead were reinterred in the 1880s to a national cemetery in Beaufort, South Carolina. Some stories endure, some disappear, some are rediscovered in dusty archives, the pages of old newspapers, and in oral history. All such stories as the First Decoration Day are but prelude to future reckonings. All memory is prelude. (source: David Blight.com)

David W. Blight teaches American History at Yale University where he is the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, the author of the Bancroft prize-winning Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the forthcoming A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation.

"The First Decoration Day"

The Life of A Slave Girl

Click HERE to read The Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself: Harriet Jacob [Electronic Edition]

From North Carolina History Project -- The “best-known, nineteenth-century African-American woman’s autobiography” is how historian Nell Irvin Painter describes Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861). The Tar Heel’s work is also noteworthy because Jacobs penned the words, unlike other slave autobiographies, including Sojourner Truth’s, which were dictated. The book’s cumbersome title makes this point evident.

The slave autobiography describes the cruelty of slavery, debunks the myth of the content or happy slave, and argues that a slave’s behavior must be judged by different standards than those applied to free people. Harriet Jacobs’s slave experiences in Edenton, North Carolina influenced her themes and rationalizations for her behavior. (Her judgmental grandmother denounced Jacob’s physical relationship with an unmarried white lawyer and held her grandaughter to moral standards that wavered not in trying times.)

Harriet Jacob's owner placed an advertisement in newspapers offering a $100 reward for Jacob's capture. Image courtesy of North Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh, NC.

After she fled to the North, Jacobs was encouraged by friends to write her story. She started writing her story (in secret) during the 1850s, and it was ready for publication in 1861. Using a pseudonym, Linda Brent, Jacobs described the horrors of slavery and discussed topics, including rape and prostitution, theretofore unmentionable in print. After searching in vain for a publisher, Jacobs found a Boston firm willing to publish her work. The company experienced financial difficulties in late 1860, so one of Jacobs’s friends provided a subvention so that the book might be published in 1861.

The secession of the Southern states and the formation of the Confederacy understandably distracted editors from Incidents publication. A few abolitionist journals, including National Anti-Slavery Standard and Anglo-African, praised the book for shedding light on how the peculiar institution fostered moral and sexual turpitude. Overall, however, editors ignored the book, and it went into obscurity until the Civil Rights Movement.  (source: North Carolina History Project)

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.