Slavery for Almost One Hundred Years Before That Custom Was Recognized As a Social Disease and People Began to Fight It
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GO BACK TO THE PREVIOUS CENTURY HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT, ETC. IN THE MID-18TH CENTURY “The United States of America had human slavery for almost one hundred years before that custom was recognized as a social disease and people began to fight it. Imagine that. Wasn’t that a match for Auschwitz? What a beacon of liberty we were to the rest of the world when it was perfectly acceptable here to own other human beings and treat them as we treated cattle. Who told you we were a beacon of liberty from the very beginning? Why would they lie like that? Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, and not many people found that odd. It was as though he had an infected growth on the end of his nose the size of a walnut, and everybody thought that was perfectly OK.” – Kurt Vonnegut, FATES WORSE THAN DEATH, page 84 THOMAS JEFFERSON NOTE: In this series of files, you may be startled to discover, an attempt is being made to untangle the issues of slavery and race in such manner as to allow for a factoid which the US Supreme Court has not once recognized: that not all enslaved Americans were non-white. For instance seamen who were “crimped” or “shanghaied” might or might not have been black but nevertheless had been reduced by force or trickery to a longterm and dangerous condition of involuntary servitude (this term “to crimp” had originated in the 18th Century in England and characterized the occupation of luring or forcing men into sea duty either for the navy or for the merchant marine). NOTE ALSO: Binary opposites, such as “war vs. peace,” “slavery vs. antislavery,” etc. are mirrors to each other. The problem is never which of the two is the proper alternative but rather, the problem is always how to shatter such a conceptual mirror — so that both images can simultaneously safely be dispensed with. HDT WHAT? INDEX HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC. 1750 During this year and the following one, Joseph Bernard Marquis de Chabert would be establishing an astronomical observatory at Louisbourg, and he was carrying out a series of latitude and longitude observations as a base for the charting of the St. Lawrence River. CARTOGRAPHY The slave population of the English colonies in America reached 236,400, with over 206,000 of the total living south of Pennsylvania. Slaves comprised about 20% of the general population, over 40% of Virginia’s. 346 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC. A Quaker in Newport, one of the two major slave importing centers of the USA, was put under dealing by the elders of his monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, on account of his firm’s continuing to engage in the international slave trade.1 Aaron Lopez, who would be known as the “Merchant Prince” of early American commerce, and his family, at this point arrived in Newport from Lisbon, Portugal, where as a Marrano2 he had been being required to use the Christian name “Don Duarte Lopez.” 1. So, exactly who, by name, was this interesting Friend? We know that Friend Abraham Redwood needed to be dealt with by the elders of his meeting, on account of his refusal to give up the ownership of beaucoup black slaves on his sugar plantation in Antigua, but I have not heard that this Friend Abraham was engaged in any trade other than the sugar trade — so presumably this Quaker slavetrader of unspecified name was some other Newport Quaker. Below, for your interest, appears the rotting hulk of the slave ship Jem, as of the Year of Our Lord 1891 at Fort Adams near Newport on Aquidneck Island: 2. Marrano = a Spanish or Portuguese Jew of the late Middle Ages who converted to Christianity, especially one forcibly converted but adhering secretly to Judaism. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 347 HDT WHAT? INDEX HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC. (Probably, the family came to the port of New-York first and then went on up to Rhode Island.) The father of the family immediately underwent ritual circumcision. Within twenty years he would own or have interests in nearly a hundred sailing vessels. Aaron and his nephew Moses would wholly own 27 square- rigged vessels, including whale-ships — although they would lose nearly all of these during the Revolutionary War. Like the aforementioned Newport Quaker, he would be heavily involved in the international slave trade. He would be one of the original founders of and contributors to Touro Synagogue. Adolph Philipse, a member of the New York Assembly, died. Although he had rarely visited there, Philipsburg Manor in Sleepy Hollow, built in the 1680s, which is now a National Historical Landmark, had been the center of his commercial trade between New-York, the West Indies, and Europe. Albert, a nearby white tenant farmer, functioned as the overseer of the Philipse estate in Sleepy Hollow. In addition to trading in grain and farm goods, Philipse had engaged extensively in the slave trade. He had published various advertisements for runaway slaves in the local gazettes. Enslaved Africans who spoke several languages ran his international shipping operations. His mill on the Pocantico near the Hudson River was managed by Caesar, an enslaved African man. His dairy was managed by Susan, an enslaved African woman. The Philipse family was among the wealthiest in the colony. His probate inventory listed 30 sheep, 6 spinning wheels, silverware, pewter dishes, 3 feather beds, and 23 named men, women, and children slaves. Georgia, which had originally been scoped out as a buffer entity between the slavery of the Carolinas and the freedom of Spanish Florida, cancelled the ban on local slavery which it had created upon its founding in 1732. This policy of local opposition to local human enslavement, based as it had been not upon principle but upon expedience, had been able to persist for merely a couple of decades before the institution of human enslavement had trickled across its borders from the plantations of South Carolina and it had begun to develop its own tradition of a white planter aristocracy. 348 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC. Thomas Thistlewood, son of an English tenant farmer, arrived in Jamaica at the age of 29. He would eventually come to rank in the richest top 5th of Jamaica’s planters, become a commissioner in the parish constabulary and a magistrate of the local court. He would develop a showplace garden, and a reputation as a horticulturist. A few days after disembarking, he had occasion to watch as a slaveholder whipped a runaway and then rubbed pepper, salt, and lime juice into the wounds. Then he observed that when a fugitive slave died, the master put the head atop a pole and burned the body. Then he watches as some 300 lashes were administered to a mulatto overseer for “crimes and negligences.” A slave who had pulled a knife on a white man had the offending hand “cutt off,” was “hang’d upon ye lst tree immediately,” and was “left unbury’d.” Thistlewood had no difficulty adjusting to local conditions and soon was administering “Derby’s dose” to his own slaves (a slave being required to defecate into the mouth of another offending slave, who would then be gagged). During his first year on the island, this white master would keep track of having sex with 13 black women on 59 occasions, jotting down the details of who, when, where, and how, and over the following four decades of plantation rule, he would make record of 3,852 copulations with a total of 138 women (he seems particularly fond of rape). He would “pickett” a female slave, “Douglas’ Coobah,” by forcing the neck of a quart bottle into her “till she begged hard.” In Rhode Island harbors alone, during this year alone, it has been estimated by Alexander Boyd Hawes, some 6 negreros were being fitted out for the international slave trade. If an average cargo of slaves was 109 –as we have estimated on the basis of a number of known cargos– then a total of more than 650 souls would have been being transported over the dreadful Middle Passage during this year in Rhode Island bottoms alone. On October 5th of this year, Spain paid a sum of money to England and the “Assiento” deal that had been in effect since 1713 was at an end. The English “Royal African Company” that had had a monopoly in this area of the international slave trade was forced to declare bankruptcy. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: It is stated that, in the twenty years from 1713 to 1733, fifteen thousand slaves were annually imported into America by the English, of whom from one-third to one-half went to the Spanish colonies.3 To the company itself the venture proved a financial failure; for during the years 1729-1750 Parliament assisted the Royal Company by annual grants which amounted to £90,000,4 and by 1739 Spain was a creditor to the extent of £68,000, and threatened to suspend the treaty. The war interrupted the carrying out of the contract, but the Peace 3. Bandinel, ACCOUNT OF THE SLAVE TRADE, page 59. Cf. Bryan Edwards, HISTORY OF THE BRITISH COLONIES IN THE W. INDIES (London, 1798), Book VI. 4. From 1729 to 1788, including compensation to the old company, Parliament expended £705,255 on African companies. Cf. REPORT OF THE LORDS OF THE COMMITTEE OF COUNCIL, etc. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 349 HDT WHAT? INDEX HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC. of Aix-la-Chapelle extended the limit by four years.