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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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Slavery for Almost One Hundred Years Before That Custom Was Recognized As a Social Disease and People Began to Fight It GO BACK TO EARLIER IN THE CENTURY HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT, ETC. IN THE LATE 19TH 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. 1850 Let us here attempt a graphic contrast between decency and indecency. By this decade only a very few of the slave states (such as I think Arkansas, Missouri, and perhaps Maryland) were allowing slavemasters to manumit their slaves without a special bill by the legislature. “It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.” — Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141 This was the approximate year of manumission for Elizabeth, 3rd child of Sojourner Truth. (A process of mandatory indenture had been utilized in New York State to effectively extend the condition of servitude of young slaves, after they had on the 4th of July 1827 received their formal papers.) As of the turn of the century South Carolina had passed a law requiring that any slaves who were manumitted possess, or receive from their manumitting masters, “the capacity... to function in a free society...” The goal had been to end such abuses as the “freeing” of the aged, the infirm, and those considered by the slavemaster to be useless due to bad or depraved character. After the 1831 Nat Turner rebellion, most southern states passed such laws restricting (or prohibiting) manumission. By this decade only Delaware, Missouri, and Arkansas were allowing masters to free slaves without requiring their departure from the state. (Refer to Ira Berlin, SLAVES WITHOUT MASTERS: THE FREE NEGRO IN THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH, NY: Pantheon Books, 1974, pages 138-153. Note 2 on pages 138-139 provides a comprehensive list of state laws regulating or prohibiting manumission.) 1980 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC. The rolled 24-scene panorama before which William Wells Brown lectured on the Lyceum circuit, entitled “Original Panoramic Views of the Scenes in the Life of an American Slave,” included painted depictions of the brig Creole and of the schooners Pearl and Franklin which had figured prominently in attempts to escape from human enslavement. (Below is a Daguerreotype of a man, evidently a lecturer, standing in front of an arctic panorama. To provide some idea of what this sort of panorama looked like, on the following screen appears a printed version of one having to do with arctic exploration, that was making the rounds during this year.) THE FROZEN NORTH Henry Thoreau went to one of the traveling “panorama” shows made up of painted canvas rolls then being exhibited behind lecturers on theater stages, of the Rhine, and was intrigued enough by it, and by the idea of himself as a “younger son” who would, at least traditionally, need to venture and adventure for his inheritance, that he soon went to see another panorama, one of travel up the Mississippi. After January 10 and before February 9, 1851: I went some months ago to see a panorama of the Rhine It was like a dream of the Middle ages– I floated down its historic stream in something more than imagination under bridges built by the Romans and repaired by later heroes past cities & castles whose very names were music to me made my ears tingle –& each of which was the subject of a legend. There seemed to come up from its waters & its vine-clad hills & vallys a hushed music as of crusaders departing for the Holy Land– There were Ehrenbreitstein & Rolandseck & Coblentz which I knew only in history. I floated along through the moonlight of history under the spell of enchanment It was as if I remembered a glorious dream as if I had been transported to a heroic age & breathed an atmospher of chivalry Those times appeared far more poetic & heroic than these Soon after I went to see the panorama of the Mississippi and as I fitly worked my way upward in the light of today –& saw the steamboats wooding up –& loooked up the Ohio & the Missouri & saw its unpeopled cliffs –& counted the rising cities –& saw the Indians removing west across the stream & heard the legends of Dubuque & of Wenona’s Cliff –still thinking more of the future than of the past or present –I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a dif kind that the foundations {One leaf missing} all this West –which our thoughts traverse so often & so freely. We have never doubted that their prosperity was our prosperity– It is the home of the younger-sons As among the Scandinavians the younger sons took to the seas for their inheritance and became the Vikings or Kings of the Bays & colonized Ice land & Greenland & probably discovered the continent of America The Reverend Theodore Parker sheltered William and Ellen Craft, who were fleeing from slaveholders in Georgia, and married them to one another. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 1981 HDT WHAT? INDEX HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC. 1982 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 1983 HDT WHAT? INDEX HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC. 1984 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC. A correspondent for Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal was harboring the fantastical notion that the Great Dismal Swamp around Lake Drummond near Norfolk, Virginia was providing refuge for perhaps as many as one thousand runaway slaves. An army! (Shudder.) “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 1985 HDT WHAT? INDEX HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC. You may peruse the full text of all the articles in this year’s issues of the Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal online. ISSUE OF JANUARY 5 ISSUE OF JANUARY 12 ISSUE OF JANUARY 19 ISSUE OF JANUARY 26 ISSUE OF FEBRUARY 2 ISSUE OF FEBRUARY 9 ISSUE OF FEBRUARY 16 ISSUE OF FEBRUARY 23 ISSUE OF MARCH 2 ISSUE OF MARCH 9 ISSUE OF MARCH 16 ISSUE OF MARCH 23 ISSUE OF MARCH 30 ISSUE OF APRIL 6 ISSUE OF APRIL 13 ISSUE OF APRIL 20 ISSUE OF APRIL 27 ISSUE OF MAY 4 ISSUE OF MAY 11 ISSUE OF MAY 18 ISSUE OF MAY 26 ISSUE OF JUNE 1 ISSUE OF JUNE 8 ISSUE OF JUNE 15 1986 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC. ISSUE OF JUNE 22 ISSUE OF JUNE 29 ISSUE OF JULY 6 ISSUE OF JULY 13 ISSUE OF JULY 20 ISSUE OF JULY 27 ISSUE OF AUGUST 3 ISSUE OF AUGUST 10 ISSUE OF AUGUST 17 ISSUE OF AUGUST 24 ISSUE OF AUGUST 31 ISSUE OF SEPTEMBER 7 ISSUE OF SEPTEMBER 14 ISSUE OF SEPTEMBER 21 ISSUE OF SEPTEMBER 28 ISSUE OF OCTOBER 5 ISSUE OF OCTOBER 12 ISSUE OF OCTOBER 19 ISSUE OF OCTOBER 26 ISSUE OF NOVEMBER 2 ISSUE OF NOVEMBER 9 ISSUE OF NOVEMBER 16 ISSUE OF NOVEMBER 23 ISSUE OF NOVEMBER 30 “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 1987 HDT WHAT? INDEX HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC. ISSUE OF DECEMBER 7 ISSUE OF DECEMBER 14 ISSUE OF DECEMBER 21 ISSUE OF DECEMBER 28 According to the Congressional Globe for the 1st session of the 31st Congress, Senator Jacob W. Miller of New Jersey responded to charges by his southern colleagues, that New Jersey had become a harbor for their fugitive slaves, by commenting that: The difficulty in New Jersey has been, not about surrendering fugitive slaves to their legal masters, but rather how to get rid of those worthless slaves which you suffer to escape into our territory, and to remain there to the annoyance of our people.
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