An Unpleasant Incident. by Eyre Crowe

More negro-limning [drawings, illustrating] engaged me as I left Philadelphia next day for Baltimore. It was not, as it turned out, a cheerful incident which I was to cany out, though begun without any idea further than that of an ordinary passenger's likeness. It happened thus. On seeing a good - humoured negro attired in a chimney-pot hat, and leaning upon his modest linen bag (possibly his whole belongings), the sight was so novel I sketched him ; but presently the car-man came up with anger in his countenance and beckoned him away, saying, " Get into the first car, sir sitting here among white people, indeed ! "

He moved away as told ; a mother clasping her infant, in an adjoining cushioned compartment, looked pityingly on the scene, as I did too. I now saw for the first time an ill-lighted compartment next the engine, in which were already ensconced a young negro and his wife, or female companion.

Whilst on this topic I may mention a pathetic story we were told at Baltimore of a lax white trader, who, besides his legitimate offspring, left a second family of dusky-coloured children. Not knowing, what was a fact, that he was insolvent, he left them free by his will. The creditors, not to be baulked, sold these little mulattoes as slaves, to be sent down South.

Dire war has done this good that such fell purposes can never more be carried out on a free soil. --Eyre Crowe, 1853

A Slave Sale in Richmond

A Slave Sale at the Richmond Slave Market written and illustrated by EYRE CROWE

The 3rd of March, 1853, is a date well imprinted on my memory. I was sitting at an early table breakfast by myself, reading the ably conducted local newspaper, of which our kind friend was the editor. It was not, however, the leaders or politics which attracted my eye, so much as the advertisement columns, containing the announcements of slave sales, some of which were to take place that morning in Wall Street, close at hand, at eleven o'clock.

Ideas of a possibly dramatic subject for pictorial illustration flitted across my mind ; so, with small notepaper and pencil, I went thither, inquiring my way to the auction rooms. They consisted, I soon discovered, of low rooms, roughly white-washed, with worn and dirty flooring, open, as to doors and windows, to the street, which they lined in succession. The buyers clustered first in one dealer's premises, then moved on in a body to the next store, till the whole of the tenants of these separate apartments were disposed of. The sale was announced by hanging out a small red flag on a pole from the doorway. On each of these was pinned a manuscript notice of the lot to be sold.

Thus I read : " Fifteen likely negroes to be disposed of between half-past nine and twelve five men, six women, two boys, and two girls." Then followed the dealer's signature, which corresponded to that inscribed over the doorway. When I got into the room I noticed, hanging on the wall, a quaintly framed and dirty lithograph, representing two horsemen galloping upon sorry nags, one of the latter casting its shoe, and his companion having a bandaged greasy fetlock ; the marginal inscription on the border was to this effect : " Beware of what you are about."

I have often thought since how foolish it was, on my part, not to have obeyed this premonitory injunction to act prudently in such a place as this was. The ordeal gone through by the several negroes began by making a stalwart hand pace up and down the compartment, as would be done with a horse, to note his action. This proving satisfactory, some doubt was expressed as to his ocular soundness. This was met by one gentleman unceremoniously fixing one of his thumbs into the socket of the supposed valid eye, holding up a hair by his other hand, 'and asking the negro to state what was the object held up before him.

He was evidently nonplussed, and in pain at the operation, and he went down in the bidding at once. More hands were put up ; but by this time feeling a wish for fresh air, I walked out, passing intervening stores and the grouped expectant negroes there.

I got to the last and largest end store, and thinking the sales would occupy a certain time, I thought it might be possible to sketch some of the picturesque figures awaiting their turn. I did so. On rough benches were sitting, huddled close together, neatly dressed in grey {sic}, young negro girls with white collars fastened by scarlet bows, and in white aprons. The form of a woman clasping her infant, ever touching, seemed the more so here. There was a muscular field-labourer {sic}sitting apart ; a rusty old stove filled up another space. Having rapidly sketched these features, I had not time to put my outline away before the whole group of buyers and dealers were in the compartment. I thought the best plan was to go on unconcernedly ; but, perceiving me so engaged, no one would bid. The auctioneer, who had mounted his table, came down and asked me whether, " if I had a business store, and someone came in and interrupted my trading, I should like it." This was unanswerable ; I got up with the intention of leaving quietly, but, feeling this would savour {sic}of flight, I turned round to the now evidently angry crowd of dealers, and said, "You may turn me away, but I can recollect all I have seen." I lingered in a neighbouring {sic}vacated store, to give myself the attitude of leisurely retreat, and I left this stifling atmosphere of human traffic."Crowe has been very imprudent," Thackeray wrote to a friend afterwards. And, in truth, I soon reflected it was so... (source: With Thackeray in America, 1893 )

Enslaved Kids

The caption reads: "As We Found Them."

This brother and sister were found wandering around on the battlefields during the Civil War. The rags that pass for clothing are their only possessions for making people and this country rich. Orphaned and abandoned bare-footed and destitute.

Kids of the Contraband Camps

This is a photograph taken by one of the Union Officers during the Civil War. Many children were orphaned or abandoned on plantations. The rich white planters removed their families and left the slaves behind. Then as now, the able bodied young and resourceful men and women fled. The young children, women and old people were left behind.

The laws in the USA forbade the selling of children under the age of 10, so from age 10 an enslaved child was fair game. Of course, this was only on the honor system, as if slave owners had any honor, what a joke. This poor kid looks between 10 to 13 years old. He is shoeless and dressed in filthy rags.

His face is the face of American slavery, not the fiction or the drawings. This is an actual photograph not some contrived image of the "happy darky," but the lost look of an orphaned child. He was either orphaned on the auction block or by the ravages of the war. Either way, he was an American slave orphan.

Salt Sex Slaves

Best known for 2005's critically acclaimed Greetings From Cairo, Illinois, Stace England emerged as an intriguing geographical yang to Sufjan Stevens yin. Live performances featured extensive multimedia, documentaries in the US and Europe and stellar press on both sides of the Atlantic. England and his new band, The Salt Kings, continue his storytelling mastery with another slice of unknown US history on Salt Sex Slaves, weaving tales of brutal salt production, kidnapped free blacks, ghosts, slave breeding and murder in a supposed Free State, the Land of Lincoln, into a volatile, provocative Exile On Main St.-ish stew.

On my first listening, the emotion and poignancy of these songs hit me hard. This is a story of one of the worst periods in American history, that of slavery, and so few happy endings come out of that period that one would have to look hard to find them. England doesn't bother because his point is not happy endings that came out of slavery, his point was that there were people in America and a time in America when atrocity was the norm, and ignorance was the justification for it. Not only that, but it was no secret. Even the government participated in it. England holds up the legend of the Salt King like Sam Shepard's buried child, a rotten corpse pulled from the ground to reveal true horrors of slavery, heart-rending of lovers torn apart by capture and enslavement, the heinous gloating of men who kidnap a beautiful young woman and return her to slavery, a dastardly pastime of the Salt King.

Even the song in which the Salt King gets his comeuppance, delivered by a slave who reaches the limits of his tolerance and chops off the slave owner's leg with an ax, is sad. The man knows that his life will be forfeit, leaving him lynched by nightfall, and he gives his life for the chance to maim the Salt King, driving his ax against muscle and bone. The lesson to be learned in this story is that there was no good side to slavery, there was never any way for anyone to come out of it unscathed, nor should they have. England gives not so much a history lesson as a lesson in man's inhumanity to man in a historical setting, but that relates directly to the present day. In the time of the Salt King, the inhumanity toward those of a different skin color was justified by the riches of the salt trade, a commodity that was taken from the ground and made rich men of the few who controlled the many. The parallels to our current drive to take oil from the ground at the cost of as many lives as necessary are made with style, melody, and fierceness by England, which adds to the very raw emotion of this record. Just as the slave drivers were and the oil men are, England's rock and roll cry for someone to feel shame is relentless. (Source: Amazon Review)

Rembrandt

Negress Lying Down, 1658

'Slaves in the Family'

Slavery did not end in the United States with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 or even with the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865. Through its powerful legacy it has persisted into our own time... In ''Slaves in the Family,'' Edward Ball, a descendant of South Carolinians who owned thousands of slaves over a period of more than 150 years, makes a personal effort to come to terms with his history. ''To contemplate slavery,'' he observes, ''was a bit like doing psychoanalysis on myself.''

But Ball insists that it was not guilt that motivated his search into the past. ''A person cannot be culpable for the acts of others, long dead, that he or she could not have influenced,'' he writes. ''Rather than responsible, I felt accountable for what had happened, called on to try to explain it.'' ''Slaves in the Family'' is thus an account and an accounting, a chronicle of Ball owners and Ball slaves that is designed to break the silences surrounding the author's troubling heritage. (New York Times, "Skeletons in the Family Closet" by Drew Faust)
EDWARD BALL: Well, I thought that the black story and the white story should be told side by side. You know, we hear a lot about the plantation owners, but we don't hear enough about the people with whom they lived and who made their lives possible. And I thought that I should try to write a shared history - black with whites side by side. But more important than that was my attempt to find black families today whose ancestors were enslaved by my family and to meet with them and try to reckon with this shared legacy. (PBS News Hour).

Read an excerpt from Edward Ball's Chapter One here.

Watch author Edward Ball here:

Sullivan's Island

Sullivan's Island lies in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. Small posts on the island provided good sea defense for the settlers of Charleston. Sullivan's Fort was still under construction in 1776 when defenders successfully repelled the British fleet from behind palmetto-log walls.

The third fort on the site, Ft. Moultrie, was erected in 1809. In 1827, Edgar Allen Poe served at the Fort, and he subsequently used Sullivan's Island as the setting for his short story, "The Gold Bug."

During the Second Seminole War, the U.S. Army sent Osceola and over 200 other Seminole to Charleston by steamship. They arrived at Ft. Moultrie on January 1, 1838.

Osceola was housed in officer's quarters, reputedly attended a play in Charleston, received visitors, and had his portrait painted. His health failed, and Osceola died of malaria on January 30, 1838. Osceola's remains are buried at Ft. Moultrie, which is part of Ft. Sumter National Monument, administered by the National Park Service. (Source: Slavery In America)

King Rice

In low-country South Carolina, American slavery assumed a distinctive form, one that has captured the attention of generations of historians. Between the end of the 17th century and the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of people of African descent toiled in swamps, ditches and fields cultivating rice, a crop that by the time of the American Revolution had created a planter aristocracy wealthier than any other group in the British colonies....
In ''Black Rice,'' Judith A. Carney, finds new ''ways to give voice to the historical silences of slavery.''

Carney challenges conventional histories, which describe Europeans adapting an Asian crop to American uses. Arguing persuasively that highly sophisticated forms of rice culture from West Africa preceded the arrival of any knowledge from Asia, she carefully traces the variety of production systems used by Africans in different environments and landscapes, including the elaborate construction of canals and dikes in coastal swamps.

The existence of these complex adaptations was ignored by European observers all too ready to dismiss the possibility of technological achievement among African peoples. The ''denial of African accomplishment in rice systems,'' Carney writes, ''provides a stunning example of how power relations mediate the production of history.''

In order to understand the role of Africans in rice history, Carney argues, it is necessary to think of rice as a ''knowledge system'' -- not just a plant or a seed but an entire complex of techniques, technology and processing skills. Africans imported as slaves into Carolina possessed this knowledge, and used their understanding to guide phases of evolution in American rice production.

Thus, after a vast increase in importations of slaves between 1720 and 1740 provided the necessary labor, Carolina rice cultivation, which had begun with upland or rain-fed culture, shifted to higher-yielding inland swamps. The newly arrived Africans created embankments, sluices and canals almost identical to patterns of West African mangrove rice production. With another influx of slaves after 1750, cultivation moved to still more productive tidal flood plains, which required such a large-scale deployment of floodgates, canals and ditches that rice fields became, in one planter's words, a ''huge hydraulic machine.'' This transition, Carney writes, depended on ''the large number of slaves imported directly from the rice area of West Africa who possessed knowledge of the crop's cultivation.''

Carolina planters even knew which African ethnic groups were expert in rice growing and explicitly favored them in their purchases of new slaves. A newspaper in Charleston, for example, advertised the sale of 250 slaves ''from the Windward and Rice Coast, valued for their knowledge of rice culture.''

The knowledge system Carney describes called for different roles and distinctive kinds of expertise for men and women, and these aspects of rice culture were also transported to the New World. Women played a critical part in seed selection, sowing, hoeing and processing of rice. The importance of these skills enabled slave traders to command higher prices for women in Carolina rice-growing areas than in other American slave markets.

The Carolina rice kingdom, the foundation of power in a state that would eventually lead the South out of the nation, came into being because African slaves had mastered -- and shared -- the techniques necessary for growing rice seeds in standing water. ''Why,'' Carney asks, ''would West African slaves transfer to planters a sophisticated agricultural system . . . that would in turn impose upon them unrelenting toil throughout the year?'' The knowledge of rice cultivation, she concludes, provided slaves arriving in South Carolina with a crucial negotiating tool, enabling them to bargain for labor arrangements that guaranteed them greater autonomy than in any other Southern agricultural environment....

The knowledge and creativity of Africans created an agricultural system in South Carolina that was based firmly on their own enslavement and exploitation. (Source: The New York Times, “Seeds of History: The expertise of African slaves in growing rice played a crucial role in the American South.” by Drew Gilpin Faust)

Rice Harvest

"With forty or fifty pounds of rice stalks on their heads."

Black Canadians Confront Cape Coast Slave History

CAPE COAST, Ghana–Dusk settles on the ghostly slave castle here, and the shadowy figures walking, weeping in a daze are trying, and failing, to deal with their past.

The 21 Canadians confronting their history last night have returned to Africa from the Caribbean, via Toronto, as free men and women, descendants of slaves. They've just emerged through the Door of No Return – survivors all. And the experience is shattering.

At the last stop on this disturbing tour of the Slave Dungeon, one of the female visitors loses it. She gags, wails and vomits on the floor where her ancestors did the same 300, 400 years ago.

Just outside the door labelled "Cell," her travelling companions sit in the castle's courtyard, in a stupor. Grown men are reduced to sobs. One is being comforted by a crying child.

They have come to reconnect with their roots, a past severed by one of the most brutal and destructive institutions in history, which saw 12 million or more Africans captured, enslaved and shipped to the Americas.

It is a despicable place...But the visitors say this is an odyssey they must complete. They want to see where their ancestors were warehoused in horrible conditions before they were spirited on slave ships across the Atlantic to the New World.

"There is a lot of pain, and some anger," explains Sherwin Modeste, a community housing manager in Toronto. "It's like a funeral procession. People ask why you go, if you know it is painful. But you still have to go."

"Haunting," says Violet Dennison, at 61, the oldest of the visitors. We approach the terrible door. Above it, the sign reads: Door of No Return. "It's called the Door of No Return because when you enter this, you never come back."

Through the door we go, onto the viewing deck where the slavers and merchants surveyed their wretched merchandise, animate and inanimate, before ascending 34 steps to conduct their bloody bartering – humans for gunpowder and ivory and trinkets – in the palaver room.

One last stop at the Cell. This room, barely 10 feet by 12 feet, is oppressively hot. Here is where they kept the slaves who couldn't be tamed – the ones who loved freedom more than life. And this is where they died.

And it's here the sister loses it and pours out her soul to her creator. She howls. She shakes. She throws up her breakfast. And it is a good while before she is comforted. (Source: The Star)

Slave Castle São Jorge da Mina: Elmina, Ghana

In the 15th century AD, Elmina was one of several port communities on the Ghana coast (aka Gold Coast) of western Africa, associated with the West African ethnic group called Akan. Most of the ports were small, dispersed settlements that supported larger communities in the interior. That pattern of settlement probably began at least as long ago as 400 AD. Elmina had a fairly sizable population, as it was located on an excellent harbor. The Portuguese began exploring the Gold Coast in search of gold and trading opportunities in the early 15th century. In 1482 they built the Sao Jorge Castle, to help support their trade networks and fend off European competitors. Castle São Jorge da Mina (or St. George's Castle as it is known today) was the first fortified European trade post in subsaharan Africa. The Portuguese were interested in gold and luxury items such as ivory, pepper, and redwood, as were the Dutch who captured the fort in 1627. Elmina was under Dutch control until 1872 when it was captured by the British. In response to a revolt by the Elmina residents, the British burned the city and abandoned the fort. (Source: About.com "Portuguese Slave Colony of Elmina")The first slaves traded out of Elmina were imported into the city from Liberia, Benin, northern Ghana and other parts of coastal Africa, by the Portuguese during the 15th century. Slaves became the primary export from Elmina in the 17th century.

Cape Coast Slave Castle, Ghana

For nearly one hundred and fifty years before abolition in 1807, Cape Coast Castle on the African ‘Gold Coast’ was, in the words of one of its British governors, the grand emporium of the British slave trade. From this handsome building perched on the shore of the South Atlantic Ocean, men, women and children born in Africa were sold as slaves and carried on British slave ships to the West Indies, to North and South America, and to destinations elsewhere. Here the ancestors of millions of people living today in Britain, the United States and many other countries passed through the ‘door of no return’.

In a most original and remarkable book, by telling the story of the castle and of some of the people who lived, worked or were imprisoned within its walls, William St Clair is able to illuminate a vast panorama of modern history, which in its entirety is hard to comprehend.

He draws on an immense archive of records, hitherto hardly explored, agreements with local African leaders, correspondence between colleagues in the Africa Service, letters from home, receipts for the buying and selling of slaves, and scribbled notes sent between the Castle and the slave ships. Bleached by the sun or stained by salt water, these unique writings offer glimpses of events noted down as they happened without hindsight or agenda. In telling the story of Cape Coast Castle, the building, the sea around and its people, St Clair catches for us the sense of actually being there at the time as witnesses. (Source: The Economist Shop)

Gorée Island, Senegal, Africa

Goree: The Slave Island

Goree Island is on the great western bulge of Africa - the nearest point on the continent to the Americas.

The Senegalese people called it Ber. The Portuguese renamed it Ila de Palma.

The name was changed to Good Reed by the Dutch and the French called the island Goree - meaning "good harbour".

But the name did not match with what went on in this tiny island between the 16th and 19th centuries when wooden ships sailed from here with human beings chained in their holds across the Atlantic.

On the island, there is a small fort known as Slave House. This was in effect one of the slave warehouses through which Africans passed on their way to the Americas.

Millions have passed through the island and other similar trading posts to work in the plantations of the New World, including America.

Slave Depot

The shipping of slaves from Goree lasted from 1536 when the Portuguese launched the slave trade to the time the French halted it 312 years later.

The Portuguese, Dutch, French and British all fought and killed each other over the trade from there

The island is just 3 km off the Senegalese coast, and its tiny size made it easy for merchants to control their captives.

The surrounding waters are so deep that any attempt at escaping would mean sure drowning.

With a five kg metal ball permanently attached to their feet or necks, a captured African would know what jumping into the deep sea would bring.

Goree Island

16-19 Century: Slaves shipped from Goree

1780: Slave House built

1978: World Heritage Site

Visitors: Pope, Mandela, Clinton

Tales of Delphine Lalaurie

"The man who smashed the garret door saw powerful male slaves, stark naked, chained to the wall, their eyes gouged out, their fingernails pulled off by the roots; others had their joints skinned and festering, great holes in their buttocks where the flesh had been sliced away, their ears hanging by shreds, their lips sewed together, their tongues drawn out and sewed to their chins, severed hands stitched to bellies, legs pulled joint from joint. Female slaves there were, their mouths and ears crammed with ashes and chicken offal and bound tightly; others had been smeared with honey and were a mass of black ants. Intestines were pulled out and knotted around naked waists. There were holes in skulls, where a rough stick had been inserted to stir the brains. Some of the poor creatures were dead, some were unconscious; and a few were still breathing, suffering agonies beyond any power to describe." - From the firemen entering the house
-- "Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans" by Jeanne deLavigne, published 1946 "The Haunted House of the Rue Royale" pp.248-258

The LaLaurie Mansion

It was said that Mme. Lalaurie's manners were sweet, gracious and captivating. She was born in the society's upper circles. She was accustomed to and acculturated to the good life. Yet there were persistent rumors that she treated her servants with disdain and in a cruel, abusive manner.

And still, those who visited her said that she was kind to her servants. If one of them tremble in her presence or startled at the sound of her voice, she would soothe and endeavor to reassure her. Nevertheless, the stories of barbarity increased. The smothered indignation on Royal Street grew.

One day the street was filled with the wild rumor that Mme. Lalaurie was seen by the neighbors cowhiding a little girl in the courtyard. The terrified young thing fled across the yard, into the house and up the winding stairway from gallery to gallery followed by her infuriated mistress. She rushed out onto the belvedere and darted up to roof, with Mme Lalaurie hot on her heels.
In another instant the child reached the edge of the roof -- falling with a dull thud to the courtyard below. She was lifted up and borne into the house a silent, crushed, lifeless mass of humanity. In the old yard there was a shallow well that is now a mere pit and neighbors assert that the night the young girl fell to her death, she was buried by torchlight in the well.

Gullah of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina

MALCOLM X: Who Taught You To Hate Yourself?

Slavery and the Making of America - Episode 1