400 Years of African Slavery in America

[barnhart]

I am a Southerner in many respects, so you all can take this comment with a grain of salt, maybe a chunk of salt...

I agree with nearly everything Neto writes here, including his self identity as a southerner (my ancestors have lived in the south since landing in Philidelphia 275 years ago). One of the reasons behind the 400 years project was to counter the historical interpretation that evils like african and native american dehumanization, exploitation and slaughter were small, aberrant details practiced a morally deficient few and did not generally detract or add to the american character or experience. Neto has punched a few holes in that interpretation.

Take for example the history of Georgia where I was born and raised and New York where I live. The african slavery system was practice in Georgia for less than 115 years, and in New York for a little over 200 years. During that time the atlantic trade triangle was centered in NYC, not Georgia. The wealth passed in and out through pier 17 in Manhattan, not Georgia. Per capita wealth grew in NYC and shrank in Georgia. Before Wall street could become a center for capital investment (much of which was earned through exporting slave labor in the form of agricultural goods) it was as wall built largely by african labor to protect euro colonial civilization from native american civilization. In the end, the workers who built it were forced to live outside of its protection. You can still see, and in some cases tour, the mansions in Manhattan built by southern planters bringing their wealth and power into the center of capital trade.

It is also a thin argument to cast the Civil War as primarily an anti-slavery conflict. While I am not a states-rights/ history of honor/ neo confederate, it seems more honest to me to allow the conflict was over dominance and control. Particularly over the westward expansion, (as it is euphemistically termed) atop existing native nations. Lincoln brought in emancipation as a measure of desperation to channel the passions of the abolitionist movement to compensate for flagging public support for the war. Even then it only applied to states already in rebellion and not to states in his own coalition where it might have done some real good.

It doesn't seem un-american to me to look at these things with a clear eye. The qualities often assigned to the american experiment of liberty, justice and government by the people are noble, wouldn't it also be noble to add the ability to learn from the past?

[Ms. Izzie]

To my knowledge, Anabaptists were one of the few, perhaps the only, Christian faith community who consistently opposed the american slavery system from the beginning.

Are there other writings besides the 1688 protest where I could read about the Anabaptist's involvement? The Quakers were active both here and in the UK. Are you saying the Quakers were Anabaptists? Exactly how did Anabaptists consistently oppose American slavery? I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but simply would like to read the same sources you have read on this.

William Wilberforce is somebody that needs mentioning in this thread. I would like to do more reading about him on the subject of slavery and as a Christian politician.

[barnhart]

To my knowledge, Anabaptists were one of the few, perhaps the only, Christian faith community who consistently opposed the american slavery system from the beginning.

Are there other writings besides the 1688 protest where I could read about the Anabaptist's involvement? The Quakers were active both here and in the UK. Are you saying the Quakers were Anabaptists? Exactly how did Anabaptists consistently oppose American slavery? I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but simply would like to read the same sources you have read on this.

William Wilberforce is somebody that needs mentioning in this thread. I would like to do more reading about him on the subject of slavery and as a Christian politician.

The men who composed the 1688 document were practicing Quakers, three of whom were previously Mennonite. Some sources list the document as Mennonite https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/men01.asp. The two groups had much in common. The Brethren Church had a similar stance on slavery, requiring baptism applicants to emancipate all slaves. You can read more of the interaction between Mennonites and slavery here http://www.themennonitesfilm.com/civil- ... ence-will/.

Wilberforce is an interesting topic.

[Ms. Izzie]

Thanks, barnhart.

http://144.208.79.222/~abraha21/alo/lin ... quotes.htm (if anybody is interested in quotes from Abraham Lincoln)

[HondurasKeiser]

I am a Southerner in many respects, so you all can take this comment with a grain of salt, maybe a chunk of salt...

I agree with nearly everything Neto writes here, including his self identity as a southerner (my ancestors have lived in the south since landing in Philidelphia 275 years ago). One of the reasons behind the 400 years project was to counter the historical interpretation that evils like african and native american dehumanization, exploitation and slaughter were small, aberrant details practiced a morally deficient few and did not generally detract or add to the american character or experience. Neto has punched a few holes in that interpretation.

Take for example the history of Georgia where I was born and raised and New York where I live. The african slavery system was practice in Georgia for less than 115 years, and in New York for a little over 200 years. During that time the atlantic trade triangle was centered in NYC, not Georgia. The wealth passed in and out through pier 17 in Manhattan, not Georgia. Per capita wealth grew in NYC and shrank in Georgia. Before Wall street could become a center for capital investment (much of which was earned through exporting slave labor in the form of agricultural goods) it was as wall built largely by african labor to protect euro colonial civilization from native american civilization. In the end, the workers who built it were forced to live outside of its protection. You can still see, and in some cases tour, the mansions in Manhattan built by southern planters bringing their wealth and power into the center of capital trade.

It is also a thin argument to cast the Civil War as primarily an anti-slavery conflict. While I am not a states-rights/ history of honor/ neo confederate, it seems more honest to me to allow the conflict was over dominance and control. Particularly over the westward expansion, (as it is euphemistically termed) atop existing native nations. Lincoln brought in emancipation as a measure of desperation to channel the passions of the abolitionist movement to compensate for flagging public support for the war. Even then it only applied to states already in rebellion and not to states in his own coalition where it might have done some real good.

It doesn't seem un-american to me to look at these things with a clear eye. The qualities often assigned to the american experiment of liberty, justice and government by the people are noble, wouldn't it also be noble to add the ability to learn from the past?

What strikes me as remarkable is not that people in the colonies trafficked in slavery but that over the course of a few generations, gave it up. I find that exceptional.

[Neto]

What strikes me as remarkable is not that people in the colonies trafficked in slavery but that over the course of a few generations, gave it up. I find that exceptional.

I know nothing of this first hand, or from any person known to me (my people all came to the States after the War Between the States), but I tend to think that it was inevitable that it would be given up. I could not find any information in respect to how soon, after the first African slaves were brought to America, and specifically in the American South, slaves were trained to work in the slave owner's household. While there are many accounts of cruel treatment of both household and field slaves, the following account is what I would expect to eventually develop.

Mrs. Williams was a kind-hearted good woman, and she treated all her slaves well. She had only one daughter, Miss Betsey, for whom I was purchased, and who was about my own age. I was made quite a pet of by Miss Betsey, and loved her very much. She used to lead me about by the hand, and call me her little *******. This was the happiest period of my life; for I was too young to understand rightly my condition as a slave, and too thoughtless and full of spirits to look forward to the days of toil and sorrow. My mother was a household slave in the same family. I was under her own care, and my little brothers and sisters were my play-fellows and companions.

My mother had several fine children after she came to Mrs. Williams, - three girls and two boys. The tasks given out to us children were light, and we used to play together with Miss Betsey, with as much freedom almost as if she had been our sister.

[An excerpt from https://spartacus-educational.com/USASdomestic.htm]

I think that the close association of a slave woman with young children would, at least in many cases, cause the children of slave owners to began to see the slaves as human beings like themselves. Add to this the blurring of ethnic lines as some slave owners had children with household slave women, and the resulting desire to care for one's own children, even though they were still slaves. But obviously if a wife found out about her husband's misuse of a slave woman in her own household, this could unleash a different kind of cruelty, one borne of marital jealousy. (As for the case above, note that there is no mention of her father, and if you continue reading from this quotation on, you will see that that man of the house was an immoral cruel man, and that the writer was eventually sold into a situation of hard labor.)

[barnhart]

What strikes me as remarkable is not that people in the colonies trafficked in slavery but that over the course of a few generations, gave it up. I find that exceptional.

I've been thinking about this. My first thought was similar to Neto, as an institution, legal enslavement could not have survived the industrialization process. But after some consideration, I would guess it easily could have made that transition. De-humanization has few limits. Industrial labor could have been shaped to accept enslaved workers. Perhaps even labor unions could have survived, populated by "owners" vying for more income or better conditions for "their" workers. So maybe it is remarkable the system was dissolved.

One point of respect for the way the Americans handled that transition as compared to the UK, the system was simply dissolved, not bought out. In the UK, the government paid the "owners" to release the enslaved from bondage. This was accomplished by taking on the largest per capita debt the UK has ever seen. So the formerly enslaved paid taxes for the remainder of their lives to pay for their own skin, and the capitalized lived on the profits. Shameful.

[HondurasKeiser]

Just stumbled upon this and thought it was relevant to the discussion we have intermittently been having here:

https://1776unites.com/

Please note, this an organization of largely Black Academics, pushing back against the "1619 Project" of the NYT.

A contributor to the "1776" project writes at Quillette:

...it is not enough merely to critique an opponent’s worldview: A successful movement must provide a worldview of its own. Three core elements of my view of slavery—and, I think it is fair to say, 1776’s as well—are: (1) recognizing that an anti-slavery movement led by white and Black people of goodwill existed in this country as long as slavery did, and won in the end; (2) recognizing that slavery did not “build the USA,” but rather made the pre-bellum South into something of a backwater, due largely to the proud if subtle resistance of the slaves themselves; and (3) recognizing that America paid a diverse butcher’s bill of hundreds of thousands of lives, during the Civil War, in order to FREE the slaves.

[HondurasKeiser]

Nikole Hannah-Jones Wins Pulitzer Prize for 1619 Project:

Nikole Hannah-Jones was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for The 1619 Project, The New York Times Magazine’s groundbreaking exploration of the legacy of Black Americans starting with the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1619.

As The 1619 Project’s official education partner, the Pulitzer Center has connected curricula based on the work of Hannah-Jones and her collaborators to some 4,500 classrooms since August 2019.

[HondurasKeiser]

Bret Stephens offers a withering critique of the 1619 Project in The Times:

In his introduction, Silverstein argues that America’s “defining contradictions” were born in August 1619, when a ship carrying 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from what is present-day Angola arrived in Point Comfort, in the English colony of Virginia. And the title page of Hannah-Jones’s essay for the project insists that “our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written.”

Both points are illogical. A “defining contradiction” requires a powerful point of opposition or inconsistency, and in the year 1619 the points of opposition were few and far between. Slavery and the slave trade had been global phenomena for centuries by the early 17th century, involving Europeans and non-Europeans as slave traders and the enslaved. The Africans who arrived in Virginia that August got there only because they had been seized by English privateers from a Portuguese ship headed for the port of Veracruz in Mexico, then a part of the Spanish Empire.

In this sense, and for all of its horror, there was nothing particularly surprising in the fact that slavery made its way to the English colonies on the Eastern Seaboard, as it already had in the rest of the Western Hemisphere.

What was surprising was that in 1776 a politically formidable “defining contradiction” — “that all men are created equal” — came into existence through the Declaration of Independence. As Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1859, that foundational document would forever serve as a “rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.” It’s why, at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery, Lincoln would date the country’s founding to “four score and seven years ago.”

As for the notion that the Declaration’s principles were “false” in 1776, ideals aren’t false merely because they are unrealized, much less because many of the men who championed them, and the nation they created, hypocritically failed to live up to them. Most of us, at any given point in time, are falling short of some ideal we nonetheless hold to be true or good.

These two flaws led to a third, conceptual, error. “Out of slavery — and the anti-Black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional,” writes Silverstein.

Nearly everything? What about, say, the ideas contained by the First Amendment? Or the spirit of openness that brought millions of immigrants through places like Ellis Island? Or the enlightened worldview of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift? Or the spirit of scientific genius and discovery exemplified by the polio vaccine and the moon landing? On the opposite side of the moral ledger, to what extent does anti-Black racism figure in American disgraces such as the brutalization of Native Americans, the Chinese Exclusion Act or the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II?

Monocausality — whether it’s the clash of economic classes, the hidden hand of the market, or white supremacy and its consequences — has always been a seductive way of looking at the world. It has always been a simplistic one, too. The world is complex. So are people and their motives. The job of journalism is to take account of that complexity, not simplify it out of existence through the adoption of some ideological orthodoxy.

This mistake goes far to explain the 1619 Project’s subsequent scholarly and journalistic entanglements. It should have been enough to make strong yet nuanced claims about the role of slavery and racism in American history. Instead, it issued categorical and totalizing assertions that are difficult to defend on close examination.

None of this should have come as a surprise: The 1619 Project is a thesis in search of evidence, not the other way around. Nor was this fire from the right: Both Wilentz and Harris were at pains to emphasize their sympathy with the project’s moral aims.

Yet, aside from a one-word “clarification” issued in March — after months of public pressure, The Times conceded that only “some” colonists fought for independence primarily to defend slavery — the response of the magazine has been, in effect, “nothing to see here.” In a pair of lengthy editor’s notes, Silverstein has defended much of the scholarship in the project by citing another slate of historians to back him up. That’s one way of justifying the final product.

The larger problem is that The Times’s editors, however much background reading they might have done, are not in a position to adjudicate historical disputes. That should have been an additional reason for the 1619 Project to seek input from, and include contributions by, an intellectually diverse range of scholarly voices. Yet not only does the project choose a side, it also brooks no doubt.

“It is finally time to tell our story truthfully,” the magazine declares on its 1619 cover page. Finally? Truthfully? Is The Times suggesting that distinguished historians, like the ones who have seriously disputed aspects of the project, had previously been telling half-truths or falsehoods?