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 EARLY 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. 1700 Three Rhode Island vessels sailed from Newport to Africa, and then to Barbados with cargos of slaves. A minister of the Church of England in Newport was pulling together the 1st public library to be found in Rhode Island. This was the Reverend Thomas Bray, and the library amounted to approximately a hundred volumes, 57 of which were of a theological character useful only for preachers. The other volumes were also of a generally religious bent, and over and above these there were on file about a hundred pastoral letters. We can probably guess –guess safely– that nowhere in these religious volumes, and nowhere in these pastoral letters, would we have been able to encounter any troubling thoughts about the iniquity of the international slave trade. READ EDWARD FIELD TEXT In Scotland, the expectation of a criminal upon conviction was that if he or she were not hung, he or she would be sentenced to life enslavement. SLAVERY From the late 1600s into the early 1700s, in the New England colonies, there was a general prejudice and caution in regard to anyone with a French accent, whether or not they identified themselves as Catholic. Particularly in regions near Canada such as upstate New York and Pennsylvania, there was a general fear of sneak attacks by the Indian tribes with whom the French trappers and traders of the interior were known to have allied. Any man with a French accent might find himself accused of spying for the Jesuits, even if he was a longtime neighbor and even if he insisted that his parents had been Huguenot refugees who had fled France in fear of being made galley slaves.1 SLAVERY Popish priests were banned from Boston and from surrounding areas. All French Catholics were imprisoned and all citizens of French extraction, regardless of religion, were required to register with the police. People were being warned that they had better not be heard to speak French. In the Virginia colony, however, they appeared to be able to distinguish between Catholic Frenchmen and Protestant Frenchmen. A settlement of Huguenots having been paid for by donations from the English, the overlords of Virginia promised them land in the area of Norfolk. Once they had arrived, however, the found that this prime land had been swapped out, under their feet, by William Byrd, and that they would need to settle on 10,000 acres out on the frontier, just west of present-day Richmond, more than 20 miles distant from any other white settlement. Byrd wanted them there in order to discourage the Monocan natives who had lived there from moving back into the area. They named their town Manakintowne. 1. During this period the Pope himself, in the Papal States, was holding galley slaves to row him to and fro. These slaves might be in one or another of the following categories: “convicted criminals condemned to a life sentence” — “captured non-Christian prisoners of war” — “bonavoglie, so-called ‘volunteers’ who through indigence had sold themselves into slavery, and could be released at the end of their contracted period of service in the galleys on condition of good conduct.” 194 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC. 1701 Alexander Selkirk (Alexander Selcraig) returned to Largo, Scotland, where he had grown up, but almost immediately he got in a fight with his brothers. As a joke they had given him a mug of seawater.In Scotland, DANIEL DEFOE a habeas corpus act expressly excluded the workers in the coal mines and the salt pans. Those who were white slaves for life were not to be protected under such a law. 1702 In New-York, the Slave Regulating Act brought increasing control over blacks. 1703 A census revealed a population in New-York of 4,375. Of 818 heads of families, fewer than half were of Dutch origin. As an interesting statistic, the average white family that owned slaves, owned 2.4 slaves. Since Massachusetts slaveholders had gotten into the practice of granting “liberty” to slaves who had become chronically ill or aged in order to relieve themselves of the onus of supporting a nonproductive person, a law was enacted required that these slaveholders post a security bond during manumission proceedings. You could no longer just set someone free. This law would remain on the books until 1807. (Later, accusations of not supporting ill or aged slaves would become, self-righteously, one of the most pronounced charges that Northerners would make against the wicked Southern slavemasters.)2 May 6: In order to pay for South Carolina’s military expedition against St. Augustine, Florida, its legislature imposed a general duty on imports and exports, to include a poll tax of 10 shillings per head on the import of Africans, and a poll tax of 20 shillings on the import of anyone else (presumably meaning white bond servants and apprentices): “An Act for the laying an Imposition on Furrs, Skinns, Liquors and other Goods and Merchandize, Imported into and Exported out 2. Legally, there was a distinction between a slaveowner and a slaveholder. The owner of a slave might rent the custody and use of that slave out for a year, in which case the distinction would arise and be a meaningful one in law, since the other party to such a transaction would be the holder but not the owner. However, in this Kouroo database, I will ordinarily be deploying the term “slaveholder” as the normative term, as we are no longer all that concerned with the making of such fine economic distinctions but are, rather, concerned almost exclusively with the human issues involved in the enslavement of other human beings. I use the term “slaveholder” in preference to “slaveowner” not only because no human being can really own another human being but also because it is important that slavery never be defined as the legal ownership of one person by another — in fact not only had human slavery existed before the first such legislation but also it has continued long since we abolished all legal deployment of the term “slave.” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 195 HDT WHAT? INDEX HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC. of this part of this Province, for the raising of a Fund of Money towards defraying the publick charges and expenses of this Province, and paying the debts due for the Expedition against St. Augustine.” 10s. on Africans and 20s. on others. Cooper, STATUTES, II. 201. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE SLAVERY 1704 Robert Beverley, in HISTORY AND PRESENT STATE OF VIRGINIA, published his memories of Nathaniel Bacon’s 1676 test of self-government in Virginia. Beverley had sided with Governor Berkeley during this dispute and, although his later recounting of events was not wholly dispassionate, in it he demonstrated himself to be at the very least a shrewd and thoughtful observer. CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE 196 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 197 HDT WHAT? INDEX HUMAN ENSLAVEMENT ETC. all other taxes, which was an excessive burden. They likewise laid amercements of seventy, fifty, or thirty pounds of tobacco, as the cause was on every law case tried throughout the country. Besides all this, they applied the balance, remaining due upon account Of the two shilling per hogshead, and fort duties, to this use. Which taxes and amercements fell heaviest on the poor people, the effect of whose labor would not clothe their wives and children. This made them desperately uneasy, especially when, after a whole year’s patience under all these pressures, they had no encouragement from their agents in England, to hope for remedy; nor any certainty when they should be eased of those heavy impositions.