human enslavement

484 Pages·2000·18.79 MB·English

GO BACK TO EARLIER IN THE CENTURY
HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT, ETC. IN THE LATE 19TH CENTURY
“The United States of America had human slavery for
almost one hundred years before that custom was
recognized as a social disease and people began to fight
it. Imagine that. Wasn’t that a match for Auschwitz?
What a beacon of liberty we were to the rest of the world
when it was perfectly acceptable here to own other human
beings and treat them as we treated cattle. Who told you
we were a beacon of liberty from the very beginning?
Why would they lie like that? Thomas Jefferson owned
slaves, and not many people found that odd. It was as
though he had an infected growth on the end of his nose
the size of a walnut, and everybody thought that was
perfectly OK.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, FATES WORSE THAN DEATH, page 84
THOMAS JEFFERSON
NOTE:
In this series of files, you may be startled to discover,
an attempt is being made to untangle the issues of slavery
and race in such manner as to allow for a factoid which the US
Supreme Court has not once recognized: that not all enslaved
Americans were non-white. For instance seamen who were
“crimped” or “shanghaied” might or might not have been black but
nevertheless had been reduced by force or trickery to a longterm
and dangerous condition of involuntary servitude (this term “to
crimp” had originated in the 18th Century in England and
characterized the occupation of luring or forcing men into sea
duty either for the navy or for the merchant marine).
NOTE ALSO:
Binary opposites, such as “war vs. peace,” “slavery vs.
antislavery,” etc. are mirrors to each other. The problem is
never which of the two is the proper alternative but rather, the
problem is always how to shatter such a conceptual mirror — so
that both images can simultaneously safely be dispensed with.
HDT WHAT? INDEX
HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC.
1850
Let us here attempt a graphic contrast between decency and indecency. By this decade only a very few of the
slave states (such as I think Arkansas, Missouri, and perhaps Maryland) were allowing slavemasters to
manumit their slaves without a special bill by the legislature.
“It is simply crazy that there should ever have come
into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man
is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact
about a human being. Who could want such a world? For
an American fighting for his love of country, that the
last hope of earth should from its beginning have
swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice
so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only
with God.”
— Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY?
1976, page 141
This was the approximate year of manumission for Elizabeth, 3rd child of Sojourner Truth. (A process of
mandatory indenture had been utilized in New York State to effectively extend the condition of servitude of
young slaves, after they had on the 4th of July 1827 received their formal papers.)
As of the turn of the century South Carolina had passed a law requiring that any slaves who were manumitted
possess, or receive from their manumitting masters, “the capacity... to function in a free society...” The goal
had been to end such abuses as the “freeing” of the aged, the infirm, and those considered by the slavemaster
to be useless due to bad or depraved character. After the 1831 Nat Turner rebellion, most southern states passed
such laws restricting (or prohibiting) manumission. By this decade only Delaware, Missouri, and Arkansas
were allowing masters to free slaves without requiring their departure from the state. (Refer to Ira Berlin,
SLAVES WITHOUT MASTERS: THE FREE NEGRO IN THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH, NY: Pantheon Books, 1974,
pages 138-153. Note 2 on pages 138-139 provides a comprehensive list of state laws regulating or prohibiting
manumission.)
1980 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith
HDT WHAT? INDEX
HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC.
The rolled 24-scene panorama before which William Wells Brown lectured on the Lyceum circuit, entitled
“Original Panoramic Views of the Scenes in the Life of an American Slave,” included painted depictions of
the brig Creole and of the schooners Pearl and Franklin which had figured prominently in attempts to escape
from human enslavement.
(Below is a Daguerreotype of a man, evidently a lecturer, standing in front of an arctic panorama. To provide
some idea of what this sort of panorama looked like, on the following screen appears a printed version of one
having to do with arctic exploration, that was making the rounds during this year.)
THE FROZEN NORTH
Henry Thoreau went to one of the traveling “panorama” shows made up of painted canvas rolls then being
exhibited behind lecturers on theater stages, of the Rhine, and was intrigued enough by it, and by the idea of
himself as a “younger son” who would, at least traditionally, need to venture and adventure for his inheritance,
that he soon went to see another panorama, one of travel up the Mississippi.
After January 10 and before February 9, 1851: I went some months ago to see a panorama of the
Rhine It was like a dream of the Middle ages– I floated down its historic stream in something more than
imagination under bridges built by the Romans and repaired by later heroes past cities & castles whose very
names were music to me made my ears tingle –& each of which was the subject of a legend. There seemed to
come up from its waters & its vine-clad hills & vallys a hushed music as of crusaders departing for the Holy
Land– There were Ehrenbreitstein & Rolandseck & Coblentz which I knew only in history. I floated along
through the moonlight of history under the spell of enchanment It was as if I remembered a glorious dream as
if I had been transported to a heroic age & breathed an atmospher of chivalry Those times appeared far more
poetic & heroic than these
Soon after I went to see the panorama of the Mississippi and as I fitly worked my way upward in the light of
today –& saw the steamboats wooding up –& loooked up the Ohio & the Missouri & saw its unpeopled cliffs
–& counted the rising cities –& saw the Indians removing west across the stream & heard the legends of
Dubuque & of Wenona’s Cliff –still thinking more of the future than of the past or present –I saw that this was
a Rhine stream of a dif kind that the foundations {One leaf missing} all this West –which our thoughts traverse
so often & so freely. We have never doubted that their prosperity was our prosperity– It is the home of the
younger-sons As among the Scandinavians the younger sons took to the seas for their inheritance and became
the Vikings or Kings of the Bays & colonized Ice land & Greenland & probably discovered the continent of
America
The Reverend Theodore Parker sheltered William and Ellen Craft, who were fleeing from slaveholders in
Georgia, and married them to one another.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 1981
HDT WHAT? INDEX
HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC.
1982 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith
HDT WHAT? INDEX
HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 1983
HDT WHAT? INDEX
HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC.
1984 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith
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HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC.
A correspondent for Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal was harboring the fantastical notion that the Great Dismal
Swamp around Lake Drummond near Norfolk, Virginia was providing refuge for perhaps as many as one
thousand runaway slaves. An army! (Shudder.)
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 1985
HDT WHAT? INDEX
HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC.
You may peruse the full text of all the articles in this year’s issues of the Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal online.
ISSUE OF JANUARY 5
ISSUE OF JANUARY 12
ISSUE OF JANUARY 19
ISSUE OF JANUARY 26
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ISSUE OF MAY 4
ISSUE OF MAY 11
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ISSUE OF MAY 26
ISSUE OF JUNE 1
ISSUE OF JUNE 8
ISSUE OF JUNE 15
1986 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith
HDT WHAT? INDEX
HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC.
ISSUE OF JUNE 22
ISSUE OF JUNE 29
ISSUE OF JULY 6
ISSUE OF JULY 13
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ISSUE OF AUGUST 3
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ISSUE OF SEPTEMBER 7
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ISSUE OF OCTOBER 5
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ISSUE OF NOVEMBER 2
ISSUE OF NOVEMBER 9
ISSUE OF NOVEMBER 16
ISSUE OF NOVEMBER 23
ISSUE OF NOVEMBER 30
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 1987
HDT WHAT? INDEX
HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC.
ISSUE OF DECEMBER 7
ISSUE OF DECEMBER 14
ISSUE OF DECEMBER 21
ISSUE OF DECEMBER 28
According to the Congressional Globe for the 1st session of the 31st Congress, Senator Jacob W. Miller of
New Jersey responded to charges by his southern colleagues, that New Jersey had become a harbor for their
fugitive slaves, by commenting that:
The difficulty in New Jersey has been, not about surrendering
fugitive slaves to their legal masters, but rather how to get
rid of those worthless slaves which you suffer to escape into
our territory, and to remain there to the annoyance of our
people.
(Decoding this, “our people” means “white people.”)
Lewis Henry Morgan opinioned that “it is time to fix some limits to the reproduction of this black race among
1
us.”
Upon the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law William Cooper Nell formed a Committee of Vigilance. He
increased his participation in the Underground Railroad.
Henry Youle Hind’s TWO LECTURES, ON AGRICULTURAL CHEMISTRY (Toronto, Canada). This would quickly
be overshadowed as a textbook by the publications of John William Dawson.
Upon passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, Henry Bibb fled with his 2d wife, Mary Miles Bibb, to Canada.
There, they would work to establish a Refugees’ Home Colony for other Black American immigrants, such as
the ones being forwarded by the minuscule Ms. Tubman and her Equalizer. The Bibbs would publish a
newspaper, The Voice of the Fugitive, in the columns of which they would render the following ecologically
unsound and problematic advice to fellow escaping slaves:
1. We will also find him arguing for the abolition of slavery on the grounds that once this social institution is abolished, the support
system of the negro in the paternalistic benevolence of the slavemaster will be disintegrated — and the freed slaves would have to
die away.
1988 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith