Tag Archives: slavery

King Cotton

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Here’s a quick look at South Carolina’s addiction to cotton.  Like other kinds of junkies, its love of the white stuff led it to make rash decisions and sacrifice its future.  By the looks of it, the effects of the Civil War are still plaguing the state.

“The story of cotton itself is as interesting as the stories about its place in American history,” Cox said.

That includes cotton’s role in the Civil War. Thanks to cotton, U.S. Census data ranked South Carolina third in wealth among the states on the eve of the war. With most young men fighting, cotton production fell 96 percent during the war. And since then, South Carolina has consistently been in the bottom 10 in per capita income in the U.S.

The state’s fortunes were tied to cotton long after the war. In the 1880s, some cotton farmers went from the richest men in the state after boom years with good weather to bust in just a few years when drought returned.

via BISHOPVILLE, S.C.: Cotton may not be king, but it’s still vital to SC | State | The State.

Slave Tags

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Here’s a fact about slavery that is new to me: The Slave Tag.

In Charleston, S.C., slave owners could rent out the services of their slaves to others for a fee. The registration fee for slave tags brought income to the city of Charleston. To oversee the slave trade, slaves in Charleston were required to wear a slave tag or identification marker. Fees for the tags, like a license, were set based on the abilities and skills of the slave.

By law, the slave tag had to be worn at all times during the calendar year marked on the tag.

Art and Antiques: Dark history told through slave tags - News - Republican Herald

via Art and Antiques: Dark history told through slave tags – News – Republican Herald.

The Scourged Back

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Disunion presents a piece on Civil War photographers, but introduces it with the background of that most famous of slave pictures, “The Scourged Back”.  I’d never heard it before, and assumed that the photo was from earlier than it was actually taken.

The image made its way back to New England, where it was converted by an artist into a wood engraving, a backwards technological step that allowed it to be published in the newspapers. On July 4, 1863, the same day that Vicksburg fell, “The Scourged Back” appeared in a special Independence Day issue of Harper’s Weekly. All of America could see those scars, and feel that military and moral progress were one. The Civil War, in no way a war to exterminate slavery in 1861, was increasingly just that in 1863. “The Scourged Back” may have been propaganda, but as a photograph, which drew as much from science as from art, it presented irrefutable evidence of the horror of slavery. Because those scars had been photographed, they were real, in a way that no drawing could be.

via The Civil War and Photography – NYTimes.com.

Forty Acres and a Mule

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Sherman’s famous field order is one of the war’s great what-ifs.  A terrific idea nixed by a man who can only be described as the anti-Lincoln.  Reconstruction in microcosm.

Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau shortly after Sherman’s Field Order No. 15 demanded the redistribution of land to former slaves. The Freedmen’s Bureau was created to ensure that millions of free slaves would begin to receive economic equality and empowerment, their 40 acres and mule, shortly after the Civil War ended. President Johnson, however, reversed Sherman’s policy and issued an order for all land to be returned to the Confederacy’s White landowners and confiscated from the free Blacks.

via Michigan Chronicle – Forty Acres and a Mule.

The Role of Cotton

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This site was suggested to me by a reader, which is always a thrill – it’s nice to hear from you, and to exchange new knowledge!

Reading about cotton was a bit like reading about salt; it’s one of those commodities that’s so omnipresent I never spared it much thought.  But this tshirt sales site surprisingly offers a good little history about the cultivation of cotton.

As mentioned above, cotton and cotton cloth that date back 7,000 years have been recovered. With that fact in mind, it’s no surprise that by 3,000 BC, cotton was being grown and woven on a commercial scale in the Indus River Valley and along the Egyptian Nile. Cotton traveled to Europe at around 800 A.D., courtesy of Arabian traders. It was not, however, passed along to America in the same way. When Christopher Columbus landed in 1492, he was surprised to discover cotton in the Bahaman Islands. Cotton began growing in the southern United States around 1556, and by 1793, it was being spun by Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. The cotton gin completely revolutionized the speed with which cotton could be produced. Before its introduction, laborers had to struggle to pick clean one pound of cotton per day. With the help of the cotton gin, a single worker could clean and produce fifty pounds of cotton per day. Of course, this meant that more laborers would mean more money for plantation owners, and this put slaves at high demand.

via From Cotton to T-Shirts: The Role of Cotton in the Civil War – ooShirts.com.

Then, Thenceforth and Forever Acid Free

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I’m proclaiming this week Emancipation Proclamation week here at the CWP.  It’s just too big an anniversary for all the mainstream news outlets to ignore, and they’re proffering some fantastic articles I want to share.

The video here lets you see what the Proclamation actually looks like. As the article says, it’s wonderfully, revealingly banal.  I love the ribbons and the affixed seal.  As a history fanatic with ridiculously sweaty hands, though, I was sent to new depths of stress-sweats watching the curator touching the paper with her bare hands.  All the while talking about methods to keep the acid out of the paper.

But what’s pretty amazing about the juxtaposition here — the document that bears the phrase “forever free,” folded and be-ribboned — is how eloquently it expresses technological frailty as a symptom of human frailty. The Proclamation wasn’t written double-sided because people couldn’t afford paper back then, or because they thought paper was more enduring than parchment, or because, indeed, they made any strategic decision at all to write the Proclamation the way they did; it was written that way because that’s just how things were done at that particular moment in our history. I asked Archives representatives about the double-sided nature of the Proclamation; they replied that “writing on both sides of the document was the convention of the time. It was written on a folded folio so that they could have four writing surfaces.” That’s it: Folio was the convention, so that’s what they did. (The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation — the document that announced the Emancipation would take effect on January 1, 1863 — is written in the same format.) Technology isn’t just about tools; it’s about the assumptions and conventions that inform our use of those tools. And in the America of 1863, matters of national business were conducted with folded paper and punches and ribbons. Not for reasons that were transcendent, but for reasons that were wonderfully, revealingly banal. 

via The Emancipation Proclamation Was Written Double-Sided – Megan Garber – The Atlantic.

Watch Night

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Came across this while researching yesterday’s podcast, but sadly, the writing got away from me and I had to cut the reference.  This is a really lovely callout to history – it wouldn’t fit on my podcast but I might just put it on my bucket list.

A tradition began Dec. 31, 1862, as many black churches held Watch Night services, awaiting word that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation would take effect amid a bloody Civil War. Later, congregations listened as the president’s historic words were read aloud…

This year, the Watch Night tradition will follow the historic document to its home at the National Archives with a special midnight display planned with readings, songs and bell ringing among the nation’s founding documents…

“We will be calling back to an old tradition,” said U.S. Archivist David Ferriero, noting the proclamation’s legacy. “When you see thousands of people waiting in line in the dark and cold … we know that they’re not there just for words on paper.

via National Archives tribute, Watch Nights among events marking Emancipation Proclamation’s 150th – Washington Post.

It’s Heeeeere!

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I’m in under the wire of my deadline, but I can proudly say I’ve checked a resolution off my list already: The first ever Civil War Podcast is ready to go! (Take that, 2013!)

To marvel at my lucid writing and dulcet tones (I know, I know – I am an admitted amateur!) click the Podcast tab in the menu bar, then the January link. Clicking on the “0101 the emancipation proclamation 1” link on the January page will download a copy of the audio file to your hard drive.*

The topic is, as you can no doubt guess, the Emancipation Proclamation, which was signed on this day in 1863. Much like Lincoln, I was slow to get moving on the topic, but as I’m sure Salmon Chase would say of me, “so you see, the woman moves.”

Sadly, I decided to scale back my podcasty undertaking from a daily podcast to a weekly one (frankly, it takes a lot longer to research, write and record a 6 minute podcast than you’d think) but I hope you enjoy the presentation, which includes a piano intro/outro of “We Are Coming Through the Cotton Fields”, performed by my good friend, Tom Nagy. Hopefully his lovely playing will offset my monotone.

*I need to find a solution for embedding the link without incurring hosting surcharges. Podcasting is not a cheap hobby!

Black Confederates

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The Union County Historic Preservation Commission voted unanimously Thursday to approve a plan for a privately funded marker to honor 10 black men, nine of whom were slaves, who eventually received small state pensions for their Civil War service.

It will be one of the few public markers of its kind in the country, and arrives in the midst of state and national commemorations of the Civil War’s sesquicentennial. The granite marker will be placed on a brick walkway at the Old County Courthouse in Monroe in front of the 1910 Confederate monument.

“I’m glad to see Union County is finally stepping out of the Jim Crow era and being all-inclusive of its history,” said Tony Way, the local amateur historian and Sons of Confederate Veterans member who has led the push for the project…

In pension applications, all 10 men were described as “body servants” or bodyguards. They hauled water, carried supplies and helped build forts. Two were wounded.

I have mixed feelings about this kind of news. On the one hand, slaves were brought along to the front lines, and no doubt they made their contributions. Their descendants certainly seem thrilled at the gesture. But such a monument, championed by the SCV, leaves a bitter aftertaste of pandering, particularly when one reads what kind of duties are being honored with bronze. Methink they doth celebrateth too much.

via Union County board approves marker honoring slaves who served in Confederate Army | CharlotteObserver.com & The Charlotte Observer Newspaper.