Slavery Everywhere?

 Americans, some of us, know that slavery was part of our history from 1619 to the Civil War.  We're less knowledgable about the slavery in the Caribbean and South America.  I'd have to use Google to find out the extent of slavery in Canada or Chile, Bolivia or Mexico.  

I know, of course, that "slave" derived from "Slav" because Slavs were often enslaved sometime back in history. The TV series "Vikings" touched on slavery there. 

The Bible includes codes for treatment of slaves. 

My recent reading has included discussions of slavery among Native American tribes and enslavement and slave trading in Africa.

The Port Royal Experiment and Phonics

 Stumbled across an odd fact today.  I've been reading Roger Lowenstein's "Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War."  It's interesting.  A main character for most of the book is Sec. of Treasury Chase, who ends up designing the "National Bank System" and also had charge mostly for the Sea Island plantations after the Union Army took the islands.  This led to what is called the Port Royal Experiment, giving the government the problem of how to handle the freed slaves and the occupied plantations.  It was a forerunner of Reconsttuction's issues.

One problem was teaching adult blacks to read. A teacher was John Zachos, a Greek whose father was killed in the Greek rebellion in 1824, and was brought to the US by an American who supported the rebellion.  He wrote a book, the first book the blacks had, entitled: " The Phonic Primer and Reader, A National Method of teaching Reading by the Sounds of the Letters without altering the Orthography. Designed Chiefly for the Use of Night-Schools Where Adults are Taught, and for the Myriads of Freed Men and Women, Whose First Rush from the Prison-House of Slavery is to the Gates of the Temple of Knowledge?"

Arms Dealings

 Got the book "Thundersticks" from the library. It's a history of the arms trade with Native Americans from the initial contact through the nineteenth century.

I've only read the first couple chapters--it seems a bit too scholarly for my current ability to focus.  But a couple things struck me:

• the pattern of arms dealing in the seventeenth century is similar to the pattern in modern times: countries/companies with advanced technology sell weapons to those who don't have the capability to produce their own.  (Natives weren't able to produce their own weapons or gunpowder, while they could make their own bullets if they could obtain the lead.) And the sales are used to influence international/intertribal politics, just as the Soviet Union/Russia sold weapons to India and the US sells to Israel and Saudi Arabia.
• what was surprising was how the natives financed their purchases.  Furs--beaver skins and deer skins, I knew.  But capturing slaves from other tribes for resale to colonists, possibly for export to the Caribbean--that was new. 

Anglo-Saxon England and Slavery

 Just finished Marc Morris book on Anglo-Saxon England, an interest partially spurred by the TV series "The Last Kingdom".  I liked it, given the scarcity of sources with which he was dealing.

One thing I learned--10 percent of English residents were slaves at the time of the Norman conquest.

I vaguely knew that the word "slaves" comes from "Slav"--from the internet:

What's the etymology of slave?

Etymology. From Middle English sclave, from Old French sclave, from Medieval Latin sclāvus (“slave”), from Late Latin Sclāvus (“Slav”), because Slavs were a common source of slaves, during the Middle Ages, for Europe, the Byzantine Empire, and Arabs.

And I know "slaves" are described in the Bible, etc., but the dominant image in my mind is the rise of African slavery in the mid 15th century, through to the mid 19th century. 

It's so easy to make the accessible information seem like the exclusive and essential information.

Differences in Slavery in New World

 One big part of slavery in the US was the internal "migration", the movement of slaves from the Atlantic Coast colonies to the newer states of MS, AL, AL, AR, mostly it seems by sale  to slave traders.  

There are differences in the societies in different parts of the New World, partially from differences in Spain, France, and Britain, partially from differences in the crops being grown, and partially the climate/health conditions.  I know that; what I didn't think about until today was the difference in size.  The US and Brazil are big countries, while the Caribbean islands are much smaller.  So in the US slaves who gave trouble could be threatened with being sold to slave traders or "down river". On the other hand the slave population multiplied by natural increase in the US, less so or not so at times elsewhere.

So the question I have is whether historians can find a difference in what might be termed "mobility", except it connotes choice.  What was the probability that a slave born in 1770 in Virginia would die 200+ miles away versus the same probability for a slave in the sugar islands of the Caribbean?  And, if there's a difference, what impact was there on the societies?

Who Would Enslave Britons in the Eighteenth Century?

 What threatened Britain in the 18th century that Britons would not be slaves, as in the refrain of Rule, Britannia. The poetry was written by James Thomson, a Scot for whom there's not much other information easily available. 

The year of the poem is 1740 and it turns out the poem was written after the British took Porto Bello in the War of Jenkin's Ear.  Fears of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 might have been a factor, since France and Spain were supporting the Stuart pretender to the throne by 1743. So it's wartime when he's writing, the Brits have a victory, and the poem is both boastful and anxious.

The "slavery" in the poem is rhetorical, not descriptive of anything like chattel slavery.

And Now for Something Entirely Different: Nigeria

 Over at the Atlantic, an interview by Conor Friedersdorf  with a Nigerian writer.  From it I learned  learned about the Nigerian caliphate, and its involvement in slavery.  If you can trust wikipedia, it may have been the second largest slave society (after US) at any time, though I don't believe it.  Brazil likely is similar in size and the Roman empire may well have had more slaves than the US. Other empires likely also had numbers in the millions.  The problem though is we're likely comparing apples and oranges, since the rules about slavery were different in different societies.

Nevertheless, an interesting take.

The Meanings of Slavery

 I'm not sure what "slavery" meant in the18th and early 19th century.  One meaning obviously was chattel slavery, where a person was enslaved, could be sold, and the status was inherited based on one parent's status.

But what was the "slavery" which the American rebels feared at the hands of the British?  What was the opposite of the , "land of the free" in the Star Spangled Banner--was that also slavery?

One thing that's true--for centuries in many different places the losers in a war might be subject to slavery, or worse.   The New England settlers sold some of their Indian captives into slavery in the Caribbean. Oliver Cromwell sold Irish captives into the Caribbean (though I don't believe their status was inheritable).  Some Native American tribes imposed "slavery" on their war captives, although it seems there was a lot of variety in the patterns. I was surprised to learn that some Pacific Northwest tribes indeed had chattel slavery.  

I've not seen any discussion of whether the rebels really feared being sent into slavery if they lost the war, or whether the use of "slavery" was similar to the current use of "slavery" in connection with socialism by libertarians.

Thomas Jefferson and Hemings

 Reading "Most Blessed Patriarch:Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination" by Gordon-Reed and Onof.  It reads well, discusses his ideas more than his deeds.  

I'm just part way through it, but I wanted to note an observations which struck me:  the authors write that in his own time, his contemporaries viewed his relationship with Sally Hemings as one of love, which was dangerous to the social structure;  while in our time most critics refuse to believe it was love, rather a relationship of power which was the essence of slavery.

Quibbling with Caste

 Started reading Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents". I want to quibble with some sentences on page 29: 

"[The South] was where the tenets of intercaste relations took hold before spreading to the rest of the country..." (There follows a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville with a similar point.) 

I think this is wrong: slavery was a feature of the world before Europeans reached the Americas.  It was a part of the Old Testament, it was part of medieval times, it was an accepted feature of war. It was arguably part of many Native American societies.  There was slavery in Great Britain until the Somerset decision.

The bottom line is: we can't blame the South for slavery, which is the way I read Wilkerson.  She can argue that slavery on Southern plantations was developed into an American archetype, perhaps with some unique features.  But even there, she would need to recognize the differences between Southern slavery and Caribbean sugar plantations. 

As I said, it's a quibble.  Wilkerson's writing at a level of generality and artistry with which I'm not terribly comfortable.

1619 Project and the Birth of the Nation

 Bret Stephens writes about the 1619 Project  Actually, he focuses on only a few sentences of it, but the sentences have become controversial.  In a nutshell, the original writeup in the Times said two things: the Revolution was fought to preserve slavery and the nation was born with the arrival of slaves in 1619.  The writeup has been changed and softened since its original publication.  IMHO the Revolution was well underway in the hearts and minds of Americans well before 1775 and had little to do with slavery.  It's true that slaveowners were alarmed by British attempts to woe slaves to support the Loyalist cause, but that was late in the process.  If the preservation of slavery in the face of the Somerset decision in the UK had been a major factor, one would have expected the British sugar colonies in the Caribbean to have joined the 13 colonies because they were even more dependent on slavery than were the mainland colonies.

The question I really want to consider is: what constitutes the "birth" of a country, a nation?  How do we know? Was Canada born with the French in the the 17th century or when the British conquered it in the 18th century, or with the 1867 Act?  When was the UK born, and did it die with the loss of Eire, or will it die if Scotland secedes?  

Was France born with the First Republic, or the Second, Third, Fourth or Fifth?  Was Germany born before Bismarck?  

Our Schizoid History-I

 Someday I may write more on this, but here's a placeholder: Throughout our history white America has had a schizoid attitude towards slavery, possibly an attitude also found in England and elsewhere.

• on the one hand slavery is bad, the worst thing possible.  It's what Americans feared, or at least said they feared from British rule.  You can see it in the pamphlets leading up to the Revolution, and you can see it in our national anthem.  (Britain's "Rule Britannia" also claims "Britons will never be slaves" in its second line.)
• on the other hand, of course, slavery is legal in some places until 1865.

On Removing Statues and Renaming Names

I'm of two multiple minds on the issue, as I am on most things:

• on one hand I never give a thought to statues or names--who or what they stand for.  I just accept them as part of the environment, rather like the weather or gravity.
• on the other hand I know intellectually, if not emotionally, that some people do, at least at some times.  I really doubt that a black person who drove through Alexandria every day on the way to work gave much of a thought to the statue of the Confederate soldier which used to stand at the intersection of the two main streets.  More likely their attention was on navigating the traffic.  But I accept the idea that such a statue could, on occasion, be disturbing.
• on the third hand, my two positions above are coming from my background as a white 79 year old American male.  If I make the effort, I can imagine perhaps a German street with a statue of Hitler or an idealized Wehrmacht soldier and a Jewish person's reaction to it.  If I come at the issue from that direction, as putting myself in the place of a Jew confronting a statue or name which commemorated the Third Reich, it's a lot easier to empathize with the reaction of a black American confronting a reminder of the Confederacy or of slavery.

My contrarian side is a bit activated on the third point--some resistance to the implied comparison of the German treatment of the Jews and American slavery. But the above describes my position today.

I think in the long run the specifically Confederate statues and names will be removed.  That set of symbolic victories will be enough in the long run to reduce the feeling behind the movement.  As is usual with humans we'll end with a mixed bag of things, with no clear algorithm evident. 

Slavery in Canada and "Turn"

We've been watching "Turn" on Netflix, which is a 4 season series dealing mainly with Washington's spies, but which touches on, or forces connections to, episodes in the Revolution which are more commonly known. (I think it makes very generous use of "dramatic license".)

Anyhow, in the episode ending season 2, the African-American who was freed by Capt. Simcoe and enlisted in his Queen's Rangers takes the son of the enslaved maid to Major Andre from Setauket into York City to rejoin his mother. (The maid's been doing a little spying for the rebels on the side.) Needless to say, the British soldier loves the maid and urges her to flee with him to Canada so they can both be free.

I wondered about the accuracy of that so I did a little researching on the internet.

Sure enough, slavery in Canada lasted until 1834, when it was abolished throughout the empire.

But wait, it's not that simple.  "Lower Canada" was originally Quebec, founded by the French until the Brits won it by conquest in the French and Indian War. "Upper Canada" became today's Ontario and was mostly settled by the English.

Reading between the lines it seems likely the Brits just kept the old French laws, including those pertaining to slavery at the start.  And in "Lower Canada" they might have kept the laws until 1834. But by 1790's slavery in Upper Canada was being questioned, and a courageous troublemaker  named Chloe Cooley resisted being sold as a slave into New York.  That resulted in an act restricting the importation of slaves and promising freedom to children born after 1793. But the act only applied to Upper Canada.

Based on skimming the second article I linked to, slaves in the thirteen colonies should not have seen Canada as the promised land of freedom before 1793.

Slavery and Caste Systems

Having read Ants Among Elephants (see yesterday's post) I'm musing about the similarities and differences between the caste system and slavery.

Did a google search, with limited results--I don't see a solid academic study, just some student work or summaries that can go off track. This might be the best one, throwing in "class system" and "meritocracy" as well as slavery and caste. One big problem is comparing different times and different countries.

What's striking to me from Ants is the use of force to enforce caste boundaries.  As it happens, a front page article in the Post today is an account of an honor killing, a Dalit married a woman of a trading caste, her father hired men to kill him.  Force obviously was used in slavery.  Which one was/is more violent.

In both cases (chattel slavery and caste system), the position is inherited by child from parent. In chattel slavery the law backs the social norms; apparently in the caste system social norms were  sufficient. And in India these days the law doesn't support the system.

It seems some social mobility is possible in both systems.  Certainly the family described in Ants is mobile, though their upward progress seems a function of the changing laws.  Their progress seems more problematic than some mobility under slavery.  The key difference might be the ownership: if your owner was your father and/or enlightened, he could boost you.  Since Dalits have no owner, that doesn't work.

On the other hand, there might be more unity among the caste (considering Dalits as a caste) than there was in slavery.  Perhaps, perhaps not.

[Added:  Other important differences:

• there seems to be no boss, no slave driver in the caste system. That might mean more "freedom" in one's daily routine, more akin to the "task" system in rice culture than the "driver" in cotton system.
• mobility within the caste is restrcted--no house slaves versus field slaves, no chance to become a skilled artisan]

Slaves in the North

Discussing with a relative the existence of slavery in the North.

I mentioned the idea/fact that New England settlers sometimes swapped Indian slaves (captured in war, particularly IIRC King Philips War) for black slaves by sending the former to British Caribbean colonies.   

On a  practical if very cynical basis, it makes sense.  Society recognized that when you won a war people were part of the booty.  Women to rape, men to work as slaves if they weren't killed.  (No conventions about treatment of prisoners of war back then.) But the problem with captures in the wars between the colonists and the Native Americans was it was relatively easy for the captives to escape and return to their people.  White colonists often did this, so would Native Americans.  The practical answer was to ship your war captives away to someplace where they were foreigners, where society was foreign.

(I suspect some part of the dynamic accounting for the capture and sale of black slaves to the slave traders was similar.  Keep your captives with you as slaves and they escape; sell them to the European trader who could provide weapons, etc. and it was a win.  Not for the slave.)

Adam Smith on Slavery

I generally think of Adam Smith as explaining what was happening in the 18th century economy, not as a social reformer.  But there's this, highlighted in a recent paper.

There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished. (TMS 206–7.9) 

Myths Never Die: Millions of Slaves Imported

Since the NYTimes doesn't offer a comment section on this article about what DNA tests of African-Americans show about their migrations, I'm <s>nitpicking</s> criticizing here.

Its first three sentences read:

"The history of African-Americans has been shaped in part by two great journeys.

The first brought millions of Africans to the southern United States as slaves. The second, the Great Migration, began around 1910 and sent six million African-Americans from the South to New York, Chicago and other cities across the country."

 Two serious errors in the second sentence.  First, the colonies and the US did not import "millions" of slaves.  In fact, as Prof. Gates of Harvard writes here, there were less than 400,000 imported.  The vast majority of the close to 13 million slaves went to the Caribbean and South America.

Second, a bit less serious, the South wasn't the only region importing slaves, the Middle Atlantic and New England colonies/states also participated.

Slavery was bad enough, it doesn't need to be clothed in mythical figures.

[I see the Times has issued a correction for the millions figure as of 5/31]

What Is America--the Biggest Slave Revolt

We write as if the definition of America is self-evident, thus the adjective "American" is self-evident as well.

Not so fast.  I tried, and failed, to become a professor of American history.  It's a hard term to define.  Is it the history of the people who live or lived in America?  Sounds like a good starting point, but do we include the history of the Native Americans? Does that make them more American than Americans, or less, or different? 

Maybe we just limit the term to the history of the people who lived in America after 1492?  Does that exclude the Spanish who settled in Florida and the Southwest, or the French who settled in New Orleans and Louisiana?  Or do we say that they only became American when the US gained sovereignty over the land, so their history begins with acquisition?

The other related question is whether there are degrees of Americanness?  Asking the question brings up, for those of us of a certain age, the divisiveness of the McCarthy times.  But it's a good question, at least for the way we usually write.  But it often excludes such groups as Native American tribes, the Amish/Mennonite community, the Hasidic Jewish community, etc. who don't fit neatly into generalizations about American.

This post was prompted by this piece, discussing the biggest slave revolt on soil now claimed by the US.

Historical Errors

Thinkprogress has a piece where a mother who's also a historian challenges a Texas schoolbook used by her child.  From the piece:

"A Texas mother spoke out against part of McGraw-Hill’s textbook, “World Geography,” when she noticed that the language erased slavery by calling slaves “workers” and including them in the section “Patterns of Immigration.” One example of the text:

The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations."

The challenge is to "workers" instead of "slaves", a challenge with which I agree.

But there's another error which passes unnoticed: "millions".

From Gilderlehrman:

 Approximately 11,863,000 Africans were shipped across the Atlantic, with a death rate during the Middle Passage reducing this number by 10-20 percent. As a result between 9.6 and 10.8 million Africans arrived in the Americas.
About 500,000 Africans were imported into what is now the U.S. between 1619 and 1807--or about 6 percent of all Africans forcibly imported into the Americas. About 70 percent arrived directly from Africa.