Slavery and Mauretania

Kottke.org links to a desire map--Google analyzed the most common query "how much does X cost" by country. 

In four countries of east Africa the most common "X" is "cow".

In Mauretania the most common "X" is "slave", which led me to find this wikipedia entry on slavery in modern?-day Mauretania.

General Ross, the Irish, the Star Spangled Banner, and Memory

A relative forwarded this link to me--Irish Ulster schoolkids with a US flag at the General Ross memorial in Rostrevor, Northern Ireland, set to the music of the Star Spangled Banner.

Some points:

• who was Ross?  -- the British general who commanded the forces which won the Battle of Bladensburg, leading to the burning of public buildings in DC in late summer 1814. He was killed by a sniper during the attack on Fort McHenry, hence the connection to the Star Spangled Banner/flag.
• the comments on the video show that some in Ulster/Ireland have a long long memory and bear grudges--Ross was from the landowning class.
• from the video, I guess that drones have now a place in public ceremonies.
• the 200th anniversary of the writing of the song has gotten Francis Scott Key a good bit of notice, but little comment on his ownership of some slaves, his freeing of some, his prosecution of cases against and for slaves as an attorney in DC and sometime district attorney for the district.  Does this mean Americans, unlike the Irish, have a shorter memory or don't like to dwell on the gloomy and complicated?

The Conservative America

Thomas Fleming has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (hat tip Ann Althouse), discussing the colonies at the time of independence.  The closest he comes to mentioning slavery is this: " In some parts of the South, 10% owned 75% of the wealth."

It's amazing how easy it is to exclude people.  For example, Mr. Fleming above excluded the slaves.  But I myself did not remember to include Native Americans.  Were they "Americans" included in the Declaration? Are they "Americans" today?  Certainly their status is more complicated than most other citizens of the country.  When Jackson sent the Cherokees and Creeks on the Trail of Tears from Georgia to Oklahoma was he in effect taking away their citizenship in the U.S.?

Gardens, Slaves, and Pigford

The NY Times has a long article about slaves, African-Americans, gardens, and vegetables.

I read it with interest, because I've toyed with the idea of writing on a similar subject, tied to the Pigford case.  A couple of points:

• some African-Americans run away from the land because farming means toil and drudgery (a sentiment which I share)
• heir property, as in the following:

"Perhaps Malva will feel inspired to water the garden next week, when Diana goes to Philadelphia for the annual slavery reparations conference. Along the way, she’ll also stop in Baltimore to ask her uncle to sign legal papers that would give her power of attorney to manage the land.

The farm, she explained, is heir property: it belongs to 19 relatives, across the nation. And almost nothing can get done without their written consent. This is a common dilemma on African-American farms, explained Dr. Bandele, who started his career with the Emergency Land Fund, a black farm and property preservation group.

One cousin neglects to pay his share of the property tax; in protest, another cousin refuses to pay. Ultimately, Dr. Bandele said, the property ends up in a forfeiture auction. Another black farm is lost."

Slavery in the Shadow of the Capitol

Found this link in doing research for my cousin--unfortunately it's from 2001 and the links supporting it seem to be broken:

Foreign travelers accounts from the 1830 and 1840 described the Robey and
Williams slave pens which stood along the Mall in the shadow of the Capitol;
the two were often juxtaposed in artworks, and the presence of slave pens in
the center of the nation's capitol captured the attention of abolitionists.
(Ironically, today the Museum of African Art sits less than a block away from
the former location of the Robey and Williams slave pens.)

High on the Hog, Surprising Factoids

High on the Hog, subtitled "A Culinary Journey from Africa to America" is a broadbrush history of slavery and race relations focused through the prism of food, food crops, food preparation, cuisines, etc. It's well-written, although I'd quibble with a couple items where I think an urbanite showed lack of agricultural background.  One was a reference to a slave being given 17 "stalks" of corn to subsist on.  Possible, but more likely "ears".  Another was a reference to an early writer (circa 1600?) who claimed that native Americans could raise 200 English bushels of wheat per acre.  The cite may be accurate, but it shows credulity by the writer.
 
A couple factoids: It has the surprising claim that the death rate for sailors on ships engaged in the slave trade was higher than the rate for the Africans held captive. Although the author, Jessica Harris, is a professor, it's not footnoted within the book.

I could explain it: if the analysis includes the whole trip for the sailors, time spent off the coast of Africa waiting to fill the slave ships was notoriously unhealthy.  And, there was a definite economic incentive to keep captives healthy enough to survive the Middle Passage.  So the factoid might be right, but I'm still uncomfortable

Another factoid: France's Code Noir in 1685 prescribed the diet to be provided to French slaves. The U.S. federal government never had such a provision and apparently no states did either.  That's a reflection of the difference in government between France and the U.S.: our governments are weaker and less prescriptive; French governments, whether monarcharies or democracies, are more centralized and prescriptive.

International Courts, 19th century

I didn't do well in my political science courses in college but the issue of the relationship of different governmental entities is always interesting. Add in slavery and it becomes more interesting. Here is a piece in the Boston Review on the efforts to control the international slave trade in the 19th century. The author claims that Britain devoted a significant part of its economic output to this effort.