Tag Archives: slavery

Sherman Behaving Badly

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It’s always disheartening to read reports of your favourite generals and presidents saying horrible things on the subject of race, but given the times, there’s a distasteful story for just about every personality in the war, North and South. Today, it’s Sherman:

Blinded by his implacable racism, Sherman could see no worthwhile moral or legal debate to be had over slavery. History had forced this institution on the South, Sherman thought, and its continued prosperity depended on embracing it. “Theoretical notions of humanity and religion,” he flatly declared, “cannot shake the commercial fact that their labor is of great value and cannot be dispensed with.” Further, Sherman believed that slavery benefited both races. In 1854 he assured his brother that blacks thrived in the Southern heat and later told David F. Boyd, one of his professors at the Louisiana military academy and eventual friend, that he considered slavery in the South “the mildest and best regulated system of slavery in the world, now or heretofore.”

Still, slavery did trouble Sherman in one way: He grew increasingly worried that the political fight over it would threaten the stability of the Union. However, while he occasionally singled out Southerners for overreacting to antislavery sentiment — once writing that they “pretend to think that the northern people have nothing to do but steal niggers and preach sedition” — Sherman overall displayed a clear sympathy for their side in the growing schism. He was emphatic in an 1859 letter to his wife that the South should make its own decisions regarding slavery and then “receive its reward or doom.” Sherman thus anticipated Jefferson Davis’ famous plea of two years later that the South simply be left alone.

One of the things I love about Sherman was his pragmatism. He disagreed with the root cause of the war, but once the South went in for treason, he embraced the waging of it wholeheartedly. Ironic then, by his quote above of letting the South decide its own doom, that he wound up as the angel that avenged its choice.

“Passing”

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Yesterday’s post about Eliza, the 1/64th black slave sold into sexual slavery, reminded me of a discussion from my university race relations class. A quick Google search (possibly hampered by my increasingly foggy memory – university’s starting to feel like a long time ago) doesn’t reveal much on the “one fatal drop” theory we discussed, but the Brazilian alternative “mulatto escape hatch” brought up this Wikipedia article on racial identity.

What it comes down to is, when do slaveowning societies stop considering a mixed race person to be black? In Brazil, mulattoes were able to move far more smoothly into society. In America, “one fatal drop” of black blood meant you were forever considered to be black. So despite Eliza being only 1/64th black and looking like a white woman, she was considered a purchaser’s bargain, not a societal catch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_(racial_identity)

**UPDATE**

Found it! It’s the “One Drop Rule”

According to Jose Neinstein, a native white Brazilian and executive director of the Brazilian-American Cultural Institute in Washington, in the United States, “If you are not quite white, then you are black.” However, in Brazil, “If you are not quite black, then you are white.” Neinstein recalls talking with a man of Poitier’s complexion when in Brazil: “We were discussing ethnicity, and I asked him, ‘What do you think about this from your perspective as a black man?’ He turned his head to me and said, ‘I’m not black,’ . . . It simply paralyzed me. I couldn’t ask another question.”

The Washington Post story also described a Brazilian-born woman who for 30 years before immigrating to the United States considered herself a morena. Her skin had a caramel color that is roughly equated with whiteness in Brazil and some other Latin American countries. “I didn’t realize I was black until I came here,” she explained. “‘Where are you from?’ they ask me. I say I’m from Brazil. They say, ‘No, you are from Africa.’ They make me feel like I am denying who I am.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule

“Fancy Girls”

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More insights into the horrors of slavery, and more incidences of slaveowners’ distaste for the traders with whom they trucked. The more I read about Southern “civilization” (or “monstrous system”, as Mrs. Chesnut put it), the gladder I am that Sherman swept it away with such force.

(Unrelated aside: Who knew Lexington, KY had such a huge population of slaves? I always assumed the equal- or greater-than ratios of blacks to whites were reserved for cotton heavy South Carolina and Mississippi, but I suppose certain centres were the exception, rather than the rule?)

Smith said that, more than any slave-trading city except New Orleans, Lexington was known for its “fancy girls” — light-skinned, mixed-race young women who were sold into sexual slavery. The best-known dealer was Lewis Robards, who kept his “choice stock” in parlors above his Short Street office.

Not all of these deals were conducted behind closed doors. The most infamous case involved a beautiful young woman named Eliza — said to be just 1⁄64 black — who was sold at Cheapside in May 1843 to satisfy the debts of her deceased master and father.

Abolitionist accounts of the sale tell of a hard-hearted auctioneer who exposed Eliza’s breasts and thighs to encourage bidders, much to the horror of the assembled crowd.

http://www.kentucky.com/2012/01/31/2050313/tom-eblen-without-the-civil-war.html

Voices from the Days of Slavery

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The most depressing thing about the current economic crisis is that governments are tackling the crisis through austerity measures and cutbacks. When you see websites like this one, you’re reminded of what was accomplished when the WPA assigned the country odd jobs (in a literal sense) and gifted its results upon later generations.

The ethnomusicology work performed by the Federal Music Project has fascinated me since my University days; I was a history student working at a late, lamented, legendary record store to pay my tuition. Unlike my much cooler coworkers I was more than happy to cover shifts in the Folk section, where I had access to all the Smithsonian Folkways CDs and very few customers to complain if I played them.

The CDs I listened to were preserved music, but I knew of the interviews’ existence. Thank goodness for the Internet; an easily-accessed repository for these chronicles out of time. I’ve listened to Fountain Hughes’ interview already – it was excerpted in the Ken Burns series – and I can’t wait to get at some of the others. I mean, how’s this for a teaser?

I got my name from President Jeff Davis. He was president of the Southern Confederacy. He owned my grandfather and my father. Brought them from Richmond, Virginia.

Voices from the Days of Slavery – Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/voices/

To My Old Master

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This letter – an emancipated slave responding to his former master’s request that he come back “home” – has made the rounds on the web, but if you haven’t seen it, it’s spectacular. I publish an excerpt just to give readers a taste – read the whole thing for the full, bitingly sarcastic effect.

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/to-my-old-master.html

Slavery in Canada

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An odd choice of topic for Valentine’s Day, but this Wikipedia entry (pulled up when I was investigating comparative slavery systems for that Atlantic Monthly article) contained a paragraph that warmed the cockles of my patriotic heart:

By 1790 the abolition movement was gaining credence in Canada and the ill intent of slavery was evidenced by an incident involving a slave woman being violently abused by her slave owner on her way to being sold in the United States. In 1793 Chloe Clooey, in an act of defiance yelled out screams of resistance. The abuse committed by her slave owner and her violent resistance was witnessed by Peter Martin and William Grisely. Peter Martin, a former slave, brought the incident to the attention of Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe. Under the auspices of Simcoe, The Slave Act of 1793 was legislated. The elected members of the executive council, many of whom were merchants or farmers who depended on slave labour, saw no need for emancipation. White later wrote that there was “much opposition but little argument” to his measure.

Isn’t that us in a nutshell? Plenty of griping, but resigned to the pragmatic solution. Take that, South Carolina.

Slavery by Another Name

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In reading that discussion in The Atlantic, a few of the commenters mentioned Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name, which chronicles the virtual enslavement of blacks in the South after the war. The reviews are all along the lines of, “excellent, but exhausting” (with tons of depressing statistics), so I’m glad to see that it’s been turned into a documentary, for broadcast on PBS. I’ll be keeping an eye out for this one.

http://www.twincities.com/entertainment/ci_19785894

The Atlantic – Still Relevant!

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One of the best in-print observations of the sesquicentennial is by The Atlantic Monthly (altogether fitting, since it was one of the most influential magazines in the 1860s), who’ve assigned blogging duties to Ta-Nehisi Coates.

I’ve seen Coates in a few talking-head spots (and, if I recall correctly, a Colbert Report interview) and he’s always fascinating; well-versed in popular culture yet deeply intellectual. Go figure, this sums up his regular column, too.

The most recent is an investigation into Ron Paul’s controversial (read: ridiculous) pro-Southern stance on the war, which he considers to have been unnecessary, claiming compensated emancipation would’ve solved all the problems. Coates approaches the topic as a scientist:

One of the more unfortunate aspects of blogging about the Civil War is that a great deal of time is expended on debunking, as opposed to discovery. Instead of looking at, say, Unionism in Tennessee, or Native American participation in the Confederate Army, we end up revisiting black Confederates again. I’ve tried to avoid this. But history is political and the deployment of comfortable narratives is a constant malady. Moreover, I get something out of these repeated debunkings that I didn’t realize until this weekend. My wife recently noted that is not unusual for scientist to spend as much, or more, time disproving things, as opposed to proving. She added that sometimes in disproving, they actually make a discovery…

The problem debating this sort of thing is the side of dishonesty and intellectual laziness is at an advantage. It will likely take more effort for me to compose this post, then it took for Ron Paul to stand before the Confederate Flag and offer his thin gruel of history. Those attempting to practice history need not only gather facts, but seek out facts that might contradict the facts they like, and then gather more facts of context to see what it all means.

He presents some facts:

We know that states like Mississippi and South Carolina were, in 1860, majority black and thus compensated emancipation in Hammond and Calhoun’s South Carolina would not simply mean the end of this broad aristocracy, but the prospect of a free white populations outnumbered by a free black population. We can thus surmise that it is no coincidence that South Carolina inaugurated the Civil War.

We know that to alleviate fears of black majority, compensated emancipation was usually partnered with a proposal of colonization–that is the removal of African-Americans from slave states to colonies in Africa or the Caribbean. We know that colonization was a polarizing issue in the black community, and by 1860, much of its popular support had collapsed. Thus we know that any contemplation of compensated emancipation must grapple with how several counties, and some states in the South, would react to finding themselves suddenly outnumbered by free black people.

Then asks more questions:

2.) Was a mass payment toward slave-holders even possible? We know that in 1860, slaves were worth $3 billion in 1860 dollars (75 billion in today’s dollars.) Did the American government have access to those sorts of funds? If so, how would they have been garnered?

4.) Assuming compensation, how would Southerners have reacted to a substantial black minority in their midst? What would the labor system have looked like? What would have happened with black male suffrage? How would the white working class reacted to finding itself in competition with blacks?

6.) Why didn’t England have a war over slavery? What were the specific differences between England slave colonies and the Antebellum South?

upon which, in the comments, his readers expound.

I would have to assume on 2, there would never have been enough money to buy the slaves outright, considering both the numbers (4.5 million, if memory serves) and southron intransigence. I can easily envision a situation like Germany’s WW1 reparations, which it just finished paying a couple of years ago (!), where the Union would make payments over time. Imagine the implications of that, with the South changing from Slave Power to perpetual creditor. And if you consider the financial rollercoaster of the late 1800s and the risk of a missed payment, I’m sure any arrangements would include a penalty for default that would have fallen on the freed slaves somehow.

It’s an antidote to the Ron Paul incident, and the recent Jim Crow revival for voting rights, to see an educated black man, at a liberal publication, asking tough questions. Isn’t this every Republican’s worst nightmare?

http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2012/01/crowd-sourcing-american-history/251771/

12 Years A Slave

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One of the less-discussed facts of slavery is that free blacks were at risk when travelling. The tale of Solomon Northup (whose autobiography I’ve added to the Library) is a prime example: Slave dealers coaxed the musician – a free black from New York – to DC under the pretense of arranging a concert, then kidnapped him and sold him South into slavery. Solomon was eventually freed when the governor of New York interceded on his behalf. One has to wonder how many blacks were imprisoned in this manner, and how few of them had the luck that Solomon had, to have been freed.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

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Another e-book uncovered on my travels, though I’m shocked that I hadn’t included this one earlier: I read it in university, and it’s a very famous account of life as a female slave in the South.  Well worth a read for an insight into the horrors of slavery. Project Gutenberg, as always, provides multiple formats from which to choose.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11030