American Colonization Society”

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE:

“COLONIALISM IN REVERSE”

AS PRACTICED BY THE

“AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY”

From Thomas Jefferson’s NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA (an excerpt selected by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze in his RACE AND THE E NLIGHTENMENT): “This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.... Among the Romans, emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining, the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”

— George Bernard Shaw HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1770

The specialist in natural history under whom Samuel Taylor Coleridge would study at Götingen from 1798 to 1799, Herr Professor Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, laid the groundwork for Nazi racial thinking first by classifying the human races into 28 varieties and then by attributing the differences between these varieties to varying sorts of degeneration or deterioration, on account of influences of gender, of geography, or both gender and geography, from a uniform originary white male standard. However, while he coined the term “Caucasian,” at this point the term “Aryanism” had not come into being — and, this theorist at this point was presuming Semites to be a part of the white race.1 As [Martin] Bernal has argued in one of the most interesting parts of [BLACK ATHENA: THE AFROASIATIC ROOTS OF CLASSICAL CIVILIZATION. VOLUME I, THE FABRICATION OF ANCIENT GREECE 1785-1985 (London: Free Association Books, 1987, page 220)], the curious and disturbing fact is that the rise of professional scholarship and the transmutation of knowledge into the different forms of academic disciplines, decisively established at the University of Göttingen (founded in 1734) and then in the new University of Berlin and elsewhere, was intimately bound up with the development of racial theory and the ordering of knowledge on a racial basis. As [Edward W.] Said observes, “What gave writers like [Joseph Ernest] Renan and [Matthew] Arnold the right to generalities about race was the official character of their formed cultural literacy” [ORIENTALISM: WESTERN REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ORIENT (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, page 227)]. The blunt fact that has even now not been faced is that modern racism was an academic creation. What we are dealing with here is the dominance of racial theory so widespread that it worked as an ideology, permeating both consciously and implicitly the fabric of almost all areas of thinking of its time. This racialization of knowledge demonstrates that the university’s claim to project knowledge in itself outside political control or judgement cannot be trusted and, in the past at least, has not been as objective as it has claimed; the university’s amnesia about its own relation to race is a sign of its fear of the loss of legitimation.

But that was Germany. In America, already at this point, the Reverend Samuel Hopkins, who in April of this year become the pastor the 1st Congregational Church at Newport, Rhode Island, was suggesting a program to train black missionaries so as eventually to begin a mass repatriation of American blacks — back to Africa

1. Refer to THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL TREATISES OF JOHANN FRIEDRICH BLUMENBACH [1775-1795], edited and translated by T. Bendyshe and published by the Anthropological Society in London in 1865 and to Young, Robert J.C. COLONIAL DESIRE: HYBRIDITY IN THEORY, CULTURE AND RACE (London: Routledge, 1995, page 64). HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE where they belonged. This continent of course needed to belong to its white people.

LIBERIA

For some reason we keep forgetting that the original reason we didn’t like slavery was that we didn’t like black people. One wonders why we keep forgetting that.

The contemporary scholar Lewis Perry has characterized this American Colonization Society, on page 9 of his RADICAL ABOLITIONISM: ANARCHY AND THE GOVERNMENT OF GOD IN ANTISLAVERY THOUGHT, as the antebellum political organization which most successfully arranged a political marriage of convenience between the American white racists and the American antislavery crusaders. He has used the example of Friend Benjamin Lundy to illustrate just how lacking in influence the antebellum antislavery crusaders actually were where they were unable to forge this political bond with their strange bedfellow, the white American who hated and feared black Americans whether they were enslaved or free. Samuel J. Mills of the American Colonization Society summed everything up when he wrote in his memoirs published at the point of his death in 1820 that “we must save the Negroes or the Negroes will ruin us.”

“Historical amnesia has always been with us: we just keep forgetting we have it.” — Russell Shorto

THE AGE OF REASON WAS A PIPE DREAM, OR AT BEST A PROJECT. ACTUALLY, HUMANS HAVE ALMOST NO CLUE WHAT THEY ARE DOING, WHILE CREDITING THEIR OWN LIES ABOUT WHY THEY ARE DOING IT.

Someplace Else “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1815

Friend Paul Cuffe’s interest in Africa stemmed in part from his father’s having been born there. The success he achieved as a captain of color, with black crews, was evidence of the black expertise thought essential to the redemption of Africa. In this year, at a personal expenditure of $4,000, Cuffe took nine free black families in his ship Traveler to settle in Sierra Leone. This voyage, and his financial success, anticipated ideals later associated with black nationalists from Henry Highland Garnet to Marcus Garvey. And this complex man, like Bishop Henry M. Turner later in the century, was certain enough of his own vision to risk association with the American Colonization Society, whose motives regarding the return of blacks to Africa were, in black leadership circles, highly suspect. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1816

The American Colonization Society was formed, out of illustrious dignified white patriots such as Francis Scott Key and Henry Clay, to “rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous, portion of its population.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE Christmas Season: During this holiday season at our nation’s puzzle palace in Washington DC, Virginia congressman Charles Fenton Mercer was founding what we now refer to as the American Colonization Society, the “American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color in the United States.” Africa for Africans, America for Americans — what an excellent Christmas present from the Christ child! As the Reverend Robert Finley of Princeton University put the matter, “Every thing connected with their condition, including their colour, is against them, nor is there much prospect that their state can ever be greatly ameliorated, while they continue among us.” The Brits had done this, in Sierra Leone, so why couldn’t we? The movers and shakers in this new benevolent association included: LIBERIA

The American Colonization Society

Speaker of the House of Representatives Henry Clay

Representative from Virginia John Randolph

Representative of New Hampshire Daniel Webster

Secretary of the Treasury William Harris Crawford

Attorney General Richard Rush

Author of “The Star-Spangled Banner” Francis Scott Key

General Andrew Jackson

Justice of the Supreme Court Bushrod Washington

The agenda of this association was the lightening of America.

The plan had been urged by Thomas Jefferson, who knew the value of enlightenment, as early as 1777, and the legislature of Virginia had been advocating it since 1801. Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington would function as the 1st president of the society and his immediate successors would be signer Charles Carroll, signer James Madison, and Speaker of the House Henry Clay.

Congress appropriated ten millions to the sinking fund. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

needs his Freedom

needs his Africa HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE The city of Baltimore had begun, in this year, to illuminate (lighten?) some city streets with gas lights on light poles. By December some night streets in London were also being thus brightened, and the envoy John Quincy Adams, witnessing this, has recorded that the illumination seemed “almost too dazzling for my eyes.” The police in particular liked this lighting and began to explore the ever-popular project of relocating crime from well-to-do districts which could afford street lamps to poor districts which could not. As one authority of this period put the matter:

Without presuming to play on words, I regard gas as essential to an enlightened police.

The 1st theaters to be presumably mainly lit by coal-gas rather than oil or candles are said to have been the East London Theatre and a theater in Philadelphia. Gas of course offered a measure of dimming control, but it also generated heat, and toxic gases which caused headaches, eye discomfort, and sore throats. So now we have an enlightened planet:

The talk of New-York and Boston during this month was an arson-for-profit scheme that had just been exposed in the course of a lawsuit against an insurance company that had been refusing to pay out on a policy. A New Jersey judge was suing in regard to the supposedly accidental loss of his home, and the insurance company was responding in court that it believed the home had been set on fire by a slave at the judge’s instigation. The legal outcome was hinging on the admissibility of the testimony of that black man. When this black was allowed to testify, the judge “fell lifeless,” the report had it, and for the remainder of the trial he appeared “much agitated.” The court concluded that this judge had indeed ordered his own home to be torched, and released the insurer from obligation. (We know about the case by way of a letter from Henry Dwight Sedgwick to Jane Minot dated December 9, 1816 and completed on the following day, in Box 8.9 of the Henry Dwight Sedgwick V Papers, and by way of a letter from Robert Sedgwick to Catharine Maria Sedgwick dated December 12, 1816, in Box 3.7, at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston.)

December 5, Thursday: The Reverend Robert Finley, an activist in the American Colonization Society, wrote to Captain Paul Cuffe about how unhappy the free Negroes of America were going to remain, “as long as they continue among the whites.” This white man somehow knew that these black man were going to be unhappy. So how could they be made happy, he asked? –Well, he suggested, we could “place them perhaps in Africa.”2

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE 5th day 5th of 12 M 1816 / Meeting was attended as well as usual. silent & to me rather a barran season. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

2. So explain this relative unhappiness to me, please, as there seem to be three possibilities: is the black man somewhat unhappier than the white man, that the black man is in America? –Or are the white man and the black man approximately equally unhappy, that the black man is in America? –Or is the black man slightly less unhappy than the white man, that the black man is in America? Inquiring minds want to know. Is it the black man who is going to be happier, when the black man is back in Africa where he belongs, or is it the white man who is going to be happier, when the black man is back in Africa where he belongs, or, perchance, are they both going to be equally happy once the white man is alone in America and the black man alone in Africa? HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1817

January 15, Wednesday: The Reverend Leonard Withington got married with Sophie Sherburne. The couple would produce 3 sons, William Sherburne Withington, Leonard Withington, Jr., and George Aspinwall Withington.

The American Colonization Society had been in existence for less than a month when more than 3,000 members of Philadelphia’s black community crammed the Reverend Richard Allen’s Bethel African Methodist Church at 125 South 6th Street in order to express their distress at its agenda to pack them off to another continent, such as Africa:

Our ancestors were, though not from choice, the first LIBERIA cultivators of the wilds of America, and we, their descendants, claim a right to share in the blessings of her luxuriant soil which their blood and sweat manured. We read with deep abhorrence the unmerited stigma, attempted to be cast on the reputation of the free people of color.... We declare that we will never be separated from the slave population of this country....

An 11-member committee including Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, James Forten, and Russell Parrott was appointed to broadcast their inalienable right to remain in the USA not only on the basis of the announced HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE principles of this republic, but also on the basis of their heritage of work, suffering, and enslavement.

December 19, Friday: The government of Georgia acted to dispose of negroes, mulattoes, and persons of color who had been imported as slaves in defiance of the federal law of 1808 outlawing the international slave trade. § 1. The governor by agent shall receive such Negroes, and, § 2. sell them, or, § 3. give them to the Colonization Society to be transported, on condition that the Society reimburse the State for all expense, and transport them at their own cost. Prince, DIGEST, page 793.

We notice immediately, of course, that these victims were being treated as disposable people. We notice, immediately, that the law against the slave trade had not been enacted for their benefit, but for the benefit of the white people who were being oppressed by the presence of these black victims. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: The dozen or more propositions on the question of the disposal of illegally imported Africans may be divided into two chief heads, representing two radically opposed parties: 1. That illegally imported Africans be free, although they might be indentured for a term of years or removed from the HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE country. 2. That such Africans be sold as slaves.3 The arguments on these two propositions, which were many and far-reaching, may be roughly divided into three classes, political, constitutional, and moral. The political argument, reduced to its lowest terms, ran thus: those wishing to free the Negroes illegally imported declared that to enslave them would be to perpetrate the very evil which the law was designed to stop. “By the same law,” they said, “we condemn the man-stealer and become the receivers of his stolen goods. We punish the criminal, and then step into his place, and complete the crime.”4 They said that the objection to free Negroes was no valid excuse; for if the Southern people really feared this class, they would consent to the imposing of such penalties on illicit traffic as would stop the importation of a single slave.5 Moreover, “forfeiture” and sale of the Negroes implied a property right in them which did not exist.6 Waiving this technical point, and allowing them to be “forfeited” to the government, then the government should either immediately set them free, or, at the most, indenture them for a term of years; otherwise, the law would be an encouragement to violators. “It certainly will be,” said they, “if the importer can find means to evade the penalty of the act; for there he has all the advantage of a market enhanced by our ineffectual attempt to prohibit.”7 They claimed that even the indenturing of the ignorant barbarian for life was better than slavery; and Sloan declared that the Northern States would receive the freed Negroes willingly rather than have them enslaved.8 The argument of those who insisted that the Negroes should be sold was tersely put by Macon: “In adopting our measures on this subject, we must pass such a law as can be executed.”9 Early expanded this: “It is a principle in legislation, as correct as any which has ever prevailed, that to give effect to laws you must not make them repugnant to the passions and wishes of the 3. There were at least twelve distinct propositions as to the disposal of the Africans imported: — 1. That they be forfeited and sold by the United States at auction (Early’s bill, reported Dec. 15: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, pages 167-8). 2. That they be forfeited and left to the disposal of the States (proposed by Bidwell and Early: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, pages 181, 221, 477. This was the final settlement.) 3. That they be forfeited and sold, and that the proceeds go to charities, education, or internal improvements (Early, Holland, and Masters: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 273). 4. That they be forfeited and indentured for life (Alston and Bidwell: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, pages 170-1). 5. That they be forfeited and indentured for 7, 8, or 10 years (Pitkin: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 186). 6. That they be forfeited and given into the custody of the President, and by him indentured in free States for a term of years (bill reported from the Senate Jan. 28: HOUSE JOURNAL (reprinted 1826), 9th Congress 2d session, V. 575; ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 477. Cf. also ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 272). 7. That the Secretary of the Treasury dispose of them, at his discretion, in service (Quincy: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 183). 8. That those imported into slave States be returned to Africa or bound out in free States (Sloan: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 254). 9. That all be sent back to Africa (Smilie: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 176). 10. That those imported into free States be free, those imported into slave States be returned to Africa or indentured (Sloan: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 226). 11. That they be forfeited but not sold (Sloan and others: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 270). 12. That they be free (Sloan: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 168; Bidwell: HOUSE JOURNAL (reprinted 1826), 9th Congress 2d session, V. 515). 4. Bidwell, Cook, and others: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 201. 5. Bidwell: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 172. 6. Fisk: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, pages 224-5; Bidwell: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 221. 7. Quincy: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 184. 8. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 478; Bidwell: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 171. 9. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 172. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE people among whom they are to operate. How then, in this instance, stands the fact? Do not gentlemen from every quarter of the Union prove, on the discussion of every question that has ever arisen in the House, having the most remote bearing on the giving freedom to the Africans in the bosom of our country, that it has excited the deepest sensibility in the breasts of those where slavery exists? And why is this so? It is, because those who, from experience, know the extent of the evil, believe that the most formidable aspect in which it can present itself, is by making these people free among them. Yes, sir, though slavery is an evil, regretted by every man in the country, to have among us in any considerable quantity persons of this description, is an evil far greater than slavery itself. Does any gentleman want proof of this? I answer that all proof is useless; no fact can be more notorious. With this belief on the minds of the people where slavery exists, and where the importation will take place, if at all, we are about to turn loose in a state of freedom all persons brought in after the passage of this law. I ask gentlemen to reflect and say whether such a law, opposed to the ideas, the passions, the views, and the affections of the people of the Southern States, can be executed? I tell them, no; it is impossible — why? Because no man will inform — why? Because to inform will be to lead to an evil which will be deemed greater than the offence of which information is given, because it will be opposed to the principle of self-preservation, and to the love of family. No, no man will be disposed to jeopard his life, and the lives of his countrymen. And if no one dare inform, the whole authority of the Government cannot carry the law into effect. The whole people will rise up against it. Why? Because to enforce it would be to turn loose, in the bosom of the country, firebrands that would consume them.”10 This was the more tragic form of the argument; it also had a mercenary side, which was presented with equal emphasis. It was repeatedly said that the only way to enforce the law was to play off individual interests against each other. The profit from the sale of illegally imported Negroes was declared to be the only sufficient “inducement to give information of their importation.”11 “Give up the idea of forfeiture, and I challenge the gentleman to invent fines, penalties, or punishments of any sort, sufficient to restrain the slave trade.”12 If such Negroes be freed, “I tell you that slaves will continue to be imported as heretofore.... You cannot get hold of the ships employed in this traffic. Besides, slaves will be brought into Georgia from East Florida. They will be brought into the Mississippi Territory from the bay of Mobile. You cannot inflict any other penalty, or devise any other adequate means of prevention, than a forfeiture of the Africans in whose possession they may be found after importation.”13 Then, too, when foreigners smuggled in Negroes, “who then ... could be operated on, but the purchasers? There was the rub — it was their interest alone which, by being operated on, would produce a check. Snap their purse-strings, break open their strong box, deprive them of their slaves, and by destroying the temptation to buy, you put an end to the trade, ... nothing short of a forfeiture of the slave would afford an effectual remedy.”14 Again, it was argued 10. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, pages 173-4. 11. Alston: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 170. 12. D.R. Williams: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 183. 13. Early: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, pages 184-5. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE that it was impossible to prevent imported Negroes from becoming slaves, or, what was just as bad, from being sold as vagabonds or indentured for life.15 Even our own laws, it was said, recognize the title of the African slave factor in the transported Negroes; and if the importer have no title, why do we legislate? Why not let the African immigrant alone to get on as he may, just as we do the Irish immigrant?16 If he should be returned to Africa, his home could not be found, and he would in all probability be sold into slavery again.17 The constitutional argument was not urged as seriously as the foregoing; but it had a considerable place. On the one hand, it was urged that if the Negroes were forfeited, they were forfeited to the United States government, which could dispose of them as it saw fit;18 on the other hand, it was said that the United States, as owner, was subject to State laws, and could not free the Negroes contrary to such laws.19 Some alleged that the freeing of such Negroes struck at the title to all slave property;20 others thought that, as property in slaves was not recognized in the Constitution, it could not be in a statute.21 The question also arose as to the source of the power of Congress over the slave-trade. Southern men derived it from the clause on commerce, and declared that it exceeded the power of Congress to declare Negroes imported into a slave State, free, against the laws of that State; that Congress could not determine what should or should not be property in a State.22 Northern men replied that, according to this principle, forfeiture and sale in Massachusetts would be illegal; that the power of Congress over the trade was derived from the restraining clause, as a non-existent power could not be restrained; and that the United States could act under her general powers as executor of the Law of Nations.23 The moral argument as to the disposal of illegally imported Negroes was interlarded with all the others. On the one side, it began with the “Rights of Man,” and descended to a stickling for the decent appearance of the statute-book; on the other side, it began with the uplifting of the heathen, and descended to a denial of the applicability of moral principles to the question. Said Holland of North Carolina: “It is admitted that the condition of the slaves in the Southern States is much superior to that of those in Africa. Who, then, will say that the trade is immoral?”24 But, in fact, “morality has nothing to do with this traffic,”25 for, as Joseph Clay declared, “it must appear to every man of common sense, that the question could be

14. Lloyd, Early, and others: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 203. 15. Alston: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 170. 16. Quincy: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 222; Macon: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 225. 17. Macon: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 177. 18. Barker: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 171; Bidwell: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 172. 19. Clay, Alston, and Early: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 266. 20. Clay, Alston, and Early: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 266. 21. Bidwell: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 221. 22. Sloan and others: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 271; Early and Alston: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, pages 168, 171. 23. Ely, Bidwell, and others: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, pages 179, 181, 271; Smilie and Findley: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, pages 225, 226. 24. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 240. Cf. Lloyd: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 236. 25. Holland: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 241. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE considered in a commercial point of view only.”26 The other side declared that, “by the laws of God and man,” these captured Negroes are “entitled to their freedom as clearly and absolutely as we are;”27 nevertheless, some were willing to leave them to the tender mercies of the slave States, so long as the statute- book was disgraced by no explicit recognition of slavery.28 Such arguments brought some sharp sarcasm on those who seemed anxious “to legislate for the honor and glory of the statute book;”29 some desired “to know what honor you will derive from a law that will be broken every day of your lives.”30 They would rather boldly sell the Negroes and turn the proceeds over to charity. The final settlement of the question was as follows: — “SECTION 4.... And neither the importer, nor any person or persons claiming from or under him, shall hold any right or title whatsoever to any negro, mulatto, or person of color, nor to the service or labor thereof, who may be imported or brought within the United States, or territories thereof, in violation of this law, but the same shall remain subject to any regulations not contravening the provisions of this act, which the Legislatures of the several States or Territories at any time hereafter may make, for disposing of any such negro, mulatto, or person of color.”31

26. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 227; Macon: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 225. 27. Bidwell, Cook, and others: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 201. 28. Bidwell: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 221. Cf. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 202. 29. Early: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 239. 30. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session 31. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress 2d session, page 1267. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1820

For some two decades the US customs collector at Bristol, Rhode Island had been a brother-in-law of James DeWolf who had a major investment in the illicit international slave trade, an official who could be counted on not to interfere with the importation of generations of fresh slaves from Africa into the United States of America. In this year, however, that convenient arrangement came to an end. –No more slaves were to be disembarked in broad daylight at this New England port!

The African Freedmen’s Society of Providence had become the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. At first the Bethel group had met in the homes of members and in the meetinghouse of the Religious Society of Friends at the corner of North Main Street and Meeting Street (when the white Quakers were not in the building, the black folks were of course allowed to sit anywhere they pleased, even downstairs rather than in the building’s dilapidated “pigeon loft”; the unused segregated seats would be torn out in a building renovation in 1822). Such churches were disapproved of by the white community, but as one meeting place

had been removed by the authorities, it had been replaced by another, and sometimes two or three. In the previous year members of the local black community had met at the 1st Baptist Church, the nation’s oldest Baptist church, to discuss their need for an African Meeting House. In this year the African Union Meeting and School House Society’s new facility was erected at Meeting Street and Congdon Street (this currently houses the Congdon Street Baptist Church). At this point the congregation purchased a lot on top of College Hill on Meeting Street, and they would be constructing a building on this lot in 1866. (In 1961 the building would have become so shaky that the congregation would sell the plot to Brown University in order to purchase their current Bethel Church on Hope Street at the intersection of Rochambeau Avenue.)

Early in this decade Rhode Island’s black citizens would be being stripped of their hard-won voting rights, and segregated in the public schools. White rioters would be destroying property in Providence’s “Hard-Scrabble,” HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE the 1st separate black neighborhood, off what is now North Main Street near University Heights.

At about this point, down in Little Rest (now Kingston), Rhode Island, Cato Pearce was being hired as a farm worker by Elisha Reynolds Potter, Senior, at his farm homestead. (Potter was a state Representative who had recently run unsuccessfully for Governor, and his political attitudes might be said to be somewhat to the right of unreconstructed since he favored, for instance, that the bankrupt be thrown in debtors’ prison; the son Potter, Junior would attempt to follow in his father’s political footprints, with a more liberal bent, but would have his greatest success as a scholar.32)

The efforts of Cato to make a personal contribution were being supported by, among others, two white men, elders in the Quidnesset Baptist Church of North Kingstown, William Northrop and Thomas Cole.

(It seems clear that there was a reason why Cato could not affiliate with the Quakers of North Kingstown, in his desire to preach. Although Quaker practice would have allowed him to rise during silent worship and speak, in fact it seems there were only a couple of men attending the Quaker meeting in that town at that time, and they weren’t offering words to each other but simply sitting in silence.)

It was in about this year that the significant event occurred, which would cause us to retitle Cato Pearce’s 1842 autobiography, when it eventually came to be republished, as “JAILED FOR PREACHING.” The event is of significance to us not so that we can experience a sense of outrage, senses of outrage being easy enough to arrange, but so that we can get an approximation of what real human life amounted to in southern Rhode Island during the early years of the 19th Century. It is noteworthy, for instance, that despite the fact that Joshua Pearce, Cato’s former master, had beaten him as a child, and despite the fact that as a young man he had had the first mate of Captain Rogers’s schooner lay him over the capstan and go after him with the end of a rope, in these goings-on in about 1820 the plantation manager Elisha Potter did not actually put into play the horse-

32. For instance, EARLY HISTORY OF NARRAGANSETT WITH AN APPENDIX OF ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS MANY OF WHICH ARE NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME PUBLISHED. Providence RI, 1935 HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE whip he held in his hand. It had been used as a prop, to threaten but not to inflict injury. Most likely, by this point in time the tenor of life on the former slave plantations of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations had changed somewhat. It had become socially unacceptable for a white man to thus administer lashes to a now- “free” person of color. The reason why Cato was put in jail was, Potter needed to resolve upon some alternative punishment. Thus it was that, rather than risk social disapprobation by whipping Cato, Potter “got the officer — the jailer — and put [Cato] in jail.” Cato had committed no crime and Potter held no official town or state government post such as sheriff or judge, that would legally permit him to commit a person to incarceration; nevertheless, Potter’s informal power in the community was so great that he could use it to have the local jailer take a free man into the jailhouse merely for having failed to abide by his wishes. And Potter felt no inhibitions about treating a free black man the way Cato’s slave parents would have been treated by their white masters. When Mr. Potter had done his breakfast he come out with his horse-whip in his hand. Says he, “Why wa’nt you here last night to do the chores.” I told him I hired some body. He said he wouldn’t have him on his place. He said he hired me. He said he didn’t understand why I went away to preach. Says he, “I won’t have no nigger preachers — I’ll horse-whip you;” and he swore. Says I, “Don’t strike me, Mr. Potter....” Well he said they had a good minister there, and they wouldn’t have no nigger preachers, and said he would put me where he could find me. So he went and got the officer — the jailer — and put me into jail. Cato was incarcerated in the jail for “two nights and parts of two days....” Fortunately, the county court was in session. Sheriff Allen and a number of the great men came in to visit them that was in prison, and asked me what I was put in for. I told ’em for preachin’ — but yet I couldn’t help weepin’. [One of the visitors] said, “You won’t stay here but a few minutes — he had done parfectly wrong — we will have you out in a few minutes.” Then they gave me some money and went out and told Elisha Potter they would give so long to take me out [or] they was goin’ to prosecute him if he didn’t. About half an hour after that, I could see Elisha Potter through the grate, comin’ up the back side and in the back way, and [he] got the jailer to talk with me while he stood down to the bottom of the stairs. And the jailer took me in another room and told me that Mr. Potter said I might go every Saturday night and stay till Monday mornin’ and have meetins where I was a mind to. I told the jailer I had nothin to do with Elisha Potter. “If he had put me in here, amen — if I have got to stay here and die, amen to it: I have nothin’ to do with him. I never have stole nor cheated nor done any thing wrong to him.... I said I hadn’t nothin’ ’gainst Elisha Potter: I loved him as well as ever. At that Elisha Potter come up stairs and said I had better go to work — he liked me well, and I might go to meetin’ when I was a mind to. I told him I didn’t calculate to work for him any more. Then he told me to go and git my things, and I come out. We notice that the situation in Rhode Island had even changed to such a degree by this point in time that once prominent whites visiting Little Rest learned of Potter jailing Cato, they became so upset that they threatened to prosecute Potter, the most important personage by far in that entire district. Then, it was an act of repentance and humility for Potter to invite Cato to continue to work for him and to offer that in the future he would have the weekend off to attend Sunday services. Then, it was an act of dignity as well as independence, that Cato rejected the offer, wanting “nothin’ to do” with Elisha Potter in the future.

A joke broadside was circulating in Boston on the anniversary of the abolition of the international slave trade. One of the jokes was in the form of a toast offered by a black man: HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE De day, one of does great nashumnal hepox will call fort de sensumbility and de herhaw of good feelum of ebery son and daughter of Africa in dis world, and good many udder place beside....

ME HAPPY SO ME SING

From this year into 1823, pursuant to an 1819 act of Congress, our naval units would be raiding slave traffic off the coast of Africa. US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS

For instance, during this year the negreros Endymion, Plattsburg, Science, Esperanza, and Alexander would be captured on the African coast by ships of the United States navy and forwarded to the ports of New-York and Boston (HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress, 1st session II, No. 92, pages 6 and 15; 21st Congress, 1st session III, No. 348, pages 122, 144, and 187).33 THE TRAFFIC IN MAN-BODY

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE consequent rise in the South of vested interests strongly opposed to slave smuggling, led to a falling off in the illicit introduction of Negroes after 1825, until the fifties; nevertheless, smuggling never entirely ceased, and large numbers were thus added to the plantations of the Gulf States. Monroe had various constitutional scruples as to the execution of the Act of 1819;34 but, as Congress took no action, he at last put a fair interpretation on his powers, and appointed Samuel Bacon as an agent in Africa to form a settlement for recaptured Africans. Gradually the agency thus formed became merged with that of the Colonization Society on Cape Mesurado; and from this union Liberia was finally evolved.35 Meantime, during the years 1818 to 1820, the activity of the slave-traders was prodigious. General James Tallmadge declared in the House, February 15, 1819: “Our laws are already highly penal against their introduction, and yet, it is a well known fact, that about fourteen thousand slaves have been brought into our country this last year.”36 In the same year Middleton of South Carolina and Wright of Virginia estimated illicit introduction at 13,000 and 15,000 respectively.37 Judge Story, in charging a jury, took occasion to say: “We have but too many proofs from unquestionable sources, that it [the slave-trade] is still carried on with all the implacable rapacity of former times. Avarice has grown more subtle in its evasions, and watches and seizes its prey with an appetite quickened rather than suppressed by its guilty vigils. American citizens are steeped to their very mouths (I can hardly use too bold a figure) in this stream of iniquity.”38 The following year, 1820, brought some significant statements from various members of Congress. Said Smith of South Carolina: “Pharaoh was, for his temerity, drowned in the Red Sea, in pursuing them [the Israelites] contrary to God’s express will; but our Northern friends have not been afraid even of that, in their zeal to furnish the Southern States with Africans. They are better seamen than Pharaoh, and calculate by that means to elude the vigilance of Heaven; which they seem to disregard, if they can but elude the violated laws of their country.”39 As late as May he saw little hope of suppressing the traffic.40 Sergeant of Pennsylvania declared: “It is notorious that, in spite of the utmost vigilance that can be employed, African negroes are clandestinely brought in and sold as slaves.”41 Plumer of New Hampshire stated that “of the unhappy beings, thus in violation of all laws transported to our shores, and thrown by force into the mass of our black population, scarcely one in a hundred is ever detected by the officers of the General Government, in a part of the country, where, if we are to believe the statement of Governor Rabun, ‘an officer who would perform his duty, by attempting to enforce the law [against the slave trade] is, by

34. Attorney-General Wirt advised him, October, 1819, that no part of the appropriation could be used to purchase land in Africa or tools for the Negroes, or as salary for the agent: OPINIONS OF ATTORNEYS-GENERAL, I. 314-7. Monroe laid the case before Congress in a special message Dec. 20, 1819 (HOUSE JOURNAL, 16th Congress 1st session, page 57); but no action was taken there. 35. Cf. Kendall’s Report, August, 1830: SENATE DOCUMENT, 21st Congress 2d session, I. No. 1, pages 211-8; also see below, Chapter X. 36. Speech in the House of Representatives, Feb. 15, 1819, page 18; published in Boston, 1849. 37. Jay, INQUIRY INTO AMERICAN COLONIZATION (1838), page 59, note. 38. Quoted in Friends’ FACTS AND OBSERVATIONS ON THE SLAVE TRADE (ed. 1841), pages 7-8. 39. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 16th Congress 1st session, pages 270-1. 40. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 16th Congress 1st session, page 698. 41. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 16th Congress 1st session, page 1207. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE many, considered as an officious meddler, and treated with derision and contempt;’ ... I have been told by a gentleman, who has attended particularly to this subject, that ten thousand slaves were in one year smuggled into the United States; and that, even for the last year, we must count the number not by hundreds, but by thousands.”42 In 1821 a committee of Congress characterized prevailing methods as those “of the grossest fraud that could be practised to deceive the officers of government.”43 Another committee, in 1822, after a careful examination of the subject, declare that they “find it impossible to measure with precision the effect produced upon the American branch of the slave trade by the laws above mentioned, and the seizures under them. They are unable to state, whether those American merchants, the American capital and seamen which heretofore aided in this traffic, have abandoned it altogether, or have sought shelter under the flags of other nations.” They then state the suspicious circumstance that, with the disappearance of the American flag from the traffic, “the trade, notwithstanding, increases annually, under the flags of other nations.” They complain of the spasmodic efforts of the executive. They say that the first United States cruiser arrived on the African coast in March, 1820, and remained a “few weeks;” that since then four others had in two years made five visits in all; but “since the middle of last November, the commencement of the healthy season on that coast, no vessel has been, nor, as your committee is informed, is, under orders for that service.”44 The United States African agent, Ayres, reported in 1823: “I was informed by an American officer who had been on the coast in 1820, that he had boarded 20 American vessels in one morning, lying in the port of Gallinas, and fitted for the reception of slaves. It is a lamentable fact, that most of the harbours, between the Senegal and the line, were visited by an equal number of American vessels, and for the sole purpose of carrying away slaves. Although for some years the coast had been occasionally visited by our cruizers, their short stay and seldom appearance had made but slight impression on those traders, rendered hardy by repetition of crime, and avaricious by excessive gain. They were enabled by a regular system to gain intelligence of any cruizer being on the coast.”45 Even such spasmodic efforts bore abundant fruit, and indicated what vigorous measures might have accomplished. Between May, 1818, and November, 1821, nearly six hundred Africans were recaptured and eleven American slavers taken.46 Such measures gradually changed the character of the trade, and opened the international phase of the question. American slavers cleared for foreign ports, there took a foreign flag and papers, and then sailed boldly past American cruisers, although their real character was often well known. More stringent clearance laws

42. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 16th Congress 1st session, page 1433. 43. Referring particularly to the case of the slaver “Plattsburg.” Cf. HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress 1st session, II. No. 92, page 10. 44. HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress 1st session, II. No. 92, page 2. The President had in his message spoken in exhilarating tones of the success of the government in suppressing the trade. The House Committee appointed in pursuance of this passage made the above report. Their conclusions are confirmed by British reports: PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1822, Vol. XXII., SLAVE TRADE, Further Papers, III. page 44. So, too, in 1823, Ashmun, the African agent, reports that thousands of slaves are being abducted. 45. Ayres to the Secretary of the Navy, Feb. 24, 1823; reprinted in FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 31. 46. HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress 1st session, II. No. 92, pages 5-6. The slavers were the “Ramirez,” “Endymion,” “Esperanza,” “Plattsburg,” “Science,” “Alexander,” “Eugene,” “Mathilde,” “Daphne,” “Eliza,” and “La Pensée.” In these 573 Africans were taken. The naval officers were greatly handicapped by the size of the ships, etc. (cf. FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), pages 33-41). They nevertheless acted with great zeal. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE and consular instructions might have greatly reduced this practice; but nothing was ever done, and gradually the laws became in large measure powerless to deal with the bulk of the illicit trade. In 1820, September 16, a British officer, in his official report, declares that, in spite of United States laws, “American vessels, American subjects, and American capital, are unquestionably engaged in the trade, though under other colours and in disguise.”47 The United States ship “Cyane” at one time reported ten captures within a few days, adding: “Although they are evidently owned by Americans, they are so completely covered by Spanish papers that it is impossible to condemn them.”48 The governor of Sierra Leone reported the rivers Nunez and Pongas full of renegade European and American slave-traders;49 the trade was said to be carried on “to an extent that almost staggers belief.”50 Down to 1824 or 1825, reports from all quarters prove this activity in slave-trading. The execution of the laws within the country exhibits grave defects and even criminal negligence. Attorney-General Wirt finds it necessary to assure collectors, in 1819, that “it is against public policy to dispense with prosecutions for violation of the law to prohibit the Slave trade.”51 One district attorney writes: “It appears to be almost impossible to enforce the laws of the United States against offenders after the negroes have been landed in the state.”52 Again, it is asserted that “when vessels engaged in the slave trade have been detained by the American cruizers, and sent into the slave-holding states, there appears at once a difficulty in securing the freedom to these captives which the laws of the United States have decreed for them.”53 In some cases, one man would smuggle in the Africans and hide them in the woods; then his partner would “rob” him, and so all trace be lost.54 Perhaps 350 Africans were officially reported as brought in contrary to law from 1818 to 1820: the absurdity of this figure is apparent.55 A circular letter to the marshals, in 1821, brought reports of only a few well-known cases, like that of the “General Ramirez;” the marshal of Louisiana had “no information.”56 There appears to be little positive evidence of a large illicit importation into the country for a decade after 1825. It is hardly possible, however, considering the activity in the trade, that slaves were not largely imported. Indeed, when we note how the laws were continually broken in other respects, absence of evidence of petty smuggling becomes presumptive evidence that collusive or tacit understanding of officers and citizens allowed the trade to some extent.57 Finally, it must be noted that during all this time scarcely a man suffered for participating in the trade, beyond the loss of the Africans and, 47. PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1821, Vol. XXIII., SLAVE TRADE, Further Papers, A, page 76. The names and description of a dozen or more American slavers are given: PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1821, Vol. XXIII., SLAVE TRADE, Further Papers, A, pages 18-21. 48. HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress 1st session, II. No. 92, pages 15-20. 49. HOUSE DOCUMENT, 18th Congress 1st session, VI. No. 119, page 13. 50. PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1823, Vol. XVIII., SLAVE TRADE, Further Papers, A, pages 10-11. 51. OPINIONS OF ATTORNEYS-GENERAL, V. 717. 52. R.W. Habersham to the Secretary of the Navy, August, 1821; reprinted in FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 47. 53. FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 42. 54. FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 43. 55. Cf. above, pages 126-7. 56. FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 42. 57. A few accounts of captures here and there would make the matter less suspicious; these, however, do not occur. How large this suspected illicit traffic was, it is of course impossible to say; there is no reason why it may not have reached many hundreds per year. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE more rarely, of his ship. Red-handed slavers, caught in the act and convicted, were too often, like La Coste of South Carolina, the subjects of executive clemency.58 In certain cases there were those who even had the effrontery to ask Congress to cancel their own laws. For instance, in 1819 a Venezuelan privateer, secretly fitted out and manned by Americans in Baltimore, succeeded in capturing several American, Portuguese, and Spanish slavers, and appropriating the slaves; being finally wrecked herself, she transferred her crew and slaves to one of her prizes, the “Antelope,” which was eventually captured by a United States cruiser and the 280 Africans sent to Georgia. After much litigation, the United States Supreme Court ordered those captured from Spaniards to be surrendered, and the others to be returned to Africa. By some mysterious process, only 139 Africans now remained, 100 of whom were sent to Africa. The Spanish claimants of the remaining thirty-nine sold them to a certain Mr. Wilde, who gave bond to transport them out of the country. Finally, in December, 1827, there came an innocent petition to Congress to cancel this bond.59 A bill to that effect passed and was approved, May 2, 1828,60 and in consequence these Africans remained as slaves in Georgia. On the whole, it is plain that, although in the period from 1807 to 1820 Congress laid down broad lines of legislation sufficient, save in some details, to suppress the African slave trade to America, yet the execution of these laws was criminally lax. Moreover, by the facility with which slavers could disguise their identity, it was possible for them to escape even a vigorous enforcement of our laws. This situation could properly be met only by energetic and sincere international co- operation....61

58. Cf. editorial in Niles’s Register, XXII. 114. Cf. also the following instances of pardons: — PRESIDENT JEFFERSON: March 1, 1808, Phillip M. Topham, convicted for “carrying on an illegal slave-trade” (pardoned twice). PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 146, 148-9. PRESIDENT MADISON: July 29, 1809, fifteen vessels arrived at New Orleans from Cuba, with 666 white persons and 683 negroes. Every penalty incurred under the Act of 1807 was remitted. (Note: “Several other pardons of this nature were granted.”) PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 179. Nov. 8, 1809, John Hopkins and Lewis Le Roy, convicted for importing a slave. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 184-5. Feb. 12, 1810, William Sewall, convicted for importing slaves. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 194, 235, 240. May 5, 1812, William Babbit, convicted for importing slaves. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 248. PRESIDENT MONROE: June 11, 1822, Thomas Shields, convicted for bringing slaves into New Orleans. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 15. Aug. 24, 1822, J.F. Smith, sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and $3000 fine; served twenty-five months and was then pardoned. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 22. July 23, 1823, certain parties liable to penalties for introducing slaves into Alabama. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 63. Aug. 15, 1823, owners of schooner “Mary,” convicted of importing slaves. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 66. PRESIDENT J.Q. ADAMS: March 4, 1826, Robert Perry; his ship was forfeited for slave-trading. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 140. Jan. 17, 1827, Jesse Perry; forfeited ship, and was convicted for introducing slaves. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 158. Feb. 13, 1827, Zenas Winston; incurred penalties for slave-trading. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 161. The four following cases are similar to that of Winston: — Feb. 24, 1827, John Tucker and William Morbon. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 162. March 25, 1828, Joseph Badger. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 192. Feb. 19, 1829, L.R. Wallace. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 215. PRESIDENT JACKSON: Five cases. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 225, 270, 301, 393, 440. The above cases were taken from manuscript copies of the Washington records, made by Mr. W.C. Endicott, Jr., and kindly loaned me. 59. See SENATE JOURNAL, 20th Congress 1st session, pages 60, 66, 340, 341, 343, 348, 352, 355; HOUSE JOURNAL, 20th Congress 1st session, pages 59, 76, 123, 134, 156, 169, 173, 279, 634, 641, 646, 647, 688, 692. 60. STATUTES AT LARGE, VI. 376. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE February 6, Sunday: The merchant vessel Elizabeth, for the moment redesignated as the Mayflower of Liberia, sailed out of New-York harbor under the escort of an American sloop of war, transporting 86 freed black Americans to swampy Sherbro Island in Sierra Leone on their way to becoming African colonists, and Africans. The American Colonization Society had (in effect) founded Liberia — although many details remained to be worked out such as precisely where the hell Liberia was supposed to be (some land, eventually, would be “purchased” for some $300.00 worth of rum, clothing, tobacco, clothing, trinkets, and guns and powder in a transaction we know took place only because a pistol was being aimed). But the idea, the idea was most exceedingly clear: Africa was to be for Africans, black Africans and America was to be for Americans, white Americans.62

(Sherbro Island’s unhealthy conditions would produce a high death rate among the settlers as well as the society’s representatives. The British governor would tolerate relocation of the immigrants to a safer area temporarily while the ACS worked to save its colonization project from complete disaster.)

Lord Cochrane occupied Valdivia in the name of the Republic of Chile.

61. Among interesting minor proceedings in this period were two Senate bills to register slaves so as to prevent illegal importation. They were both dropped in the House; a House proposition to the same effect also came to nothing: SENATE JOURNAL, 15th Congress 1st session, pages 147, 152, 157, 165, 170, 188, 201, 203, 232, 237; 15th Congress 2d session, pages 63, 74, 77, 202, 207, 285, 291, 297; HOUSE JOURNAL, 15th Congress 1st session, page 332; 15th Congress 2d session, pages 303, 305, 316; 16th Congress 1st session, page 150. Another proposition was contained in the Meigs resolution presented to the House, Feb. 5, 1820, which proposed to devote the public lands to the suppression of the slave-trade. This was ruled out of order. It was presented again and laid on the table in 1821: HOUSE JOURNAL, 16th Congress 1st session, pages 196, 200, 227; 16th Congress 2d session, page 238. 62. At this point freed and refugee slaves had been being welcomed on this Sierra Leone coast controlled by Great Britain already for some 30 years. By the time of our civil war there would be some 11,000 American blacks free in this Liberia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1821

The American Colonization Society sent Dr. Eli Ayres, a white man, to purchase some coastal land north of Sierra Leone. With the aid of US naval Lieutenant Robert F. Stockton, another white man, Dr. Ayres cruised the coastal waters west of Grand Bassa seeking out lands appropriate for the colony. Lt. Stockton took charge of the negotiations with leaders of the Dey and Bassa peoples who lived in the area of Cape Mesurado. The local leaders were persuaded –some said at the point of a gun– to part with a “36 mile long and 3 mile wide” strip of coastal land for approximately $300 worth of trade goods, supplies, weapons, and rum.

Between this year and 1831 more than 300 slaving expeditions would be bringing an estimated 60,000 more black captives to Cuba

TRIANGULAR TRADE The negreros La Jeune Eugène, La Daphnée, La Mathilde, and L’Elize were during this year captured by the USS Alligator. La Jeune Eugène was sent to the port of Boston, but the other slavers escaped, only to be recaptured under the French flag (there would be controversy over credit, between the US and France) (HOUSE REPORTS, 21st Congress, 1st session III, No. 348, page 187; FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE, 1824, pages 35-41). HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE The negrero La Pensée was captured with a cargo of 220 slaves, by the USS Hornet, and taken to Louisiana (HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress, 1st session II, No. 92, page 5; 21st Congress, 1st session III, No. 348, page 186).

The negrero Esencia succeeded in putting 113 black slaves ashore at Matanzas (PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1822, Vol. XXII., SLAVE TRADE, FURTHER PAPERS, III. page 78).

We infer that most likely it was in this year that the negrero Dolphin was captured by United States officers and sent into the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina (FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE (1824), pages 31-2).

December 15, Saturday: US Navy officers forced the local king to sell Cape Mesurado (near present Monrovia, Liberia) to the American Colonization Society. The society would found a colony for freed slaves on the site. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1822

The West African nation of Liberia63 was being founded by blacks of the American Colonization Society for freed slaves, primarily from “our land” — the home of freedom and, especially, the home of feeling free to exploit the defenseless.

63. “Liberty” — free at last. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE April 25, Thursday: For having killed Billy Williams in the yard of the Massachusetts State Prison, Samuel Green was hanged on the Boston Neck gallows tree.64

(no gallows now, just a traffic light)

The survivors of the initial settlement on swampy Sherbro Island arrived at Cape Mesurado and began to build a new American Colonization Society settlement. A white representative of the Society was governing the colony, although eventually there would arise objections to the authoritarianism of a white Methodist missionary, the Reverend Jehudi Ashmun, who would replace Dr. Ayres as the ACS governing representative.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 25th of 4th M / With my H rode to Portsmouth to attend our Moy [Monthly] Meeting, stoped at Uncle Thurstons. — In the first Meeting was favored a little - two female appearances in the Ministry In the last Meeting tho’ I laboured to get into the life & center down to the gift, yet it lay so low & my efforts was so paralised that I could not attain to what I desired & took but little share in the buisness Dined at Uncle Stantons - then rode Home — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

64. Presumably the duly constituted authorities in Boston would have experienced no difficulty whatever in seeking out and retaining and remunerating the services of one or another Protestant reverend who was not so embarrassed by the death penalty as to be unwilling to mount the scaffold with the victim, and administer last rites. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1823

Spring: At this point the Reverend Henry C. Wright began musing about “colonizing the free negroes in Africa.” If they weren’t going to be slaves they didn’t have any business being over here bothering us! He would not, however, become energized on this topic for another dozen years. “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 HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1824

Our former president Thomas Jefferson was a guy who really knew how to think with a sharp pencil. (For instance, faced with the problem of homosexuality, he saw no reason to go around hanging people: sodomites surely had some sort of sexual malfunction, so we have the opportunity to approach their problem directly — why hang them when we can simply cut their balls off?)

In that tradition of sharp-pencil thinking, during this year former president Tommy-lad was doing some simple math and pointing out that since there were at this point all of a million and a half Americans in slavery, it could never become “practicable for us, or expedient for them,” to get them transported out of the country: “Their estimated value as property, in the first place, (for actual property has been lawfully vested in that form, and who can lawfully take it from the possessors?) at an average of two hundred dollars each ... would amount to six hundred millions of dollars which must be paid or lost by somebody. To this add the cost of their transportation by land and sea to Mesurado [the west coast of Liberia], a year’s provision of food and clothes, implements of husbandry and of their trades, which will amount to three hundred millions more ... and it is impossible to look at the question a second time.”

[COMPARE THIS WITH EMERSON’S SPURIOUS CALCULATION]

Conor Cruise O’Brien has commented that: It is precisely Thomas Jefferson’s status as the oracle of liberty within the American civil religion that is becoming unsustainable in a postracist America. Consider the implications of the story of Jame Hubbard. Hubbard’s sole offense was to claim liberty for himself and try to win it. For that offense Jefferson had him “severely flogged in the presence of his old companions.” For many Americans today (I would hope for most Americans, and most other people), the hero of liberty in that story is not the famous Thomas Jefferson but the otherwise unknown Jame Hubbard.

In related mathematical news, in this year Neils Henrick Abel (1802-1829) was providing a proof that it is impossible to derive the root of a polynomial of higher than the fourth degree. Abel’s calculations were more complex than Jefferson’s, but equivalently conclusive. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE In this year, believing that the colonial agent had allocated town lots and rationed provisions unfairly, a few of the settlers of Liberia armed themselves and forced the society’s representative to flee the colony. The disagreements were resolved temporarily when an American Colonization Society representative came to investigate the colony’s problems and persuaded Ashmun to return. Steps were initiated to spell out a system of local administration and to codify the laws. This would result, a year later, in the Constitution, Government, and Digest of the Laws of Liberia. In this document, sovereign power continued to rest with the American Colonization Society’s agent but the colony was to operate under common law. Slavery and participation in the slave trade were forbidden. The settlement that had been called Christopolis would be renamed Monrovia after the American president, James Monroe, and the colony as a whole would be formally designated Liberia (the free land).

August 15, Sunday: The Cape Mesurado Colony, founded by the American Colonization Society for the repatriation of American slaves, was expanded into the Colony of Liberia.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 15 of 8 M / In the Morng Meeting two short testimonys & in the Afternoon silent — both pretty solid to me Took tea at D Buffums with Saml Peebles. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1825

March 16, Wednesday: The Supreme Court of the United States issued its judgment in regard to the captured negrero Antelope and its human cargo. Chief Justice John Marshall assailed the slave trade but admitted that because it was still legal in Spain and Portugal, those countries could lay legitimate claim to some of the enslaved Africans. He considered, however, that Portugal had failed to make its case for possession of any of the Africans, and that the Spanish claims could be for a maximum of only 93. The remainder, the chief justice indicated, must be set at liberty and deported to Liberia. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE

December 16, Friday: The British cabinet met in the absence of Huskisson, minister of finance, to figure out how to back up the paper currency by obtaining as much gold as possible. They discussed such matters as whether if they neglected to pay the army and the navy this would of necessity produce mutiny. Meanwhile, the banking system of England was making full use of the opportunity, carefully “screwing” (which at that point in time merely meant “putting the thumbscrews to,” to wit torturing) every person or firm who owed anyone any money. The family fortune of the family of Harriet Martineau, which had been doing quite well thank you in the textile industry, was for instance being ruined — which would make it necessary for the daughters to live by their pens and needles.

In France, the Minister of the Interior fired architect Jean-Nicolas Huyot for not heeding instructions in the erection of the Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile in Paris.

In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 16th of 12th M 1825 / This Afternoon between 1 & 2 OC A number of Black people embarked on board a Providence packet on their way to Boston from thence to Embark for Liberia in Africa where they are to settle under the patronage of the American Colonization Society — I have just returned from Banisters Wharf where I went to take some of them my old & respectable acquaintance by the hand, in all human probability for the last time -Particularly old Newport Gardiner who I have known & can remember well from my early youth to the present day & have been Associated with, particularly in the African Benevolent Society for several years — His Son Ahema Gardiner & his wife go with him, Also John Chavers & are very respectable Black folks - I wish them well & desire they may better their condition in this life & that which is to come. — My heart was much affected in parting with them & I could hardly refrain from tears RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1826

It was at about this point that James Gillespie Birney began to show an active interest in the American Colonization Society. In 1832-1833 he would for a brief period be serving as its agent in the southwest, before formally repudiating colonization in 1834.

February 14, Tuesday: Representative Forsyth proposed that the US House of Representatives modify the nation’s policy toward Liberia — so as not to spend so much money “to support the negroes.” His proposal was read and then laid on the table. 1. “Resolved, That it is expedient to repeal so much of the act of the 3d March, 1819, entitled, ‘An act in addition to the acts prohibiting the slave trade,’ as provides for the appointment of agents on the coast of Africa. 2. “Resolved, That it is expedient so to modify the said act of the 3d of March, 1819, as to release the United States from all obligation to support the negroes already removed to the coast of Africa, and to provide for such a disposition of those taken in slave ships who now are in, or who may be, hereafter, brought into the United States, as shall secure to them a fair opportunity of obtaining a comfortable subsistence, without any aid from the public treasury.” HOUSE JOURNAL, 19th Congress, 1st session, page 258. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: With the North as yet unawakened to the great changes taking place in the South, and with the attitude of the South thus in process of development, little or no constructive legislation could be expected on the subject of the slave-trade. As the divergence in sentiment became more and more HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE pronounced, there were various attempts at legislation, all of which proved abortive. The pro-slavery party attempted, as early as 1826, and again in 1828, to abolish the African agency and leave the Africans practically at the mercy of the States;65 one or two attempts were made to relax the few provisions which restrained the coastwise trade;66 and, after the treaty of 1842, Benton proposed to stop appropriations for the African squadron until England defined her position on the Right of Search question.67 The anti-slavery men presented several bills to amend and strengthen previous laws;68 they sought, for instance, in vain to regulate the Texan trade, through which numbers of slaves indirectly reached the United States.69 Presidents and consuls earnestly recommended legislation to restrict the clearances of vessels bound on slave-trading voyages, and to hinder the facility with which slavers obtained fraudulent papers.70 Only one such bill succeeded in passing the Senate, and that was dropped in the House.71 The only legislation of this period was confined to a few appropriation bills. Only one of these acts, that of 1823, appropriating $50,000,72 was designed materially to aid in the suppression of the trade, all the others relating to expenses incurred after violations. After 1823 the appropriations dwindled, being made at intervals of one, two, and three years, down to 1834, when the amount was $5,000. No further appropriations were made until 1842, when a few thousands above an unexpended surplus were appropriated. In 1843 $5,000 were given, and finally, in 1846, $25,000 were secured; but this was the last sum obtainable until 1856.73 Nearly all of these meagre appropriations went toward reimbursing Southern plantation owners for the care and support of illegally imported Africans, and the rest to the maintenance of the African agency. Suspiciously large sums were paid for the first purpose, considering the fact that such Africans were always worked hard by those to whom they were farmed out, and often “disappeared” while in their hands. In the accounts we nevertheless find many items like that of $20,286.98 for the maintenance of Negroes imported on the “Ramirez;”74 in 1827, $5,442.22 for the “bounty, subsistence, clothing, medicine,” etc., of fifteen Africans;75 in 1835, $3,613 for the support of thirty-eight slaves for two months (including a bill of $1,038 for medical attendance).76 65. In 1826 Forsyth of Georgia attempted to have a bill passed abolishing the African agency, and providing that the Africans imported be disposed of in some way that would entail no expense on the public treasury: HOME JOURNAL, 19th Congress, 1st session, page 258. In 1828 a bill was reported to the House to abolish the agency and make the Colonization Society the agents, if they would agree to the terms. The bill was so amended as merely to appropriate money for suppressing the slave-trade: HOME JOURNAL, 20th Congress, 1st session, House Bill No. 190. 66. HOME JOURNAL, 20th Congress, 1st session, House Bill No. 190, pages 121, 135; 20th Congress, 2d session, pages 58-9, 84, 215. 67. Congressional Globe, 27th Congress, 3d session, pages 328, 331-6. 68. Cf. Mercer’s bill, HOUSE JOURNAL, 21st Congress, 1st session, page 512; also Strange’s two bills, SENATE JOURNAL, 25th Congress, 3d session, pages 200, 313; 26th Congress, 1st session, Senate Bill No. 123. 69. SENATE JOURNAL, 25th Congress, 2d session, pages 297-8, 300. 70. SENATE DOCUMENTS, 28th Congress, 1st session IV. No. 217, page 19; SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENTS, 31st Congress, 2d session, II. No. 6, pages 3, 10, etc.; 33d Congress, 1st session VIII. No. 47, pages 5-6; 34th Congress, 1st session, XV. No. 99, page 80; HOUSE JOURNAL, 26th Congress, 1st session, pages 117-8; cf. HOUSE JOURNAL, 20th Congress, 1st session, page 650, etc.; 21st Congress, 2d session, page 194; 27th Congress, 1st session, pages 31, 184; HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 29th Congress, 1st session, III. No. 43, page 11; HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENTS, 31st Congress, 1st session, III. pt. 1, No. 5, pages 7-8. 71. SENATE JOURNAL, 26th Congress, 1st session, Senate Bill No. 335; HOUSE JOURNAL, 26th Congress, 1st session, pages 1138, 1228, 1257. 72. STATUTES AT LARGE, III. 764. 73. Cf. above, Chapter VIII. page 125. 74. Cf. REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE NAV Y, 1827. 75. Cf. REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE NAV Y, 1827. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE The African agency suffered many vicissitudes. The first agent, Bacon, who set out early in 1820, was authorized by President Monroe “to form an establishment on the island of Sherbro, or elsewhere on the coast of Africa,” and to build barracks for three hundred persons. He was, however, warned “not to connect your agency with the views or plans of the Colonization Society, with which, under the law, the Government of the United States has no concern.” Bacon soon died, and was followed during the next four years by Winn and Ayres; they succeeded in establishing a government agency on Cape Mesurado, in conjunction with that of the Colonization Society. The agent of that Society, Jehudi Ashmun, became after 1822, the virtual head of the colony; he fortified and enlarged it, and laid the foundations of an independent community. The succeeding government agents came to be merely official representatives of the United States, and the distribution of free rations for liberated Africans ceased in 1827. Between 1819 and 1830 two hundred and fifty-two recaptured Africans were sent to the agency, and $264,710 were expended. The property of the government at the agency was valued at $18,895. From 1830 to 1840, nearly $20,000 more were expended, chiefly for the agents’ salaries. About 1840 the appointment of an agent ceased, and the colony became gradually self-supporting and independent. It was proclaimed as the Republic of Liberia in 1847.77

October 18, Wednesday: Professor John Hough of Middlebury College opinioned, in a sermon before the Vermont Colonization Society at Montpelier, Vermont, that: The state of the free colored population of the United States, is one of extreme and remediless degradation, of gross irreligion, of revolting profligacy, and, of course, deplorable wretchedness.... They are found in vast numbers in the haunts of riot and dissipation and intemperance where they squander in sin the scanty earnings of their toil, contract habits of grosser iniquity and are prepared for acts of daring outrage and of enormous guilt.

76. HOUSE REPORTS, 24th Congress, 1st session, I. No. 223. 77. This account is taken exclusively from government documents: AMERICAN STATE PAPERS, NAVA L, III. Nos. 339, 340, 357, 429 E; IV. Nos. 457 R (1 and 2), 486 H, I, page 161 and 519 R, 564 P, 585 P; HOUSE REPORTS, 19th Congress, 1st session, I. No. 65; HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 19th Congress, 2d session, IV. No. 69; 21st Congress, 2d session, I. No. 2, pages 42-3, 211-8; 22d Congress 1st session, I. No. 2, pages 45, 272-4; 22d Congress, 2d session, I. No. 2, pages 48, 229; 23d Congress, 1st session, I. No. 1, pages 238, 269; 23d Congress, 2d session, I. No. 2, pages 315, 363; 24th Congress 1st session, I. No. 2, pages 336, 378; 24th Congress, 2d session, I. No. 2, pages 450, 506; 25th Congress, 2d session, I. No. 3, pages 771, 850; 26th Congress, 1st session, I. No. 2, pages 534, 612; 26th Congress, 2d session, I. No. 2, pages 405, 450. It is probable that the agent became eventually the United States consul and minister; I cannot however cite evidence for this supposition. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

(Please pardon me for pointing out here, that the conclusion that the audience would be driven of necessity to derive from this professor’s description of the situation, would be that the kindest thing to be done with these unfortunate people from whom labor had been extracted for generations without compensation would be that now, when we don’t need their free labor anymore, to ship them off back to Africa and forget about them, it being clear that, failing some kind solution in that genre, it would eventually be necessary for us to rise up in our righteous wrath and put them out of their misery once and for all by a resolute act of genocide. If you don’t get that by reading the passage above, please go back and read the passage again, more slowly, and savor the final part about how we need to get them before they get us.)

The last lottery was held in England. ENGLISH EVENTS OF 1826

Thomas Carlyle arose from his wedding bed and with great vehemence tore up a flowerbed in the yard. One suspicion is that he had discovered himself to be hopelessly impotent. Another suspicion is that his eroticism had become anally fixated. Another suspicion is that he was exclusively homosexual (there is doubt that he ever became able to consummate his union with Jane Welsh, Mrs. Carlyle).78

THOMAS CARLYLE

Albert Gallatin wrote to John Quincy Adams:

DEAR SIR, LONDON, October 18, 1826 I had intended next spring, before my return to America, to have an excursion to Paris once more to see some of my friends. Mr. Canning’s absence and the dispersion of the other members of the Cabinet having left me literally without anything to do here, I embraced what was the most favourable opportunity of making that journey, from which I have just returned. My letter of yesterday to the Secretary of State contains the substance of the information I was able to collect there; and I will now add some 78. According to the early biographer James Anthony Froude, Carlyle had intended that there be no biography written of him because “there was a secret connected with him unknown to his closest friends, that no one knew and no-one would know it, and that without a knowledge of it no true biography of him was possible.” Jane Carlyle had related the secret to Geraldine Jewsbury, but Victorian reticence was such that when it came time to pass this on to Froude, all Jewsbury was able to communicate was “she had something to tell me which I ought to know. I must have learnt that the state of things had been most unsatisfactory; the explanation of the whole of it was that ‘Carlyle was one of those persons who ought never to have married.’” It was clear to Froude on the basis of this communication only that the secret was not that Mrs. Carlyle had been incapable of becoming pregnant, but that the secret had to do rather with an “injury which she believed herself to have received. She had often resolved to leave Carlyle. He, of course, always admitted that she was at liberty to go if she pleased.” Froude inferred that Carlyle had been impotent, and that this was the reason why, on the morning after his wedding night, he “tore to pieces the flower garden at Comely Bank in a fit of ungovernable fury.” Frank Harris, not your paragon of truthfulness, would later allege that in a casual conversation Carlyle had indicated that the marriage had not been consummated: “The body part, he pleaded, seemed so little to him.” On the basis of little other than Freudian theology, Dr. James Halliday had been able to propose that the author of a set of writings such as Carlyle’s could only had been anally fixated, inclined toward homosexually, and sado-masochistic. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE particulars which, as they involve the names of individuals, I did not wish to remain on record in the Department of State. In the course of a long conversation with Pozzo di Borgo the state of our relations with Great Britain was alluded to. I told him that the Emperor’s decision in the case of slaves carried away and the convention relative thereto had not been carried into effect by Great Britain in conformity with what we considered their real intention and meaning; that the British Government had offered to compromise the matter by payment of a sum of money which fell short of our expectations; but that we were nevertheless inclined to accept it, principally on account of the reluctance we felt to trouble the Emperor by an appeal, asking from him further explanation of his decision. Pozzo immediately expressed his wish that we might compromise or otherwise adjust the matter without making such an appeal, which, particularly at this time, would be, as he thought, extremely inconvenient to the Emperor; and speaking of the Maine Boundary question, with which and its possible consequences he appeared well acquainted, he appeared also desirous, though he did not express himself as positively as on that of slaves, that Russia should not be selected as the umpire. I only observed that if there was any inconvenience in being obliged to make decisions which might not please both parties, that inconvenience was less to Russia than to any other Power, and that a compensation for it was found in the additional degree of consideration accruing to the Monarch in whom such confidence was placed. All this, however, corroborates what I have stated in my official letter respecting an approximation between Russia and Great Britain, and the disposition of the Emperor to interfere less than his predecessor in affairs in which he has no immediate interest. The most remarkable change discoverable to France is the extinction of Bonapartism, both as relates to dynasty and to the wish of a military Government. This, I am happy to say, appears to have had a favourable effect on our friend Lafayette, who was very ungovernable in all that related to petty plots during my residence at Paris as Minister, and to whom I had again spoken on the same subject in the most forcible manner whilst he was in America. His opinions and feelings are not changed; but he appears to be thoroughly satisfied of the hopelessness of any attempt to produce a change at present; and he confines his hopes to a vague expectation that, after the death of the present King and of the Dauphin, the Duc d’Orleans will dispute the legitimacy of the Duke of Bordeaux and become a constitutional King. This is such a doubtful and distant contingency as is not likely to involve Lafayette in any difficulties. Mr. de Villele complained to me of those expressions in the President’s message which declared Hayti to have placed herself in a state of vassalage to France, as calculated to increase the dissatisfaction amongst the people of the island at the late arrangement. He said that he was aware of the objections of a very different nature which we had to a recognition of the independence of Hayti, but did not see the necessity of alleging the reason alluded to. As I did not wish and did not think it at all proper to enter into any discussion of the subject, I answered, as if in jest, “Qu’un tribut, impose a une colonie cornme le prix de son independance, etait contraire aux grands principes.” I forgot to mention the circumstance to Mr. Brown, HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE and do not know whether the thing had already been complained of to him. If so, its being repeated to me-and they were almost the first words Mr. de Villele addressed to me-shows that it must have made a deep impression on the French Government. This reminds me that I received here a communication from a respectable quarter stating that, a few days before the publication of the order in council of July last, one of the King’s Ministers had complained to a confidential friend of the general tone of the American (United States) diplomacy towards England, still more so as respected manner than matter, and added that it was time to show that this was felt and resented. As to manner, the reproach cannot certainly attach either to Mr. Rush’s or Mr. King’s correspondence; and I know, from a conversation with Mr. Addington, that in that respect Mr. Clay’s has been quite acceptable. On looking at your own communications, I am satisfied that those to the British Ministers can have given no offence whatever, and that what they allude to and which has offended them is your instructions to Mr. Rush, printed by order of the Senate, and which have been transmitted both to Mr. Canning and to Mr. Huskisson; a circumstance, by the by, not very favourable to negotiations still pending. That they have no right to complain of what you wrote to our own Minister is obvious; still, I think the fact to be so. I forgot to mention in my letter of yesterday to the Secretary of State that there is some alarm amongst the legitimates about a plan of Metternich to change the line of succession in Austria, or a plea of the presumed incapacity of the heir presumptive; and that the King of the Netherlands has at last, by his unabated and exclusive attention to business and by his perfect probity and sincerity, so far conquered the prejudices of the Belgians as to have become highly respected and almost popular amongst them. I have the honour, &c., ALBERT GALLATIN

NEVER READ AHEAD! TO APPRECIATE OCTOBER 18TH, 1826 AT ALL ONE MUST APPRECIATE IT AS A TODAY (THE FOLLOWING DAY, TOMORROW, IS BUT A PORTION OF THE UNREALIZED FUTURE AND IFFY AT BEST).

Someplace Else “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1827

Slave states in North America, increasingly interested in getting rid of their populations of bothersome free African-Americans, were encouraging the formation of various colonization societies. These societies were organizing themselves independently of the American Colonization Society and founding their own several colonies in Liberia for transplanting their local bothersome free African-Americans: for instance, the Maryland State Colonization Society established its own colony, in Cape Palmas, Liberia. Virginia and Mississippi also established Liberian colonies for former slaves and free blacks. Some of the American blacks were volunteers only in the sense that they were only being emancipated on condition that they would “pledge to go back home to Africa.”

Early in this year, John Russworm offered his services to the American Colonization Society, and they offered to send him to Liberia — but after consultation with various friends he decided against this step.

July 18, Wednesday: The transport Norfolk sailed from Savannah, carrying 131 Africans of the negrero Antelope, bound for Liberia and liberation. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1829

February 7, Saturday: According to an almanac of the period, “General Harrison, Minister Plenipotentiary from the United States to Colombia, received and recognized at Bogota, by the Minister of State, in the absence of the President Bolivar.” CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS

Prince Ibrahima and 151 other passengers set out for Liberia and African freedom aboard the Harriet. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE March 28, Saturday: The last issue of Freedom’s Journal. Shortly thereafter John Russworm would be emigrating to Liberia, making remarks about “violent persecution.”

According to an almanac of the period, “General Rauch of the Lavalle or Buenos Ayres party, defeated by the Monteneros or party of the provinces” and “Castle of Rumelia surrendered to the Greek army under Count Agostino Capo d’Istrias.” CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

Our national birthday, Saturday the 4th of July: This was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 25th birthday.

According to an almanac of the period, “Navigation opened on the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, by the removal of the embankment at the summit level. Cornerstone of an edifice for the accommodation of the United States’ Mint, laid at Philadelphia.” CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS

Sam Patch leaped at Little Falls on the Passaic River: “One thing can be done as well as another.”

CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY

The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal was complete. The embankments at the summit of the canal were opened and water filled the canal, with large crowds and the Mayor of Philadelphia, Benjamin W. Richards, in attendance.

The ceremonial laying of the cornerstone of one of the Eastern locks of the C&O Canal near Georgetown was HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE canceled on account of rain. It must not have been raining in Augusta, Maine, for a corner stone of the “New State House” was ceremonially laid. It must not have been raining in Cincinnati, for an illuminated balloon 15 feet in diameter was sent aloft.

General Van Ness, on behalf of the Board of Aldermen and Common Council of Washington DC, presented a written statement of confidence to President Andrew Jackson — because at the moment he was encountering in that city a significant degree of unpopularity.

Lowell Mason directed the music at Boston’s celebration. At 4PM at the orthodox Congregationalist church on Park Street on Beacon Hill, William Lloyd Garrison made his 1st major antislavery speech, “Dangers to the Nation” (in attendance was John Greenleaf Whittier). Expected to orate acceptably in favor of colonization as a way to dispose of American blacks and restore racial separation, he instead espoused abolitionism in the name of freedom and of equal rights.79

James Henry Hammond, at the age of 25, opinioned at the Columbia Presbyterian Church that the citizenry had begun “to question the value of the American Union ... Patience under usurpation is a word for slaves.”

YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT EITHER THE REALITY OF TIME OVER THAT OF CHANGE, OR CHANGE OVER TIME — IT’S PARMENIDES, OR HERACLITUS. I HAVE GONE WITH HERACLITUS.

July 6, Monday: Gaetano Donizetti’s melodramma Elisabetta al castello di Kenilworth to words of Tottola after Hugo and Scribe after Scott was performed for the initial time, in Teatro San Carlo, Naples.

The former African prince, former American slave, Ibrahima, aboard ship off the coast of Liberia, died of fever at the age of 67.

79. During the following decade of the 1830s the number of free black Americans would increase by nearly 86,000 to over 319,000 while the American Colonization Society would raise some $113,000, but by use of that money only 1,430 freed American blacks would be transported from “our” shores toward Liberia. (A significant %age of such persons had been freed on condition that they were to “volunteer” for such transportation to a foreign shore.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE August: The US arranged to transport the Africans of the wrecked Spanish negrero Guerrero to Liberia on the Washington’s Barge, chartered by the US government from Richard Churchward of New York. A number of them had died in the wreck on the reef at Key West, many had been recaptured by the Spaniards and taken to slavery in Cuba, and some had died on the Zephaniah Kingsley and Hernandez plantations of North Florida where they had been forced to work during the interim. More would die while in transport to Liberia and only 91 would eventually see African shores. The Washington’s Barge would sail to Norfolk and then to Florida during August and September. There were problems on the voyage and the Africans would not arrive in Liberia until March 1830, in the Heroine, a vessel out of Barbados. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1830

August 28, Saturday: The Charleston Courier reported Congressman Warren Davis, one of the most extreme nullifiers, as saying “An oppressive and tyrannical law, that is driving almost to madness a generous, patriotic and highminded people, would be seen to be annulled, avoided, and made harmless by the quiet and peaceful intervention of ‘trial by jury.’”

A convict ship, the Andromeda, set sail from England for New South Wales, Australia. Of the 2 convicts undergoing transportation, 1 had received a life sentence and the other a sentence of 7 years.

The first American-built locomotive, Peter Cooper’s Tom Thumb, was given a trial run between Baltimore and Ellicott Mills, on an existing rail road which had been being used for horse-drawn travel, pulling a car full of passengers a distance of 13 miles — after some delays caused by people stealing pipes off it at night for their copper content. In those initial days, the fuel used in the firebox was what was known in the south as “lightwood,” which was pitch pine and which gave off plumes of dense and stinky and sticky black smoke and soot. While the engine was operational it was able to travel at an average speed of 5 1/2 miles per hour while heading uphill and all the way up to 18 miles per hour at spots while heading downhill — which is faster than you can get a horse to trot. Some of the gents in the passenger carriage pulled out their pocket notebooks and wrote things down, so’s they could later point at these marks and go “When I wrote that line right there, I happened to be traveling along at a clip of 18 miles per hour.” They raced a horse, drawing a carriage along a parallel rail track, and for a time they drew ahead, but then their fan belt started to slip off and so the horse won. The records of the event do not state how long it took the “gallant gray” to recover from the lashing it endured during this “race.” John Hazlehurst Boneval Latrobe is the guy who founded the Maryland Institute, invented the “Baltimore heater,” and was long identified with the American Colonization Society’s agenda to send American blacks back where they came from, to Africa “where they belonged.” He would succeed to the presidency of that America-is-for-white-people-only organization, following Henry Clay in 1853. He would become the president of the Maryland Historical Society and would author a HISTORY OF MASON AND DIXON’S LINE. He would be legal counsel to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad for more than 50 years. Here is Latrobe describing Peter Cooper’s pioneer steam engine, late in life in his PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF THE BALTIMORE & OHIO RAILROAD. This Tom Thumb had not been exactly the 1st locomotive placed on American track, that distinction belonging to an English-built engine which had not exactly been a success. It had been, however, the 1st America-built locomotive to make a successful trip. Here he described the experimental run of the new American locomotive in order to demonstrate some principals of boiler design, but more particularly, to describe how being pulled by a locomotive rather than by a team of draft horses had been proven to be feasible, not merely on the flat, straight railroads which had been put in place as of that early date in England, but over the sorts of hills and curves that could not be avoided in America: In the beginning, no one dreamed of steam upon the road. Horses were to do the work; and even after the line was completed to Frederick, relays of horses trotted the cars from place to place.... To ride in a railroad car in those days was, literally, to go thundering along, the roll of the wheels on the combined rail of stone and iron being almost deafening. When steam made its appearance on the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad it attracted great attention here. But there was this difficulty about introducing an English engine on an American road. An English road was virtually a straight road. An American road had curves sometimes of as small radius as two hundred feet.... For a brief season it was believed that this feature of the early American roads would prevent the use of locomotive engines. The contrary was demonstrated by a gentleman still HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE living in an active and ripe old age, honored and beloved, distinguished for his private worth and for his public benefactions; one of those to whom wealth seems to have been granted by Providence that men might know how wealth could be used to benefit one’s fellow-creatures. The speaker refers to Mr. Peter Cooper of New York. Mr. Cooper was satisfied that steam might be adapted to the curved roads which he saw would be built in the United States; and he came to Baltimore, which then possessed the only one on which he could experiment, to vindicate his belief. He had another idea, which was, that the crank could be dispensed with in the change from a reciprocating to a rotary motion; and he built an engine to demonstrate both articles of his faith. The machine was not larger than the hand cars used by workmen to transfer themselves from place to place; and as the speaker now recalls its appearance, the only wonder is, that so apparently insignificant a contrivance should ever have been regarded as competent to the smallest results. But Mr. Cooper was wiser than many of the wisest around him. His engine could not have weighed a ton; but he saw in it a principle which the forty-ton engines of to-day have but served to develop and demonstrate. The boiler of Mr. Cooper’s engine was not as large as the kitchen boiler attached to many a range in modern mansions. It was of about the same diameter. But not much more than half as high. It stood upright in the car, and was filled, above the furnace, which occupied the lower section, with vertical tubes. The cylinder was but three-and-a-half inches in diameter, and speed was gotten up by gearing. No natural draught could have been sufficient to keep up steam in so small a boiler; and Mr. Cooper used therefore a blowing-apparatus, driven by a drum attached to one of the car wheels, over which passed a cord that in its turn worked a pulley on the shaft of the blower.... Mr. Cooper’s success was such as to induce him to try a trip to Ellicott’s Mills; and an open car, the first used upon the road, already mentioned, having been attached to his engine, and filled with the directors and some friends, the speaker among the rest, the first journey by steam in America was commenced. The trip was most interesting. The curves were passed without difficulty at a speed of fifteen miles an hour; the grades were ascended with comparative ease; the day was fine, the company in the highest spirits, and some excited gentlemen of the party pulled out memorandum books, and when at the highest speed, which was eighteen miles an hour, wrote their names and some connected sentences to prove that even at that great velocity it was possible to do so. The return trip from the Mills a distance of thirteen miles- was made in fifty-seven minutes. This was in the summer of 1830. But the triumph of this Tom Thumb engine was not altogether without a drawback. The great stage proprietors of the day were Stockton & Stokes; and on this occasion a gallant gray of great beauty and power was driven by them from town, attached to another car on the second track-for the Company had begun by making two tracks to the Mills and met the engine at the Relay House on its way back. From this point it was determined to have a race home; and, the start being even, away went horse and engine, the snort of the one and the puff of the other keeping time and tune. At first the gray had the best of it, for his steam would be applied to the greatest advantage on the instant, HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE while the engine had to wait until the rotation of the wheels set the blower to work. The horse was perhaps a quarter of a mile ahead when the safety valve of the engine lifted and the thin blue vapor issuing from it showed an excess of steam. The blower whistled, the steam blew off in vapory clouds, the pace increased, the passengers shouted, the engine gained on the horse, soon it lapped him-the silk was plied-the race was neck and neck, nose and nose then the engine passed the horse, and a great hurrah hailed the victory. But it was not repeated; for just at this time, when the gray’s master was about giving up, the band which drove the pulley, which drove the blower, slipped from the drum, the safety valve ceased to scream, and the engine for want of breath began to wheeze and pant. In vain Mr. Cooper, who was his own engineman and fireman, lacerated his hands in attempting to replace the band upon the wheel: in vain he tried to urge the fire with light wood; the horse gained on the machine, and passed it; and although the band was presently replaced, and steam again did its best, the horse was too far ahead to be overtaken, and came in the winner of the race. But the real victory was with Mr. Cooper, notwithstanding. He had held fast to the faith that was in him, and had demonstrated its truth beyond peradventure. All honor to his name. In the Musee d’Artillerie at Paris there are preserved old cannon, contemporary almost with Crecy and Poitiers. In some great museum of internal improvement, and some such will at some future day be gotten up, Mr. Peter Cooper’s boiler should hold an equally prominent and far more honored place; for while the old weapons of destruction were ministers of man’s wrath, the contrivance we have described was one of the most potential instruments in making available, in America, that vast system which unites remote peoples and promotes that peace on earth and good will to men which angels have proclaimed.

Posters had been put up in various counties of England, signed “Captain Swing.” That night, at the end of the harvest, the rioting farm laborers and their city cousins destroyed a considerable number of new agricultural machines, harvesters, etc. By the third week in October, a cumulative total of about a hundred such pieces of equipment would have been destroyed in the fields and barns of England, and justices of the peace would have posted notices which “begged to recommend” to the proprietors of farms that they suspend their use of their new threshing machines at least temporarily. Notices were also posted “To the labouring classes,” explaining plans for “increasing your Wages to a satisfactory extent” and asking that they withdraw themselves “from Practices which tend to destroy the Property from whence the very means of your additional Wages are to be supplied.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE October 15, Friday: Helen Fiske was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. She and another faculty child, Emily Dickinson, would play together and would attend one year of grammar school together at the Amherst Academy.

A convict ship, the Lady Harewood, set sail from England for New South Wales, Australia. Of the 216 convicts undergoing transportation, 62 had received life sentences and the average sentence was 8 years.

When no white Boston church would allow use of their space for such questionable activities as developing among white Americans an opposition to the peculiar institution of human enslavement, it was arranged for William Lloyd Garrison to deliver his lecture at Julien Hall, the site usually used by such marginal folks as the

Freethinkers’ Society and Abner Kneeland’s Universalist Society. The Reverend Lyman Beecher attended and would term Garrison’s ideas not only misguided but dangerously fanatical (Beecher had been a hero of Garrison’s, but this would put an end to that). Also present at the speech in that packed chamber, but approving of it, were the Reverend Samuel Eliot Sewall and his cousin, the Reverend Samuel J. May, Jr., and Sam’s new brother-in-law Bronson Alcott. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

The Reverend May had come from his home in Connecticut to visit with family and friends and had been attracted by a newspaper advertisement to this series of lectures on “the awful sinfulness of slaveholding” in which the “duplicity of the American Colonization Society” would be exposed and “immediate, unconditional emancipation” would be proclaimed to be “the right of every slave and the duty of every master.” May was particularly affected by the fact that with Boston’s church doors being closed, such lectures were possible only due to the generosity of such as Abner Kneeland –this municipality’s reigning atheist– at the Freethinkers’ Society. Present were Lyman Beecher (disapproving), and Unitarian ministers Samuel HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE Sewall and Samuel J. May (highly approving). They noticed the presence of the Reverend Ezra Stiles Gannett. Deacon Moses Grant was in attendance, and John Tappan. The burden of Garrison’s talk was that to speak of “a republican or Christian slaveholder” was as self-contradictory as to speak of “a religious atheist, a sober drunkard, or an honest thief.” Trying to remain a Christian and a true American citizen while holding other Americans in slavery was about as nonsensical as squandering one’s life in an attempt to square the circle or devise a perpetual-motion machine. After the lecture Sam suggested:

We ought to know him. We ought to help him. Come, let us go and give him our hands.

The Reverends Sewall and May took Garrison to Alcott’s rooms and they all talked to this misguided and dangerous fanatic ’till midnight! The Reverends Sewall and May promised not only moral but also financial support, and Garrison, at that point but 25 years old, would eventually become Sam’s best friend. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1831

August 5, Friday: Sebastien Erard died near Passy, France at the age of 79.

Frances Trollope set foot on English soil again, almost 4 years after having departed for America.

Stephen Smith, opposing the scheme of the colonization of Liberia by manumitted slaves and free persons of color from the United States, presided at a meeting held in Columbia, Pennsylvania to denounce the scheme being sponsored by the American Colonization Society.

November 13, Sunday: The abolitionists met in the law offices of Samuel Eliot Sewall on State Street in Boston to discuss the formation of an anti-slavery society in opposition to the gradualist agenda of the American Colonization Society.

STATE STREET, BOSTON

They agreed going in that it would be mandatory to secure at least a dozen positive votes to get this abolitionist society started. Present, besides of course Sewall whose offices these were, and William Lloyd Garrison, were: • David Lee Child, representing himself and also his spouse Lydia Maria Child who could of course not be present since this was an all-guys thing, a business meeting • Joshua Coffin • Isaac Knaap • Friend Oliver Johnson • Ellis Gray Loring ABOLITIONISM • The Reverend Samuel Joseph May • The Reverend Moses Thacher HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE • Friend Arnold Buffum of old Smithfield, Rhode Island

Their initial ballot unfortunately produced, among the fifteen who voted, only nine persons ready to proceed on an “immediatist” or “just do it” agenda rather than the agreed magic minimum number of twelve. They would therefore need to hold another meeting, in December, and then three more such meetings, before they would be able to complete their agreement on January 1, 1832 and then confirm it with their dozen signatures, in the basement classroom of the African Meeting House on Belknap Street in the presence of black witnesses, on January 6, 1832.

BETWEEN ANY TWO MOMENTS ARE AN INFINITE NUMBER OF MOMENTS, AND BETWEEN THESE OTHER MOMENTS LIKEWISE AN INFINITE NUMBER, THERE BEING NO ATOMIC MOMENT JUST AS THERE IS NO ATOMIC POINT ALONG A LINE. MOMENTS ARE THEREFORE FIGMENTS. THE PRESENT MOMENT IS A MOMENT AND AS SUCH IS A FIGMENT, A FLIGHT OF THE IMAGINATION TO WHICH NOTHING REAL CORRESPONDS. SINCE PAST MOMENTS HAVE PASSED OUT OF EXISTENCE AND FUTURE MOMENTS HAVE YET TO ARRIVE, WE NOTE THAT THE PRESENT MOMENT IS ALL THAT EVER EXISTS — AND YET THE PRESENT MOMENT BEING A HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE MOMENT IS A FIGMENT TO WHICH NOTHING IN REALITY CORRESPONDS.

Someplace Else “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1832

January 6, Friday: In Providence, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 6th of 1st M 1832 / This evening recd a letter from my old & long loved friend Thomas Thompson of Liverpool it contained a pleasant acct of the travels of our friend John Wilbour now in that country on a religious visit as well of Stephen Grillett & Christo Healy - it also contained the information of the decease of our dear friend Jonathon Taylor of Ohio, in Ireland, who was also in that country on a religious Mission, I was comforted with receiving a letter from Thomas & think I shall now renew my correspondence with him. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS That evening 12 abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison and others, walked up “Nigger Hill” in Boston in a northeaster snowstorm to meet in the basement of the African Meeting House off Belknap Street and constitute themselves as a New England Anti-Slavery Society, in opposition to the agenda of the American Colonization Society which was seeking to return the freed Africans to Africa. There were “a number of colored citizens” present as observers as these white men filed to the front and placed their signatures in the meeting book. A number of black elders placed their names in a parallel column as a gesture of general support. Friend Arnold Buffum of Old Smithfield and Providence became president. Garrison became corresponding secretary, but declined to allow the new society any control over the editorial policies of his newspaper. ABOLITIONISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE June 1, Friday: William Lloyd Garrison attacked the proslavery duplicity of the American Colonization Society in his self-published 236-page THOUGHTS ON AFRICAN COLONIZATION: OR AN IMPARTIAL EXHIBITION OF THE DOCTRINES, PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSES OF THE AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY, TOGETHER WITH THE RESOLUTIONS, ADDRESSES AND REMONSTRANCES OF THE FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR. These folks were, he amply demonstrated on the basis of their own writings, a group of people who rather than desiring the wellbeing of abused Americans of color, desired merely to eliminate the danger posed to slavery by the local presence of free persons of color by getting rid of these free persons of color, an agenda which was entirely due to cupidity and to “an antipathy to blacks.” 2,275 copies were produced and placed on sale at $0.62 each, one of them winding up in the hands of a student in the Lane Seminary of Cincinnati, Theodore Dwight Weld. ABOLITIONISM

In Providence, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 1st of 6th M 1832 / Today an Indian Man by the name of Wamsley was hung for Murder, about two miles South of the Road to Pawtucket - I happened in town as he was going to the Gallows & saw him at a distance - it was a most affecting scene to see so many thousands flocking after the Miserable man. - such executions are in my opinion not calculated to effect any moral & certainly no relegious good - for among the crowd were many who were drunk, some staggering & others laying. - my heart was deeply affected with the scene & I could but deplore the fate of the poor object, & intercede that we might all be preserved from crime. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

November: The St. Helena Railway Co. sold the inclined plane known as “Jacob’s Ladder” to the East India Company for £882.50.

The American Colonization Society made its studied response to the accusations William Lloyd Garrison had been publishing against it:

“It is not right that men should possess that freedom, for which they are entirely unprepared, which can only prove injurious to themselves and others.” ABOLITIONISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1833

January: Prudence Crandall, headmistress of the Canterbury, Connecticut female academy, visited Boston, Providence, New-York, and New Haven to recruit 20 students of color, and sought the counsel of William Lloyd Garrison. When she returned to Canterbury she announced that she had decided to do without the white students and instead educate free young black women: “Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color.” The town fathers of course went apeshit.

When the school reopened, some of its students were from out of state, from for instance such foreign municipalities as Boston and Philadelphia. The Selectmen of the town responded by declaring: “Open this door, and New England will become the Liberia of America.”80 Merchants refused to sell supplies. The town doctor refused to treat the students. The local church refused to admit the students. Manure was thrown into their drinking water. Rocks were thrown at the school building while these “young ladies and little misses of 80. Had, through the efforts of Prudence, New England become the Liberia of America — this is what its currency would have looked like: HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE color” were inside. The local authorities began to threaten the application of a local “vagrancy” ordinance, a law that would provide such visitors with ten lashes of the whip (to my knowledge, however, not one of these young ladies of color ever was actually whipped in accordance with this “vagrancy” idea, the idea of torturing them being, apparently, merely a nasty threat).

February: In Salem, Massachusetts, there was a public confrontation between the New England Anti-Slavery Society (let’s set them free) and the American Colonization Society (let’s be rid of them). HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1834

In the USA, Friend John Greenleaf Whittier self-published a 23-page pamphlet arguing for emancipation on moral grounds. SLAVERY “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

(In this year the English Parliament estimated that the cost of such an abolition of slavery would be in the range of £20,000,000 sterling, because this would involve freeing some 700,000 persons.)

(At the annual meeting of the American Colonization Society there was general agreement among the white philanthropists that there should be no Black Emancipation until arrangements for expatriation were in place. While they are over here in White America — they are going to be here as our slaves and as nothing but!)

Friend John would be moved to create the following poem:

THE HUNTERS OF MEN. HAV E ye heard of our hunting, o’er mountain and glen, Through cane-brake and forest, — the hunting of men? The lords of our land to this hunting have gone, As the fox-hunter follows the sound of the horn; Hark! the cheer and the hallo! the crack of the whip, And the yell of the hound as he fastens his grip! All blithe are our hunters, and noble their match, Though hundreds are caught, there are millions to catch. So speed to their hunting, o’er mountain and glen, Through cane-brake and forest, — the hunting of men! Gay luck to our hunters! how nobly they ride In the glow of their zeal, and the strength of their pride! The priest with his cassock flung back on the wind, Just screening the politic statesman behind; The saint and the sinner, with cursing and prayer, The drunk and the sober, ride merrily there. And woman, kind woman, wife, widow, and maid, For the good of the hunted, is lending her aid: Her foot’s in the stirrup, her hand on the rein, How blithely she rides to the hunting of men!

Oh, goodly and grand is our hunting to see, In this “land of the brave and this home of the free.” Priest, warrior, and statesman, from Georgia to Maine, All mounting the saddle, all grasping the rein; Right merrily hunting the black man, whose sin Is the curl of his hair and the hue of his skin! HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE Woe, now, to the hunted who turns him at bay! Will our hunters be turned from their purpose and prey? Will their hearts fail within them? their nerves tremble, when All roughly they ride to the hunting of men? Ho! alms for our hunters! all weary and faint, Wax the curse of the sinner and prayer of the saint. The horn is wound faintly, the echoes are still, Over cane-brake and river, and forest and hill. Haste, alms for our hunters! the hunted once more Have turned from their flight with their backs to the shore: What right have they here in the home of the white, Shadowed o’er by our banner of Freedom and Right? Ho! alms for the hunters! or never again Will they ride in their pomp to the hunting of men! Alms, alms for our hunters! why will ye delay, When their pride and their glory are melting away? The parson has turned; for, on charge of his own, Who goeth a warfare, or hunting, alone? The politic statesman looks back with a sigh, There is doubt in his heart, there is fear in his eye. Oh, haste, lest that doubting and fear shall prevail, And the head of his steed take the place of the tail. Oh, haste, ere he leave us! for who will ride then, For pleasure or gain, to the hunting of men? ABOLITIONISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1836

From this year until 1846 Jefferson Davis would be establishing his slave plantation “Brierfield” 20 miles down the Mississippi River from Vicksburg on land adjacent to his brother Joseph Davis’s slave plantation “Hurricane” at Davis Bend. He traveled and involved himself in local and state politics.

Isaac Ross, the owner of a 5,000-acre plantation with 225 slaves, Prospect Hill in Jefferson County in Mississippi, on his deathbed instructed that at the point of his daughter Margaret’s death, “Prospect Hill would be sold and the money used to pay the way for his slaves who wanted to emigrate to Liberia.”

Although this daughter would not contest the will, it would be contested for years by a grandson, Isaac Ross Wade, in the Mississippi legislature as well as in court. It would not be until early 1848 that the first group of manumitted slaves at Prospect Hill would be able to begin their long journey of exile to a foreign continent. Ultimately there would be a colony made up of several hundred of Isaac Ross’s slaves, conjoining themselves with another several hundred people who had been freed by other members of the extended Ross family in a colony at the mouth of the Sinoe River that they referred to as “Mississippi in Africa.” Initially, in part because of disagreements between the Mississippi Colonization Society and the American Colonization Society, this was not considered to be part of the colony of Liberia that centered at Monrovia, but it would come under attack by local tribespeople who resented the privileged position of these freed slaves, the way they lorded it over the native Africans, and so eventually it would need to be made part of that independent nation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE December 2, Friday: Charles Darwin having returned to London from the Beagle expedition, Professor Thomas Bell, FRS accepted the task of describing his reptile specimens. Bell would also be entrusted with the specimens of Crustacea collected on the voyage.

Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum. THE LIST OF LECTURES

He wrote in his journal:

The present state of the colony at Liberia is a memorable fact. It is found that the black merchants are so fond of their lucrative occupations that it is with difficulty that any of them can be prevailed upon to take office in the colony. They dislike the trouble of it. Civilized arts are found to be as attractive to the wild negro, as they are disagreeable to the wild Indian.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 2nd of 12 M 1836 / This morning took the Stage & came home, finding our family & other things as well as when I left them HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1838

In a Louisiana case at law, that of “C.P. Poulard et al v. Delamere et al,” a slave named C.P. Poulard and some of the other former slaves of Julien Poydras sought legal help in forcing the implementation of their deceased slavemaster’s last will and testament. Julien Poydras had specified in his last will and testament that after his death, his slaves were to be maintained with his lands rather than being sold away. He had specified in his last will and testament, also, that his slaves were to be manumitted at age 60, or after 25 years of service, whichever was earlier, and had arranged for an annual stipend to be given to each former slave. The slaves lost on the issue of their manumission, and they also lost on the money issues, and the court did allow them to be sent out to work on another plantation — but they did achieve a stipulation that they could not be sold away, either by the heirs to the plantation or by the first vendee of any property of the estate.

During this year African colonies established severally by A.) the Virginia Colonization Society, B.) the Quaker Young Men’s Colonization Society of Pennsylvania, and C.) the American Colonization Society merged into a common colony claiming control over all settlements between the Cestos River and Cape Mount, to be known as the Commonwealth of Liberia. This new political entity would in the following year adopt a constitution and a newly-appointed governor. Joseph Jenkins Roberts, a free mulatto trader and successful military commander who, it was said at the time, could easily have passed as white, was named the 1st lieutenant governor of this Commonwealth of Liberia and would, when the appointed governor died in office in 1841, become its 1st “African-American” governor. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1842

A settlement of manumitted slaves from Mississippi that had been established at the mouth of the Sinoe River in this year merged into the Commonwealth of Liberia.

Allegedly, a Scots soldier in the British army was at an army camp at Caffraria on the South African coast, and consorting with a French camp follower. She gave birth to Kady Southwell and died and allegedly, the family of Duncan and Alice McKenzie then took in the orphan infant. The name “Colonel George Southwell” has been assigned as the name of this alleged father, although in the entire ample British military records there is no trace of the existence of such an officer. The name “Kady” is explained as being the surname of this alleged officer father’s good friend and military colleague “Sir James Kady” but similarly, no record has turned up of the actual existence of any such individual.81

81. Possibly, both Kady and her parents actually were Rhode Islanders and this entire Africa, Scotland, and France thingie a zinger — at one late point, the elder Kady would indicate to a census worker that both she and her parents had been born in Rhode Island. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1843

The negrero Kentucky, out of the harbor of New-York, carried a cargo to Brazil (SENATE DOCUMENT, 28th Congress, 2d session IX, Number 150, 30th Congress, 1st session IV, Number 28, pages 71-8; HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 30th Congress, 2d session VII, Number 61, page 72 ff).

There was a treaty between Britain and the USA to suppress the international slave trade, and the US Navy created an African Squadron that intercepted ships like the Cora, Wildfire, Bonita, Erie, etc. and dropped the slave cargoes at Monrovia, Liberia, placing these people under the care of the American Colonization Society.

W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: A somewhat more sincere and determined effort to enforce the slave-trade laws now followed; and yet it is a significant fact that not until Lincoln’s administration did a slave-trader suffer death for violating the laws of the United States. The participation of Americans in the trade continued, declining somewhat between 1825 and 1830, and then reviving, until it reached its highest activity between 1840 and 1860. The development of a vast internal slave-trade, and the consequent rise in the South of vested interests strongly opposed to slave smuggling, led to a falling off in the illicit introduction of Negroes after 1825, until the fifties; nevertheless, smuggling never entirely ceased, and large numbers were thus added to the plantations of the Gulf States. Monroe had various constitutional scruples as to the execution of the Act of 1819;82 but, as Congress took no action, he at last put a fair interpretation on his powers, and appointed Samuel Bacon as an agent in Africa to form a settlement for recaptured Africans. Gradually the agency thus formed became merged with that of the Colonization Society on Cape Mesurado; and from this union Liberia was finally evolved.83 Meantime, during the years 1818 to 1820, the activity of the slave-traders was prodigious. General James Tallmadge declared in the House, February 15, 1819: “Our laws are already highly penal against their introduction, and yet, it is a well known fact, that about fourteen thousand slaves have been brought into our country this last year.”84 In the same year Middleton of South Carolina and Wright of Virginia estimated illicit 82. Attorney-General Wirt advised him, October, 1819, that no part of the appropriation could be used to purchase land in Africa or tools for the Negroes, or as salary for the agent: OPINIONS OF ATTORNEYS-GENERAL, I. 314-7. Monroe laid the case before Congress in a special message Dec. 20, 1819 (HOUSE JOURNAL, 16th Congress 1st session, page 57); but no action was taken there. 83. Cf. Kendall’s Report, August, 1830: SENATE DOCUMENT, 21st Congress 2d session, I. No. 1, pages 211-8; also see below, Chapter X. 84. Speech in the House of Representatives, Feb. 15, 1819, page 18; published in Boston, 1849. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE introduction at 13,000 and 15,000 respectively.85 Judge Story, in charging a jury, took occasion to say: “We have but too many proofs from unquestionable sources, that it [the slave-trade] is still carried on with all the implacable rapacity of former times. Avarice has grown more subtle in its evasions, and watches and seizes its prey with an appetite quickened rather than suppressed by its guilty vigils. American citizens are steeped to their very mouths (I can hardly use too bold a figure) in this stream of iniquity.”86 The following year, 1820, brought some significant statements from various members of Congress. Said Smith of South Carolina: “Pharaoh was, for his temerity, drowned in the Red Sea, in pursuing them [the Israelites] contrary to God’s express will; but our Northern friends have not been afraid even of that, in their zeal to furnish the Southern States with Africans. They are better seamen than Pharaoh, and calculate by that means to elude the vigilance of Heaven; which they seem to disregard, if they can but elude the violated laws of their country.”87 As late as May he saw little hope of suppressing the traffic.88 Sergeant of Pennsylvania declared: “It is notorious that, in spite of the utmost vigilance that can be employed, African negroes are clandestinely brought in and sold as slaves.”89 Plumer of New Hampshire stated that “of the unhappy beings, thus in violation of all laws transported to our shores, and thrown by force into the mass of our black population, scarcely one in a hundred is ever detected by the officers of the General Government, in a part of the country, where, if we are to believe the statement of Governor Rabun, ‘an officer who would perform his duty, by attempting to enforce the law [against the slave trade] is, by many, considered as an officious meddler, and treated with derision and contempt;’ ... I have been told by a gentleman, who has attended particularly to this subject, that ten thousand slaves were in one year smuggled into the United States; and that, even for the last year, we must count the number not by hundreds, but by thousands.”90 In 1821 a committee of Congress characterized prevailing methods as those “of the grossest fraud that could be practised to deceive the officers of government.”91 Another committee, in 1822, after a careful examination of the subject, declare that they “find it impossible to measure with precision the effect produced upon the American branch of the slave trade by the laws above mentioned, and the seizures under them. They are unable to state, whether those American merchants, the American capital and seamen which heretofore aided in this traffic, have abandoned it altogether, or have sought shelter under the flags of other nations.” They then state the suspicious circumstance that, with the disappearance of the American flag from the traffic, “the trade, notwithstanding, increases annually, under the flags of other nations.” They complain of the spasmodic efforts of the executive. They say that the first United States cruiser arrived on the African coast in March, 1820, and remained a “few weeks;” that since then four others had in two years made five visits 85. Jay, INQUIRY INTO AMERICAN COLONIZATION (1838), page 59, note. 86. Quoted in Friends’ FACTS AND OBSERVATIONS ON THE SLAVE TRADE (ed. 1841), pages 7-8. 87. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 16th Congress 1st session, pages 270-1. 88. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 16th Congress 1st session, page 698. 89. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 16th Congress 1st session, page 1207. 90. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 16th Congress 1st session, page 1433. 91. Referring particularly to the case of the slaver Plattsburg. Cf. HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress 1st session, II. No. 92, page 10. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE in all; but “since the middle of last November, the commencement of the healthy season on that coast, no vessel has been, nor, as your committee is informed, is, under orders for that service.”92 The United States African agent, Ayres, reported in 1823: “I was informed by an American officer who had been on the coast in 1820, that he had boarded 20 American vessels in one morning, lying in the port of Gallinas, and fitted for the reception of slaves. It is a lamentable fact, that most of the harbours, between the Senegal and the line, were visited by an equal number of American vessels, and for the sole purpose of carrying away slaves. Although for some years the coast had been occasionally visited by our cruizers, their short stay and seldom appearance had made but slight impression on those traders, rendered hardy by repetition of crime, and avaricious by excessive gain. They were enabled by a regular system to gain intelligence of any cruizer being on the coast.”93 Even such spasmodic efforts bore abundant fruit, and indicated what vigorous measures might have accomplished. Between May, 1818, and November, 1821, nearly six hundred Africans were recaptured and eleven American slavers taken.94 Such measures gradually changed the character of the trade, and opened the international phase of the question. American slavers cleared for foreign ports, there took a foreign flag and papers, and then sailed boldly past American cruisers, although their real character was often well known. More stringent clearance laws and consular instructions might have greatly reduced this practice; but nothing was ever done, and gradually the laws became in large measure powerless to deal with the bulk of the illicit trade. In 1820, September 16, a British officer, in his official report, declares that, in spite of United States laws, “American vessels, American subjects, and American capital, are unquestionably engaged in the trade, though under other colours and in disguise.”95 The United States ship “Cyane” at one time reported ten captures within a few days, adding: “Although they are evidently owned by Americans, they are so completely covered by Spanish papers that it is impossible to condemn them.”96 The governor of Sierra Leone reported the rivers Nunez and Pongas full of renegade European and American slave-traders;97 the trade was said to be carried on “to an extent that almost staggers belief.”98 Down to 1824 or 1825, reports from all quarters prove this activity in slave-trading. The execution of the laws within the country exhibits grave defects and even criminal negligence. Attorney-General Wirt finds it necessary to assure collectors, in 1819, that “it is against public policy to dispense with prosecutions for violation of the law to prohibit the Slave trade.”99 One district 92. HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress 1st session, II. No. 92, page 2. The President had in his message spoken in exhilarating tones of the success of the government in suppressing the trade. The House Committee appointed in pursuance of this passage made the above report. Their conclusions are confirmed by British reports: PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1822, Vol. XXII., SLAVE TRADE, Further Papers, III. page 44. So, too, in 1823, Ashmun, the African agent, reports that thousands of slaves are being abducted. 93. Ayres to the Secretary of the Navy, Feb. 24, 1823; reprinted in FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 31. 94. HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress 1st session, II. No. 92, pages 5-6. The slavers were the Ramirez, Endymion, Esperanza, Plattsburg, Science, Alexander, Eugene, Mathilde, Daphne, Eliza, and La Pensée. In these 573 Africans were taken. The naval officers were greatly handicapped by the size of the ships, etc. (cf. FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), pages 33-41). They nevertheless acted with great zeal. 95. PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1821, Vol. XXIII., SLAVE TRADE, Further Papers, A, page 76. The names and description of a dozen or more American slavers are given: PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1821, Vol. XXIII., SLAVE TRADE, Further Papers, A, pages 18-21. 96. HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress 1st session, II. No. 92, pages 15-20. 97. HOUSE DOCUMENT, 18th Congress 1st session, VI. No. 119, page 13. 98. PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1823, Vol. XVIII., SLAVE TRADE, Further Papers, A, pages 10-11. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE attorney writes: “It appears to be almost impossible to enforce the laws of the United States against offenders after the negroes have been landed in the state.”100 Again, it is asserted that “when vessels engaged in the slave trade have been detained by the American cruizers, and sent into the slave-holding states, there appears at once a difficulty in securing the freedom to these captives which the laws of the United States have decreed for them.”101 In some cases, one man would smuggle in the Africans and hide them in the woods; then his partner would “rob” him, and so all trace be lost.102 Perhaps 350 Africans were officially reported as brought in contrary to law from 1818 to 1820: the absurdity of this figure is apparent.103 A circular letter to the marshals, in 1821, brought reports of only a few well-known cases, like that of the “General Ramirez;” the marshal of Louisiana had “no information.”104 There appears to be little positive evidence of a large illicit importation into the country for a decade after 1825. It is hardly possible, however, considering the activity in the trade, that slaves were not largely imported. Indeed, when we note how the laws were continually broken in other respects, absence of evidence of petty smuggling becomes presumptive evidence that collusive or tacit understanding of officers and citizens allowed the trade to some extent.105 Finally, it must be noted that during all this time scarcely a man suffered for participating in the trade, beyond the loss of the Africans and, more rarely, of his ship. Red-handed slavers, caught in the act and convicted, were too often, like La Coste of South Carolina, the subjects of executive clemency.106 In certain cases there were those who even had the effrontery to ask Congress to cancel their own laws. For instance, in 1819 a Venezuelan privateer, secretly fitted out and manned by Americans in Baltimore, succeeded in capturing several American, Portuguese, and Spanish slavers, and appropriating the slaves; being finally wrecked herself, she transferred her crew and slaves to one of her prizes, the “Antelope,” which was eventually captured by a United States cruiser and the 280 Africans sent to Georgia. After much litigation, the United States Supreme Court ordered those captured from Spaniards to be surrendered, and the others to be returned to Africa. By some mysterious process, only 139 Africans now remained, 100 of whom were sent to Africa. The Spanish claimants of the remaining thirty-nine sold them to a certain Mr. Wilde, who gave bond to transport them out of the country. Finally, in December, 1827, there came an innocent petition to Congress to cancel this bond.107 A bill to that effect passed and was approved, May 2, 1828,108 and in consequence these Africans remained as slaves in Georgia. On the whole, it is plain that, although in the period from 1807 to 1820 Congress laid down broad lines of legislation sufficient, save in some details, to suppress the African slave trade to America, yet the execution of these laws was criminally

99. OPINIONS OF ATTORNEYS-GENERAL, V. 717. 100. R.W. Habersham to the Secretary of the Navy, August, 1821; reprinted in FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 47. 101. FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 42. 102. FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 43. 103. Cf. above, pages 126-7. 104. FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 42. 105. A few accounts of captures here and there would make the matter less suspicious; these, however, do not occur. How large this suspected illicit traffic was, it is of course impossible to say; there is no reason why it may not have reached many hundreds per year. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE lax. Moreover, by the facility with which slavers could disguise their identity, it was possible for them to escape even a vigorous enforcement of our laws. This situation could properly be met only by energetic and sincere international co- operation....109

106. Cf. editorial in Niles’s Register, XXII. 114. Cf. also the following instances of pardons: — PRESIDENT JEFFERSON: March 1, 1808, Phillip M. Topham, convicted for “carrying on an illegal slave-trade” (pardoned twice). PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 146, 148-9. PRESIDENT MADISON: July 29, 1809, 15 vessels arrived at New Orleans from Cuba, with 666 white persons and 683 negroes. Every penalty incurred under the Act of 1807 was remitted. (Note: “Several other pardons of this nature were granted.”) PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 179. Nov. 8, 1809, John Hopkins and Lewis Le Roy, convicted for importing a slave. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 184-5. Feb. 12, 1810, William Sewall, convicted for importing slaves. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 194, 235, 240. May 5, 1812, William Babbit, convicted for importing slaves. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 248. PRESIDENT MONROE: June 11, 1822, Thomas Shields, convicted for bringing slaves into New Orleans. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 15. Aug. 24, 1822, J.F. Smith, sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and $3000 fine; served twenty-five months and was then pardoned. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 22. July 23, 1823, certain parties liable to penalties for introducing slaves into Alabama. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 63. Aug. 15, 1823, owners of schooner “Mary,” convicted of importing slaves. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 66. PRESIDENT J.Q. ADAMS: March 4, 1826, Robert Perry; his ship was forfeited for slave-trading. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 140. Jan. 17, 1827, Jesse Perry; forfeited ship, and was convicted for introducing slaves. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 158. Feb. 13, 1827, Zenas Winston; incurred penalties for slave-trading. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 161. The four following cases are similar to that of Winston: — Feb. 24, 1827, John Tucker and William Morbon. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 162. March 25, 1828, Joseph Badger. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 192. Feb. 19, 1829, L.R. Wallace. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 215. PRESIDENT JACKSON: Five cases. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 225, 270, 301, 393, 440. The above cases were taken from manuscript copies of the Washington records, made by Mr. W.C. Endicott, Jr., and kindly loaned me. 107. See SENATE JOURNAL, 20th Congress 1st session, pages 60, 66, 340, 341, 343, 348, 352, 355; HOUSE JOURNAL, 20th Congress 1st session, pages 59, 76, 123, 134, 156, 169, 173, 279, 634, 641, 646, 647, 688, 692. 108. STATUTES AT LARGE, VI. 376. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1846

The Commonwealth of Liberia received most of its revenue from custom duties, and this was angering the indigenous traders and British merchants upon whom these duties were being levied. The British government therefore advised Liberian authorities that it did not recognize that the American Colonization Society, a private organization, had any right to levy any such duties. Britain’s refusal to recognize Liberian sovereignty would convince many of the colonists that independence with full taxing authority was necessary for the survival of the colony and its immigrant population.

The Reverend Dr. Johann Ludwig Krapf, bringing his pregnant wife Rosine Krapf, and another southwest German Lutheran missionary in the service of the Anglican Church Missionary Society, Johannes Rebmann, journeyed to the east coast of Africa aboard the Arrow. After their arrival in Mombasa the wife gave birth to a daughter but both mother and infant soon succumbed to malaria. The Reverend Krapf therefore relocated his mission station to higher ground at Rabai in the coastal hills. There he wrote the first dictionary and grammar of the Swahili language. He started studying other African languages, drafting dictionaries and translating sections of the Bible. Working with a Muslim judge, Ali bin Modehin, he translated the book of GENESIS. He went on to translate the NEW TESTAMENT, as well as the BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. Most of this would remain unpublished but would be useful while revising a translation in a more southern version of Swahili.

This year saw the 1st recognition of sickle cell disease-like symptoms in the New World, recorded in a paper by R. Lebby, “Case of Absence of the Spleen.”

October: Americo-Liberian colonists voted in favor of independence. DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

109. Among interesting minor proceedings in this period were two Senate bills to register slaves so as to prevent illegal importation. They were both dropped in the House; a House proposition to the same effect also came to nothing: SENATE JOURNAL, 15th Congress 1st session, pages 147, 152, 157, 165, 170, 188, 201, 203, 232, 237; 15th Congress 2d session, pages 63, 74, 77, 202, 207, 285, 291, 297; HOUSE JOURNAL, 15th Congress 1st session, page 332; 15th Congress 2d session, pages 303, 305, 316; 16th Congress 1st session, page 150. Another proposition was contained in the Meigs resolution presented to the House, Feb. 5, 1820, which proposed to devote the public lands to the suppression of the slave-trade. This was ruled out of order. It was presented again and laid on the table in 1821: HOUSE JOURNAL, 16th Congress 1st session, pages 196, 200, 227; 16th Congress 2d session, page 238. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1847

July 26, Monday: Ernte-Tänze, op.45, a waltz by Johann Strauss, was performed for the first time, in Brigittenau.

The Liberian Declaration of Independence in the Liberia Colony, founded for the repatriation of American slaves was adopted and signed and that nation became an independent republic, but only by the cutting of the American purse-strings. In this document, Liberians charged their mother country, the United States of America, with injustices that had made it necessary for them to leave and fashion new lives for themselves in Africa. Colonized in 1821 by freedmen with the backing of the American Colonization Society, the republic’s first president was Joseph Jenkins Roberts (1809-1876), a native Virginian. They called upon the international community to recognize the independence and sovereignty of Liberia. Britain would be one of the first nations to recognize the new country. The United States of America would not recognize Liberia until 1862, during the American Civil War. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1848

The Liberian Constitution was ratified and the 1st elections were held in that new African republic.

The Reverend Dr. Johann Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann journeyed into the interior of East Africa and Rebmann became the initial Europeans to sight a mountain he was told was “Kilimansharo” which stood above the clouds “topped with silver.”110 They encountered the Maasai, “dreaded as warriors, laying all to waste with fire and sword.”

January 3, Monday: Field Marshall Count Josef Radetzky, commander of Austrian troops in Italy, sought to provoke the Milanese boycotters of tobacco by issuing cigars and brandy to his men. The drunken soldiers taunted the tobacco-starved citizenry and the inevitable scuffles began. In the ensuing fighting 61 civilians were killed.

The Liberian colony’s former Governor, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, became the 1st president of the Republic of Liberia.

The United States House of Representatives adopted a resolution stating that the war with Mexico was “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.”

In 1836 Isaac Ross, the owner of a 5,000-acre plantation with 225 slaves, Prospect Hill in Jefferson County in Mississippi, had instructed on his deathbed that at the point of his daughter Margaret’s death, “Prospect Hill would be sold and the money used to pay the way for his slaves who wanted to emigrate to Liberia.” Early in this year, the first group of Prospect Hill’s manumitted slaves began their long journey of exile to a foreign continent. Ultimately there would be a colony made up of several hundred of Isaac Ross’s slaves, conjoining themselves with another several hundred people who had been freed by other members of the extended Ross family in a colony at the mouth of the Sinoe River that they would refer to as “Mississippi in Africa.” Initially, in part because of disagreements between the Mississippi Colonization Society and the American Colonization Society, this was not considered to be part of the colony of Liberia that centered at Monrovia, but it would SELFPRIVILEGING come under attack by local tribespeople who resented the privileged position of these freed slaves, the way they lorded it over the native Africans, and so eventually it would need to be made part of that independent nation. COLONIZATION LIBERIA

110. Their report of Rebmann’s sighting of snow in Africa would be endlessly ridiculed by experts in Europe and England. One of the round dozen glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro is now named in honor of Johann Rebmann, the initial white explorer to report the presence of snow there. (Various legends, that King Solomon was buried on this mountain, remain unconfirmed.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1850

November 11, Monday: Salmon Portland Chase wrote to C.H. and J.M. Langston about his “Free Soiler” attitude toward American blacks. There was just no chance that free Negroes could expect equality in Ohio with free whites. If both races were equally free, they would naturally separate. A free black “would do well to emigrate to Jamaica, Hayti, Liberia and other countries, where the population is prepared to welcome them.” (And this guy was known derisively at the time as the “Attorney-General of Fugitive Slaves”! You can see from this, where I get one of my more outrageous accusations — that at a first-order approximation, what the righteous white American abolitionists in general, and the Free Soil Party in particular, and the Republican Party that sprang out of this Free-Soilism, were seeking to get rid of in those antebellum years was not slavery, but black people.)

“In those parts of the Union in which the negroes are no longer slaves, they have in no wise drawn nearer to the whites. On the contrary, the prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the States which have abolished slavery ... and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known.” — Alexis de Tocqueville HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

For a murder trial in which opposing lawyers quoted Thoreau at the judge and jury, see the entry for July 15, 1993 , a reprint of an article which appeared in the Sacramento, California Bee: ...[Defense attorney] Clymo read to the jury excerpts from a January 4, 1860, journal entry written by Thoreau titled, “Murder Mystery: Rabbit, Fox, Owl.”... In the prosecution’s closing argument last week, [Assistant District Attorney] O’Mara had invoked Thoreau’s journal entry of November 11, 1850 : “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”...

Nov. 11th Gathered today the Autumnal Dandelion? –and the common dandelion. Some farmer’s wives use the white ashes of corn-cobs instead of pearlash.

November 11: I am attracted by a fence made of white-pine roots. There is or rather was one (for it has been tipped into the gutter this year) on the road to Hubbard’s bridge which I can remember for more than twenty years. It is almost as indestructible as a wall and certainly requires fewer repairs. It is light white & dry Cyrus Hubbard withal, & its fantastic forms are agreeable to my eye. One would not have believed that any trees had such snarled & gnarled roots– In some instances you have a coarse net work of roots as they interlaced on the surface perhaps of a swamp –which set on its edge really looks like a fence with its paling crossing at various angles and root repeatedly growing into root, a rare phenomenon above ground –so as to leave open spaces square & diamond shaped & triangular –quite like a length of fence. It is remarkable how white & clean these (stumps) roots are, and that no lichens or very few grow on them. so free from decay are they The different branches of the roots continually grow into one another –so as to make grotesque figures –some times rude harps whose resonant strings of roots give a sort of musical sound when struck –such as the earth spirit might play on– Some times the roots are of a delicate wine color here & there. an evening tint. No line of fence could be too long for me to study each individual stump. Rocks would have been covered with lichens by this time.– Perhaps they are grown into one another that they may stand more firmly Now is the time for wild apples I pluck them as a wild fruit native to this quarter of the earth –fruit of old trees that have been dying ever since I was a boy and are not yet dead. From the appearance of the tree you would expect nothing but lichens to drop from it –but underneath your faith is rewarded by finding the ground strewn with spirited fruit. Frequented only by the woodpecker –deserted now by the farmer –who has not faith enough to look under the boughs. Food for walkers Some times apples red inside perfused with a beautiful blush –faery food too beautiful to eat apple of the evening sky –of the Hesperides– This afternoon I heard a single cricket singing chiruping in a bank –the only one I have heard for a long time, like a squirrel or a little bird –clear & shrill –as I fancied like an evening robin –singing in this evening of the year– A very fine & poetical strain for such a little singer. I had never before heard the cricket so like a little bird– This a remarkable note– The earth-song. That delicate waving-feathery dry grass which I saw yesterday is to be remembered with the autumn– The dry HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE grasses are not dead for me. A beautiful form has as much life at one season as another. I notice that every where in the pastures minute young mulleins, with only 4 or 5 flat lying leaves & thread-like roots all together as big as a fourpence spot the ground –like winter rye & grass which roots itself in the fall against the spring– These little things have bespoken their places for the next season. They have a little pellet of cotton or down in their centers –ready for an early start in the spring. The Autumnal dandelion? is still bright I saw an old bone in the woods covered with lichens which looked like the bone of an old settler –which yet some little animal had recently gnawed & I plainly saw the marks of its teeth –so indefatigable is nature to strip the flesh from bones –and return it to dust again. No little rambling beast can go by some dry and ancient bone but he must turn aside and try his teeth upon it. An old bone is knocked about till it becomes dust– Nature has no mercy on it. It was quite too ancient to suggest disagreeable associations –it was like a piece of dry pine root. The fields are covered now with the empty cups of the trichostema dichotoma –all dry. We had a remarkable sunset tonight. I was walking in the meadow the source of nut-meadow brook {One leaf missing} we walked in so pure & bright a light –so softly & serenely bright –I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood –without a ripple or a murmur to it The west side of every wood & rising ground gleamed like the boundary of elysium– An adventurous spirit turns the evening into morning.– A little black stream in the midst of the marsh –just beginning to meander –winding slowly round a decaying stump –an artery of the meadow Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand– I saw the fences half consumed – their ends lost in the middle of the prairie –and some worldly misers with a surveyor looking after their bounds. While heaven had taken place around them –and he did not see the angels around –but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise I looked again and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy stygian fen surrounded by devils –& he had found his bounds without a doubt –3 little stones where a stake had been driven.– and looking nearer I saw that the prince of darkness was his surveyor. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1851

The Reverend Dr. Johann Ludwig Krapf returned to his travels/travails in Africa.

Liberia College was founded. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1852

January 17, Saturday: This was published in Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series (printed and published by W. and R. CHAMBERS, High Street, Edinburgh):

A NEGRO'S ACCOUNT OF LIBERIA. All of you that feel like it, my friends, come on home — the bush is cleared away — you can hear no one say there is nothing to eat here. Why, one man, Gabriel Moore, brought better than 200 cattle from the interior this year — another 100 — some 60, some 50, &c. There are no hogs there, they say — no turkeys — why, I saw 50 or 60 in the street at Millsburg the other day. No horses: I have got four in my stable now; I have a mare and two colts, and I have a horse that I have been offered 100 dollars for here; if you had him he would bring 500. If you don't believe it, let some gentleman send me a buggy or a single gig — you shall see how myself and wife will take pleasure, going from town to town — throw the harness in too — any gentleman that feels like it — white or coloured — and I will try to send him a boa constrictor to take his comfort; I know how to take the gentleman without any danger. My oxen I was working them yesterday; and as for goats and sheep, we have a plenty. We have a plenty to eat, every man that will half work. I give you this; you are all writing to me to tell you about Liberia, what we eat, and all the news — I mean my coloured friends. Yours truly, ZION HARRIS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE June 29, Tuesday: Henry Clay died of tuberculosis in Washington DC. According to the text of his will, which you may inspect at http://www.uky.edu/Libraries/KLP/gallery/clay1991/page-4.gif and http://www.uky.edu/ Libraries/KLP/gallery/clay1991/page-5.gif, he had set up a scheme for the gradual manumission of those of his slaves who were female, and for their issue, and sending them off to Africa. Although we don’t know whether any of Clay’s slaves actually obtained their manumission in accordance with this will, or actually were sent to Liberia in accordance to this will, there is an intriguing question (a question of the sort that might be asked by Charlie McCarthy of Edgar Bergen): What do you suppose it might have been that would have motivated a Southern gentleman to free his female slaves and their issue while freeing neither his male slaves nor their issue?

You don’t suppose, that there may have been a wooden puppet hiding in his woodpile?

Henry Thoreau made an entry in his journal that he was later to copy into his early lecture “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” It would be combined with an entry made on September 7, 1851 to form the following:

[Paragraph 6] I cannot easily buy a blank book to write thoughts in; they are all ruled for dollars and cents. If a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or scared out of his wits by the Indians, it is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for—business! I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1853

The Providence, Rhode Island Baptist church for people of color that was favored by William J. Brown at this point secured the services of a recent graduate of a theological institution, the Reverend Chauncey Leonard. There was, however, a problem connected with this hire, as the young man had received financial assistance during his education, and part of that deal was that he had agreed to go as a missionary to Liberia. It would turn out that if he was to stay and minister in the USA instead, he would need to repay said student loan — and on the low salary that this church congregation would be able to afford to pay, it would prove to be difficult for him to discharge such a dead horse. The situation they were creating was, therefore, unfortunately preloaded for a future personnel problem, a problem that would surface after but two years of the Reverend Leonard’s pastorate in Providence.111

On the following screen is the coast of Liberia as it appeared in this year:

October 14, Friday: Henry Thoreau had a mystery visitor, a Quaker schoolmaster. Since there does not seem to be any written record of the reasons for this, from either side, or of what was discussed, we are left to speculate. (Since the two men did have a friend in common, Moncure Daniel Conway, and since Moncure was nearby at the time, attending the Harvard Divinity School to acquire new credentials as a Unitarian, residing in Concord, reshaping himself, obtaining spiritual counsel from Thoreau and from Emerson, and since this mystery visitor, the Hicksite Friend William Henry Farquhar, had also previously attempted to offer in his school in Maryland spiritual advice to Moncure — in the absence of all evidence we may be forgiven if we hypothecate that the subject of the conversations between Henry and Friend William, since obviously they were something too sensitive to have been alluded to in any way in the journal, may well have been the guidance that was being offered collectively to this failed Methodist circuit preacher in his spiritual crisis.)

Oct. 14. Friday. 1853. A Mr. Farquhar of Maryland came to see me; spent the day and the night.

Why would such guidance have been of such importance? In order to comprehend this, you will need carefully to consider the times, and in particular the needs of the ongoing nonviolent national antislavery crusade. There wasn’t anything more important going down, than this conversion of this genuine Southern aristocrat scion of plantation slavemasters to the cause.

How, in those years prior to our Civil War, might one have gone about creating an effective nonviolent abolitionist movement? The Bible itself implicitly accepted slavery as a normal human condition. Jesus had not so much as blinked at the human slavery that had been all around him in his life context. The churches of America, virtually all of them not only in the South but also in the North, were vehemently proslavery. Virtually every government entity outside of New England was at the very best neutral on this issue. Some of the prominent white men, such as Abraham Lincoln, were hoping to figure out a way that we could afford to dump our black people back onto the coast of Africa and be rid of them once and for all, at “Liberia” or wherever, and a vanishingly small percentage of Americans had any sympathy to waste on abolitionists. The antislavery sort of person was being considered a sort of freak — somebody who was willing to run the risk of a bloody race war, servile insurrection, black men running through the night with hatchets. John Brown did not have any key to unlock this door, for his key only fit in the door Make-All-This-Unbearably-Worse. Seizing weapons and starting something deadly was obviously the way only a crazed ideolog would want to go (either then at the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, or more recently in the Hollywood home of Sharon Tate 111. Note please, that the organization we are speaking of here was a Baptist one, and definitely was not the Methodist or “AME” one which has so frequently been inferred to have been taking part in the Underground Railroad. There is nothing in the late-life reminiscences of Brown to suggest that he or his associates or his denomination ever were involved in any way with escaping slaves. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE where Charles Manson attempted to stage what he described as a “Helter Skelter” that would set us off into a national race war). No. The key to this in 1853 would be to suborn this young Southern white aristocrat, a goldplated hairball of impeccable credentials and background, and make him willing to step forward and state plainly, for all to hear loud and clear north and south “My own family owns slaves down South, hundreds of them, whom I would inherit, but slavery being wrong in the eyes of God, I am renouncing my inheritance and cannot be part of this exploitation.” The three families of Virginia who had real pioneer credentials, the Moncures, the Daniels, and the Conways, were all present in this young gentleman who had eponymously been named “Moncure Daniel Conway.” What authenticity! Not only that, but Moncure was a reverend, a man of the cloth. What credibility! –That’s why this Quaker elder, Friend William of the Sandy Spring monthly meeting in Maryland, had come to Concord, and would spend all of October 14, 1853 and that night at the Thoreau boardinghouse scheming with Henry Thoreau. This man was the behind-the-scenes stage manager of this most important abolitionist event. It was his responsibility to make certain that nothing fell out of bed. This self-important, confused, shallow new convert needed constant handholding and it was his agenda to make certain that he received this in full measure. There was hot propaganda stuff brewing — and our Henry was in the very thick of it in his guise as a mere walking companion and casual confidant. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1854

In Palestine, The Reverend Dr. Johann Ludwig Krapf met Bishop Gobat. He prepared a VOCABULARY OF THE ENGÚTUK ELOIKOB, OR OF THE LANGUAGE OF THE WAKUAFI-NATION IN THE INTERIOR OF EQUATORIAL AFRICA, and SALLA SA SUBUCI NA JIONI SASALLIWASO KATIKA KIRIAKI JA KIENGLESE SIKU SOTHE SA MUAKA. I.E.: MORNING AND EVENING PRAYERS SAID IN THE ENGLISH CHURCH DAILY THROUGHOUT THE YEAR. TRANSLATED INTO KISUAHILI BY THE REVD DR. L. KRAPF. He challenged the Church Missionary Society to make the grave of his wife and infant daughter, near Mombasa, the starting point for the Christian conversion of East Africa.

When a colony of manumitted Maryland slaves, holding the African coastline between the Grand Cess River and the San Pedro River, declared its independence from the Maryland State Colonization Society, it elected not to become part of the Republic of Liberia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1855

The Providence, Warren, and Bristol railroad link began to provide mass transportation for the East Bay region of Rhode Island. If the locomotive used for this service was a new one, it may have looked like this, for this was “A good Standard Type” built by Danforth Cooke & Company in 1855:

William J. Brown would report a beginning of a decline, in the Baptist church for people of color on College Hill in Providence, Rhode Island, due to their having lost their minister: PAGES 121-124: Our church had been in a very low state. It commenced to decrease in 1855, directly after our pastor, Rev. Chauncey Leonard, left us. He had been with us some two years, when he united with us. He had come directly from a theological institution. His education was good, and his oratory surpassed any pastor that ever graced our pulpit since the organization of our church. He was receiving from us four hundred dollars a year, which was all we were able to give, and a portion of that came from the Rhode Island State Convention. But our pastor was greatly in debt for his education, and if he did not go as a missionary to Liberia, he must repay them. As soon as they learned that he had settled over our church, they demanded their pay, and this brought him into such straitened circumstances that he could not remain here and support his family; and having an offer from the people in Baltimore, Md., to take charge of a select school, and supply a church, with a salary of six hundred dollars, he tendered his resignation to our church and accepted the call to Baltimore. That left us without any pastor, and the church fell into a despondent state.... Brother Waterman remarked that we had better disband, as we were all paupers, our pastor had gone and we could not do anything. But the majority proposed to continue together and trust in the Lord.

(During this period of his church’s vulnerability, Brown would be serving proudly as a lay minister or exhorter.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1856

The independent state of Maryland in Africa, a colony of manumitted slaves from Maryland, requested military aid from Liberia in a war with the Grebo and Kru peoples who were resisting these settlers’ efforts to control their trade. President Roberts assisted the Marylanders, and a joint military campaign by both groups of African American colonists resulted in victory. In 1857, Maryland would become a county of Liberia. The 2d president of the Republic of Liberia was Stephen Allen Benson.112

The negrero Mary E. Smith sailed from Boston in spite of efforts to detain the vessel, but would then be captured while carrying a cargo of 387 slaves at port of St. Matthews by the Brazilian brig Olinda (SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 34th Congress, 1st session XV, Number 99, pages 71-3). INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: A somewhat more sincere and determined effort to enforce the slave-trade laws now followed; and yet it is a significant fact that not until Lincoln’s administration did a slave-trader suffer death for violating the laws of the United States. The participation of Americans in the trade continued, declining somewhat between 1825 and 1830, and then reviving, until it reached its highest activity between 1840 and 1860. The development of a vast internal slave-trade, and the consequent rise in the South of vested interests strongly opposed to slave smuggling, led to a falling off in the illicit introduction of Negroes after 1825, until the fifties; nevertheless, smuggling never entirely ceased, and large numbers were thus added to the plantations of the Gulf States. Monroe had various constitutional scruples as to the execution of the Act of 1819;113 but, as Congress took no action, he at last put a fair interpretation on his powers, and appointed Samuel Bacon as an agent in Africa to form a settlement for recaptured Africans. Gradually the agency thus formed became merged with that of the Colonization Society on Cape Mesurado; and from this union Liberia was finally evolved.114 Meantime, during the years 1818 to 1820, the activity of the slave-traders was prodigious. General James Tallmadge declared in the House, February 15, 1819: “Our laws are already highly penal against their introduction, and yet, it is a well known fact, that about fourteen thousand slaves have been brought into our country this last year.”115 In the same year Middleton of South Carolina and Wright of Virginia estimated illicit introduction at 13,000 and 15,000 respectively.116 Judge Story, in charging a jury, took occasion to say: “We have but too many proofs from unquestionable sources, that it [the slave-trade] is still carried on with all the implacable rapacity of former times. Avarice has grown more subtle in its evasions, and watches and seizes its prey with an appetite quickened rather 112. Benson (1856-1864), born free in the state of Maryland, had previously served as the vice-president and had a practical knowledge of the republic’s local peoples and social institutions. He was able to speak several indigenous languages. In 1864 he would be succeeded by Daniel B. Warner, who would serve until 1868. 113. Attorney-General Wirt advised him, October, 1819, that no part of the appropriation could be used to purchase land in Africa or tools for the Negroes, or as salary for the agent: OPINIONS OF ATTORNEYS-GENERAL, I. 314-7. Monroe laid the case before Congress in a special message Dec. 20, 1819 (HOUSE JOURNAL, 16th Congress 1st session, page 57); but no action was taken there. 114. Cf. Kendall’s Report, August, 1830: SENATE DOCUMENT, 21st Congress 2d session, I. No. 1, pages 211-8; also see below, Chapter X. 115. Speech in the House of Representatives, Feb. 15, 1819, page 18; published in Boston, 1849. 116. Jay, INQUIRY INTO AMERICAN COLONIZATION (1838), page 59, note. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE than suppressed by its guilty vigils. American citizens are steeped to their very mouths (I can hardly use too bold a figure) in this stream of iniquity.”117 The following year, 1820, brought some significant statements from various members of Congress. Said Smith of South Carolina: “Pharaoh was, for his temerity, drowned in the Red Sea, in pursuing them [the Israelites] contrary to God’s express will; but our Northern friends have not been afraid even of that, in their zeal to furnish the Southern States with Africans. They are better seamen than Pharaoh, and calculate by that means to elude the vigilance of Heaven; which they seem to disregard, if they can but elude the violated laws of their country.”118 As late as May he saw little hope of suppressing the traffic.119 Sergeant of Pennsylvania declared: “It is notorious that, in spite of the utmost vigilance that can be employed, African negroes are clandestinely brought in and sold as slaves.”120 Plumer of New Hampshire stated that “of the unhappy beings, thus in violation of all laws transported to our shores, and thrown by force into the mass of our black population, scarcely one in a hundred is ever detected by the officers of the General Government, in a part of the country, where, if we are to believe the statement of Governor Rabun, ‘an officer who would perform his duty, by attempting to enforce the law [against the slave trade] is, by many, considered as an officious meddler, and treated with derision and contempt;’ ... I have been told by a gentleman, who has attended particularly to this subject, that ten thousand slaves were in one year smuggled into the United States; and that, even for the last year, we must count the number not by hundreds, but by thousands.”121 In 1821 a committee of Congress characterized prevailing methods as those “of the grossest fraud that could be practised to deceive the officers of government.”122 Another committee, in 1822, after a careful examination of the subject, declare that they “find it impossible to measure with precision the effect produced upon the American branch of the slave trade by the laws above mentioned, and the seizures under them. They are unable to state, whether those American merchants, the American capital and seamen which heretofore aided in this traffic, have abandoned it altogether, or have sought shelter under the flags of other nations.” They then state the suspicious circumstance that, with the disappearance of the American flag from the traffic, “the trade, notwithstanding, increases annually, under the flags of other nations.” They complain of the spasmodic efforts of the executive. They say that the first United States cruiser arrived on the African coast in March, 1820, and remained a “few weeks;” that since then four others had in two years made five visits in all; but “since the middle of last November, the commencement of the healthy season on that coast, no vessel has been, nor, as your committee is informed, is, under orders for that service.”123 The United States African agent, Ayres, reported in 1823: “I was informed by an American officer who had been on the coast in 1820, that he had boarded 20 American vessels in one morning, lying in the port of Gallinas, 117. Quoted in Friends’ FACTS AND OBSERVATIONS ON THE SLAVE TRADE (ed. 1841), pages 7-8. 118. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 16th Congress 1st session, pages 270-1. 119. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 16th Congress 1st session, page 698. 120. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 16th Congress 1st session, page 1207. 121. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 16th Congress 1st session, page 1433. 122. Referring particularly to the case of the slaver “Plattsburg.” Cf. HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress 1st session, II. No. 92, page 10. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE and fitted for the reception of slaves. It is a lamentable fact, that most of the harbours, between the Senegal and the line, were visited by an equal number of American vessels, and for the sole purpose of carrying away slaves. Although for some years the coast had been occasionally visited by our cruizers, their short stay and seldom appearance had made but slight impression on those traders, rendered hardy by repetition of crime, and avaricious by excessive gain. They were enabled by a regular system to gain intelligence of any cruizer being on the coast.”124 Even such spasmodic efforts bore abundant fruit, and indicated what vigorous measures might have accomplished. Between May, 1818, and November, 1821, nearly six hundred Africans were recaptured and eleven American slavers taken.125 Such measures gradually changed the character of the trade, and opened the international phase of the question. American slavers cleared for foreign ports, there took a foreign flag and papers, and then sailed boldly past American cruisers, although their real character was often well known. More stringent clearance laws and consular instructions might have greatly reduced this practice; but nothing was ever done, and gradually the laws became in large measure powerless to deal with the bulk of the illicit trade. In 1820, September 16, a British officer, in his official report, declares that, in spite of United States laws, “American vessels, American subjects, and American capital, are unquestionably engaged in the trade, though under other colours and in disguise.”126 The United States ship “Cyane” at one time reported ten captures within a few days, adding: “Although they are evidently owned by Americans, they are so completely covered by Spanish papers that it is impossible to condemn them.”127 The governor of Sierra Leone reported the rivers Nunez and Pongas full of renegade European and American slave-traders;128 the trade was said to be carried on “to an extent that almost staggers belief.”129 Down to 1824 or 1825, reports from all quarters prove this activity in slave-trading. The execution of the laws within the country exhibits grave defects and even criminal negligence. Attorney-General Wirt finds it necessary to assure collectors, in 1819, that “it is against public policy to dispense with prosecutions for violation of the law to prohibit the Slave trade.”130 One district attorney writes: “It appears to be almost impossible to enforce the laws of the United States against offenders after the negroes have been landed in the state.”131 Again, it is

123. HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress 1st session, II. No. 92, page 2. The President had in his message spoken in exhilarating tones of the success of the government in suppressing the trade. The House Committee appointed in pursuance of this passage made the above report. Their conclusions are confirmed by British reports: PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1822, Vol. XXII., SLAVE TRADE, Further Papers, III. page 44. So, too, in 1823, Ashmun, the African agent, reports that thousands of slaves are being abducted. 124. Ayres to the Secretary of the Navy, Feb. 24, 1823; reprinted in FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 31. 125. HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress 1st session, II. No. 92, pages 5-6. The slavers were the “Ramirez,” “Endymion,” “Esperanza,” “Plattsburg,” “Science,” “Alexander,” “Eugene,” “Mathilde,” “Daphne,” “Eliza,” and “La Pensée.” In these 573 Africans were taken. The naval officers were greatly handicapped by the size of the ships, etc. (cf. FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), pages 33-41). They nevertheless acted with great zeal. 126. PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1821, Vol. XXIII., SLAVE TRADE, Further Papers, A, page 76. The names and description of a dozen or more American slavers are given: PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1821, Vol. XXIII., SLAVE TRADE, Further Papers, A, pages 18-21. 127. HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress 1st session, II. No. 92, pages 15-20. 128. HOUSE DOCUMENT, 18th Congress 1st session, VI. No. 119, page 13. 129. PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1823, Vol. XVIII., SLAVE TRADE, Further Papers, A, pages 10-11. 130. OPINIONS OF ATTORNEYS-GENERAL, V. 717. 131. R.W. Habersham to the Secretary of the Navy, August, 1821; reprinted in FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 47. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE asserted that “when vessels engaged in the slave trade have been detained by the American cruizers, and sent into the slaveholding states, there appears at once a difficulty in securing the freedom to these captives which the laws of the United States have decreed for them.”132 In some cases, one man would smuggle in the Africans and hide them in the woods; then his partner would “rob” him, and so all trace be lost.133 Perhaps 350 Africans were officially reported as brought in contrary to law from 1818 to 1820: the absurdity of this figure is apparent.134 A circular letter to the marshals, in 1821, brought reports of only a few well-known cases, like that of the “General Ramirez;” the marshal of Louisiana had “no information.”135 There appears to be little positive evidence of a large illicit importation into the country for a decade after 1825. It is hardly possible, however, considering the activity in the trade, that slaves were not largely imported. Indeed, when we note how the laws were continually broken in other respects, absence of evidence of petty smuggling becomes presumptive evidence that collusive or tacit understanding of officers and citizens allowed the trade to some extent.136 Finally, it must be noted that during all this time scarcely a man suffered for participating in the trade, beyond the loss of the Africans and, more rarely, of his ship. Red-handed slavers, caught in the act and convicted, were too often, like La Coste of South Carolina, the subjects of executive clemency.137 In certain cases there were those who even had the effrontery to ask Congress to cancel their own laws. For instance, in 1819 a Venezuelan privateer, secretly fitted out and manned by Americans in Baltimore, succeeded in capturing several American, Portuguese, and Spanish slavers, and appropriating the slaves; being finally wrecked herself, she transferred her crew and slaves to one of her prizes, the “Antelope,” which was eventually captured by a United States cruiser and the 280 Africans sent to Georgia. After much litigation, the United States Supreme Court ordered those captured from Spaniards to be surrendered, and the others to be returned to Africa. By some mysterious process, only 139 Africans now remained, 100 of whom were sent to Africa. The Spanish claimants of the remaining thirty-nine sold them to a certain Mr. Wilde, who gave bond to transport them out of the country. Finally, in December, 1827, there came an innocent petition to Congress to cancel this bond.138 A bill to that effect passed and was approved, May 2, 1828,139 and in consequence these Africans remained as slaves in Georgia. On the whole, it is plain that, although in the period from 1807 to 1820 Congress laid down broad lines of legislation sufficient, save in some details, to suppress the African slave trade to America, yet the execution of these laws was criminally lax. Moreover, by the facility with which slavers could disguise their identity, it was possible for them to escape even a vigorous enforcement of our laws. This situation could properly be met only by energetic and sincere international co- operation....140

132. FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 42. 133. FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 43. 134. Cf. above, pages 126-7. 135. FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 42. 136. A few accounts of captures here and there would make the matter less suspicious; these, however, do not occur. How large this suspected illicit traffic was, it is of course impossible to say; there is no reason why it may not have reached many hundreds per year. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

137. Cf. editorial in Niles’s Register, XXII. 114. Cf. also the following instances of pardons: — PRESIDENT JEFFERSON: March 1, 1808, Phillip M. Topham, convicted for “carrying on an illegal slave-trade” (pardoned twice). PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 146, 148-9. PRESIDENT MADISON: July 29, 1809, 15 vessels arrived at New Orleans from Cuba, with 666 white persons and 683 negroes. Every penalty incurred under the Act of 1807 was remitted. (Note: “Several other pardons of this nature were granted.”) PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 179. Nov. 8, 1809, John Hopkins and Lewis Le Roy, convicted for importing a slave. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 184-5. Feb. 12, 1810, William Sewall, convicted for importing slaves. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 194, 235, 240. May 5, 1812, William Babbit, convicted for importing slaves. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 248. PRESIDENT MONROE: June 11, 1822, Thomas Shields, convicted for bringing slaves into New Orleans. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 15. Aug. 24, 1822, J.F. Smith, sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and $3000 fine; served twenty-five months and was then pardoned. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 22. July 23, 1823, certain parties liable to penalties for introducing slaves into Alabama. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 63. Aug. 15, 1823, owners of schooner “Mary,” convicted of importing slaves. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 66. PRESIDENT J.Q. ADAMS: March 4, 1826, Robert Perry; his ship was forfeited for slave-trading. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 140. Jan. 17, 1827, Jesse Perry; forfeited ship, and was convicted for introducing slaves. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 158. Feb. 13, 1827, Zenas Winston; incurred penalties for slave-trading. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 161. The four following cases are similar to that of Winston: — Feb. 24, 1827, John Tucker and William Morbon. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 162. March 25, 1828, Joseph Badger. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 192. Feb. 19, 1829, L.R. Wallace. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 215. PRESIDENT JACKSON: Five cases. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 225, 270, 301, 393, 440. The above cases were taken from manuscript copies of the Washington records, made by Mr. W.C. Endicott, Jr., and kindly loaned me. 138. See SENATE JOURNAL, 20th Congress 1st session, pages 60, 66, 340, 341, 343, 348, 352, 355; HOUSE JOURNAL, 20th Congress 1st session, pages 59, 76, 123, 134, 156, 169, 173, 279, 634, 641, 646, 647, 688, 692. 139. STATUTES AT LARGE, VI. 376. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1859

During this year the last known negrero was arriving in this nation which had supposedly outlawed the import of slaves without ever having convicted anyone of violation of said law: this was in Mobile Bay, Alabama, and this negrero was named the Clothilde.

But during this year and the next Dr. Martin Robison Delany would be leading a party of exploration, back to West Africa, to check out the delta of the Niger River as a suitable location for repatriation of American blacks.

Have you ever wondered what happened to people who got freed from slave ships? The anti-international slave trade squadron of the American Navy that was patrolling off the African coast at this point was beefed up with an additional four steam gunboats so it could set up a similar patrol off the destination end of the passage, the Cuban coast. Three American-owned slavers, the Wildfire of New-York, the William of Baltimore, and the Bogota of New-York, were captured enroute to Cuba from the Congo River and from Ouidah by the USS

140. Among interesting minor proceedings in this period were two Senate bills to register slaves so as to prevent illegal importation. They were both dropped in the House; a House proposition to the same effect also came to nothing: SENATE JOURNAL, 15th Congress 1st session, pages 147, 152, 157, 165, 170, 188, 201, 203, 232, 237; 15th Congress 2d session, pages 63, 74, 77, 202, 207, 285, 291, 297; HOUSE JOURNAL, 15th Congress 1st session, page 332; 15th Congress 2d session, pages 303, 305, 316; 16th Congress 1st session, page 150. Another proposition was contained in the Meigs resolution presented to the House, Feb. 5, 1820, which proposed to devote the public lands to the suppression of the slave-trade. This was ruled out of order. It was presented again and laid on the table in 1821: HOUSE JOURNAL, 16th Congress 1st session, pages 196, 200, 227; 16th Congress 2d session, page 238. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE Mohawk, the USS Wyandott, and the USS Crusader, and brought into the port of Key West, Florida. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE Some 294 of the 1,432 Africans aboard died at Key West from illnesses brought on by their confinement in the holds and were buried on a local beach. After some 80 days in America, the survivors would depart Key West for Liberia, transported by the American Colonization Society with financial support from the U.S. Government. Hundreds more of them would perish before again sighting the shores of Africa, and be consigned to the waves. Key West, because of the power of the Union Navy, would remain in Northern hands, and a couple of years later Union soldiers would construct a fortification, West Martello Tower, atop the beach graves. The strip of sand would be doing service as a public beach during our current era, when some local historian would inspect an 1863 map and notice “African Cemetery” clearly marked on it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE This was reported to have been the scene on the deck of the Wildfire:141

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE of the Act of 1819;142 but, as Congress took no action, he at last put a fair interpretation on his powers, and appointed Samuel Bacon as an agent in Africa to form a settlement for recaptured Africans. Gradually the agency thus formed became merged with that of the Colonization Society on Cape Mesurado; and from this union Liberia was finally evolved.143 Meantime, during the years 1818 to 1820, the activity of the slave-traders was prodigious. General James Tallmadge declared in the House, February 15, 1819: “Our laws are already highly penal against their introduction, and yet, it is a well known fact, that about fourteen thousand slaves have been brought into our country this last year.”144 In the same year Middleton of South Carolina and Wright of Virginia estimated illicit introduction at 13,000 and 15,000 respectively.145 Judge Story, in charging a jury, took occasion to say: “We have but too many proofs from unquestionable sources, that it [the slave-trade] is still carried on with all the implacable rapacity of former times. Avarice has grown more subtle in its evasions, and watches and seizes its prey with an appetite quickened rather than suppressed by its guilty vigils. American citizens are steeped to their very mouths (I can hardly use too bold a figure) in this stream of iniquity.”146 The following year, 1820, brought some significant statements from various members of Congress. Said Smith of South Carolina: “Pharaoh was, for his temerity, drowned in the Red Sea, in pursuing them [the Israelites] contrary to God’s express will; but our Northern friends have not been afraid even of that, in their zeal to furnish the Southern States with Africans. They are better seamen than Pharaoh, and calculate by that means to elude the vigilance of Heaven; which they seem to disregard, if they can but elude the violated laws of their country.”147 As late as May he saw little hope of suppressing the traffic.148 Sergeant of Pennsylvania declared: “It is notorious that, in spite of the utmost vigilance that can be employed, African negroes are clandestinely brought in and sold as slaves.”149 Plumer of New Hampshire stated that “of the unhappy beings, thus in violation of all laws transported to our shores, and thrown by force into the mass of our black population, scarcely one in a hundred is ever detected by the officers of the General Government, in a part of the country, where, if we are to believe the statement of Governor Rabun, ‘an officer who would perform his duty, by attempting to enforce the law [against the slave trade] is, by many, considered as an officious meddler, and treated with derision and contempt;’ ... I have been told by a gentleman, who has attended particularly to this subject, that ten thousand slaves were in one year smuggled into the United States; and that, even for the last year, we must count the number not by hundreds, but by thousands.”150 In 1821 a committee of Congress 142. Attorney-General Wirt advised him, October, 1819, that no part of the appropriation could be used to purchase land in Africa or tools for the Negroes, or as salary for the agent: OPINIONS OF ATTORNEYS-GENERAL, I. 314-7. Monroe laid the case before Congress in a special message Dec. 20, 1819 (HOUSE JOURNAL, 16th Congress 1st session, page 57); but no action was taken there. 143. Cf. Kendall’s Report, August, 1830: SENATE DOCUMENT, 21st Congress 2d session, I. No. 1, pages 211-8; also see below, Chapter X. 144. Speech in the House of Representatives, Feb. 15, 1819, page 18; published in Boston, 1849. 145. Jay, INQUIRY INTO AMERICAN COLONIZATION (1838), page 59, note. 146. Quoted in Friends’ FACTS AND OBSERVATIONS ON THE SLAVE TRADE (ed. 1841), pages 7-8. 147. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 16th Congress 1st session, pages 270-1. 148. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 16th Congress 1st session, page 698. 149. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 16th Congress 1st session, page 1207. 150. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 16th Congress 1st session, page 1433. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE characterized prevailing methods as those “of the grossest fraud that could be practised to deceive the officers of government.”151 Another committee, in 1822, after a careful examination of the subject, declare that they “find it impossible to measure with precision the effect produced upon the American branch of the slave trade by the laws above mentioned, and the seizures under them. They are unable to state, whether those American merchants, the American capital and seamen which heretofore aided in this traffic, have abandoned it altogether, or have sought shelter under the flags of other nations.” They then state the suspicious circumstance that, with the disappearance of the American flag from the traffic, “the trade, notwithstanding, increases annually, under the flags of other nations.” They complain of the spasmodic efforts of the executive. They say that the first United States cruiser arrived on the African coast in March, 1820, and remained a “few weeks;” that since then four others had in two years made five visits in all; but “since the middle of last November, the commencement of the healthy season on that coast, no vessel has been, nor, as your committee is informed, is, under orders for that service.”152 The United States African agent, Ayres, reported in 1823: “I was informed by an American officer who had been on the coast in 1820, that he had boarded 20 American vessels in one morning, lying in the port of Gallinas, and fitted for the reception of slaves. It is a lamentable fact, that most of the harbours, between the Senegal and the line, were visited by an equal number of American vessels, and for the sole purpose of carrying away slaves. Although for some years the coast had been occasionally visited by our cruizers, their short stay and seldom appearance had made but slight impression on those traders, rendered hardy by repetition of crime, and avaricious by excessive gain. They were enabled by a regular system to gain intelligence of any cruizer being on the coast.”153 Even such spasmodic efforts bore abundant fruit, and indicated what vigorous measures might have accomplished. Between May, 1818, and November, 1821, nearly six hundred Africans were recaptured and eleven American slavers taken.154 Such measures gradually changed the character of the trade, and opened the international phase of the question. American slavers cleared for foreign ports, there took a foreign flag and papers, and then sailed boldly past American cruisers, although their real character was often well known. More stringent clearance laws and consular instructions might have greatly reduced this practice; but nothing was ever done, and gradually the laws became in large measure powerless to deal with the bulk of the illicit trade. In 1820, September 16, a British officer, in his official report, declares that, in spite of United States laws, “American vessels, American subjects, and American capital, are

151. Referring particularly to the case of the slaver “Plattsburg.” Cf. HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress 1st session, II. No. 92, page 10. 152. HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress 1st session, II. No. 92, page 2. The President had in his message spoken in exhilarating tones of the success of the government in suppressing the trade. The House Committee appointed in pursuance of this passage made the above report. Their conclusions are confirmed by British reports: PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1822, Vol. XXII., SLAVE TRADE, Further Papers, III. page 44. So, too, in 1823, Ashmun, the African agent, reports that thousands of slaves are being abducted. 153. Ayres to the Secretary of the Navy, Feb. 24, 1823; reprinted in FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 31. 154. HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress 1st session, II. No. 92, pages 5-6. The slavers were the “Ramirez,” “Endymion,” “Esperanza,” “Plattsburg,” “Science,” “Alexander,” “Eugene,” “Mathilde,” “Daphne,” “Eliza,” and “La Pensée.” In these 573 Africans were taken. The naval officers were greatly handicapped by the size of the ships, etc. (cf. FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), pages 33-41). They nevertheless acted with great zeal. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE unquestionably engaged in the trade, though under other colours and in disguise.”155 The United States ship “Cyane” at one time reported ten captures within a few days, adding: “Although they are evidently owned by Americans, they are so completely covered by Spanish papers that it is impossible to condemn them.”156 The governor of Sierra Leone reported the rivers Nunez and Pongas full of renegade European and American slave-traders;157 the trade was said to be carried on “to an extent that almost staggers belief.”158 Down to 1824 or 1825, reports from all quarters prove this activity in slave-trading. The execution of the laws within the country exhibits grave defects and even criminal negligence. Attorney-General Wirt finds it necessary to assure collectors, in 1819, that “it is against public policy to dispense with prosecutions for violation of the law to prohibit the Slave trade.”159 One district attorney writes: “It appears to be almost impossible to enforce the laws of the United States against offenders after the negroes have been landed in the state.”160 Again, it is asserted that “when vessels engaged in the slave trade have been detained by the American cruizers, and sent into the slaveholding states, there appears at once a difficulty in securing the freedom to these captives which the laws of the United States have decreed for them.”161 In some cases, one man would smuggle in the Africans and hide them in the woods; then his partner would “rob” him, and so all trace be lost.162 Perhaps 350 Africans were officially reported as brought in contrary to law from 1818 to 1820: the absurdity of this figure is apparent.163 A circular letter to the marshals, in 1821, brought reports of only a few well-known cases, like that of the “General Ramirez;” the marshal of Louisiana had “no information.”164 There appears to be little positive evidence of a large illicit importation into the country for a decade after 1825. It is hardly possible, however, considering the activity in the trade, that slaves were not largely imported. Indeed, when we note how the laws were continually broken in other respects, absence of evidence of petty smuggling becomes presumptive evidence that collusive or tacit understanding of officers and citizens allowed the trade to some extent.165 Finally, it must be noted that during all this time scarcely a man suffered for participating in the trade, beyond the loss of the Africans and, more rarely, of his ship. Red-handed slavers, caught in the act and convicted, were too often, like La Coste of South Carolina, the subjects of executive clemency.166 In certain cases there were those who even had the effrontery to ask Congress to cancel their own laws. For instance, in 1819 a Venezuelan privateer, secretly fitted out and manned by Americans in Baltimore, 155. PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1821, Vol. XXIII., SLAVE TRADE, Further Papers, A, page 76. The names and description of a dozen or more American slavers are given: PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1821, Vol. XXIII., SLAVE TRADE, Further Papers, A, pages 18-21. 156. HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress 1st session, II. No. 92, pages 15-20. 157. HOUSE DOCUMENT, 18th Congress 1st session, VI. No. 119, page 13. 158. PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1823, Vol. XVIII., SLAVE TRADE, Further Papers, A, pages 10-11. 159. OPINIONS OF ATTORNEYS-GENERAL, V. 717. 160. R.W. Habersham to the Secretary of the Navy, August, 1821; reprinted in FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 47. 161. FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 42. 162. FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 43. 163. Cf. above, pages 126-7. 164. FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 42. 165. A few accounts of captures here and there would make the matter less suspicious; these, however, do not occur. How large this suspected illicit traffic was, it is of course impossible to say; there is no reason why it may not have reached many hundreds per year. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE succeeded in capturing several American, Portuguese, and Spanish slavers, and appropriating the slaves; being finally wrecked herself, she transferred her crew and slaves to one of her prizes, the “Antelope,” which was eventually captured by a United States cruiser and the 280 Africans sent to Georgia. After much litigation, the United States Supreme Court ordered those captured from Spaniards to be surrendered, and the others to be returned to Africa. By some mysterious process, only 139 Africans now remained, 100 of whom were sent to Africa. The Spanish claimants of the remaining thirty-nine sold them to a certain Mr. Wilde, who gave bond to transport them out of the country. Finally, in December, 1827, there came an innocent petition to Congress to cancel this bond.167 A bill to that effect passed and was approved, May 2, 1828,168 and in consequence these Africans remained as slaves in Georgia. On the whole, it is plain that, although in the period from 1807 to 1820 Congress laid down broad lines of legislation sufficient, save in some details, to suppress the African slave trade to America, yet the execution of these laws was criminally lax. Moreover, by the facility with which slavers could disguise their identity, it was possible for them to escape even a vigorous enforcement of our laws. This situation could properly be met only by energetic and sincere international co- operation....169

166. Cf. editorial in Niles’s Register, XXII. 114. Cf. also the following instances of pardons: — PRESIDENT JEFFERSON: March 1, 1808, Phillip M. Topham, convicted for “carrying on an illegal slave-trade” (pardoned twice). PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 146, 148-9. PRESIDENT MADISON: July 29, 1809, 15 vessels arrived at New Orleans from Cuba, with 666 white persons and 683 negroes. Every penalty incurred under the Act of 1807 was remitted. (Note: “Several other pardons of this nature were granted.”) PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 179. Nov. 8, 1809, John Hopkins and Lewis Le Roy, convicted for importing a slave. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 184-5. Feb. 12, 1810, William Sewall, convicted for importing slaves. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 194, 235, 240. May 5, 1812, William Babbit, convicted for importing slaves. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 248. PRESIDENT MONROE: June 11, 1822, Thomas Shields, convicted for bringing slaves into New Orleans. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 15. Aug. 24, 1822, J.F. Smith, sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and $3000 fine; served twenty-five months and was then pardoned. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 22. July 23, 1823, certain parties liable to penalties for introducing slaves into Alabama. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 63. Aug. 15, 1823, owners of schooner “Mary,” convicted of importing slaves. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 66. PRESIDENT J.Q. ADAMS: March 4, 1826, Robert Perry; his ship was forfeited for slave-trading. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 140. Jan. 17, 1827, Jesse Perry; forfeited ship, and was convicted for introducing slaves. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 158. Feb. 13, 1827, Zenas Winston; incurred penalties for slave-trading. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 161. The four following cases are similar to that of Winston: — Feb. 24, 1827, John Tucker and William Morbon. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 162. March 25, 1828, Joseph Badger. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 192. Feb. 19, 1829, L.R. Wallace. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 215. PRESIDENT JACKSON: Five cases. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 225, 270, 301, 393, 440. The above cases were taken from manuscript copies of the Washington records, made by Mr. W.C. Endicott, Jr., and kindly loaned me. 167. See SENATE JOURNAL, 20th Congress 1st session, pages 60, 66, 340, 341, 343, 348, 352, 355; HOUSE JOURNAL, 20th Congress 1st session, pages 59, 76, 123, 134, 156, 169, 173, 279, 634, 641, 646, 647, 688, 692. 168. STATUTES AT LARGE, VI. 376. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE May 24, Tuesday: Prideaux John Selby’s wife Tabitha Lewis Mitford Selby died.

Martin Robison Delany departed with others aboard the Mendi from New-York harbor toward Liberia. Is freedom going to be an option?

A great rally was held in Cleveland, organized by Joshua Reed Giddings, and featured as speakers the Rescuers’ black leader John Mercer Langston, and Ohio Governor Salmon Portland Chase. The rally was held in the jailyard and four of the prisoners were able to make speeches from cell windows. Until this rescue crisis, Chase had been a Republican moderate, opposed violence, and had been criticized for doing nothing in 1856 to help Margaret Garner who had tried to escape from slavery in Kentucky with her husband and parents and 4 children by crossing the Ohio River at Cincinnati. (When she had been caught, she had started to kill her children rather than allow them to return to slavery, killing one daughter before being stopped by the slavecatchers. When the steamboat she was being transported on collided in the river with another steamboat, one of her infant children drowned — and Margaret had wept with joy.) The two convicted Ohio rescuers of John Price, one white and one black, were allowed to post a letter from their prison.

May 24. What that brilliant warbler on the young trees on the side of the Deep Cut? Orange throat and beneath, with distinct black stripes on breast (i.e. on each side?), and, I think, some light color on crown. Was [IT] Blackburnian? or maculosa?? [Probably first.] Hear the wood pewee. Sand cherry flower is apparently at its height. I see (the 9th of June) that its fruit is an abortive puff, like that of some plums.

July 10, Sunday: Martin Robison Delany arrived on shores of Liberia at Cape Palmas.

At a mass during which 200 girls were receiving their 1st communion in Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe, Louis Moreau Gottschalk performed a long improvisation on the organ, after which 4 bishops, the ones from Trinidad, Martinique, Dominica and Guadeloupe, led an outdoor procession complete with military units and the ringing of church bells. That night the French governor hosted a ball during which Gottschalk again performed, and then gave a benefit concert before the 4 bishops and 150 clergymen and students (it is possible that Gottschalk premiered, in piano score, part of his La Nuit des tropiques). It was a day and an evening to remember!

July 10: Water ten and a half inches above summer level. 8 A.M.–Take boat at Fair Haven Pond and paddle up to Sudbury Causeway, sounding the river. To-day, like yesterday, is very hot, with a blue haze concealing the mountains and hills, looking like hot dust in the air. Hearing a noise, I look up and see a pigeon woodpecker pursued by a kingbird, and the former utters loud

169. Among interesting minor proceedings in this period were two Senate bills to register slaves so as to prevent illegal importation. They were both dropped in the House; a House proposition to the same effect also came to nothing: SENATE JOURNAL, 15th Congress 1st session, pages 147, 152, 157, 165, 170, 188, 201, 203, 232, 237; 15th Congress 2d session, pages 63, 74, 77, 202, 207, 285, 291, 297; HOUSE JOURNAL, 15th Congress 1st session, page 332; 15th Congress 2d session, pages 303, 305, 316; 16th Congress 1st session, page 150. Another proposition was contained in the Meigs resolution presented to the House, Feb. 5, 1820, which proposed to devote the public lands to the suppression of the slave-trade. This was ruled out of order. It was presented again and laid on the table in 1821: HOUSE JOURNAL, 16th Congress 1st session, pages 196, 200, 227; 16th Congress 2d session, page 238. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE shrieks with fear. Paddling through the wild Sudbury meadows, I am struck with the regularity with which the phalanxes of bulrushes (Scirpus lacustris) occur. They do not grow in a continuous line, like pipes or pontederia, but in small isolated patches. At each bend, though it does not appear on Baldwin’s map, there is a bay-like expansion of the liver, now half emerged, thus:–

where the more stagnant water has deposited mud, and in each such place, with remarkable regularity, a phalanx of bulrushes presents itself as you ascend. It occasionally occupies a corresponding place as you descend, and also intermediate shores of a similar character. Yet it so constantly occurs in just this position as to be remarkable. It is not very common along our river, being mainly confined to the larger and wilder meadows,– at any rate to the expansions, be they larger or smaller. These phalanxes are from one to three or more rods wide, and the rush is of a glaucous green, very interesting with its shafts slanting different ways. At one bend, especially, grows–and I have not noticed it elsewhere except in this meadow–the great Scirpus fluviatilis (how long out?). Yet the leaves are not so roughish nor so long as described. The Arundo Phragmites is not nearly out, though quite tall. Spartina cynosuroides well out. The green pipes border the stream for long distances. The high water of the last month has left a whitish scum on the grass. We scare up eight or a dozen wood ducks, already about grown. The meadow is quite alive with them. What was that peculiar loud note from some invisible water-fowl near the Concord line? Any kind of plover? or clapper rail? H. Buttrick says he has shot a meadow-hen much larger than the small one here. I hear in the ridge the peculiar notes of, I think, the meadow-hen,– same e.g. [SIC] where I got an egg and nest. The young are probably running there. Often hear it in the great Sudbury meadow. See many young birds now,–blackbirds, swallows, kingbirds, etc., in the air. Even hear one link from a bobolink. I notice at Bittern Cliff that the sparganium floats upstream, probably because the wind has blown thus.

The bottom of Fair Haven Pond is very muddy. I can generally thrust a pole down three feet into it, and it may be very much deeper. Young pouts are an inch long, and in some ditch s left high and dry and dead with the old.

December 3, Saturday: Tuscany, Parma, Piacenza, Modena, and Reggio formed The United Provinces of Central Italy.

Harpers Ferry residents George Mauzy and Mary Mauzy wrote again to their daughter Eugenia Mauzy Burton and son-in-law James H. Burton, who were then living in England (Burton had been a machinist, foreman, and Acting Master Armorer at the Harpers Ferry Armory between 1844-1854): To Mr. & Mrs. James H. Burton December 3, 1859 My dear Children: Well the great agony is over. “Old Osawatomie Brown” was executed yesterday at noon – his wife came here the day before, & paid him a short visit, after which she returned here under an escort, where she and her company remained until the body came down from Charlestown, in the evening, after which she took charge of it and went home. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE This has been one of the most remarkable circumstances that ever occurred in this country, this old fanatic made no confession whatever, nor concession that he was wrong, but contended that he was right in everything he done, that he done great service to God, would not let a minister of any denomination come near or say anything to him, but what else could be expected from him, or anyone else who are imbued with “Freeloveism, Socialism, Spiritualism,” and all the other isms that were ever devised by man or devil. There is an immense concourse of military at Charlestown, not less than 2000 men are quartered there, the Courthouse, all the churches & all the Lawyers offices are occupied. We have upwards of 300 regulars & 75 or 80 Montgomery Guards. These men were all sent here by the Sec. of War & Gov. Wise to prevent a rescue of Brown & his party by northern infidels and fanatics: of which they boasted loudly, but their courage must have oozed out of their finger ends, as none made their appearance. We are keeping nightly watch, all are vigilant, partys of 10 men out every night, quite a number of incendiary fires have taken place in this vicinity & County, such as grain stacks, barns & other out- buildings. —George Mauzy

THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE Upon learning that John Brown had indeed been executed, Friend Daniel Ricketson continued his musing in his journal:

Learned that John Brown was hanged in Charlestown, HANGING Virginia, yesterday, between 11 and 12 A.M., — a martyr to the cause of the oppressed slave, — meeting death with the dignity and composure of a Christian martyr, as he undoubtedly was, although I do not think he took the wisest or best way to effect his noble object, — that of liberating the slaves of this professed republic. Peace to his memory. Good men will bless his name, and his memory will be venerated by the wise and good. His death must prove the destruction of the blood- cemented union of this nation. Mark this record, whosoever may at some future day read this page. I would make this record with due humility, and with a tender solicitude for the best interests of my countrymen. I wish not the blood of the tyrant, but that he may become abashed and conscience-stricken before God. My soul truly yearneth for peace and prosperity to all mankind, but cruelty and slavery must cease. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE Mary Ann Day Brown would be granted the corpse of her hanged husband, but not those of her two sons.

The widow Brown would continue to bear the year of Jubilee as best she could.

The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson would visit her and then write A VISIT TO JOHN BROWN’S HOUSEHOLD IN 1859, and Edmund Wilson has commented, in regard to this (page 247), that Higginson interviewed the “widow in her bleak little Adirondack farm with a piety that could not have been more reverent if Mrs. Brown had been the widow of Emerson.”

On this morning Francis Jackson Meriam had come out from Boston to Concord on the train, and made an appearance on the doorstep of Secret “Six” conspirator Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. Sanborn wondered whether the man was being activated by a “wish for suicide,” and sicked his inconvenient fugitive on his friend Henry Thoreau under the name “Mr. Lockwood.” They got Waldo Emerson to rent a horse and covered wagon so Thoreau could drop him off at the train station in South Acton in the morning, where he would be less likely to be noticed as he boarded the train (toward Boston, although Sanborn was presuming toward Canada). Thoreau referred to Meriam in his journal as “X” and noted: “Rode with a man this forenoon who said that if

he did not clean his teeth when he got up, it made him sick all the rest of the day, but he found by late HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE experience that when he had not cleaned his teeth for several days they cleaned themselves. I assured him that such was the general rule, —that when from any cause we were prevented from doing what we had commonly thought indispensable for us to do, things cleaned or took care of themselves. X was betrayed by his eyes, which had a glaring film over them and no serene depth into which you could look. Inquired particularly the way to Emerson’s and the distance, and when I told him, said he knew it as well as if he saw it. Wished to turn and proceed to his house. Told me one or two things which he asked me not to tell S. Said, “I know I am insane,” — and I knew it too. Also called it “nervous excitement.” At length, when I made a certain remark, he said, “I don’t know but you are Emerson; are you? You look somewhat like him.” He said as much two or three times, and added once, “But then Emerson would n’t lie.” Finally put his questions to me, of Fate, etc., etc., as if I were Emerson. Getting to the woods, I remarked upon them, and he mentioned my name, but never to the end suspected who his companion was. Then “proceeded to business,” — “since the time was short,” — and put to me the questions he was going to put to Emerson. His insanity exhibited itself chiefly by his incessant excited talk, scarcely allowing me to interrupt him, but once or twice apologizing for his behavior. What he said was for the most part connected and sensible enough.” Francis Jackson Meriam made it safely to Boston without being identified and arrested, and would be hid out for several days in the home of his namesake grandfather on Hollis Street, the Garrisonian abolitionist and Boston historian Francis Jackson.

December 3: Suddenly quite cold, and freezes in the house. Rode with a man this forenoon who said that if he did not clean his teeth when he got up, it made him sick all the rest of the day, but he had found by late experience that when he had not cleaned his teeth for several days they cleaned themselves. I assured him that such was the general rule,–that when from any cause we were prevented from doing what we had commonly thought indispensable for us to do, things cleaned or took care of themselves. X was betrayed by his eyes, which had a glaring film over them and no serene depth into which you could look. Inquired particularly the way to Emerson’s and the distance, and when I told him, said he knew it as well as if he saw it. Wished to turn and proceed to his house. Told me one or two things which he asked me not to tell S. [SANBORN]. Said, “I know I am insane,”–and I knew it too. Also called it “nervous excitement.” At length, when I made a certain remark, he said, “I don’t know but you are Emerson; are you? You look somewhat like him.” He said as much two or three times, and added once, “But then Emerson wouldn’t lie.” Finally put his questions to me, of Fate, etc., etc., as if I were Emerson. Getting to the woods, I remarked upon them, and he mentioned my name, but never to the end suspected who his companion was. Then “proceeded to business,” – “since the time was short,”– and put to me the questions he was going to put to Emerson. His insanity exhibited itself chiefly by his incessant excited talk, scarcely allowing me to interrupt him, but once or twice apologizing for his behavior. What he said was for the most part connected and sensible enough. When I hear of John Brown and his wife weeping at length, it is as if the rocks sweated.

According to the Elwood Free Press for this date, this had been candidate Abraham Lincoln’s speech at Elwood in “Bleeding Kansas,” a speech that must have been delivered on or about November 30th: Mr. Lincoln was received with great enthusiasm. He stated the reasons why he was unable to make a speech this evening. He could only say a few words to us who had come out to meet him the first time he had placed his foot upon the soil of Kansas. Mr. Lincoln said that it was possible that we had local questions in regard to Railroads, Land Grants and internal improvements which were matters of deeper interest to us than the questions arising out of national politics, but of these local interests he knew nothing and should say nothing. We had, however, just adopted a State Constitution, and it was probable, that, under that Constitution, we should soon cease our Territorial existence, and come forward to take our place in the brotherhood of States, and act our parts as a member of the confederation. Kansas would be Free, but the same questions we had had here in regard to Freedom or Slavery would arise in regard to other Territories and we should have to take our part in deciding them. People often ask, “why make such a fuss about a few niggers?” I answer the question by asking what will you do to dispose of this question? The Slaves constitute one seventh of our entire HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE population. Wherever there is an element of this magnitude in a government it will be talked about. The general feeling in regard to Slavery had changed entirely since the early days of the Republic. You may examine the debates under the Confederation, in the Convention that framed the Constitution and in the first session of Congress and you will not find a single man saying that Slavery is a good thing. They all believed it was an evil. They made the Northwest Territory —the only Territory then belonging to the government— forever free. They prohibited the African Slave trade. Having thus prevented its extension and cut off the supply, the Fathers of the Republic believed Slavery must soon disappear. There are only three clauses in the Constitution which refer to Slavery, and in neither of them is the word Slave or Slavery mentioned. The word is not used in the clause prohibiting the African Slave trade; it is not used in the clause which makes Slaves a basis of representation; it is not used in the clause requiring the return of fugitive Slaves. And yet in all the debates in the Convention the question was discussed and Slaves and Slavery talked about. Now why was this word kept out of that instrument and so carefully kept out that a European, be he ever so intelligent, if not familiar with our institutions, might read the Constitution over and over again and never learn that Slavery existed in the United States. The reason is this. The Framers of the Organic Law believed that the Constitution would outlast Slavery and they did not want a word there to tell future generations that Slavery had ever been legalized in America. Your Territory has had a marked history — no other Territory has ever had such a history. There had been strife and bloodshed here, both parties had been guilty of outrages; he had his opinions as to the relative guilt of the parties, but he would not say who had been most to blame. One fact was certain — there had been loss of life, destruction of property; our material interests had been retarded. Was this desirable? There is a peaceful way of settling these questions — the way adopted by government until a recent period. The bloody code has grown out of the new policy in regard to the government of Territories. Mr. Lincoln in conclusion adverted briefly to the Harpers Ferry Affair.170 He believed the attack of Brown wrong for two reasons. It was a violation of law and it was, as all such attacks must be, futile as far as any effect it might have on the extinction of a great evil. We have a means provided for the expression of our belief in regard to Slavery — it is through the ballot box — the peaceful method provided by the Constitution. John Brown has shown great courage, rare unselfishness, as even Gov. [Henry A. Wise of Virginia] testifies. But no man, North or South, can approve of violence or crime. Mr. Lincoln closed his brief speech by wishing all to go out to the election on Tuesday and to vote as became the Freemen of Kansas. On this evening candidate Abraham Lincoln was speaking in Stockton Hall at Leavenworth, Kansas. This is how his speech would be reported in the newspaper: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: You are, as yet, the people of a Territory; but you probably soon will be the people of 170. October 16-18, 1859. This is apparently Abraham Lincoln’s 1st reference to John Brown, whose execution scheduled for December 2, 1859, undoubtedly placed him in the forefront of conversational topics among his former friends and enemies in Kansas. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE a State of the Union. Then you will be in possession of new privileges, and new duties will be upon you. You will have to bear a part in all that pertains to the administration of the National Government. That government, from the beginning, has had, has now, and must continue to have a policy in relation to domestic slavery. It cannot, if it would, be without a policy upon that subject. And that policy must, of necessity, take one of two directions. It must deal with the institution as being wrong or as not being wrong. Mr. Lincoln then stated, somewhat in detail, the early action of the General Government upon the question — in relation to the foreign slave trade, the basis of Federal representation, and the prohibition of slavery in the Federal territories; the Fugitive Slave clause in the Constitution, and insisted that, plainly that early policy, was based on the idea of slavery being wrong; and tolerating it so far, and only so far, as the necessity of its actual presence required. He then took up the policy of the Kansas-Nebraska act, which he argued was based on opposite ideas — that is, the idea that slavery is not wrong. He said: You, the people of Kansas, furnish the example of the first application of this new policy. At the end of about five years, after having almost continual struggles, fire and bloodshed, over this very question, and after having framed several State Constitutions, you have, at last, secured a Free State Constitution, under which you will probably be admitted into the Union. You have, at last, at the end of all this difficulty, attained what we, in the old North-western Territory, attained without any difficulty at all. Compare, or rather contrast, the actual working of this new policy with that of the old, and say whether, after all, the old way — the way adopted by Washington and his compeers — was not the better way. Mr. Lincoln argued that the new policy had proven false to all its promises — that its promise to the Nation was to speedily end the slavery agitation, which it had not done, but directly the contrary — that its promises to the people of the Territories was to give them greater control of their own affairs than the people of former Territories had had; while, by the actual experiment, they had had less control of their own affairs, and had been more bedeviled by outside interference than the people of any other Territory ever had. He insisted that it was deceitful in its expressed wish to confer additional privileges upon the people; else it would have conferred upon them the privilege of choosing their own officers. That if there be any just reason why all the privileges of a State should not be conferred on the people of a Territory at once, it only could be the smallness of numbers; and that if while their number was small, they were fit to do some things, and unfit to do others, it could only be because those they were unfit to do, were the larger and more important things — that, in this case, the allowing the people of Kansas to plant their soil with slavery, and not allowing them to choose their own Governor, could only be justified on the idea that the planting a new State with slavery was a very small matter, and the HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE election of Governor a very much greater matter. “Now,” said he, “compare these two matters and decide which is really the greater. You have already had, I think, five Governors, and yet, although their doings, in their respective days, were of some little interest to you, it is doubtful whether you now, even remember the names of half of them. They are gone (all but the last) without leaving a trace upon your soil, or having done a single act which can, in the least degree, help or hurt you, in all the indefinite future before you. This is the size of the Governor question. Now, how is it with the slavery question? If your first settlers had so far decided in favor of slavery, as to have got five thousand slaves planted on your soil, you could, by no moral possibility, have adopted a Free State Constitution. Their owners would be influential voters among you as good men as the rest of you, and, by their greater wealth, and consequent, greater capacity, to assist the more needy, perhaps the most influential among you. You could not wish to destroy, or injuriously interfere with their property. You would not know what to do with the slaves after you had made them free. You would not wish to keep them as underlings; nor yet to elevate them to social and political equality. You could not send them away. The slave States would not let you send them there; and the free States would not let you send them there. All the rest of your property would not pay for sending them to Liberia. In one word, you could not have made a free State, if the first half of your own numbers had got five thousand slaves fixed upon the soil. You could have disposed of, not merely five, but five hundred Governors easier. There they would have stuck, in spite of you, to plague you and your children, and your children’s children, indefinitely. Which is the greater, this, or the Governor question? Which could the more safely be intrusted to the first few people who settle a Territory? Is it that which, at most, can be but temporary and brief in its effects? or that which being done by the first few, can scarcely ever be undone by the succeeding many?” He insisted that, little as was Popular Sovereignty at first, the Dred Scott decision, which is indorsed by the author of Popular Sovereignty, has reduced it to still smaller proportions, if it has not entirely crushed it out. That, in fact, all it lacks of being crushed out entirely by that decision, is the lawyer’s technical distinction between decision and dictum. That the Court has already said a Territorial government cannot exclude slavery; but because they did not say it in a case where a Territorial government had tried to exclude slavery, the lawyers hold that saying of the Court to be dictum and not decision. “But,” said Mr. Lincoln, “is it not certain that the Court will make a decision of it, the first time a Territorial government tries to exclude slavery?” Mr. Lincoln argued that the doctrine of Popular Sovereignty, carried out, renews the African Slave Trade. Said he: “Who can show that one people have a better right to carry slaves to where they have never been, than another people have to buy slaves wherever they please, even in Africa?” He also argued that the advocates of Popular Sovereignty, by their efforts to brutalize the negro in the public mind — denying him any share in the Declaration of Independence, and comparing him to the crocodile — were beyond what avowed pro-slavery men ever do, and really did as much, or more than they, toward making HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE the institution national and perpetual. He said many of the Popular Sovereignty advocates were “as much opposed to slavery as any one;” but that they could never find any proper time or place to oppose it. In their view, it must not be opposed in politics, because that is agitation; nor in the pulpit, because it is not religion; nor in the Free States, because it is not there; nor in the Slave States, because it is there. These gentlemen, however, are never offended by hearing Slavery supported in any of these places. Still, they are “as much opposed to Slavery as anybody.” One would suppose that it would exactly suit them if the people of the Slave States would themselves adopt emancipation; but when Frank Blair tried this last year, in Missouri, and was beaten, every one of them threw up his hat and shouted “Hurrah for the Democracy!” Mr. Lincoln argued that those who thought Slavery right ought to unite on a policy which should deal with it as being right; that they should go for a revival of the Slave Trade; for carrying the institution everywhere, into Free States as well as Territories; and for a surrender of fugitive slaves in Canada, or war with Great Britain. Said he, “all shades of Democracy, popular sovereign as well as the rest, are fully agreed that slaves are property, and only property. If Canada now had as many horses as she has slaves belonging to Americans, I should think it just cause of war if she did not surrender them on demand. “On the other hand, all those who believe slavery is wrong should unite on a policy, dealing with it as a wrong. They should be deluded into no deceitful contrivances, pretending indifference, but really working for that to which they are opposed.” He urged this at considerable length. He then took up some of the objections to Republicans. They were accused of being sectional. He denied it. What was the proof? “Why, that they have no existence, get no votes in the South. But that depends on the South, and not on us. It is their volition, not ours; and if there be fault in it, it is primarily theirs, and remains so, unless they show that we repeal them by some wrong principle. If they attempt this, they will find us holding no principle, other than those held and acted upon by the men who gave us the government under which we live. They will find that the charge of sectionalism will not stop at us, but will extend to the very men who gave us the liberty we enjoy. But if the mere fact that we get no votes in the slave states makes us sectional, whenever we shall get votes in those states, we shall cease to be sectional; and we are sure to get votes, and a good many of them too, in these states next year. You claim that you are conservative; and we are not. We deny it. What is conservatism? Preserving the old against the new. And yet you are conservative in struggling for the new, and we are destructive in trying to maintain the old. Possibly you mean you are conservative in trying to maintain the existing institution of slavery. Very well; we are not trying to destroy it. The peace of society, and the structure of our government both require that we should let it alone, and we insist on letting it alone. If I might advise my Republican friends here, I would say to them, leave your Missouri neighbors alone. Have nothing whatever to do with their slaves. Have nothing whatever to do with the HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE white people, save in a friendly way. Drop past differences, and so conduct yourselves that if you cannot be at peace with them, the fault shall be wholly theirs. You say we have made the question more prominent than heretofore. We deny it. It is more prominent; but we did not make it so. Despite of us, you would have a change of policy; we resist the change, and in the struggle, the greater prominence is given to the question. Who is responsible for that, you or we? If you would have the question reduced to its old proportions go back to the old policy. That will effect it. But you are for the Union; and you greatly fear the success of the Republicans would destroy the Union. Why? Do the Republicans declare against the Union? Nothing like it. Your own statement of it is, that if the Black Republicans elect a President, you won’t stand it. You will break up the Union. That will be your act, not ours. To justify it, you must show that our policy gives you just cause for such desperate action. Can you do that? When you attempt it, you will find that our policy is exactly the policy of the men who made the Union. Nothing more and nothing less. Do you really think you are justified to break up the government rather than have it administered by Washington, and other good and great men who made it, and first administered it? If you do you are very unreasonable; and more reasonable men cannot and will not submit to you. While you elect [the] President, we submit, neither breaking nor attempting to break up the Union. If we shall constitutionally elect a President, it will be our duty to see that you submit. Old John Brown has just been executed for treason against a state. We cannot object, even though he agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong. That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might think himself right. So, if constitutionally we elect a President, and therefore you undertake to destroy the Union, it will be our duty to deal with you as old John Brown has been dealt with. We shall try to do our duty. We hope and believe that in no section will a majority so act as to render such extreme measures necessary. Mr. Lincoln closed by an appeal to all —opponents as well as friends— to think soberly and maturely, and never fail to cast their vote, insisting that it was not a privilege only, but a duty to do so. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1862

President Abraham Lincoln extended official recognition to Liberia, despite the obvious difficulty caused by the fact that society in Washington DC would be unable to sit down together with a black ambassador, let alone have dinner together.

Frederick Douglass commented that Martin Robison Delany “has gone about the same length in favor of black, as the whites have in favor of the doctrine of white superiority.” Underlying this may have been an attempt by Delany to privilege himself in the identity politics of the era as an all-black man capable of speaking on behalf of the race, in contradistinction to that Douglass fellow who was only part black and was therefore not entirely to be trusted, not entirely to be considered representative, matched by an attempt by Douglass to privilege himself in those identity politics by instancing that he had had experience of slavery, of which Delany had had none. Who then would be the more representative leader for American blacks, the man who had had experience of slavery or the man who was entirely black? The sovereignty of Liberia, which had become an independent nation as of 1847 with the cutting of the American purse-strings, was belatedly recognized by the US government. But President Abraham Lincoln was considering closer ports, such as some in South America, to which American free blacks might be exiled at a somewhat lower transport expense. At this point Delany’s African colonization plans collapsed and he switched over to recruiting black men for service with the Union Army.

The last class was graduated from Theodore Dwight Weld and Angelina Emily Grimké Weld’s Eagleswood School of Perth Amboy, New Jersey. This school had since 1854 been open to the children of white townspeople as well as to the children of members of the Union. Whether one could at any time have termed it a “Quaker” school is problematic. What is not problematic is that it had taken physical education for girls seriously, something of an innovation for the time. (Although Marcus Spring, the founder of the Raritan Bay Union, had married Friend Rebecca Buffum, daughter of the very prominent Rhode Island Quaker Arnold Buffum, the extent to which he ever embraced the culture of the Friends is not clear. Almost immediately Spring would re-purpose the physical plant of this school as an all-male as well as all-white “Eagleswood Military Academy, with both a literary and military faculty.” Spring’s academy would close after the civil war was over, around 1867, after which the facilities in question would no longer function as a school of any sort.)

Many white Americans were ambivalent about this recruitment of black Americans to fight. Such racist ambivalence is well reflected in a work by W.E. Woodward entitled MEET GENERAL GRANT, published in a much later timeframe (NY: H. Liveright, 1928), which would attempt to deny that such events ever in fact had occurred: The American negroes are the only people in the history of the world ... that ever became free without any effort of their own.... [The civil war] was not their business.... They twanged banjos around the railroad stations, sang melodious spirituals and believed that some Yankee would soon come along and give each of them forty acres of land and a mule.171 HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE April 16, Wednesday: President Jefferson Davis signed a preliminary conscription law. US CIVIL WAR

President Abraham Lincoln signed a law that provided compensation to the slaveholders of the District of Columbia (the City of Washington, Washington County, and Georgetown). They would receive, rather than the stick of imprisonment for the harm they had caused, the carrot of compensation for the personal loss they were incurring: $1,000,000 was appropriated to compensate owners of manumitted slaves — and $100,000 was set aside to fund the transportation of those who wished to emigrate to Haiti, Liberia, or any other country outside the United States of America who would have them. The Emancipation Claims Commission would retain the services of a Baltimore slavetrader to provide a professional assessment of the value of each freed slave, women and children being worth less than men etc., and suitable compensation would be awarded for a total of 2,989 manumitted persons.

171. In point of fact, a promise would be made by our federal government, that each former slave, in partial compensation for his or her unreimbursed labors while in the condition of enslavement, would receive starting-out help in the form of 40 acres and a mule. –In point of fact, however, our federal government does not ever honor such commitments to minority populations as from time to time it sees fit to dissemble that it is making. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE Curiously, the District had been operating off of longhand copies of the DC slave code for lo these many years, and the very first printed version of this code would come off the presses on March 17, 1862 — just one month before slavery in the District was to come to an end. The final printed version of this legal code would be of interest only as a historical curiosity. —Well, the slaveowning representatives voting to pay themselves for their slaves out of the government coffers was a boondoggle, so I suppose we can regard this superfluous printing of an obsolete code to have been just another boondoggle!

There was fighting at Fort Jackson / Fort St. Philip, that would continue until the 28th. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE December 24, Wednesday: After receiving some elementary education in rural England, John Anderson, his usefulness to the cause at an end, was put aboard the steamboat Armenia in Liverpool harbor, to sail to Monrovia, Liberia in its 2nd-class cabin. He was told that the Liberian government was promising to grant him some land upon arrival. He was told that Liberia was a rising and prosperous state. He commented that at one time he had felt a great prejudice against even the very name of Liberia — but that what they were telling him about it had utterly removed that prejudice from his mind. And at this point, John Anderson simply disappears from the historical record.

My suggestion would be, he let them put him on that boat, along with his luggage and his honorary bottle of free English soil, and he let them feel they were honorably free of him, and he let them depart, and then he picked up and went back to London and changed his name again and disappeared from history. Why, not being anyone’s idiot, would he go to a hell-hole like Liberia? There seems to be no corroboration whatever, that he ever went on, plus, he had pointed out to these people that he had always been hearing bad things about that place! My bet is that he was still in London as of 1863 when the book that had been written about him came off the press, and was able to pick himself up a copy, and was able to remember fondly all the white men who had once upon a time considered his life to be of some temporary importance to them!

Do I know any of this? No. All I would seek to point out is that the standard story, that he actually went to Liberia before disappearing from history, has no documentation behind it, no documentation whatever. It is sheer presumption, and is based only on the idea that those gullible and easy-going people of color always accept any gift and do precisely what the kind white men suggest that they do. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1865

346 immigrants from Barbados joined the small number of African Americans coming to Liberia after the American Civil War. With overseas immigration slowing to a trickle, the Americo-Liberians (as the settlers and their descendents were starting to be called) depended on immigrants from nearby regions of Africa to increase the republic’s population. These Americo-Liberians formed an elite and perpetuated a double-tiered social structure in which local Africans could not achieve full participation in that nation’s social, civic, and political life. The Americo-Liberians thus replicated, rather than eradicating, many of the exclusions and social differentiations that had so limited their own lives in the United States.

According to Don H. Doyle’s “Slavery, Secession, and Reconstruction as American Problems” in THE SOUTH AS AN AMERICAN PROBLEM (Athens GA and London: The U of Georgia P, 1995), the Civil War did not exactly except as a 1st approximation bring any “right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to the bulk of America’s formerly enslaved citizens of color who chose to remain or had no choice but to remain in American: HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

The strategy conservative whites in the Deep South pursued immediately following emancipation was to utilize the power of the state to reestablish planters’ control over their former slaves. Mississippi led the way in 1865 by devising a Black Code, a multifaceted legal instrument designed to force blacks to either sign year-long labor contracts or face arrest and fines (chiefly for vagrancy), which would be secured by the planters to whom the state would then bind over the prisoners to serve as an involuntary workforce. There were, in addition, a whole range of laws restricting black civil rights: the right to bear arms, assemble, and practice religion, among others. An apprenticeship law gave the state power to declare freed minors orphans and bind them over to a guardian, their former owners having first claim. Where before the state sanctioned the power of the master over slave, now the state itself was the source of coercive power over black labor ... white Democrats would stand by the polls and write down the names of black Republican voters and publish their names in the local paper along with editorials urging landlords not to employ these “disloyal” blacks the following season. Fraudulent ballot counts and other improprieties became commonplace in closely contested southern elections.... What was truly shocking to Americans outside —and many within— the South was the hideous reign of terror carried out by the Ku Klux Klan and its various local imitators, such as the Knights of the White Camelia, that began with the onset of Radical Reconstruction and peaked in 1871. Here was a violent campaign involving murder, mutilation, whipping, and the burning of homes, schools, and churches. It took place far outside the bounds of law and well outside the traditions of even the most vicious political or labor conflicts seen up to that time in America. The Klan was engaged in a campaign of terror deliberately designed to intimidate black voters and to harass or murder Republican leaders. To be sure, many of the atrocities committed by the Ku Klux Klan and its ilk were acts of personal vengeance aimed at punishing individual blacks who were “out of their place.” At times they seemed motivated by the more general goal of denigrating the status of blacks at a time when Republicans were struggling to elevate them. The Klan was never a highly structured organization; it was more a collection of very local dens who imitated one another rather than following a coherent plan. Democratic leaders did all they could to dismiss concern about the Klan by denying its existence or explaining it away as a series of disconnected personal conflicts. But the geographical pattern of violence that was concentrated in politically contested areas such as upstate South Carolina and northern Mississippi, the strategy of intimidating Republican voters and leaders, and the timing of Klan atrocities before and during elections all point to its purposeful role as the terrorist wing of the Democratic Party allied in a struggle to overthrow Republican rule.... HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE The fault for this did not, however, lie entirely with white southerner hypocrites: As horrified as they were at the atrocities in the South, northerners were growing indifferent to the plight of blacks or at least less willing to maintain their rights by force of arms. From the beginnings of the antislavery crusade, even radical abolitionists had focused moral attention on purging the Republic of sin, not on uplifting the slave or integrating freed blacks into the society as full and equal citizens. That latter goal had been advanced as a necessary political strategy of Republicans in a reconstituted Union and not solely out of humanitarian concern for the freed slaves. White supremacy may not have been as salient to northern political and social thought, but public opinion there was hardly united behind ideals of a biracial democracy in America. Furthermore, as Democrats excoriated Republicans for intervention in southern affairs, the rising political price for intervening on behalf of blacks offset the benefits of defending black citizenship in the South. President Grant referred to the change in northern public opinion in 1875 in response to the desperate pleas of fellow Republican Adelbert Ames, governor of Mississippi, who begged Grant to send U.S. troops to safeguard the coming state elections and prevent more racial violence: “[The] whole public are tired out with these annual, autumnal outbreaks in the South.” It was two years later that all federal troops were withdrawn and Reconstruction was brought to an end, part of the bargain made between Democrats and Republicans following the disputed presidential election of 1876.

No, case you hadn’t noticed, there’s hypocrisy all over the place, folks. It ain’t a local monopoly. While some Friends were spurred by the desire to emancipate the enslaved and to prevent the expansion of enslavement into the territories, this motive was “conspicuously absent” from letters Indiana Quaker soldiers wrote home, and a wider study of the letters of Quaker soldiers asserts that “sentiments of patriotism rather than hatred of slavery were foremost in these soldiers’ thought as well as in their letters.” That the war was necessary principally to preserve the Union rather than to free the enslaved people of the South was clearly a widespread sentiment that had serious consequences in the postwar era.172

172. Page 148 in Donna McDaniel’s and Vanessa Julye’s FIT FOR FREEDOM, NOT FOR FRIENDSHIP: QUAKERS, AFRICAN AMERICANS, AND THE MYTH OF RACIAL JUSTICE (Philadelphia: Quaker Press of Friends General Conference, 2009). HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

It ain’t exactly a scarce commodity.

Throughout the period of civil strive, Charles King Whipple had discouraged any army enlistment, black or white, until the government abolished slavery. Not even the Emancipation Proclamation, of course, would come close to meeting this requirement. At this point, Whipple, utterly consistent to his principles, spoke out against all proposals that rebel leaders be executed.

The 1st federal Congress meeting in New-York in 1789 had considered a “sweetener” to get several holdout states to ratify the Constitution and join in the union, the “sweetener” being adoption of 10 or 11 amendments to the newly drafted constitutional document — a batch of amendments that would come to be referred to collectively as our Bill of Rights. The federal government had retained one of these initial 14 official copies and sent out the other 13 to the prospective signees. On March 19, 2003, an attempt would be made to sell North Carolina’s official copy of the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights to the new National Constitution Center museum in center-city Philadelphia for $4,000,000 — and the FBI would recover this document under the law of “replevin” because in this year, at the end of the Civil War, it had been stolen. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE However, no arrest would be made. The document in question had originated as one of the 14 copies of the proposed Bill of Rights scribed by clerks of the 1st House of Representatives and Senate and signed by Senate Secretary Samuel A. Otis, House Clerk John Beckley, House Speaker Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg, and Vice-President John Adams. (North Carolina’s copy would be retained in their statehouse until stolen, presumably by some Union soldier of General William Tecumpseh Sherman’s army who would take it home with him to Tippecanoe, Ohio. In 1866 this veteran would find a buyer for the document he had looted. Over the decades one owner after another would offer, through intermediaries, to sell the purloined paper back to the state of North Carolina. It would turn up again in 2000 when some people would come to George Washington University’s First Federal Congress Project with armed bodyguards, making an attempt to authenticate the document.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1868

An American government official, Benjamin Anderson, journeyed into Liberia’s interior to sign a treaty with the king of Musardo. He made careful note of the peoples, the customs, and the natural resources of those areas he passed through, writing a published report of his journey. Using the information from Anderson’s report, the Liberian government would move to assert limited control over the inland region. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1869

The True Whig Party was founded in Liberia. In the late 19th Century, this party would become the dominant political party in that nation, and would maintain its dominance until the 1980 coup.

Edward J. Roye succeeded James Spriggs Payne as president of Liberia, for about a year. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1871

A high-interest British bank loan to the Liberian government contributed to a political crisis that led to President Edward J. Roye’s removal from office. He was replaced by Vice President James Skivring Smith for the remainder of his term. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1872

James Skivring Smith would be followed as the interim president of Liberia by 2 former presidents: Joseph Jenkins Roberts (1872-1876) and James Spriggs Paynes (1876-1878). Then Anthony William Gardiner (1878- 1883) would be elected president for 3 terms. Gardiner would resign during his 3d term and be replaced by Alfred Francis Russell (1883-1884). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1874

Benjamin Anderson made a 2d journey into inland Liberia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1875

A war broke out among a confederation of Grebo peoples. The Liberian government asked the United States to serve as mediator. In response, a United States emissary visited the G’debo kingdom and the Liberian republic and dispatched a naval ship to assist the Liberian government in settling the conflict. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1877

The botanist Harland Coultas died in Hackney, London, England.

A sociological study of the Juke family was unleashed in the US. Unfortunately, because there were so very many Americans who were pleased at the legitimation that this offering provided for all their hottest fantasies and most morbid agendas — it would take us many decades to dope out just how faked and tendentious this scholarship had been. EUGENICS

British traders sent seed of the rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) from Brazil to Malaya, to be followed three decades later by development of Dutch plantations in Sumatra. (By 1930 Brazil would have lost the rubber market to plantations in Malaya and elsewhere; the work of 150,000 rubber trappers would slowly dry up, returning the Amazonian city of Manaus to obscurity. In the 1920s the US company Firestone would transform the American near-colony of Liberia into a land of rubber, in the process gaining from the Liberian government a concession of 1,000,000 acres. In 1943 the US dollar would become Liberia’s currency. During WWII the US government, recognizing the importance of rubber harvest to the war effort, would maintain there a staff of plant pathologists to help prevent importation of a leaf blight disease from South America.) BOTANIZING

Frederick William Burbidge was sent to Borneo by James Veitch & Sons to collect orchids and other exotic plants. He met with Peter C. M. Veitch and they went to Kina Balu, Borneo’s Sugar Loaf Mountain (returning to England in 1879). The trip would be recorded in THE GARDENS OF THE SUN.

W. J. Beal, working at Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University) made the first controlled crosses of corn in an effort to increase yield. (Later workers would experiment with inbred varieties, devising a system of “double crossing” to produce large quantities of hybrid seed. In 1935 only one percent of US corn would come from hybrid seed but today virtually all corn grown in the US is hybrid, giving increased yields with reduced manpower.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1879

August Bondi was register clerk in the United States Land Office. He was also a police judge.

A large exodus of Southern blacks to Kansas begins as restrictions against former slaves increase in states of the old Confederacy. Many of the ones who come to Kansas do so because they cannot afford to join the movement to return to Africa and found the new country of Liberia. That state is viewed favorably by blacks because of the Kansas abolitionist John Brown; earlier migrants have already founded the town of Nicodemus.

In “The Education of Idiots and Imbeciles,” a paper presented to the Social Science Association of Indiana, Harriet M. Foster asserted that, oftentimes, imbeciles and the feeble-minded inherited their conditions from their parents. Foster stated that the most frequent causes for these types of mental problems “intermarriage of consanguineous persons, and intemperance of one or both parents.” She made this sound so scientific!

EUGENICS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1883

Liberia could not protect its claim to the Gallinas, a northern coastal area between the Mano and Sewa Rivers next to Sierra Leone, from European colonial encroachment. Economically and militarily weak, it found itself obliged to allow the British to annex that area. President Gardiner would resign in consequence of this issue but, in 1885, President Hilary Wright Johnson (1884-1892) would formally acquiesce in the annexation (Hilary Wright Johnson was Elijah Johnson’s son and Liberia’s 1st native-born president). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1885

November 11, Wednesday: George Smith Patton, Jr. was born in San Gabriel, California.

The boundary was defined between Liberia and Sierra Leone. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1888

In this year Edward Wilmot Blyden, Liberia’s leading public intellectual, published CHRISTIANITY, ISLAM AND THE NEGRO RACE. Born in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, he had arrived in Liberia in 1850 and had soon become deeply involved in its development. From 1855 to 1856 he had edited the Liberia Herald, and created LIBERIA’S OFFERING: BEING ADDRESSES, SERMONS, ETC. and A VOICE FROM BLEEDING AFRICA ON BEHALF OF HER EXILED CHILDREN. In addition to holding many positions of leadership in politics and diplomacy, he had also taught classics at Liberia College (1862-1871) and served as that college’s president (1880-1884). From 1901 to 1906, Blyden would direct the education of Muslims in Sierra Leone. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1891

June: José Martí spoke at a meeting organized by the Spanish-American Literary Society, in honor of the Central American Republics. His VERSOS SENCILLOS (SIMPLE VERSES) was published.

Professor of History and Politics of the University of Georgia John Hanson Thomas McPherson’s HISTORY OF LIBERIA. LIBERIA HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1892

France invaded Liberia, obliging it to relinquish claims to lands between the Cavalla River to the northwest and San Pedro River in the southeast. The USA did not intervene. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1903

The British and Liberian governments came to accord about the borders between Sierra Leone and Liberia. No troops were sent. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1904

The Liberian government instituted an administrative system that brought indigenous peoples into an indirect political relationship with the central government through their own paid officials. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1917

May 9, Wednesday: French, Russian and Serbian troops launched a coordinated offensive in Macedonia, but Buglarians and German defenders repulsed them.

Liberia broke with Germany. WORLD WAR I

August 7, Tuesday: Liberia declared war upon Germany. WORLD WAR I HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1919

June 28, Saturday: Harry S Truman got married with Elizabeth Virginia Wallace at her Trinity Episcopal Church in Independence, Missouri. The newlyweds would move in with Bess’s mother, Madge Gates Wallace, in her home at 219 N. Delaware Street.

The Versailles Treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors. As part of this, the League of Nations came into existence. READ THE FULL TEXT

It may not “be over ’till it’s over,” but –signed, sealed, and delivered– it’s officially over over over: Over there, Over there, It’s so over, It’s so over, Over there... It was horrible, but thank God — it’s over. It’s officially over. The world is at peace:

The treaty handed to our ally, Japan, the mandate for all the formerly enemy German island possessions in the Central Pacific. That’ll teach Germany not to be an aggressor nation! WORLD WAR I HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1920

January 10, Saturday: The new League of Nations held its initial meeting in London. Its 1st official act was ratification of the Treaty of Versailles thus officially bringing World War I to a close. On November 1, 1920 the headquarters of the League would be moved to Geneva, Switzerland, where on November 15, 1920 the initial general assembly of 41 nations of the League would take place.

READ THE FULL TEXT Sir James Eric Drummond of Great Britain would be the 1st Secretary-General. Founding members were Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, El Salvador, France, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Italy, Japan, Liberia, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Persia, Poland, Portugal, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, Siam, Spain, Sweden, the Union of South Africa, the United Kingdom, Uruguay and Venezuela (the list does not incluce the United States of America due to the determined opposition of Republican Senators Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and William E. Borah of Idaho). WORLD WAR I

Eupen and Melmédy were united with Belgium.

Poèmes juifs op.34, a cycle for voice and piano by Darius Milhaud, was performed for the initial time, in Paris, the composer at the keyboard. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1929

An International Commission investigated charges of slavery and forced labor in Liberia. A year later the committee would not be able to substantiate any such charges under standards of international law — they would establish, however, that Liberian officials, including the republic’s vice president, had indeed been profiting from the forced labor of indigenous Africans. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1935

March 8, Friday: Slavery was reported in Liberia by a US/League of Nations commission.

(Uh, once upon a time didn’t “Liberia” mean “The Place Where People Are Free?”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1944

January 3, Monday: William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman was elected to the 1st of 7 terms as Liberian president. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1945

November 2, Friday: Arabs staged a general strike in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine in protest to the Balfour Declaration. Jews and Jewish businesses were attacked in Cairo and Alexandria. A synagogue was torched in Cairo. Nine people were reported killed, and 520 were injured. ANTISEMITISM

The Republic of Costa Rica and the Republic of Liberia ratified the United Nations Charter.

Two early orchestral works by Sergei Rakhmaninov were performed for the initial time, in Moscow: Scherzo in d minor, composed in 1887, and the symphonic poem Prince Rostislav, composed in 1891.

Chant des déportés for chorus and orchestra by Olivier Messiaen to his own words was performed for the initial time, in Palais de Chaillot, Paris. The piano part was played by Pierre Boulez. This work was composed in memory of those deported to their deaths in Germany.

42 members of the staff at Dachau concentration camp were indicted in Nürnberg. WORLD WAR II

A piano concerto by Gian-Carlo Menotti was performed for the initial time, in Boston.

Leola Myers committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1946

The right to vote and participate in elections was extended to Liberia’s indigenous peoples. Fancy that. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1947

December 24, Tuesday: A rival Greek government denominated the “First Provisional Democratic Government of Free Greece” was set up in the mountains by Markos Vafiadis, thus officially beginning civil war.

Duke Ellington and his Orchestra recorded “Liberian Suite” in New York. The work had been commissioned by the Republic of Liberia to celebrate its centennial. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1958

Liberian representatives attended the 1st conference of independent African nations. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1967

Liberian officials served on the Organization of African Unity’s Consultation Committee on Nigeria’s civil war.

March 18, Saturday: The Constituent Assembly of South Vietnam adopted a new draft constitution.

The Liberian tanker Torrey Canyon ran aground at the western approach to the English Channel. Its 118,000 tons of crude oil began to spill into the sea.

Canti della lontananza, a cycle for voice and piano by Gian Carlo Menotti to his own words was performed for the initial time, at Hunter College, New York.

After study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and 4 months traveling through the Himalayas, Philip Glass reacquainted himself with Steve Reich at a concert of Reich’s music at the Park Place Gallery, New York. Afterwards, at Reich’s apartment, they discussed their recent compositions.

March 26, Sunday: The Liberian tanker Torrey Canyon continued to spill oil into the English Channel. Attempts by a Dutch salvage company to refloat the ship and pull it off the reef resulted in the ship splitting in two. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1970

February 4, Wednesday: When the Liberian tanker Arrow ran aground in Chedabucto Bay, Nova Scotia it polluted 200 kilometers of shoreline with 9,000,000 liters of oil.

“Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel” by John Cage was shown for the 1st time, in Harcus-Krakow Gallery, Boston.

September 9, Wednesday: The Liberian tanker Arrow breaks in two in Chedabucto Bay, Nova Scotia after unsuccessful attempts to off load the oil it was carrying.

Cérémony for tape by Pierre Henry was performed for the first time, at the Olympia of Paris. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1971

July 23, Friday: President of Liberia William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman died at a clinic in London of complications from prostate surgery at the age of 75. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1972

After finishing the unexpired remainder of William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman’s term, the Reverend William R. Tolbert, Jr., who sponsored an 8-year limit on service as president, would continue as Liberia’s president until assassinated. I will serve my country as long as I have life. I do not have to [be?] President to do so. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

1975

May 28, Wednesday: The USA agreed that it would end all operations of the Agency for International Development in Laos by June 30th, in exchange for the lives of 3 Americans surrounded by protesters in the AID compound in Vientiane.

The Economic Community of West African States was established by Benin, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea- Bissau, Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire), Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo and Upper Volta (Burkina Faso).

Rashid Karami replaced Nureddin Rifai as Prime Minister of Lebanon.

La cubana, oder Ein Leben für die Kunst, a vaudeville by Hans Werner Henze to words of Enzensberger, after Barnet, was staged for the initial time, in the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz, München.

Wishes, Wonders, Portents, Charms for chorus by William Bergsma was performed for the initial time, in Lincoln Center, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1979

April 14, Saturday: In Liberia, a rally protesting an increase in the price of rice ended as a riot.

July 19, Thursday: A power-sharing agreement was reached between the Revolutionary Council of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the Iranian government of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan (this would last until November 6th and the Ayatollah would take over as permanent Supreme Leader on December 3d).

Pierre Werner replaced Gaston Thorn as Prime Minister of Luxembourg.

President Antonio Ramalho Eanes of Portugal named Maria de Lurdes Pintassilgo as interim prime minister until elections in the fall.

After 7 weeks of civil war and 10,000 deaths, Sandinista fighters entered Managua as National Guardsmen fled the country. A Government of National Reconstruction assumed power in the capital.

Supertankers, one flying a Greek flag and the other a Liberian flag, colliding off Tobago, dumped more than 1,000,000 barrels of oil into the Caribbean.

November 1, Thursday: When the freighter Mimosa flying the Liberian flag rammed the tanker Burmah Agate flying the Liberian flag south of Galveston, both ships burst into flame and 250,000 barrels of oil spilled into the sea.

Afternoon: a Cakewalk-Rag Suite for clarinet, violin and piano by William Bolcom was performed for the initial time, in City Center, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1980

April 12, Saturday: Liberian President William Tolbert and 27 others were assassinated in a military coup led by Master Sergeant Samuel Kanyon Doe, a member of the Krahn tribe from inland Liberia. The republican government that had held sway over Liberia since 1847 was no more. The True Whig Party was no more.

The House of Delegates of the US Olympic Committee voted to boycott the Moscow games.

Erik Satie’s earliest extant composition, a 9-bar allegro for piano, was performed for the initial time, in Teatro di Porta Romana, Milan, 96 years after it had been composed.

Iubilum for orchestra by Alberto Ginastera was performed for the initial time, in Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires (the work was composed for the 400th anniversary of the city of Buenos Aires).

Three Dance Sketches for percussion quartet, and Pastoral for string orchestra by Karel Husa were performed for the initial time, in Miami Beach, Florida.

April 22, Tuesday: Meeting in Luxembourg, the foreigns ministers of the European Community voted to institute a gradual increase of diplomatic and economic sanctions against Iran.

The military junta that had seized power in Liberia executed 13 high-ranking members of the previous government.

The United States Olympic Committee voted to boycott the Moscow games in protest against the invasion of Afghanistan.

The Canadian government announced support for an Olympic boycott.

Barcarola for orchestra by Hans Werner Henze was performed for the initial time, in Zürich. The audience required the final movement to be repeated.

April 25, Friday: The new military junta in Liberia suspended the nation’s constitution.

Octet, A Grand Fantasia for flute, clarinet, horn, violin, viola, cello, double bass and piano by George Rochberg was performed for the initial time, in Alice Tully Hall.

A Song of Hope for solo baritone, chorus and orchestra by Gian Carlo Menotti was performed for the initial time, in Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

June 14, Saturday: Liberian troops invaded the French embassy in Monrovia to seize Adolphus Tolbert, a son of the former president who had sought sanctuary there.

“Festival” no.50 1/2, a scene from Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Donnerstag aus Licht, was performed for the initial time, in Amsterdam. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1985

Civilian rule was restored and elections were held in Liberia. Although most foreign observers would describe these elections as fraudulent, Master Sergeant Samuel Kanyon Doe would maintain the support of the United States of America. Liberia was on its way to holding a reputation as a tax haven! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1986

Although a new constitution established a 2d republic of Liberia, Master Sergeant Samuel Kanyon Doe, the 1980 coup leader, retained his power as head of state (it was like the more things change, the more they remain the same, deja vu all over again). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1989

His bioweapons still being relatively ineffective despite all our help, maybe Saddam Hussein of Iraq –or maybe somebody else, who knows– killed off 5,000 of the Kurdish citizens of Iraq with nerve gas. GERM WARFARE

Iraq had invaded Iran shortly after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, in a 1980 attempt to gain territory while Iran was preoccupied with its own internal instability. That war had dragged into an immensely costly and deadly WWI-style stalemate. Despite their very best efforts, Iraq’s mustard gas did not seem to be doing the job against Iran’s mass army of fundamentalist hotheads. During this year the Reagan administration, aware that Iraq needed to use biological weapons against Iran, authorized at least 40 shipments from the American Type Culture Collection, which is a large scientific institute housing cultures every known type of disease for scientific purposes, to Iraq, of weapons-specific biological agents. Because of the openhanded manner in which the administration had been passing around money to any and all scientists willing to do research into new biological weapons, the Council for Responsible Genetics had helped to create draft legislation for the US Congress, to counter the manner in which administration officials had been persistently tweaking research into genetic engineering technology in the direction of use for purposes of biological warfare. Since neither the biotech industry as a whole nor the US Congress as a whole had any desire to be tainted in such a manner by the mad scientists of the Pentagon, in this year, with the tacit support of the George Herbert Walker Bush White House, the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 was passed unanimously by both Houses of Congress and signed into law by the President. According to this Act, fighting fire with fire, any US scientist caught doing any research, development, or testing of biological warfare agents was to be packed off to federal prison for the remainder of his or her life.

Meanwhile, in Liberia, Charles McArthur Ghankay Taylor, an Americo-Liberian who had been convicted for embezzlement, and his followers, were toppling the Doe-led government. This was precipitating civil war among various Liberian ethnic factions, a civil war which his faction would win (until, eventually, he would be convicted of terror, murder, and rape and sentenced to 50 years in prison as “responsible for aiding and abetting as well as planning some of the most heinous and brutal crimes recorded in human history,” despite his defense that his deeds of torture and crimes against humanity were just like those of President George W. Bush in his Global War on Terror). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1990

June 30, Saturday: After 29 years, Albania and the USSR restored diplomatic relations.

British M.P. Ian Gow was killed when an IRA bomb blew up his car at his home in Hankham, East Sussex.

Liberian government troops stormed a Lutheran church in Monrovia, killing 200.

August 5, Sunday: US Marines landed in Monrovia, Liberia to evacuate foreign-nation civilians threatened by civil war (they would successfully extract 125 over the course of 3 days).

The Japanese government banned oil imports from Iraq and Kuwait, ends exports to those countries, and suspends all monetary transactions with them.

August 6, Monday: President George Herbert Walker Bush reported that a reinforced rifle company had been sent to provide additional security to the US Embassy in Monrovia, Liberia, and that helicopter teams had evacuated US citizens from Liberia. US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS

August 24, Friday: A multinational military force, with elements from Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, landed by sea in Monrovia, Liberia to effect a cease fire in the civil war.

Iraqi troops surrounded 9 foreign embassies in Kuwait and shut off their water.

President F.W. de Klerk of South Africa declared a limited state of emergency in 19 districts due to continuing black-on-black violence.

Josip Manolic replaced Stipe Mesic as Prime Minister of Croatia.

A jury in Reno, Nevada found that the musical group Judas Priest was not responsible for the deaths of two young people who had shot themselves after listening to the group’s music.

Thrinos for cello by John Tavener was performed for the initial time, in Edinburgh.

September 9, Sunday: At the headquarters of the multi-national force in Liberia, when warring factions were brought together for talks, there was an outbreak of gunfire that left 78 corpses (mostly bodyguards of President Samuel Kanyon Doe). Doe himself was seriously injured.

Mindwalk, a film with music by Philip Glass, was shown for the initial time, at the Toronto Film Festival. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE September 10, Monday: Meeting in Jakarta, the 4 warring factions in Cambodia agreed to a United Nations cease-fire plan. They agreed that their nation would be run by a 12-member Supreme National Council until elections could be held.

In a Pakistani court, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was formally charged with abuse of power.

At Côte d’Ivoire in Africa, Pope John Paul II was consecrating the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro. Meanwhile, in Liberia, rebel factions were torturing and executing seriously injured President Samuel Kanyon Doe.

Iran and Iraq announced that they were restoring diplomatic relations.

West Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to maintenance and repatriation of all Soviet troops in East Germany.

September 21, Friday: In the civil war in Liberia, rebel leader Charles McArthur Ghankay Taylor, an Americo- Liberian who had been convicted for embezzlement, declared a unilateral ceasefire.

Ancestral Voices for bass and piano by T.J. Anderson to words of Forrest was performed for the initial time, in Strasbourg.

November 22, Thursday: Amos Sawyer became the acting President of Liberia.

November 28, day: Goh Chok Tong replaced Lee Kwan Yew as Prime Minister of Singapore (Lee had filled this position since 1959).

In the face of a revolt within her Conservative Party from Michael Heseltine, Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom after having occupied that position for 11 years. She was replaced by John Major.

The interim government of Liberia and 3 warring factions signed a ceasefire agreement in Bamako, Mali. The West African Peacekeeping force was formed to maintain order in the region. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1991

February 13, Wednesday: When United States fighter-bombers used bunker-buster bombs to destroy an underground reinforced-concrete structure in a Baghdad residential neighborhood that was being used as a bomb shelter for civilians, more than 400 of these noncombatants were killed (US military intelligence, having observed activity in the vicinity of this structure, had presumed it to be sheltering Iraq government and military personnel).

Warring factions in Liberia signed a ceasefire agreement in Lomé, Togo and agreed to form a provisional government. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1993

June 6, Sunday: At a rubber plantation outside Monrovia, Liberia, more than 450 were killed by rebels.

The ruling Socialist Workers Party of Spain, together with their Catalonian allies, won a surprising victory in Spanish national elections, giving Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez a 4th term.

The Congress of Guatemala elected human rights activist Ramiro de Leon Carpio as its president. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1994

May 16, Monday: A 17-man coalition transition government was installed in Liberia.

September 12, Monday: A European Union official opened a new bridge across the Neretva River in Mostar, built by the British Army.

Leaders of 3 warring factions in Liberia signed a peace agreement in Akosombo, Ghana, ending civil war and setting elections for October 1995.

The separatist Parti Quebecois wins power in Quebec provincial elections.

While the First Family was temporarily residing at Blair House, an unemployed truckdriver, Frank Eugene Corder stole a red-and-white Cessna 150 trainer and made a name for himself by diving it into the White House. The sniper nest on the roof of the Executive Mansion had a maximum of 14 seconds to get off the Stinger missiles that were planned to disintegrate such an aircraft in the air, and failed to get off even one, possibly because the sort of threat they were on the lookout for was from substantially more high-tech attack bomber aircraft. The plane hit the magnolia tree that had been planted by the slaves of President Andrew Jackson. This graceful tree is the one that is depicted on the back of our $20.00 bill, and the Cessna HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE broke off one shapely limb and damaged the bullet-proof glass of the window of an aide-de-camp’s office on the ground floor. When First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton got back to the White House, she came out onto the upstairs portico that had been added by President Harry S Truman and leaned over to take a peek (as simulated in red, above, on this snip from the currency) as the dead body of what’s-his-face was being cut out of the wreckage.

In an AFA press release, a veteran/congressman delivered his personal blast at the Enola Gay exhibit: “In 1943, I left the United States for the Pacific theater as an 18-year-old Army Air Force recruit prepared to defend my country against one of the most brutal aggressors of our time. Fifty years later, I find myself again defending our country from another surprise attack, this time from American scholars attempting to rewrite history.” WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1995

Eric Foner’s and Olivia Mahoney’s AMERICA’S RECONSTRUCTION: PEOPLE AND POLITICS AFTER THE CIVIL WAR (NY: HarperPerennial).

What had begun as the slave coffle, the chain gang which had gradually been abandoned in the 1960s, began to appear again along the sides of Southern roads. When asked if they didn’t consider that the sight of such gangs along the sides of the roads might “hurt tourism,” local officials generally shrugged off the question. Without chaining the “convicts” together, it was explained, they would need to assign a guard with a shotgun for each 20 to 22 laborers, but with the men all chained together that way, one guard with a shotgun could ride herd on some 40. Alabama Prison Commissioner Ron Jones commented “It’s cost-effective.”

The 16-member Economic Community of West African States brokered a peace treaty between Liberia’s warring factions. An interim State Council established a tentative timetable for elections.

September 1, Friday: A 6-member interim ruling council was sworn in in Liberia in an attempt to end the civil war. About 150,000 Liberians had been killed since 1989.

French forces seized 2 Greenpeace ships to prevent them from protesting a nuclear test in French Polynesia.

At the David Bruce Centre of Keele University in England a conference “FREDERICK DOUGLASS IN BRITAIN - A LIBERATING SOJOURN: 1845-47” began in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Douglass’s first trip to Britain. As 1995 also marked 150 years since the publication of Douglass’s first autobiography and the 100th anniversary of his death, it was considered appropriate for judgements about his importance to be reviewed. Scholars assembled from both sides of the Atlantic including Douglass’s biographer William McFeeley, Abolitionist historian Richard Blackett, literary critic Anne Goodwyn-Jones, and British writer on slavery David Turley. Papers were presented on Douglass and the gender politics of reform, Douglass’s reaction to the Free Church of Scotland and to the Chartists, the relationship of Douglass’s visit to those of other American Abolitionists and his interaction with British Unitarians. The programme included visits to the recently opened Slavery Gallery at the National Maritime Museum, Liverpool and the Wedgewood Museum, Barlaston. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1996

Steven Spielberg released his movie AMISTAD. An undercritical review of this Hollywood production by a professor of law has produced the following howler: “AMISTAD begins with the event that made that ship’s history different from other slave ships: the gradual extraction of a nail from the ship which allowed Joseph Cinqué (also known as Sengbe Pie) to free first himself and then the other slaves on board.” Obviously, the movie has made it appear as if the other slaves aboard La Amistad had been, on the night of the takeover of the vessel in Cuban waters, chained, whereas it is generally recognized by historians that only Cinqué was in restraints (a collar) — because only he had made any previous gesture toward escape.

I frankly acknowledge that I was initially overwhelmed by the Spielberg movie on La Amistad. However, after a period I began to have second thoughts. On the following screen are some other very problematic aspects of the movie, more accurately presented: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• My trepidations center on the figure of Joseph Cinqué standing in court and petitioning “Give me free.” To my way of thinking Cinqué should have been presented as potentially a perplexing Patrick Henry figure, that is, as the sort of problematic person who indeed wanted freedom for himself but was ready to allow that having freedom for oneself involved, in that social context, the necessity of taking it away from others — of oneself owning slaves. The charge is available, that in both the case of Patrick Henry and the case of Cinqué, the personal freedom that was desired included the freedom to enslave others.

• It seems to me that the idea of “giving” freedom that is presented in this movie is a modern conceit and was something entirely alien to that time and place. To the very best of my understanding, freedom was recognized as something that was never given, but instead was recognized as something which ever of necessity had to be taken. My suspicion is that such a petition as this movie’s “Give me free” would have been greeted in that time and place with simple derision, with mockery; such a petitioner with manacled hands would have become the butt of rude rough barroom jests — would not by most have been taken at all seriously.

• The presentation of the complexities of the actual case, in this movie, were confined to the lower- court proceedings, and the appearance of this marvelous actor Anthony Hopkins performing John Quincy Adams before the Supreme Court of the United States of America was so constructed as to make it seem, quite falsely, that at the highest levels of our jurisprudence the Supremes were able to decide this case upon broad and righteous principles. The fact of the situation was quite different, of course. The Supremes decided this case on the basis of the same legal fine points and quibbling as had the lower courts. Had any of the petitioners made the mistake of informing the Supreme Court that actually he had been captured in Africa years ago while still quite young, before the international treaty in question had come into effect, the Supremes would have immediately and remorselessly returned these men to Cuba to face torture and execution. Thus, despite the fact that the movie’s depiction of our legal confusion begins with great accuracy, the movie winds up, suspiciously, merely perpetuating a popular patriotic myth, that at the very highest levels of our government, decency and wisdom must and shall prevail.

• John Quincy Adams defended the La Amistad mutineers by asserting a States Rights argument, not to be interfered with by the federal government, when in fact he, and his father before him, had been politically opposed to such States Rights. The Adamses were the quintessential political hacks of the first 50 years of the Republic, relentlessly pushing the economic agenda of their immediate neighbors at the expense of the rest of the citizens of the country. John Adams had attempted to subvert the Constitution and free speech with the Alien and Sedition acts and, when the voters punished him for this, seems never to have understood that he and those of his class were not entitled to more freedom than others. To become President after his father, the son had to subvert the electoral process through back-room political maneuvering, and be appointed to rule by the House of Representatives. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• The historical defense attorney Roger Sherman Baldwin, portrayed by the actor Matthew McConaughey as a cynical but ineffectual real estate lawyer, had been an abolitionist before this case began, rather than merely as presented in this movie, a person able to see only the property implications of a human being’s struggle for freedom. This defense attorney’s supposed “development” during the film, from an insensitive ambulance-chaser to a caring abolitionist, falsifies this historical person’s earlier commitment to the movement. The movie gives us no sense whatever that this ridiculous man is going to go on to become the honored governor of the State of Connecticut.

• The linguist who is depicted in the movie as a bumbling idiot and fraud –evidently for comic relief– was actually one of our foremost students of language during that period, Josiah Gibbs. It was this historical person, rather than the fictional Joadson or the fictional Baldwin, who successfully scoured eastern ports looking for a black sailor who understood the Mende language.

• District court judge Andrew T. Judson was opposed to abolitionists before the trial began and had strong racial antipathies — and yet very much overcame all this in rendering his verdict.

• Joseph Cinqué lied to his helpers in America. The film, however, never suggests that he was other than totally reliable.

• Cinqué would have been allowed to assist in no way in the creation of the legal defenses mounted by Roger Sherman Baldwin or John Quincy Adams. He would not even have been kept informed. To suppose that a black person would have been consulted or heeded, by any white movers and shakers, is to seriously misrepresent the ethos of 19th-Century America.

• John Quincy Adams was already assisting the defense team, as early as the district court trial, sending them questions and raising issues for their consideration.

• If a southerner like John C. Calhoun had mentioned the import of such a case it would not have been by use of a term such as “civil war.” (He might conceivably have referred, instead, to “disunion” or to “secession.”)

• Since the vessel La Amistad was brought into the Connecticut port during the month of August, there could not have been snow in the air.

• The depiction of presidential candidate Martin Van Buren on a campaign train indicates precious little awareness of 1840s campaign practices.

• The treaties governing the case were not merely the 1795 Pinckney treaty which might require the slaves to be returned to Spain, but also an 1819 American-Spanish treaty reconfirming that 1795 treaty and an 1817 Anglo-Spanish treaty which had outlawed the purchase of Africans in Africa for purposes of enslavement. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• President Martin Van Buren did not appoint a special judge for the circuit court trial. The critical trial was conducted at the district court level and the hearing in the circuit court was merely an exercise in which the district court decision was affirmed so that the case could be rapidly appealed to the Supreme Court. The replacement of a local judge with the imaginary judge “Coughlin” for Van Buren’s political gain as depicted in the film is not merely pure filmic invention, but masks some real and even more repulsive national history. As an outrageous betrayal of our legal process at the highest levels, Secretary of State Forsyth had made arrangements for the persons involved to be placed on the USS Grampus and returned to Cuba to be tortured and murdered no matter what the conclusion reached in the trial. The President of the United States, his Secretary of State, and this Connecticut district attorney had agreed in early 1840 to a strategy that would subvert the entire course of justice and violate the separation of powers, simply to be rid of a political bombshell before the 1840 election. The prosecutor, District Attorney Holabird, changed tactics in the middle of the trial by acknowledging that the captives were indeed Africans, merely so that the White House could continue to hold them in custody even if this court set them free. In John Quincy Adams’s summation before the Supreme Court he of course described the pattern of executive interference with the La Amistad court case and revealed Van Buren’s shocking 1840 plot to send the Africans to Cuba regardless of the lower court’s decision, because executive interference with the judiciary is of course a topic which can be reliably expected to make justices of the Supreme Court most sympathetic (personal freedom is, by contrast, a “ho-hummer”).

• The appeal from Judge Judson’s ruling to the Supreme Court in 1841, nearly two years and three presidents (Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, and John Tyler) after the case had originally begun, was heard by five Southern justices rather than seven as was asserted in the movie’s voiceover. When the Supreme Court heard John Quincy Adams’s oral argument, only seven justices rather than the nine depicted in the movie were in attendance. This sort of merely numerical inaccuracy is insignificant, of course, but it does point out how little consideration Spielberg gave to the historical details underlying his movie — since this falsifying of the number of justices on the bench in fact served no storyline function whatever.

• The movie omits to mention that a rescue was being prepared by abolitionists who were willing to risk violating the law and having all their property seized by the government, in order to forward the victims to safety on the underground railroad. The rescue would have been easy since the African women were working in local homes and since Joseph Cinqué and the other African men were allowed out of the jail for regular sports on the New Haven town common, a green across from the tavern housing the jail facility. They staged athletic exhibitions and Americans tossed coins which the Africans used to buy rum in the saloon that was the entrance to the jail and that was being run by the jailer. Had this rescue plan been implemented their path to Canada might very well have led, at one point, through the Thoreau boardinghouse or through the home of the village blacksmith in Concord, Massachusetts.

• This Hollywood movie seems to have drawn a great deal of its visual imagery from the mural “Mutiny on the Amistad” created in 1939 by the African-American artist Hale Woodruff at Talladega College’s Savery Library, in Alabama. It is obviously from this mural that the movie has derived the ludicrous and impossible shape of its Hollywood prop-shop machetes, which make sense only from the perspective of a flat wall painting projecting three-dimensionally and which never could have functioned to chop sugarcane. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• The movie has been based not on a reliable source such as Howard Jones’s 1987 historical study MUTINY ON THE AMISTAD: THE SAGE OF A SLAVE REVOLT AND ITS IMPACT ON AMERICAN ABOLITION, LAW AND DIPLOMACY, but instead on a 1953 novelization of the incident by William A. Owens entitled BLACK MUTINY: THE REVOLT ON THE SCHOONER AMISTAD. On the current paperback edition of that novel, the publisher is claiming it as “a key historical reference for the major motion picture AMISTAD.” The implication, of course, is that that old novelization by Owens is a careful and current historical account of the event; however, whatever scholarship went into the creation of this novel was not careful at the time, and assuredly is no longer current. On the back of the book as currently republished appears the following significant disclaimer: “Written as a novel in 1953 by William A. Owens, this is one historian’s view of the Amistad mutiny.”

• The movie seems to be arguing, especially in that final dramatic courtroom explanation, that an American ideology of freedom was the ultimate heroic force — and this is really, really problematic. In fact, it is a dangerous nationalistic mythification.

• At the home of John Quincy Adams in Quincy, Massachusetts, the amaryllis plant used in the movie has four blooms, which for 1839 is at least two too many. The Spielberg film seems to turn on an influence by Joseph Cinqué upon Adams, in which Cinqué communicates to Adams an African perspective having to do with influence by ancestral spirits. In this African perspective, the ancestral spirits are actively struggling to cause their descendants, in the present, to honor them by appropriate behavior and by the offering of appropriate rites. Adams receives this in the movie, however, in a typically American way, as a need to live up to an example which has been set for us by our illustrious forbears. Not only would Cinqué never have been invited to visit Adams in his home, not only did such an interaction probably never take place even away from that home environment, but, in addition, these two points of view about heritage have little or nothing in common and the attempt which the movie takes to equate them is, if it is anything at all, disingenuous.

• The story that Cinqué returned to Africa only to become himself a slave trader seems to have derived from page 308 of William Owens’s 1953 book SLAVE MUTINY. Owens seems to have done some research for this 1953 book, for in his “Afterword” he indicates that his typewritten notes from documentary sources were deposited in the New Haven Colony Historical Society. However, there are no footnotes in this volume and the author admits that he invented dialogue and “settings” for dramatic effect. Howard Jones, in his 1987 scholarly study MUTINY ON THE AMISTAD: THE SAGE OF A SLAVE REVOLT AND ITS IMPACT ON AMERICAN ABOLITION, LAW AND DIPLOMACY, alleges that “Cinqué returned to his people, although he eventually worked as an interpreter for the AMA mission at Kaw- Mende until his death about 1879" (page 255, note 27).

• Many of the settings used in the movie were anachronistic. Newport was used to represent New Haven, and many of the buildings visible in the scenes date only to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Newport’s early 18th-Century Colony House stood in appropriately for the courtroom, for Roger Sherman Baldwin’s office, and for the hotel in which Baldwin stayed during the Supreme Court deliberations. However, the Rhode Island State Capitol, erected in 1900, was used to represent the United States Capitol, apparently in the mistaken belief that the US Capitol in 1839 already had its dome despite that fact that this elaboration would not be added until the 1850s and 1860s. (The Roman Catholic church in which Judge Coughlin prayed was similarly anachronistic for the time and place of the La Amistad events.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• The AMISTAD movie does depict how Joseph Cinqué was kidnapped near the British colony of Sierra Leone by neighbors, but it fails to place sufficient emphasis upon the fact that this was done on account of his refusal to pay an acknowledged debt. He was apparently delivered to a Spanish slave merchant on the coast. Many Africans in North America did indeed owe their enslavement to this sort of initiation, though more were kidnapped in raids or wars. By British law Sierra Leone was supposed to be slave-free. At two points the film uses the Lomboko fort near Sierra Leone, that at the time was owned by the Havana trading house of Don Pedro Martínez. During the 19th Century era of illegal slave-trading many slaves were indeed kept in such “barracoons” but throughout the earlier era of legal slave-trading most slaves had been bought or bartered direct from other Africans. Cinqué was a member of an inland rice-farming group, the Mende, who basically lived by trading slaves and kola and palm products out toward the trading groups on the coast of Africa while trading European goods in toward the interior of the continent. At the time he was captured about half of the people living in Mende territory were slaves in agricultural work or in transit to the coastal trade. He probably had several names (Joseph Cinqué, Cinquez, or Singbe Pieh) not because Americans spelled his name in any manner convenient for them but because he had been trading with Englishmen, Spaniards, and Portuguese. Cinqué’s account of his capture –that the Portuguese seized him on a road near his home– is unlikely to have been the truth of the matter. More likely, he was himself a trader and had been betrayed into the same sort of thing to which he was subjecting others. Presumably Cinqué would have been telling the Americans what he supposed they wanted to hear, when he claimed that he had been a rice farmer and that he himself had never owned slaves. Cinqué was known as an African prince in his time, at least in America, and to be a prince among the Mende would have been to be a slaveholder and to be at least complicitous in the traffic in humans. The basal problem in the AMISTAD movie is that it entirely elides the critical difference between not wanting to oneself be a slave or captive, and being opposed to slavery. The same problem surfaces in our understanding the Americo-Liberians of the period, who were by no means abolitionist in their sentiments. They were settlers who sought to serve as middlemen between two great systems of slave- produced goods — North American and African. They claimed to be Virginians and, even in Monrovia, they were indeed Virginians. If we deflate these myths of the Patrick Henry who wanted freedom, the Cinqué who wanted freedom, etc., and if we deflate this Americo-Liberians-as-abolitionists myth, we may come to see more clearly the black and the white men and women who did oppose slavery.

Religious organizations with a history of involvement in abolitionism (the New Haven Congregationalists and the United Church of Christ and the United Methodists, among others) have been protesting that the movie invents a conversation in which abolitionist Lewis Tappan speculated that the African prisoners might be more valuable if they were executed and became “martyrs” to the anti-slavery cause. However, they should most definitely not be objecting, since such thought processes were in fact very common among white abolitionists. It is precisely what these religious organizations found most problematic about the movie, that I myself found most true to the actuality of the antebellum situation. I am grateful for the negative portrait of the abolitionists, in particular of the Buffum character. The arrogant manner in which these abolitionists seized upon the Right, in order to magnify themselves by invidious contrast with white Southerners who were the sheerest scum, was one of the prime causes of our civil war, and the trauma of our civil war is one of the prime reasons why even now this nation cannot bring itself to treat its citizens of color with anything approaching fairness. Had these abolitionists approached the Southern white as a person of honor facing an intransigent situation and a painful choice, the civil strife might have been averted and thus the era of Reconstruction and Segregation, from which in fact we have not yet emerged, could have been averted.

These religious organizations have protested that “Tappan himself was willing to become a martyr, and, in fact, he and his brother paid dearly for their lifelong struggle against slavery.” This tempts me to go “Oh, give me a break.” In fact the prime cover story of the person who wants to sacrifice others to his own cause has always been “Look at how I myself am sacrificing, you cannot blame me for sacrificing you as well.” It is long HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE overdue for the American public to see these abolitionists as the self-righteous troublemakers they were, part of all the problems rather than the solution for any of them. For too long we have attempted to ignore the deep chasms of suspicion that lay between the white abolitionists and the black abolitionists. It seems to me that in this constructed carriage scene in the movie, in which the Buffum character is made to speculate that the black prisoners may need to die for the good of the general movement, there was a spiritual accuracy which so far has been evading us. In fact the white abolitionists of the 19th Century in general impatiently wanted the black abolitionists to “sacrifice more for the cause,” and the response of the black abolitionists of the 19th Century was ever that the white abolitionists did not truly grasp what the struggle was all about, that the nature of the problem was that the black people of America were already being forced to sacrifice much too much during their lives.

An excerpt from an Internet page offered by one of these religious organizations reads: > Visit our Amistad Page, designed to help you and your congregation > interpret the new Steven Spielberg movie. This epic about African > slaves who fought for their freedom and the Christian abolitionists > who defended them in court marks the beginning of the mass movement > to abolish slavery in the US. But this is quite tendentious. In fact this case had no known influence on the abolition of slavery either in the US or in Africa. Had the slaves aboard the La Amistad not freed themselves, in general import nothing about US history and nothing about African history would be altered in the slightest. The advent of general freedom would have been neither delayed nor accelerated.

Here’s another such snippet. > Although the movie is historically accurate when it shows the horror > of the slave trade or the courage of the La Amistad captives rising > up against their tormenters, the screenplay often misrepresents > Christian abolitionists as arrogant or self-serving. The movie even > invents a conversation in which abolitionist Lewis Tappan speculates > that the African prisoners might be more valuable if they were > executed and became “martyrs” to the anti-slavery cause. [and a > little below] “Tappan himself was willing to become a martyr, and, > in fact, he and his brother paid dearly for their lifelong struggle > against slavery,” says the Rev. Thomas E. Dipko, a United Church of > Christ minister and head of an agency whose predecessor body was > founded by Tappan and other Christian abolitionists. “They advocated > civil disobedience for reasons of conscience, but they would never > have welcomed or exploited the suffering of other people, > particularly of slaves.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE To see how exceedingly accurate the film’s negative portrayal of certain white abolitionists actually is —to see how very complicit abolitionism could be with a straightforward racist desire to solve the American problem of the presence of inferior people by arranging for American peoples of color to be eliminated— please consider a fine new study of the complex motivations of Waldo Emerson issued in 1997 by Oxford UP. The monograph of which I speak is by Anita Haya Patterson and is titled FROM EMERSON TO KING: DEMOCRACY, RACE, AND THE POLITICS OF PROTEST: From Pages 4-5: “What I have found to be most compelling and bewildering about Emerson’s writing –what has made it hardest for me to know how to think about him– is that his defense of rights and his racism are intimately and deliberately connected.... [T]he fervent, critical recuperation of American democracy undertaken by Emerson was shaped and indeed made conceptually coherent only through his recourse to racialist language and ideology. [Continuing in an endnote] Compare Orlando Patterson’s claims regarding the sociohistorical necessity and consequences of the central contradiction between articulate defenses of freedom and the fact of slavery in America. Observing that ‘Americans have never been able to explain how it came to pass that the most articulate defender[s] of their freedoms ... were large-scale, largely unrepentant slaveholders,’ Patterson finds that ‘[s]lavery is associated not only with the development of advanced economies, but also with the emergence of several of the most profoundly cherished ideals and beliefs in the Western tradition. The idea of freedom and the concept of property were both intimately bound up with the rise of slavery, their very antithesis. The great innovators not only took slavery for granted, they insisted on its necessity to their way of life.... The joint rise of slavery and cultivation of freedom was no accident. It was ... a sociohistorical necessity’ (SLAVERY AND SOCIAL DEATH: A COMPARATIVE STUDY [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982], viii-ix).” What Anita Haya Patterson, Orlando’s spouse, is alleging in this new 1997 book of hers is that all of us, even our most radical abolitionists, were and are deeply influenced by the “double-consciousness” we find in esteemed characters such as Emerson, a doubled consciousness which has been created over the centuries by our most intransigent national race and class predicament. Her hope is that we will find the courage and the grace, rather than merely to renounce in some easy and superficial manner this doubled consciousness we have inherited as Americans of various skin hues and of various heritages, instead to learn something of great value from it.

Thus the last sentence of her Epilogue is not merely a question but is also a daunting challenge for us all: Page 199, Epilogue: “How can double possibly mean nothing?” This is a thinking and feeling person’s book. I recommend it highly. If we were to pay attention to materials such as this, America would become a quite different place. But will such a movie make America a better place? HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE In fact I am not at all certain that it is even theoretically possible to make a Hollywood movie that is historically truthful: • Hollywood history must be histrionic, that is, it must present struggle in terms of good versus evil, and present this from the viewpoint of the righteous who have triumphed or will eventually triumph. The viewing public will not attend, and would not grasp the story line of, any historical narrative which deviated from these conventions. Thus in the AMISTAD movie, it was necessary to falsify history in order to present the legal case for freeing the Africans, once that case reaches the Supreme Court of the United States, as if it had been a struggle in which good triumphed over evil. The movie would therefore leave it entirely unexplained why, when in October 1841 the American slaves aboard the Creole revolted and killed some of the crew of the vessel and forced the survivors to sail the vessel to neutral waters in the Bahamas, the US government would spend the next 15 years unsuccessfully badgering the British authorities who had promptly freed these American slaves to return this “property” to US control so we could torture and murder “it.” Likewise, the falsehoods inherent in the movie would leave it entirely unexplained how it could be that when in 1857 the Supremes would rule in the case of Dred Scott, that no American black had any rights that any American white was bound to respect, this decision would rendered by a court the majority of the sitting members of which had been the very justices who had earlier voted to free the Africans of the La Amistad case!

• The point of view of the “Point of View” characters (POV) must be the one designated as righteous, or politically correct. Sorry little historical facts, such as that ex-President John Quincy Adams never displayed any concern whatever in regard to the slaves held by his wife’s family, and did not turn antislavery until after he had come to believe, in his sulking at home, that it had been the intransigent opposition of the Southern proslavery Democrats which had prevented him in his own turn as US president from accomplishing anything of note, prevented him from rising above mediocrity, sorry little historical facts such as these, must be neglected. It must be presented that Adams would have invited a negro into his home, and would have indulged in personal intimate conversation with that negro — certainly false. It must be presented that Adams was operating out of sympathy and generosity rather than out of vengefulness. Likewise, since the figure of Joseph Cinqué is the POV character in this film for black Americans, Cinqué must be falsified into an abolitionist. There is no evidence that Cinqué, who came from the Mende, a slave-owning tribe, was opposed to slavery. The only evidence we have is that he was, like the slaveholder Patrick Henry, in favor of his own freedom. Whether his personal freedom involved an entitlement to enslave others, or excluded an entitlement to enslave others, is something which is not on the record. We do know that he himself had been enslaved while in Africa due to his refusal to pay back an acknowledged personal debt. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• The audience must be provided with a POV character with whom they can personally identify. Up to this point, that POV has always been, as in the case of the movies about A MAN CALLED HORSE, through white eyes. Even in this Spielberg movie AMISTAD, where there is a POV through black eyes, the audience is distanced by the techniques of subtle filmic narration, and this subtle filmic narration is overwhelmingly through white eyes and through white attitudes. Thus, even when the only heroes and the only actors on the screen are black, the structure of the events which they portray is the structure necessitated by the overarching white frame of reference, which is “We’ve got these people in our jail and are trying to figure out how best to dispose of them, so we need to figure out how we came to such a pass.”

• The story must be that of triumph, of overcoming. There is no triumph and no overcoming whatever in the true story of the La Amistad. By the conclusion of the case no lessons whatever had been learned, and no general societal situations had been altered in the slightest. The disposition of this case is therefore of necessity presented falsely in this movie, in order to transform it into a story of triumph, of overcoming, one of having had an influence upon the breaking out of a purgative civil war later on in our national trajectory. But that civil war would not be fought over the issue of slavery, rather it would be fought over the issue of union, plus, that civil war would most definitely not prove to be in any sense purgative. Nor did the La Amistad case (as is demonstrated in spades by the subsequent cases of the Creole and of Dred Scott) have any influence whatever toward the bringing on of this period of civil strife. To Why was this particular subject-matter chosen, to make a film of? The historic Amistad case was important and dramatic but in fact it had nothing whatever to do with the ending of human enslavement. It neither accelerated nor postponed our US Civil War. It created no freedom precedent. This historical case was entirely about adherence to international treaties by signatories to them. If at any time it had been established that these people had been transported from Africa during their teens, before the treaties in question had come into effect, all of them would have been instanter returned to Cuba by our justices, to be inevitably tortured and murdered. These were the same justices who, later, would decide the Dred Scott case. Their action in this case was HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE consistent with their agenda, to make slavery work as an institution.

The Dreamworld studio, and director Steven Spielberg, have touted their film AMISTAD as a critical examination of slavery in antebellum America. They even prepared classroom materials to be used along with the showing of the film in schools. Why did they not do this with the story of Nat Turner’s revolt, instead, or with a major escape narrative such as that of Douglass, or the Crafts, or Tubman, or with a major rescue narrative such as those dealing with Shadrach or Jerry? The nasty suspicious thought arises, that the reason might be, because dealing with such real-life scenarios would have made it quite impossible to create yet another crowd-pleasing tale of self-righteousness and national unity and democratic triumph. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE “Nobody ever bought a product that made them feel worse.” — George W. Bush

Notice how readily the La Amistad incident lent itself to a portrayal in which the iniquity of human enslavement becomes associated with silly, moribund, reactionary, monarchical, and antirepublican despots in the Old World, rather than displaying itself as a fundamental economic, social, and ideological component of our American society. The makers of AMISTAD have merely provided us with yet another in a long series of sanctimonious images of American history in which Our Nation triumphs over Wrong Others without taking note of its own moral failings.

Slavery provided us with sugar, AMISTAD with saccharine. April 6, Saturday: Factional fighting broke out in Monrovia, Liberia.

April 18, Saturday: Israeli forces attempting to hit a terrorist base camp in southern Lebanon, a terrorist base camp that was less than a kilometer from a United Nations camp near Tyre, accidentally shelled that United Nations camp instead of the terrorists, killing 107 Lebanese and injuring more than100.

When Muslim terrorists attacked a hotel near the pyramids in Giza, 18 were killed and 15 wounded.

A cease-fire was declared in the factional fighting in Monrovia, Liberia.

July 31, Wednesday: After talks in Abuja, warring factions in Liberia agreed to disarm.

September 3, Tuesday: In retaliation for the Iraqi capture of Erbil, the United States launched 27 cruise missiles into southern Iraq.

As a result of a peace agreement between warring factions, Ruth Perry was sworn in as head of state for Liberia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1997

July 19, Saturday: Ahmed Daqamseh, a Jordanian soldier, was sentenced to life in prison by a Jordanian court for having killed 7 Israeli schoolgirls the previous March.

The Provisional Irish Republican Army declared a ceasefire in its war against British rule in Northern Ireland.

Former warlord Charles McArthur Ghankay Taylor was elected President of the 3d republic of Liberia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1998

Thomas E. Woods, Jr. of North Andover, Massachusetts had some thoughts to offer about the antebellum abolitionists: Every schoolboy’s textbook portrays the nineteenth-century abolitionists as peace-loving American heroes, uniquely skilled in Constitutional interpretation and Biblical exegesis, and debated to something called “American ideals.” As with so much in standard American history texts, this characterization is not only false, but laughably so. To begin with, the abolitionists were never particularly concerned about avoiding war, and they habitually engaged in recklessly inflammatory rhetoric that was bound to alienate decent Southerners. William Lloyd Garrison, for example, once declared: “We would sooner trust the honor of our country ... in the hands of the inmates of our penitentiaries and prisons than in their hands.... [T]hey are the meanest of thieves and the worst of robbers.... We do not acknowledge them to be within the pale of Christianity or republicanism, or humanity!” Garrison’s comment may seem harsh, but compared to much of what the abolitionists had to say about the South, his remark is imbued with a spirit of sectional reconciliation. Historian Avery Craven was therefore on the mark when he concluded that hatred of the South had supplanted love for the Negro. The Old Guard, a Copperhead newspaper in New York, commented that among the “abolitionized” churches of New England, “far more time has been devoted to the generating of hatred against the people of the southern States than has been consumed in fostering the personal piety of the flocks committed to their charge.” Some of the more astute observers recognized that there was much more to the abolitionist crusade than merely the ending of slavery. The influential abolitionist George W. Julian of Ohio was frank about this: The abolition of poverty is the next work in order and the Abolitionist who does not see this fails to grasp the logic of the anti-slavery movement, and calls a halt to the inevitable march of progress.... The system of Southern slavery was the natural outgrowth of that generally accepted political philosophy which makes the protection of property the chief end of government. Charles Sumner had equally mischievous plans for postbellum society: to elevate the Declaration of Independence that it might “stand side by side with the Constitution, and enjoy with it coequal authority.” “Full well ... I know that in other days, when Slavery prevailed ... there was a different rule of interpretation,” Sumner conceded. This “different rule of interpretation,” which it pleased our Fathers to call “constitutionalism,” was far too restrictive to allow the kind of innovations of which the scheming Sumner dreamed. The war, he claimed, had established “a new rule of interpretation by which the institutions of our country are dedicated forevermore to Human Rights, and the Declaration of Independence is made a living letter instead of a promise.” Thus the statement that all men are created equal, condemned by John HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE Randolph of Roanoke as a most pernicious falsehood, was to become the central organizing principle for the republic. It is to this polluted source that we may trace the scores of crusaders for equality from forced busing to affirmative action which have been visited upon us ever since. After centuries of bitter experience, it should now be clear that an abstract commitment to equality and human rights has away of degenerating into totalitarianism and mass murder. The Jacobins spoke glowingly about the Rights of Man during the French Revolution, all the while slaughtering their countrymen by the hundreds of thousands. “If you want to know the effect of metaphysical madness,” observed John Randolph of Roanoke, “look to the history of the French Revolution, and to the undoing of the country.” On an individual level, this was most spectacularly true in the case of John Brown. Several years before his raid on Harper’s Ferry, Brown and several other men killed and mutilated five men and boys in what became known as the Pottawatomie Creek massacre. The victims, who owned no slaves, were guilty of the high crime of having supported the Missouri faction in the dispute over the Kansas government, and had thus committed a thought crime against human rights. (They had “committed murder in their hearts,” Brown said.) Indiscriminate slaughter thus became a legitimate vehicle for vindicating human rights. Following Brown’s execution in 1859, church bells rang all across the North in honor of the fallen martyr. Emerson and Thoreau actually compared Brown to Christ himself. Louisa May Alcott referred to him as Saint John the Just. Among Northern literary figures, Nathaniel Hawthorne stood virtually alone in insisting that there was never a man more justly hanged. The Rev. Thomas Beecher, the conservative sibling of abolitionists Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, was horrified by the way abolitionists employed the Bible in the service of fanaticism. In the anti-slavery crusade, he wrote, the Bible is torn up to wad the guns of controversy. God’s truth ceases to be bread and becomes bullets. It created a particularly insufferable kind of self-righteousness one which made abolitionists capable of singing the words “His truth is marching on” as the South was being looted and burned. The direct results of abolitionist fanaticism include, at the very least: the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Americans, including civilians; the precedent-setting violation of nearly every norm of civilized warfare; the destruction of America’s constitutional order and the growth of a centralized State ‘a la Rousseau; and the conquest; physical, economic, and cultural, of the Southern states all to accomplish an end that was achieved by peaceful means elsewhere throughout our hemisphere. Any civilized man must recognize in the abolitionists not noble crusaders whose one flaw was a tendency toward extremism, but utterly reprehensible agitators who put metaphysical abstractions ahead of prudence, charity, and rationality. Indeed, with heroes like this, who needs villains? Mr. Woods holds a B.A. and an M.A.in history from Harvard and is a Founding member of the League of the South. Mr. Woods is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University. DixieNet™ is maintained by Apologia Services © Copyright 1995-1998, The League of the South, Inc., HDT WHAT? INDEX

Joanne Pope Melish had some thoughts on a similar topic, in DISOWNING SLAVERY: GRADUAL EMANCIPATION AND 1780-1860 (Ithaca, New York and London: Cornell UP): In the long and rich historiography of North American slavery, relatively few scholars have explored the subject of slavery in New England or the impact of slavery and emancipation in the region on the racial attitudes of New Englanders. Joanne Pope Melish’s book Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780-1860 seeks, in her words, to put “slavery and the painful process of gradual emancipation back into the history of New England (p. 200).” Melish views as a blind spot the assumption by previous scholars that slavery in New England was peripheral to the economic, social, or political development of the region. She argues that New England slavery had a far more powerful impact on the thinking of New Englanders than they wanted to believe, and their longstanding view of the region as “free and white” has been a kind of historical amnesia, an effort to erase slavery and black people from the history of the region. That erasure of black people, she argues, resulted directly from white anxiety and confusion about how to view free blacks in their midst and what to do with or about them. Melish maintains that white New Englanders’ views of black people emerged directly from their experiences with blacks living in bondage and from their association of blackness with slavery. She writes that the unsettling process of gradual emancipation in the region after the American Revolution stirred white fears that disorderly blacks would threaten the new republic. Whereas blacks assumed that they would become free and independent citizens, whites assumed that blacks still needed to be controlled. She also argues that white people experienced anxiety about racial identity, freedom, and servitude, wondering if freedom would turn black people white and if white people could become slaves. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Melish writes, New England whites gradually resolved these questions by coming to regard blacks as inherently inferior and in need of control. She argues that a clear ideology of race thus first emerged in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century New England, in response to gradual emancipation. New Englanders, she argues, gradually came to view “racial” characteristics as immutable, inherited, and located in the body, and to view the black and white “races” as hierarchical and largely opposite in nature. Such a view permitted white New Englanders to seek to expel or erase black people, both literally and figuratively, from their region. Melish’s book makes an important contribution to the literature on slavery and abolition and fills a significant gap in our understanding of how slavery in New England affected both that region and the nation. Through her use of various local sources including town records, court records, slaveholders’ diaries, and the letters, narratives, and freedom petitions of slaves, Melish brings the reader into the world of Revolutionary-era New England masters and slaves. She illuminates their daily interactions and offers insightful interpretations of how masters and slaves each understood the meaning of slavery and HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE emancipation. She makes a compelling case that slavery was indeed significant in the New England economy and society. Using, among other evidence, racist broadsides from the region, she also illustrates clearly the willingness of many white New Englanders to denigrate, harass, and seek to erase black people in the decades after the Revolution. While Melish is right that most white New Englanders probably did wish black people would go away in the years of the early republic, she may overstate the extent to which New England whites were in agreement on this. She correctly observes that many white New Englanders supported the movement to colonize blacks outside the United States, particularly in Africa. But New England also produced a movement for immediate abolition that was explicitly opposed to colonization and demanded the right of free blacks to live as free and equal citizens of the United States. William Lloyd Garrison of Boston was probably the best-known white abolitionist in the country after 1830, and he was also a passionate opponent of colonization and a strong champion of the rights of free blacks in North America. Free blacks loved Garrison. A host of other New England activists stood with him, demanding the inclusion of free blacks as equal citizens. If most New Englanders sought to expel or eliminate blacks from their midst, these radical abolitionists often embraced the freed slaves, sought to educate them, published their narratives, and even, as in the case of Frederick Douglass, hired them as abolitionist speakers. One goal of the abolitionist efforts was to show the public that black people were fully human, able to be educated, and deserving of all the rights that whites had. Thus, well into the nineteenth century, a segment of white New Englanders actively resisted the view that blacks were inherently inferior and different from whites, and they fought to educate blacks for life as full American citizens. If, as Melish argues, New England whites sought to eradicate blacks, this process was contested by some whites as well as blacks. Melish’s most important contribution may be to the emerging body of literature on how North Americans constructed and made use of an ideology of race. Here she pushes to locate precisely when and how Americans racialized difference and came to define blackness and whiteness as fixed, immutable, biological categories. Her answer, that this process took place in New England during gradual emancipation, is new and surprising. Melish suggests that New England was first in developing a new ideology of race because of its early experience with slave emancipation. However, the struggle to define the meaning of emancipation and the fundamental nature and place of blacks was also going on in the upper South. There, manumissions increased during and after the American Revolution, and the growing numbers of free blacks increased white anxiety. Indeed, anxiety there was more pronounced than in New England, because of the larger black population. Colonization was also very popular in the upper South, and much of the strongest and most persistent support for colonization came from that region. In contrast to New England, opponents of slavery in the upper South never embraced the idea that freed slaves ought to remain in the United States, and antislavery activists in the upper South always combined efforts at gradual emancipation with plans HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE for colonization. The process that Melish describes of racializing identity and seeking to expel blacks may thus have been taking place simultaneously in New England and the upper South. A comparative study of emancipation efforts in the two regions would be illuminating. Of course, the upper South did not achieve gradual emancipation, and over time, antislavery activism and even voluntary manumission there were largely choked off. Melish’s book takes the reader through the process by which white New Englanders, through their responses to slavery, emancipation, and black people, created the myth of themselves and their region as free and white. Melish’s angle of vision and her argument are both fresh, and she offers new insights and raises new questions about how the end of slavery led to a new construction of race in North America. This is a terrific book, one that all scholars of slavery, abolition, and the early republic absolutely must read. Enjoy this one; I certainly did. Copyright © 1998, H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission questions, please contact hbooks@h- net.msu.edu.

Tunde Adeleke’s UNAFRICAN AMERICANS: NINETEENTH-CENTURY BLACK NATIONALISTS AND THE CIVILIZING MISSION (Lexington: UP of Kentucky). Key nineteenth-century American black nationalists —Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell, and Henry McNeal Turner— are derisively portrayed in Tunde Adeleke’s UNAFRICAN AMERICANS. Professor Adeleke, educated at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) and the University of Western Ontario and currently employed at Loyola University (New Orleans), argues that Delany, Crummell, and Turner —all occasional emigrationists who themselves sojourned in Liberia— were collaborators in the late-nineteenth-century imperialist ideas and policies that led to the colonization of most of Africa. Adeleke understands his subjects as reaching toward black nationalism, or pan-Africanism, but failing because of two conditions: First, relatively few African Americans endorsed or envisioned emigration to West Africa, so the theoreticians of resettlement lacked the audience that might have pushed them further into black nationalism. Second, European businessmen and governments were interested in the natural resources and cheap labor that Africa seemed to promise. Hence, Delany, Crummell, and Turner were led into collaboration with economic and military forces that the black men thought might serve their interests but soon proved to be powerful beyond their influence. The strength of UNAFRICAN AMERICANS is its author’s frank presentation of the anti-African, or civilizationist, face of its subjects. The weakness of the work is its blindness to the historical background of emigrationism. Adeleke begins his story around 1850, but many of the patterns he analyzes —including the roles individuals like Delany, Crummell, and Turner played in commerce, governance, and migration— were established between 1780 and 1830. The black nationalists’ beliefs and actions look less individual and more HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE structural, less idealistic and more self-serving, if we consider the earlier history. Moreover, the book conveys an overall uneasiness with the idea of black nationalism — an uneasiness the author does not confront but that is worth discussing in a review. Adeleke argues that, beginning with the approval of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, former integrationist Martin Robison Delany turned to Africa. Abandoning hope for liberty and self- governance for black people in the USA, Delany announced that African Americans could achieve civil rights in West Africa and, in 1859 and 1860, he traveled in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Niger Valley to arrange the future himself. In Abeokuta (birthplace of Wole Soyinka, Fela, and in the 1940s, a Nigerian women’s anti-collaborationist resistance movement) Delany contracted with local chiefs for land for African American settlers. Equality with indigenous peoples —whether cultural, economic, or political— was an impossibility for Delany, who was convinced that African American men would carry civilization, including Christianity, to West Africa and would be the governors of new states there. He thought that African American men could not achieve independence in isolation, but would rely on European markets for West African produce (cotton would be a prime export, he thought) and on cheap, indigenous labor for agricultural production. He envisioned what Adeleke acidly calls a “triple alliance” —collaboration among European industrialists, African American governors, and native laborers— in the development of new societies and commercial systems in West Africa. To this end, Delany traveled to Great Britain in 1860 and lectured to businessmen, scientists, and government officials about the value of African produce and the cheapness and availability of African labor. Tension between the American North and South in the 1850s gave him an opportunity to predict to British manufacturers the unreliability of the American cotton crop in the 1860s and to extol West African agricultural produce for manufacturers who needed steady sources of raw materials. He did argue that “legitimate” trade would muscle out the remnants of the slave trade. But his overwhelming vision was one of African workmen employed by African American settlers who traded with European manufacturers. As an episcopal priest, missionary, entrepreneur, “civilizationist,” and Delany’s host in Monrovia, Crummell could be seen as an even less attractive figure than Delany. Crummell presented West Africa as a field of rich natural resources waiting to be exploited by African Americans. He justified the use of violence against indigenous peoples, whether by African American settlers or Europeans. Not only did he assert the right of settlers to battle with native peoples, but he commended the Belgian government for its forceful moves against Africans in the Congo. (Adeleke does not note that other emigrations, like John Russwurm, saw the Americo-Liberian settlers as being in the same relationship that Englishmen had been with American Indians in the seventeenth century.) Moreover, Crummell argued that the slave trade and New World slavery were providential, were God’s way of preparing black people to enter the modern world of commerce, religion, and democratic governance. African American settlers, according to this argument, were divine instruments, forged in the New World, for civilizing and converting Africa. Turner, who went to Liberia some years after Delany and HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE Crummell, echoed their ideas about civilization and commerce, but with some significant variations. After the federal retreat from Reconstruction and the Supreme Court’s recision of civil rights extended in the 1870s to African Americans, Turner began to speak of “reparation” to blacks for the sufferings and inequities of enslavement. He demanded of the federal government $40 billion to fund the travel of African Americans to West Africa and start-up costs for their agricultural and mining concerns there. He criticized American isolationism, contrasting it to European focus on Africa. He traveled as bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church to South Africa and congratulated the Boer settlers for bringing civilization to the native peoples there. Turner had an aptitude for the infelicitous phrase. One day, he wrote, “millions will thank heaven for the limited toleration of American slavery” (p. 101). Adeleke’s distaste for his subjects is evident throughout his book, but he is also sometimes sympathetic to them. He resists the easy road of stating that Delany, Crummell, and Turner were so enthralled by European civilization that they dismissed African culture and, indeed, Africans’ lives. Instead, he argues, more complexly, that the three men aimed for black nationalism but were hamstrung by their context (insufficient interest in settlement on the part of African Americans and overwhelming interest in commercial appropriation on the part of Europeans). They were at heart American integrationists who had little true interest in Africa and who returned to the USA as soon as they felt the political climate was hopeful there. Crummell, for instance, lived in Liberia only between 1853 and 1872. They never knew, Adeleke reasons, the Africa they betrayed and abandoned. Consideration of the seventy years before Adeleke begins his analysis reveals that his subjects’ anti-Africanism can be explained in another way. Efforts to quell the slave trade by means of “legitimate trade” began in the 1780s, but were neither purely pro-African in intent nor antislavery in practice. The Sierra Leone Company, for instance, envisioned African laborers “liberated” from their traditional societies and social leadership and busy producing raw material for British manufacture and consumption. The same laborers were to become consumers of British finished goods. The “legitimate trade” campaign actually strengthened the institution of slavery in areas where goods for the Atlantic trade could be produced. The goods were produced and transported not by independent farmers but often by slaves. The first generation of Americo-Liberian settlers knew this and sought to take advantage of it. From its inception in the 1820s, Liberia was meant to be a commercial colony utilizing cheap African labor. Despite the rhetoric of carrying civilization and religion to the natives and undermining the slave trade, the Americo-Liberian and their white supporters envisioned Monrovia as an entrepot that would shuttle American goods (including such slave-produced goods as tobacco, along with whiskey, cloth, glassware, and guns) to Africans while returning African goods (including such goods as palm oil, camwood, and ivory, harvested and transported to the coast by slaves) to the United States. Records of the blacks and whites who traveled to Liberia in the 1820s under the aegis of the American Colonization Society reveal that they knew that slave labor could produce tremendous wealth and had few HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE compunctions about dealing in slave-produced material even if they opposed the Atlantic slave trade. The violent disagreements between the Americo-Liberian settlers and the native groups, beginning in the mid-1820s, are usually described as disputes about land possession, but it is at least as likely that they were disputes about the misuse of local laborers by the settlers. Even less fortunate than the locals who ended up working for the settlers were the “recaptives,” who were rescued from slavers at sea only to be indentured to Americo-Liberian settlers. A tradition of the misuse of laborers would of course result in the investigation in the 1920s by the League of Nations the result of which was that Liberian officials were condemned for profiting from the unfree labor of indigenous people. The Americo-Liberian colonist is usually understood in American historiography as an abolitionist or freedom fighter, but he was really a middleman attempting to shuttle goods produced by unfree or semi-free black people to the Atlantic economy. He was someone who transferred the value of the labor of black people, often enslaved, to a larger economic system, hoping to retain a portion for himself. Perhaps a good example is Lott Cary, who is often seen as a black Virginian preacher and abolitionist who sought a greater freedom in Liberia. In the early nineteenth century, Cary was a hired slave in a Richmond tobacco warehouse — exactly the person through whose hands the value of slave labor passed. In the 1820s, he sailed to Monrovia, ostensibly as a missionary (one of his nineteenth-century hagiographers conceded that there was no evidence that he ever preached to the natives), but actually with plans to settle himself as an entrepreneur moving goods between the USA and areas around Monrovia. The move to Liberia was meant primarily to improve his position as a middleman. He became a scourge of the natives and died in a gunpowder explosion as he was preparing for one of many assaults on them. The large question, of course, is why someone like Cary has persistently gotten good press as an American freedom fighter. The importance of Cary and early Liberia for Adeleke’s book is that the role of middleman between black labor (whether it was cheap, semi-free, or slave) and the Euro-American economy was an established one into which men like Delany, Crummell, and Turner fell easily. It was part of the structure of the Atlantic world, not merely a choice Delany and company made. Although black nationalist rhetoric might be a part of it —Cary indeed said he was going to found a black nation— the role was essentially economic and suggested no abolitionist implications at all. Often skilled people with some experience of economic advancement, the Americo-Liberian settlers, about 13,000 between 1822 and 1865, migrated in an effort to ratchet up their positions in the Atlantic economy by availing themselves of indigenous land and labor. Perhaps the most accurate way to describe the American black nationalists of the mid-nineteenth century is that they stood at the interface of slavery and imperialism, drawing their assumptions about labor and markets from the past while gesturing toward the future forms of commerce and governance they understood only imperfectly. Crummell earns particular scorn in UNAFRICAN AMERICANS for the lengths to which he was willing to pursue the providential argument that God had planned the slave trade and New World slavery as instruments of a great good — the Christianizing and HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE civilizing of Africa. The use of this providential argument in the 1860s was even worse than Adeleke relates, since it had been a standard application of theodicy to the slave trade and to slavery in the eighteenth century, but by the second half of the nineteenth century had lost its respectability. Had Crummell articulated the providential argument about a century earlier, as did Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, James Albert Ukawasw Gronniosaw, Lemuel Haynes, and Phillis Wheatley, he would have been in the black avant-garde, which was using providentialism to argue for its own role in the Atlantic world, but in his time he was at best out of date, at worst in bad faith. Crummell’s use of providence was entirely self-serving and out of line with mid-to-late-nineteenth-century Anglican theology. The omnipotent, omniscient God of the Protestant Reformation was an overruling deity who brought good out of evil by overruling the sins of humankind with events He wills to be. The most obvious example was the overruling of the Crucifixion by the Resurrection: the Reformed God worked in human affairs by bringing good out of evil. However, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century British Protestants began criticizing the idea that God works through human sin and suffering. Central to Arminian religion was the claim that suffering was not part of the divine plan. The older idea of a God who wounds with one hand and heals with the other (as the Puritans put it) retreated in the end of the eighteenth century into theology branded derisively the “New Divinity” and often called “hyper-Calvinism” or “consistent Calvinism.” This discredited theodicy did have one value to Crummell in exalting the person who could perceive and articulate the providential design in human suffering. Probably Crummell’s pronouncements on the divine design in the slave trade and slavery were not the defense of “religious optimism” (p. 102) against the pain of racism, but rather an effort to situate himself as the major interpreter both of centuries of the slave trade and enslavement and of the establishment of black settlers societies in West Africa. Unfortunately, Adeleke does not treat reparations in depth, but mentions the idea only as part of Turner’s program that had not appeared in Delany’s or Crummell’s. But one assumes that had he written more he would have argued that as an idea reparations signify an effort to deal with the costs of slavery, but in practice they are liable to become the property of elites like Turner. Funds for the establishment of a governing, entrepreneurial class of African Americans in West Africa can scarcely be seen as an honest effort at reparations. UNAFRICAN AMERICANS shows an uneasiness with black nationalism, or pan-Africanism, that Adeleke does not seek to resolve. On the one hand, the author assumes that black nationalism, or pan- Africanism, in the sense of ideas and practices predicated on the unity of black people throughout the world and aimed at their common good, does exist and can be embodied in a state as well as articulated in a philosophy. Delany, Crummell, and Turner, Adeleke reasons, moved toward black nationalism but reached only an impure form of it. Black nationalism, or pan-Africanism, can inhere in an African state as well as in the hearts and minds of diasporic blacks. On the other hand, the author’s arguments imply the opposite — that there is no unity among black people and that African states are not embodiments of black nationalism. Hence, on the one hand, Adeleke writes that “a HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE truly Pan-African and black nationalist program is one propelled by conscious efforts to harmonize, theoretically and practically, blacks in the diaspora and in the African continent” (p. 145) and “the spirit of Pan-Africanism ... emphasizes, a priori, solidarity between Africa and peoples of African descent in the diaspora” (p. 151). Yet, on the other hand, he acknowledges complexity, diversity, and conflict among black people and states that “to expect of black American nationalists absolute and unswerving commitment to Africanism and Pan-Africanism is unrealistic” (p. 148). A good example of the author’s irresolution is his argument that in “the articulation and defense of black/African interests” against European imperialism “one area of success was Liberia.” In reality, Liberia expanded its borders through aggression, provided unfree laborers for rubber plantations, and degenerated into various tribal and settler factions that have poisoned the country with carnage and mayhem. It is true that Adeleke addresses only a slice of Liberian history, but one questions the integrity of thinking about Liberia in the imperialist decades without also considering the colonizing decades as well as the years in which Nigerian-dominated ECOMOG forces intervened in Liberian politics in the name of stability. Adeleke’s comments about black and African interests and Liberia’s “success” are strange. Here, Delany and company are small fry: the real questions are the legitimacy of black nationalist philosophy and the legitimacy of African states that have relied upon it. If Adeleke is representative of current thinking about black nationalism, the philosophy is probably in much the same situation as American republicanism was in the post- Revolutionary years. A revolutionary ideology made virtually no allowance for differences and conflict among the white population and used various blunt instruments to exclude blacks and Indians from political life. Growth in the population, in the economy, and in the size of the nation blew away the revolutionary ideology forever and pulled forward a middle-class democracy in which diversity is accepted and in which the government must be responsive to a mass of politically-active citizens. Minority groups like blacks and Indians did not advance to equality quickly, but democracy has fostered their advancement in the long run. As democracy grew out of republicanism, older ideals like the mental and moral unity of the citizens (what Karl Popper called the mark of a closed society) were replaced by pragmatic notions like adaptation, inclusion, progress, and toleration (what Popper called the standard of an open society). Perhaps tomorrow’s black nationalism will grow out of today’s (or yesterday’s) just as democratic ideology grew out of republicanism. Acceptance of diversity and different interests among black people could reform black nationalist philosophy, and a reformed black nationalism could deflate the rhetoric of center and unity as well as guide a worthwhile political culture in nations like Liberia. Although he is not mentioned in UNAFRICAN AMERICANS, Wole Soyinka, one suspects, is the giant behind the book, particularly in his arguments about the importance of transcending the ideas and the politics of centralization while still maintaining the African nation-states that were formed in HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE the imperialist and nationalist decades. John Saillant. “Review of Tunde Adeleke, UNAFRICAN AMERICANS: NINETEENTH-CENTURY BLACK NATIONALISTS AND THE CIVILIZING MISSION.” http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/ showrev.cgi?path=25398919184889. Copyright © 1999, H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission questions, please contact hbooks@h- net.msu.edu.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

February 15, Sunday: Sketches for a symphony by Edward Elgar and elaborated by Payne are performed for the initial time as Elgar’s Symphony no.3 in Royal Festival Hall, London, 65 years after they were made by the composer.

Equale for four trombones by Leslie Bassett was performed for the initial time, at Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina.

An extraordinarily different article appeared in the local Providence, Rhode Island newspaper, the “ProJo”: History of slavery in R.I. not a story in black and white, but shades of gray

By JODY McPHILLIPS, Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

Steven Spielberg shot his slave-revolt film La Amistad in Rhode Island because the state has great Colonial architecture. It made sense for other reasons. Rhode Island played a bigger role than any other state in the Atlantic slave trade and had the only slave plantations in New England. At the same time, it was an early leader in the efforts to abolish slavery. “Throughout the 18th century, Rhode Island merchants controlled between 60 and 90 percent of the American trade in African slaves,” writes historian Jay Coughtry in THE NOTORIOUS TRIANGLE: RHODE ISLAND AND THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE, 1700-1807. To be fair, the American slave trade amounted to just a small fraction of the European trade, which brought more than 11 million Africans to the New World over nearly 400 years. Only half a million of them went directly to North American colonies; the rest went to the plantations and slave markets of Central and South America, from which some would be resold later to the southern colonies. By comparison Rhode Island, which came the closest of any colony to having a slave trade of its own, made more HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE than 900 slaving voyages during the 18th century, transporting about 106,000 slaves. Few actually settled in Rhode Island, which was poorly suited for large-scale agriculture with its small rocky farms and icy winters. But they were bought from the slave fortresses of Africa’s Gold Coast with Rhode Island-made rum; transported on Rhode Island-built ships to the slave markets of the Caribbean; and later dressed in Rhode Island-made slave cloth. Why did Rhode Island get so involved? Money, mostly. The state had good ports and skilled seamen but not much good farmland. Once the fertile areas of South County were settled, the only place to make real money was at sea. And no trade was as profitable as slaving. Slave traders like the Browns of Providence amassed great fortunes, enough to build those mansions along Benefit Street and to found Brown University. Later, Rhode Island textile manufacturers produced the coarse cotton cloth slaves wore throughout the New World, much like prison garb today. There were also coincidental connections. Two groups who eventually settled here –the Portuguese and the Cape Verdeans– played huge roles in the early slave trade. In the 1400s, the Portuguese were the first Europeans to buy or steal humans from the west coast of Africa; they turned the empty, volcanic Cape Verde islands into a major depot for the worldwide slave trade and created a mixed-race population that flourishes today throughout southeastern New England. And yet, from the earliest days, some Rhode Islanders were repelled by this human commerce. The conflict tore families apart. John Brown, of Providence, was an avid slaver, his brother Moses Brown an abolitionist who fought him at every turn. Bristol slaver James DeWolf’s son Levi made one slaving voyage and abandoned the trade in disgust; Levi’s brother Charles once defended his extensive slaving activities by telling a preacher, “Parson, I’ve always wanted to roll in gold.” In 1774, the General Assembly outlawed importing slaves into Rhode Island; a decade later, it was one of the first states to free children born of slave mothers. It’s a complicated story, with many moral shadings. Or, as Keith Stokes of Newport says, “It’s not black and white so much as gray.” ***

Humanity is divided into two: the masters and the slaves. — Aristotle, POLITICS.

How could it happen? How could supposedly civilized people enslave other human beings? Historian Hugh Thomas, in THE SLAVE TRADE, says slavery is as old as recorded history, known in virtually all cultures. Typically, slaves were people who lost wars, owed debts, broke laws or were sold into servitude by HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE impoverished parents. Throughout the Middle Ages, enslavement was increasingly linked to religious conflict. Moslems would enslave Christians, or vice versa: the dominant culture felt they were doing the “less enlightened” people a favor, by liberating them from error and exposing them to the true faith. By the 1400s, the seafaring Portuguese had begun trading with the small fiefdoms of northwest Africa. They went looking for gold, but didn’t find enough; increasingly, they brought home slaves, with the blessing of the Pope. Better a slave in an advanced Christian nation than a free subject of a “cannibal” king, the reasoning went. African slaves quickly became highly prized as strong, hardy workers able to withstand punishing tropical heat. As European colonists flooded into the New World, demand for workers grew exponentially, especially in the Caribbean islands and the plantations of Central and South America. At first, the Europeans tried to enslave the native Indians too. The first slaves transported across the Atlantic, in fact, went west to east: Taino Indians brought to Spain from the Caribbean by Christopher Columbus. But the New World Indians proved too susceptible to European diseases, and not strong enough to cultivate the new cash crops of sugar, tobacco, rice, cotton and indigo in the tropics. It was the Africans’ bad luck that they were physically well suited to hard work in hot climates — and that African kings and chieftains were so willing to sell their enemies and rivals into slavery. Over the next centuries, the combined lure of gold and slaves drew successive waves of Europeans to Africa: the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the French, and finally the English, in the mid-1600s. They made no bones about why. “A ship full of blacks brings more to the Treasury than galleons and fleets put together,” wrote Pedro Zapata de Mendoza, governor of Cartegena de Indias (in present- day Colombia), in 1648. The British entered the trade two centuries after the Portuguese, but quickly made up for lost time. One maritime city after another sent huge ships to Africa, capable of carrying as many as 450 slaves at once. They made money hand over fist. “Liverpool was in no way shy about the benefits brought her by the slave trade,” Thomas writes about the city. “The facade of the Exchange carried reliefs of Africans’ heads, with elephants, in a frieze, and one street was commonly known as ‘Negro Row.’” By the end of the 17th century, British traders had exported nearly 100,000 slaves from Africa; by 1725, 75,000 had been sold to British North America. It was about that time that slaving voyages start showing up in Rhode Island records. *** HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE The early eighteenth century marked the end of North America’s novitiate in the traffic of slaves. In the seventeenth century, too poor or too concerned with primitive agriculture, colonists there had been slow to participate in any substantial way. A few slaves acting as servants had always been seen in all the colonies; but it was not until the owners of plantations in the Carolinas ... realized they could make considerable profits from rice and indigo that anything like a regular trade in slaves began. — Hugh Thomas

The only land in Rhode Island good enough for plantation-style farming was the Narragansett Country (South County today), where a handful of white landowners did get rich off the labor of black slaves in the years before the Revolution. But the rest of the settlers had to come up with other ways to make money. The colony’s most successful industry was distilling rum, which at first was sold mainly to other colonies. The strong, good-quality rum soon found a market with slave-trading Africans of the Gold Coast who preferred it to Caribbean rums, which could be weak, salty or packed in leaky barrels. Rhode Island distillers in Newport (and later Bristol and Providence) were soon making double- and triple- distilled rums for the African trade, taking care to pack it in sturdy hogsheads. Rhode Island rum became so popular in Africa that, like gold, it served as money. The rum-for-slaves trade began slowly, with occasional voyages as far back as 1709. The triangle trade that evolved was simple: take rum to Africa, and trade it for slaves; take the slaves to the Caribbean, and trade them for molasses; take the molasses back to Rhode Island, and make more rum. Everybody made out — except the slaves. At first, the trade was concentrated in Newport. By 1725, one or two voyages a year were being recorded; by 1735, it was up to a dozen a year, a pace maintained until 1740, when fighting between England, Spain and then France disrupted all colonial commerce. A pattern developed: when hostilities broke out, trade faltered; when peace resumed, slaving boomed. In 1750, 15 Rhode Island trips were recorded; by 1772, that number had doubled. ***

Rhode Island and, particularly, Newport, was, in the 1750s and 1760s, still the North American colonies’ most important slaving zone. Newport, which always welcomed enterprising people without asking whence they came, also used more slaves in small businesses, farms, or homes than any other Northern colony. — Hugh Thomas

One Rhode Islander in nine was black, the highest percentage north of the Mason-Dixon line. Most were slaves on the Narragansett Country plantations, but HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE others clustered in Newport, where an artisan class of skilled workers developed. Slavery in New England –and particularly liberal Newport– was probably never absolute. From the early days, a small percentage of Newport blacks were free men, having bought or otherwise obtained their freedom. Keith Stokes, in an essay on the slave trade, writes, “An early 1770s census lists nearly one-third of (Newport’s) 9,000 inhabitants as being Negro, both slave and free.” Ship captains were always looking for able mariners; by 1800, “black seamen made up 21 percent of all Newport crews engaged in the West Indian, European and African trades,” writes Coughtry. Yet at the same time, slavers were working out of Providence, Bristol and Warren as well as Newport. (Bristol, in fact, surpassed Newport as the state’s primary slaving port as the century closed). Merchants in Greenwich, Tiverton, Little Compton and North Kingstown played a lesser role. The slavers were some of the colony’s leading citizens, their names still familiar today: Newport’s John Bannister (Bannister’s Wharf) and Abraham Redwood (Redwood Library); John Brown of Providence (Brown University); the DeWolfs of Bristol, who built Linden Place. One of the most active was Aaron Lopez of Newport, a founder of Touro Synagogue, who entered the slave trade in 1762 and by 1775 was the largest taxpayer in Newport, with more than 30 ships. Some were more reprehensible than others. In 1764, Simeon Potter of Bristol wrote to his captain on the slaver King George: “Water your rum as much as possible and sell as much by the short measure as you can.” Or the captain of James DeWolf’s slaver Polly, who lashed a slave infected with smallpox to a chair, threw her overboard, and “lamented only the lost chair.” Merchants not rich enough to build their own ships pooled resources and invested in voyages. Later on, the ships were more often owned by individuals or family groups. Rhode Islanders made a go of slaving for a number of reasons. Their small, sturdy ships held from 75 to 150 slaves, far fewer than the massive British or French slavers, but their survival rates were better. Shorter loading times in Africa exposed the crews to fewer new diseases, and less crowding of slaves meant fewer died on the voyage, which took from five to 12 weeks. La Amistad-style rebellions did occur –17 revolts were recorded on Rhode Island slavers between 1730 and 1807– but were about half as common as on British and French slavers, perhaps because conditions were somewhat better on the smaller boats. The British destruction of Newport during the Revolution brought a temporary halt to the trade. When it resumed after the war, much of the action shifted up the bay to Bristol, home of the DeWolf clan. *** HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Without a doubt, then, the DeWolfs had the largest interest in the African slave trade of any American family before or after the Revolution; theirs was one of the few fortunes that truly rested on rum and slaves. — Jay Coughtry

It was a family operation, all right — along the lines of la cosa nostra. The first DeWolf slaver was Mark Anthony DeWolf, who began as captain for his brother-in-law, Simeon Potter. By 1774, Mark Anthony and Charles, one of his five sons, had completed seven voyages and may have been financing their own ships, Coughtry writes. Between 1784 and 1807, seven DeWolfs completed 88 slaving voyages, or one-quarter of all Rhode Island trips made in those years; they were involved in 60 percent of the slaving voyages from Bristol. They didn’t just sail the ships — they branched out into all aspects of the operation. James DeWolf, another of Mark Anthony’s sons, married the daughter of William Bradford, who owned Bristol’s rum distillery; he went on to make another fortune in cotton manufacturing, and served in the U.S. Senate. Other sons sold slaves at slave markets in Charleston and Havana; the family also bought a Cuban sugar plantation, so they had a piece of the action at all stages of the cycle. They were resourceful. As the public grew more repulsed by slavery and anti-slavery laws began to be passed, the DeWolfs dug in, and used their clout and connections to keep the money flowing. By the turn of the century, William Ellery, the customs collector in Newport, was cracking down on illegal slaving. The DeWolfs got the General Assembly to create a separate customs office in Bristol, and in 1804 snared the collector’s job for Charles Collins, a DeWolf in- law and a slaver himself. It was clear sailing out of Bristol after that. Although slavery was outlawed nationally as of 1808, James DeWolf continued slaving until 1820, “the period of the [Rhode Island] trade’s greatest profits,” writes Arline Ruth Kiven, in a history of the state’s abolitionist movement called THEN WHY THE NEGROES? “This was also the time of his greatest affluence,” although, she notes, there are no records for the Bristol port during this period because Collins burned them all when he was finally ousted in 1820. Slavers were pretty crafty about staying ahead of the anti-slaving laws. A 1794 law banning U.S. citizens from carrying slaves to other nations, for example, had only one real enforcement provision: much like modern-day drug laws, the government could confiscate slaving vessels and sell them at auction. Slavers promptly rigged the auctions so they (or straw buyers) could buy back the ships for pocket change. The government countered by getting the ships assessed, and then sending an agent to the auction to enter that price HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE as an opening bid. Samuel Bosworth, the surveyor for Bristol, was the unfortunate soul sent to bid on the Lucy, a slaver confiscated from Charles DeWolf. He undertook the job “with considerable fear and trembling,” writes Coughtry. The night before the sale, Bosworth got a visit from DeWolf, his brother James, and John Brown, who advised him to refuse the assignment. He stood his ground. The next morning the DeWolfs dropped by again, telling Bosworth that while they certainly wouldn’t harm a hair of his head, if he showed up at the sale he would probably be “insulted if not thrown off the wharf” by sailors. Bosworth never made it to the auction. “His would-be baptizers, in nominal Indian dress and with faces blackened, seized him as he approached the wharf, and hustled him aboard a small sailboat” which took him for a pleasant two-mile ride down the bay, Coughtry writes. By the time he made it back to Bristol, the Lucy had been bought by a captain who worked for the DeWolfs. The DeWolfs - or their agents - at times went in for outright thuggery. In 1800 the Treasury Department sent Capt. John Leonard to Rhode Island as a kind of special prosecutor targeting slave traders. He promptly sued James DeWolf for $20,000 over violations by DeWolf’s slave ship Fanny. The jury found for DeWolf. But some months after the trial, “apparently fearful that Leonard’s strategy against DeWolf would become a dangerous and costly precedent, a group of civic-minded Bristolians traveled to Washington to make their own appeal at the Federal Courthouse,” Coughtry writes. When they spotted Leonard coming down the courthouse steps, “several unidentified assailants assaulted him.” ***

Whereas, there is a common course practiced by Englishmen to buy negers so that they may have them for service or slaves forever; for the preventinge of such practices among us, let it be ordered that no blacke mankind or white, being forced by covenant bond, or otherwise, to serve any man or his assighnes longer than 10 years or until they come to bee 24 years of age.... — Rhode Island’s first anti-slavery law, 1652

The 1652 law was supposed to ban slavery of any kind from Providence and Warwick, or indentured servitude for more than 10 years. It was enforced for whites but largely ignored for blacks; like so many cultures before them, the British colonies were deeply conflicted over slavery. In 1636, Roger Williams, who founded the colony in Providence, questioned the justice of enslaving the Pequots. Yet in 1676, the same man denounced one of the early calls for freeing black slaves as “nothing but a bundle of ignorance and boisterousness.” Kiven writes that the northern part of the state was HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE always less enamored of slavery than the seafaring and farming south. Slaving was not confined to a particular religion or sect. Christians and Jews made fortunes in the trade, though by the early 18th century Quakers began to question the ethics of what they were doing. Abolitionist sentiment got a boost in 1738, when an article in the English Weekly Miscellany “declared that, if Africans were to seize people from the coast of England, one could easily imagine the screams of ‘unjust’ which would be heard,” writes Thomas. In Newport in 1770, the Rev. Samuel Hopkins of the First Congregational Church preached his first sermon against slavery, and was surprised when his congregation –many of whom owned slaves– did not walk out en masse. Three years later, Hopkins got the idea of sending two educated blacks to Africa as missionaries. To that end, John Quamine and Bristol Yamma were sent to Princeton College to prepare. The Revolution intervened, however, and Quamine died aboard a privateer, while Yamma apparently dropped out of school to go to work and disappeared into history. According to Kiven, the Quakers were the biggest and best-organized religious group in Rhode Island, and once they began to oppose slavery, its days were numbered. One by one, slave owners changed their minds. “College Tom” Hazard, heir to Narragansett Country landowner Robert Hazard, refused his father’s offer of slaves on his marriage (Robert was said to own 1,000 slaves in 1730). In 1773, the younger Hazard convinced the Quaker Yearly Meeting to ban Quaker participation in slavery. That same year Moses Brown of Providence quit the family slaving business, and began a decades-long assault on his brother, John Brown, for continuing to buy and sell humans; the next year he became a Quaker. The approach of the Revolution brought a temporary end to slaving, but also disrupted abolitionist momentum. In 1774, the General Assembly passed a law banning residents from importing slaves to Rhode Island, though it said nothing about visitors, or slaveowners who might want to move here. (That was partly because Newport had a prosperous relationship with rich Southern plantation owners, who summered in Rhode Island before the Civil War, to escape the ferocious southern heat). Brown, working with Hopkins, set about lobbying the state legislature as well as the Continental Congress; Hopkins wrote a persuasive tract, DIALOGUE CONCERNING THE SLAVERY OF THE AFRICANS, which was used well into the 19th century as an argument for abolition. The war also gave blacks a chance to earn their own freedom. In 1778, a law was passed freeing any slave who would enlist in the Continental Army; several hundred formed the First Rhode Island Regiment, which performed well in battle, although the soldiers later had trouble getting paid. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE “Their courage in battle and the subsequent gratitude of the people of the state to them is credited for the law, passed in 1784, providing for the gradual abolition of slavery in the state,” writes Kiven. The new law, which freed children born of slaves, passed only after a provision banning the trade entirely was removed. According to Moses Brown, the act was eviscerated by the Speaker of the House, William Bradford of Bristol. Yes, the same Bradford who ran the big Bristol rum distillery, and whose daughter was married to slave- trader James DeWolf. State House insiders were apparently getting pretty sick of lectures from the reform-minded Quakers. Wrote Brown, “We were much flung at by several.” ***

Is it not extraordinary that [Rhode Island], which has exceeded the rest of the states in carrying on this trade, should be the first Legislature on this globe which has prohibited that trade? — Rev. Samuel Hopkins, Nov. 27, 1787

Other states were wrestling with the slavery issue. It proved so contentious that in 1787, when the Continental Congress adopted a constitution, it deferred any national action on slavery until 1808. New England, however, wasn’t waiting around. Rhode Island banned the trade entirely in 1787; Connecticut and Massachusetts followed suit the following year. True, the slave trade would continue for 70 years, by one means or another. Some slavers shifted operations to ports like New York, which had not yet passed any slaving laws; others simply broke the law. But in 1789, Hopkins and Moses Brown helped found the Providence Abolition Society, which worked for anti- slaving laws and sued those who broke them. One such was John Brown, Moses’ brother. The society sued him in 1796 on charges of illegal slave-trading; though he offered to abandon the trade and pay all court costs, they seemed to want to make an example of him. They should have taken the deal. He was acquitted. “The verdict was a definite defeat for the Society, many of whose members became convinced that a Rhode Island jury would not give judgment against the prominent type of men engaged in the slave-trade,” writes Kiven. Over the next few decades a pattern evolved. Abolitionists would pressure the government to pass anti-slavery legislation, and the slaving interests would do what they could to water it down. Once a law was passed, business would temporarily falter while the slavers watched to see how strictly the law would be enforced; usually, enforcement was sporadic, and business actually increased. The American and British governments finally banned slaving as of 1808. But the trade hardly stopped. Some American ships flew Spanish flags; Gen. George DeWolf of Bristol simply shifted his operations to Cuba. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE The American law only banned the international slave trade. American slavers could still trade slaves internally, or move them up and down the coast. And they did, because demand was huge. With the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, the demand for agricultural workers exploded in the south, Thomas writes. In 1792, the United States exported 138,328 pounds of cotton; by 1800, it was 17,790,000 pounds and by 1820, 35,000,000 pounds. The planters weren’t going to pick it themselves. ***

Rhode Island participation in the slave trade after Jan. 1, 1808, is a maddening puzzle, for most of the pieces are missing. — Jay Coughtry

It looks like Rhode Island slavers began to pull out of the business after the federal ban, although it’s hard to be sure since it was easy to cheat, particularly at first. Some, like the DeWolfs, continued to slave illegally. But Coughtry concludes that “it does not appear that Rhode Island ports or individual Rhode Island merchants participated in the illegal heyday of the modern American slave trade” between 1820 and 1860. They abandoned the business sporadically, much as they had started. John Brown died in 1803. James DeWolf quit the trade in 1808, though his brother George continued until 1820, when the sympathetic Collins was fired in Bristol; after a series of business failures, George fled the state in 1825 for his Cuban plantation. Rhode Island merchants gradually turned away from the maritime trade and invested their money in cotton mills — by 1830, the state had 130 of them. They managed to squeeze yet more profit from slavery: many specialized in coarse slave or negro cloth, worn by slaves throughout the New World. Abolitionists kept up the pressure. The Providence Abolition Society was joined by other groups; three buildings still standing today served as stations on the Underground Railroad — the Isaac Rice homestead in Newport, the Elizabeth Buffum Chace house in Central Falls, and the Charles Perry home in Westerly. Some decided not to wait. In 1826, a group of free Newport blacks, led by former slave Newport Gardiner, sailed for Liberia with the help of the American Colonization Society. Gardiner, who worked for years to buy freedom for himself and his family, was freed in 1791. He helped found the nation’s first black civic organizations, the African Union Society, and the African Benevolent Society. His decision to leave came 14 months after white rioters destroyed Hard Scrabble, the black community in Providence (University Heights today). He was 75 years old. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE “I go to set an example for the youth of my race,” he said. “I go to encourage the young. They can never be elevated here. I have tried it for 60 years.... It is in vain.”

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GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE

2001

February 10, Saturday: The Washington Post contained an essay by Allen C. Guelzo, “A Reluctant Recruit To the Abolitionist Cause.” Guelzo is professor of American history at Eastern College in St. David’s, Pennsylvania, and the author of Abraham Lincoln: REDEEMER PRESIDENT (William Eerdmans). A longer version of this had appeared in the Autumn 2000 issue of Wilson Quarterly. Excerpts follow: A Reluctant Recruit To the Abolitionist Cause Whatever his larger reputation as the liberator of 2 million black slaves, Abraham Lincoln has never shaken off the imputation that he was something of a half-heart about it. “There is a counter-legend of Lincoln,” acknowledges historian Stephen B. Oates, “one shared ironically enough by many white southerners and certain black Americans of our time” who are convinced that Lincoln was “a white racist who championed segregation, opposed civil and political rights for black people”.... From the start, abolitionists regarded Lincoln as a suspect recruit to the antislavery cause. Suspicions only deepened when he stepped into the national spotlight as the Republican candidate for the presidency in 1860. And the new president’s inaugural promise not to interfere with Southern slavery if the Southern states attempted no violent withdrawal from the union confirmed Frederick Douglass’s “worst fears,” that Lincoln was “showing all his inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes, and his canting hypocrisy”.... Many biographers have written off much of this to the not-inconsiderable egos of many of the abolitionist leaders, to the impatience that three decades of agitation had bred into their followers, or to political naiveté. Most have oversimplified the philosophical differences between the president and the abolitionists, viewing them as a convergence waiting to happen. Lincoln himself fed that notion from time to time. John Roll, a Springfield, Ill., builder and longtime acquaintance of Lincoln’s, remembered his friend’s reply when asked whether he was an abolitionist: “I am mighty near one.” Being “near one” was precisely the point. If opposing slavery was to be “near” abolitionism, then almost the entire population of the Northern free states was “near” abolitionism, too. Opposition to slavery never necessitated actual abolition. Antislavery might just as easily have taken the form of containment (opposing the legalization of slavery in any new states); colonization (forced repatriation of blacks to Africa); gradual emancipation (freedom keyed to decades-long timetables); or, in the minds of most Northerners, nothing at all, so long as slavery got no nearer than it was. Lincoln’s analysis of the abolition radicals as “fiends” had long roots in his own personal history. His parents were Separate Baptists, a small denomination that taught God’s absolute control over each and every human choice. Though opposed to slavery, Separates were also hostile to reform movements, since such movements smacked too strongly of human efforts at self- improvement. Lincoln rebelled against his parents’ religion early in adolescence. He understood that the universe was run not by a god who could be influenced by prayer to change the HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE course of human events, but by “Law & Order.” Asked by an acquaintance whether he belonged to any secret society, his answer was, “I do not belong to any society except it be for the good of my country.” That one exception was his political allegiance to the Whig Party. Like the Whigs, Lincoln was a liberal nationalist; he looked for his political identity not in regional or ethnic sources but in an expansive sense of American nationality. If there was such a thing as an American identity for Lincoln, it was founded on appeals to a universal human nature and universal human rights, and discovered not in the passionate romanticist ideals of race or gender but through reason.... The importance Lincoln laid in “propositions” was underscored by the reverence with which he approached the Constitution. As early as 1848, as a congressman advocating his Whig hero Henry Clay’s programs, Lincoln attacked proposals to amend the Constitution. “Better, rather, habituate ourselves to think of it as unalterable,” Lincoln said. “The men who made it have done their work, and have passed away. Who shall improve on what they did?” On this point more than any other, Lincoln expressly condemned the abolitionists as enemies of constitutional government. It is not that Lincoln’s cautious constitutionalism made him indifferent to slavery. But what he meant by slavery before the 1850s was any relationship of economic restraint. This slavery was what he experienced as a young man under his father, and he came to associate it with agrarianism. “I used to be a slave,” Lincoln said in an early speech; in fact, “we were all slaves one time or another.” It is difficult to see that Lincoln had any corresponding concern about slavery as a system of personal injustice when only blacks were the slaves. He did not openly oppose black slavery until passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, when it became evident that black slavery might extend across the Western territories and perhaps even into the free states, where slave labor could then compete with wage labor. Even so, the only solution he could imagine was to “send them to Liberia — to their own native land.” As late as 1863, Lincoln was still experimenting with such schemes. Thus, Lincoln’s approach to slavery as a political-economic problem as much as a moral one stands in dramatic contrast to the most basic instincts of American abolitionism. The basic difference was the centrality of religion to the abolitionist movement, providing its imagery, its tactics and its uncompromising urgency. The day that abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution at the annual Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society picnic was the day the Southern-born abolitionist Moncure Conway recognized “that Garrison was a successor of the inspired axe-bearers — John the Baptist, Luther, Wesley, George Fox”.... A swelling confidence in the human will to achieve salvation by its own efforts had marked much of evangelical Protestant thinking in the 19th century, as Methodists, Baptists and even many Presbyterians turned to revivals, awakenings and mass conversions to expand Protestantism’s influence in American life. Revivalism was a spiritual act one could perform for oneself, instead of waiting patiently for God to do it. That, in turn, allowed preachers to demand immediate compliance with their moral directives. For the revivalists, this translated into demands for “the great fundamental principle of immediate abolition” — exactly the HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE attitude that had alienated Lincoln from his ancestral Protestantism. Lincoln did, of course, find his way to the abolition of slavery, first undercutting the Confederacy’s war effort by emancipating the slaves who provided labor services to the Confederate armies through the Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862, then abolishing slavery in the Confederate states through the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, and finally eradicating slavery in the entire United States by pushing the 13th Amendment through Congress in 1865. By the same token, some of the abolitionists gradually warmed to Lincoln and openly supported his reelection in 1864. Lincoln himself finally had to concede that “Sumner and Wade and Chandler are right.... We can’t get through this terrible war with slavery existing.” Thus Lincoln came to emancipation by a road very different from that taken by the abolitionists. Where they built their argument on the demand of evangelicalism for immediate repentance, Lincoln instead preferred gradualism and compensation to the owners of emancipated slaves. Where the abolitionists preached from passion and choice, Lincoln worked from reason and patience. And where they brushed aside the Constitution’s implicit sanctions for slavery –and with them the Constitution– Lincoln proceeded against slavery no further than the Constitution allowed. The abolitionists were racial egalitarians in an age of unthinking racism. Lincoln was a natural-rights egalitarian in the tradition of John Locke.... So what, as historian Eric McKitrick recently asked, was the role of the extremists in preparing the way for the end of slavery? Recent abolitionist histories, by Henry Mayer and Paul Goodman, have joined older works by historians such as Howard Zinn and Martin Duberman in answering with a resounding affirmation of the strategic centrality of the abolitionists. By hallowing zealotry, these neo-abolitionist historians identify direct (even if nonviolent) action as the only morally legitimate stance in American reform. Only by means of dauntless radicalism was justice achieved and the way paved for further reform in American society. By extension, we are encouraged to go and do likewise. Lincoln, by contrast, embodied the complexity of American opposition to slavery. The end of slavery owed something to a sense of awakened moral responsibility, but it also owed far more than we have been willing to admit to the long swing of ideas about political economy, and to the public’s revulsion toward specific events, such as the efforts of slaveholders to gag debate over slavery in Congress. The president had no illusions about his own sanctity or his enemies’ depravity, and he was constantly aware of the price being paid in human lives and treasure for even the noblest of results. “If I had been allowed my way,” Lincoln told the English Quaker activist Eliza P. Gurney a month after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, “this war would have been ended before this,” perhaps before the proclamation had even been contemplated. That sentiment has earned him the execration of every abolitionist and neo-abolitionist, from Garrison to Ebony editor Lerone Bennett Jr., whose book “Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream” depicts Lincoln as the kind of fence straddler “we find in almost all situations of oppression.” For all of his rant, Lincoln biographers will ignore Bennett at their peril, because both Garrison and Bennett had a point: Lincoln’s plan for emancipation (without the helping hand of the war) was a gradual scheme that would have HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE allowed the grandparents of some of today’s adult African Americans to have been born in slavery. The question Lincoln might have asked the neo-abolitionists was whether the costs of their way of immediate emancipation –costs that included a civil war, 600,000 dead, a national economic blow worse than the Great Depression would bring and the broken glass of Reconstruction to walk over– were part of the calculation of results. Neither alternative was particularly pretty. Lincoln never doubted that emancipation was right and that slavery was wrong. But he had an inkling that it was possible to do something right in such a way that it fostered an infinitely greater wrong. “If I take the step” of emancipation purely because “I think the measure politically expedient, and morally right,” Lincoln asked Treasury Secretary Salmon Portland Chase in 1863, “would I not thus give up all footing upon Constitution or law? Would I not thus be in the boundless field of absolutism?” Between the word of abolition and the deed of emancipation falls the ambiguous shadow of Abraham Lincoln. For more than a century, the genius of American reform has been its confidence that men like Garrison were right. The realities of American reform, however, as the example of Lincoln suggests, have been another matter. © 2001 The Washington Post Company HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2006

September: Wendy’s announced that its french fries would henceforward be trans fat-free. The New York City health department proposed elimination of trans fats in Gotham’s restaurants.

A review appeared in [email protected] of a book on colonization as the “peculiar solution” for American slavery, Eric Burin’s SLAVERY AND THE PECULIAR SOLUTION: A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY (Southern Dissent Series. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2005). The review, by Eugene VanSickle of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, sparked off an interesting discussion:

What Is to Be Done? During the Early Republic, Americans struggled to address the paradox of slavery and freedom. This dichotomy prompted numerous debates and wild schemes designed to address the existence of slavery in a society based on individual freedom. Among the reform-minded societies that came out of such discussions was the American Colonization Society. This society addressed this paradox through the plan of African colonization. Eric Burin’s study of the American Colonization Society (ACS) is the latest interpretation of the African colonization movement and the actions of that organization at the local level. Part of the Southern Dissent series edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller, its title, as most scholars will note, appears a play on Kenneth Stampp’s THE PECULIAR INSTITUTION (1956). The study focuses on “colonization’s relationship with slavery ... from two vantage points. First, it gauges the movement’s effect on black bondage by providing a panoramic overview of the colonization crusade; second, it scrutinizes ACS activities as they played out at the local level” (page 2). The emphasis on ACS activities at the local level in the South is the most important contribution this study makes, as most studies tend to look at the colonization movement from the national perspective. Burin delves into the debate regarding the true purpose of the ACS, suggesting that “colonization tended to undermine slavery” (page 2). Thus, his examination returns the ACS and African colonization to the antislavery interpretation. Such an assertion is problematic, which Burin admits. Historians have attempted to fit the ACS into a particular mold since the 1920s. Nonetheless, his study is probably the first since P.J. Staudenraus’s THE AFRICAN COLONIZATION MOVEMENT (1961) to place the society in the antislavery circle.173 The suggestion that colonization was a crusade against slavery is, arguably, an exaggeration. The vast majority of colonizationists supported the movement in hopes of keeping slavery (and the debate over it) from destroying the Union. Many accepted the Jeffersonians’ proposition that slavery was doomed for extinction anyway; colonization would only aid in the eventual outcome. This thought process did not change much until after Nat Turner’s Rebellion, the Virginia Debates of 1832, and the Nullification Crisis. Most white Americans believed that the republic would fall if there were two free races, especially if 173. Staudenraus argued that the ACS was a humanitarian organization. P.J. Staudenraus, THE AFRICAN COLONIZATION MOVEMENT, 1816-1865 (Columbia: Columbia UP, 1961). HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE one of those races was denied political and social rights. Colonization offered a solution to this dilemma. Burin recognizes this fact: “The enterprise’s longevity and salience partly stemmed from its malleability: the venture certainly meant different things to different people” (page 33). It remains difficult to see colonization as a crusade, especially when John Randolph and Henry Clay, both founding members, insisted that the ACS not address the issue of slavery at all.174 Nonetheless, the membership of prominent slaveholders in the ACS, as well as the number of slaves manumitted for colonization, does imply dissent against slavery in the South. Burin further locates the true base of support for colonization in the Upper South and Border States. He also demonstrates the influence of revolutionary ideology in the discussion regarding slavery and colonization. The ideals of the revolution were most important to the post-revolution generation. For example, Burin turned to Charles Fenton Mercer, whom he credits with “laying the groundwork for the establishment of the ACS.” Mercer was a southern modernizer “who wished to replace the slave-based agrarian economy with a free-labor, commercial-industrial one” (page 13). There were, indeed, many men similar to Mercer, and to place the impetus for the ACS’s formation on him ignores prominent northern figures such as the Reverend Robert S. Finley from New Jersey. These men looked to an industrial society based on free labor; they sought also to preserve the Union. Colonization was the means to do both and address the question of their time — the fate of slavery and African descendants in America. One quite interesting question that Burin addresses is why colonizationists thought that they could succeed at settling African Americans outside the United States (pages 20-21). Burin cites historian William Freehling’s explanation that the era under examination provided no evidence that the scheme would not work. In the context of the mass migration then occurring in the Atlantic world, ACS supporters had no reason to think that they could not re-settle African Americans. Burin suggests that the problem with the thesis is that Freehling did not consider the realities of colonization at the local level (page 21). Thus, Burin returns to his study’s real contribution to the scholarship on this topic. Colonization was not a simplistic endeavor that effortlessly moved colonists across the Atlantic. Situations at the local level complicated and slowed emigration, making ACS efforts less tenable in reality. For example, Burin finds that liberated slaves in urban areas generally opposed emigration to Liberia; thus, the ACS targeted rural areas. Colonizationists encountered problems there, however, as slaveholders faced scorn and sometimes worse from neighbors (page 36). Moreover, by the early 1830s a rift emerged “between the Upper South men who dominated the powerful board of managers, and the northerners who filled many important positions in the organization” (page 23), which worked against the ACS. The conflict was primarily over the public image of the ACS and its position on slavery. Burin also points out that a split occurred in the movement because of poor fiscal management, which further slowed the organization’s progress (page 24).

174. Staudenraus, THE AFRICAN COLONIZATION MOVEMENT, pages 28-29; AFRICAN REPOSITORY, 1 (October 1825): 225, and 1 (January 1826): 335. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE Another significant contribution of Burin’s study is his examination of manumissions in the South. Burin notes that the vast majority of individual manumissions in the early colonization period took place in the Upper South (page 36). Of greater interest, however, is his conclusion that the number of manumissions also depended on whether slaveholders lived in urban or rural areas. Manumission was much more difficult, he contends, in rural areas. Burin then proceeds to discuss the factors that influenced slaveholders’ decisions. This is an important part of the study, as no other study (that the reviewer is aware of) has differentiated manumissions specifically for colonization in such a way. That a greater number occurred in the Upper South is not surprising. Northern, free neighboring states had larger immigrant populations, which Burin mentions, specifically the Germans who moved into the western regions of Maryland and later West Virginia. These people had little to tie them to the institution of slavery. In addition, a considerable factor was the industrialization of growing urban centers such as Baltimore. The emergence of the market economy, the transition to mixed agriculture, and the loss of political influence in the Chesapeake region weakened slavery’s hold there. Maryland had the largest (proportionally adjusted) free black population in the country. Further, soil depletion and the migration of planters’ sons to western territories contributed to the declining numbers of slaves in the state and, of course, higher numbers of manumissions (pages 37-40). Burin further differentiates ACS manumissions by examining programs employed by some larger slaveholders. He emphasizes that programs such as those promoted by John McDonogh, a Louisiana slave owner, actually aided in controlling slave populations. The promise of literacy in preparation for emigration and freedom in Africa, Burin argues, gave slaveholders an added element of control over their slaves. The potential pitfall of using slaveholding emancipators like McDonogh as a model, however, is that they were atypical. Burin relied on other historical collections; nonetheless, he seems to place more emphasis on McDonogh than on other slave owners. McDonogh’s plan was to provide education and training that would allow the soon-to-be-freedmen to carry the gospel to Africa, among other things, while profiting from their labors for additional years (page 41). His slaves, in fact, financed their emigration. He also did not release all of his slaves for colonization by the ACS. Slaves freed in such programs, Burin notes, were also predominantly adult males. This practice arguably increased control over slave populations (page 43). Yet, this example is perhaps not so profound given the preference of all the colonization societies for adult males in their colonies, especially those known to be industrious and obedient. Adult males would not drain social resources; adult males would develop the colonies more quickly, allowing increasing numbers to be sent; finally, adult males were most likely to make the colonies prosperous, which would lure free African Americans whose position in the United States, economically and socially, was tenuous. The numbers of African Americans transported, and little else, measured success for most white Americans supportive of colonization. Adult males were the most needed group in the colonies for these objectives to be met. Burin either ignores this fact or views the social HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE control that manumission programs gave to slaveholders as more important. Another of Burin’s contentions that scholars will certainly debate is that “ACS liberations were not instances of complaisant slaves dutifully working toward freedom, as white colonizationists originally expected. Rather, they were the product of tenacious negotiations that fundamentally recast slaveholders’ manumission plans” (page 58). In short, Burin suggests that slaves weighed offers of manumission on condition of emigration carefully to exploit the offers to their best advantage (page 59). In assessing these offers, Burin’s study explores the types of information slaves considered, as well as the sources of that information. Scrutiny was necessary as colonizationists manipulated accounts from the colony to best serve their purposes (pages 70-73). That such activities occurred is not surprising. Auxiliary societies and ACS publications were geared more towards white society because colonizationists relied on white America for the money to cover colonization, place pressure on the government to support the movement, emancipation, and the diffusion of information to African Americans. Burin in fact makes these points (chapter 4) in examining the role of the Pennsylvania Colonization Society in the larger movement the ACS led. The Pennsylvania Colonization Society (PCS), Burin contends, contributed most to the ACS objective by working hard to get funds (pages 79-80). This theme is not given the prominence it deserved in a chapter mostly about the organizational goals of the Pennsylvania Colonization Society and its members’ wishes to help emancipate slaves. While the interpretation fits within the argument that the ACS was an antislavery organization, there was considerable tension between the Pennsylvania society and the ACS — that tension no doubt a factor in the PCS’s joining the New York society in 1838 to promote their own colony in Africa. The chapter also returns to the theme of colonizationists “rationalizing” (page 86) negative reports from Africa for the benefit of the movement. Again, historians need to consider the audience as much as the agenda for this state auxiliary. The PCS appealed to a white audience appalled by the growth in the free black population in Pennsylvania — that is what motivated them to donate money to promote manumission of slaves for emigration. They had to believe that freedom was going to be accompanied by emigration — “a constant theme in discussions of individual manumission and general emancipation” (page ix). The role of the PCS in the context of this study seems overstated. Opinions about the ACS and colonization as well as the success of the organization depended on the “location of the manumission, the magnitude of the emancipating operation, and the observer’s proximity to the enterprise” (page 100). The farther south one went and the greater the slave population, the more the resistance to the movement, especially after 1832. That a full third of the manumissions took place in Virginia (page 101) supports Burin’s assessment that support for colonization was strongest in the Border States. His examination of who was most likely to emancipate slaves for emigration will prove useful as will his analysis of the problems agents had in getting potential colonists to port (pages 105-110). That opposition to colonization increased in the South as the Civil War approached HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE is not a profound observation, however. Colonizationists’ true failure was in containing the debate over slavery at the national level — one of the goals supporters established when the movement began. Burin also addresses the legal questions raised by colonization- driven manumission. The two pressing legal questions dealt with whether the state had the power to circumscribe slaveholders’ property rights (disowning slaves) and if the state would sanction slave agency (bondsmen being able to choose) in ACS operations (page 121). The former was a question colonizationists’ founding members recognized in 1816. Part of the reason they did not publicly address the question of slavery was their reluctance to interfere “with the legal rights and obligations of slavery.”175 Burin traces these legal questions throughout the period under review and finds that legal opposition tended to increase as tensions over slavery traversed the national discourse. To no one’s surprise, Upper South judges found in favor of the slaveholders and colonization, while further south, jurists eventually moved to repudiate the notion that slaves could choose between slavery in the United States and freedom in Africa (page 136). The final chapter analyzes the experience of freepersons in Liberia. This subject is very well documented with other studies. That settlers’ experiences varied is clear from their correspondence to the colonization societies or to former masters. Many were disappointed while many others were satisfied with their new homes. Still others preferred a hard existence where they were truly free to a life of degradation in American society. Aside from showing that the settlers’ negative accounts hurt colonizationists’ recruiting efforts, this chapter seemed unrelated to the rest of the study, particularly if the overriding conclusion is that the ACS was an antislavery organization. The conclusion ends the study by suggesting, “Colonization played a vital role in the Civil War” (page 160). That Lincoln was a supporter of colonization is well known. The degree to which he pursued it is probably less so. While tracing the evolution of Lincoln’s notion of colonization, what seems most clear in this portion of the analysis is that the Civil War removed colonization from the national spotlight as a solution to the slavery problem. The vital role of colonization in the war itself is unclear other than the fact that Lincoln clearly went through an evolution of his position on both colonization and slavery as well as what the war would ultimately be about. Certainly, the war and colonization did little to solve the real question — what was to be done with the African American? His strong evidence notwithstanding, historians will undoubtedly contest the overall conclusions of Burin’s work. Likewise, the notion that colonization was a peculiar solution to slavery will spark debate, especially given the prevalence of auxiliary societies that sprang up around the nation after the ACS was created in 1816. That does not mean, however, that THE PECULIAR SOLUTION is without merit. Ultimately, this is a study of how some white Americans struggled to resolve the great American paradox of freedom and slavery while giving finality to the question about the racial future of the United States. Burin makes a valuable contribution to the literature on the 175. AFRICAN REPOSITORY 1 (January 1826): 335. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE subject of colonization and slavery in the era before the Civil War. The true strength of the book is its examination of colonization at the state level. Here he shows the complexities of colonization as well as the problems facing slaveholders who dared to free their bondsmen. Yet, if the colonization movement was peculiar for anything, it was probably more so for its longevity. The ACS did, after all, continue to thrive and send African Americans to Liberia long after the peculiar institution’s demise. Copyright (c) 2006 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses contact the Reviews editorial staff: [email protected].

Reply to Eugene VanSickle, by Eric Burin Many authors have sat bewildered after reading reviews of their books, wondering if the work under consideration was really their own. As Professor Kirsten Wood noted on H-SHEAR last year, “an author’s idea of what her book is ‘really about’ does not necessarily determine how readers perceive it.”176 The likelihood of misinterpretation is particularly high when the work concerns the nineteenth century colonization movement, a subject that has generated heated debate among historians. Scholars who write about colonization may not tread “dark and bloody ground,” but the field has landmines aplenty. For the most part, Dr. VanSickle, in reviewing SLAVERY AND THE PECULIAR SOLUTION, has navigated the turf well, ably summarizing the organization and arguments of the book. At the same time, however, VanSickle’s review did not escape unscathed, as I explain below. In a strange way, VanSickle offers SLAVERY AND THE PECULIAR SOLUTION high praise. According to VanSickle, the book’s arguments about slaves’ deliberations over emigration are “not surprising.” Its insights regarding local responses to ACS manumissions are not “profound observation[s].” Its analysis of the legal conundrums posed by ACS liberations should come “to no one’s surprise.” So why are these compliments? Because the literature on these subjects is not extensive, and to declare novel arguments banal is to pay the highest of tributes. “No duh” is another way of saying “case closed.” And yet, despite its putatively mundane character, VanSickle concludes that “historians will undoubtedly contest the overall conclusions” of SLAVERY AND THE P ECULIAR S OLUTION. A book both prosaic and problematic? Like the colonization movement, VanSickle’s review is full of contradictions. VanSickle’s review is reminiscent of the colonization movement in other ways. Indeed, there is a curious similarity between nineteenth century colonizationists and the scholars who study them: some scholars, like the colonizationists, often hold convictions so strongly that they remain impervious to evidence and arguments that challenge their preconceived notions. 176. Kirsten E. Wood responds to review of MASTERFUL WOMEN: SLAVEHOLDING WIDOWS FROM THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR H-SHEAR (May 10, 2005). HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE Consider the question of how reports from Liberia influenced the colonization movement in America. Clearly, settler accounts not only shaped the thinking of would-be emancipators and prospective emigrants, they also irked proslavery southerners who protested as scores of Liberian letters, sojourners, recruiters, and refugees circulated through the South. There is abundant evidence on the matter, yet VanSickle opines that the chapter on Liberia is unrelated to the rest of the book, that it does not bear on the question of the ACS’s impact on slavery. Proslavery southerners knew better. As Edmund Ruffin seethed in 1859, when colonizationists urged would-be manumittees to emigrate, bad things happened: “Such lessons, when designed to operate on one individual, and even without having direct effect on that one, may reach hundreds of others, to the injury of their contentment, and their worth as laborers and slaves.”177 Finally, there’s the matter of historiography. I am not, as VanSickle suggests, the first scholar since Philip Staudenraus (1961) to argue that colonization undermined slavery. While many Civil Rights Era historians questioned the ACS’s antislavery credentials, more recent scholars have reconsidered the matter. William Freehling, Douglas Egerton, Peter Onuf, and Elizabeth Varon, among many, many others, have analyzed the ways in which colonization impaired (and aided) slavery. To overlook their important work would be remiss. Put another way, I wrote SLAVERY AND THE PECULIAR SOLUTION while standing on the shoulders of giants. And I had a lot of company up there. In the past few years, there has been an outpouring of scholarship on colonization. Since 2000, seven books have been published on the subject, not to mention a host of articles and dissertations. With the hope of abetting work on colonization, I would like to call H-net subscribers’ attention to my ACS Database, which contains information on 560 ACS emancipators, the 6,000 slaves they liberated, the 9,000 free blacks who also moved to Liberia, the counties in which they resided, and the emigrants’ experiences in Africa. Ultimately, I will put this database on the Web. In the meantime, I would be happy to provide data for H-net members who are working on the colonization movement. In conclusion, I would like to thank H-SHEAR, Dr. VanSickle, and all the scholars who have helped me over the years, giant or otherwise. ======From: “Charles Irons” I learned a great deal from Eric Burin’s SLAVERY AND THE PECULIAR SOLUTION and was therefore disappointed to read Professor VanSickle’s clumsy review. Professor VanSickle makes two, related missteps in his comments. First, while he recognizes the importance of Burin’s treatment of “ACS activities at the local level,” he substantially ignores that contribution in his review. Second, he oversimplifies Burin’s characterization of the ACS as an antislavery organization. Burin acknowledges the well-known proslavery convictions of Randolph and Clay but shows that the ACS could be functionally antislavery in its operation no matter how compromised the emancipationist message was from those at the center. Colonization was often functionally antislavery precisely 177. De Bow’s Review 27 (July 1859): 65. HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE because of those “activities on the local level” which VanSickle ignores. Each manumission, as Burin shows, pulled scores of black and white Southerners into a series of negotiations about the fate of the manumittee. As Burin puts it, “The tug-and-pull between slaves, their owners, and other parties rendered their liberations logistically complex, financially troublesome, legally complicated, and, at times, socially disruptive enterprises. ... Like pebbles dropped in water, ACS manumissions rippled outward, destabilizing slavery in their wake” (5). VanSickle wants to put colonization firmly in the proslavery column. Burin, on the other hand, acknowledges ideological diversity in the movement’s leadership. Moreover, he shows how manumitted men and women so complicated colonization’s operations on the local level that colonization often assumed an antislavery character in spite of itself. Charles Irons Elon University ======From: Jackie Bacon [mailto:[email protected]] I am concerned that much is being missed in this discussion of the ACS — mainly, the fact that African Americans (with a few exceptions that have been well documented) responded to the ACS very strongly, extensively, and negatively. Any discussion of the ACS’s efforts that does not try to understand black opposition on its own terms is incomplete. Burin mentions very briefly that most African Americans did not support colonization, but if we are asking whether it was an emancipatory organization, we must explore fully the critiques by free black spokespeople of the ACS. It is obvious that if most free blacks opposed it, it can hardly be called unequivocally antislavery; slavery was, as the editors of Freedom’s Journal, the first black newspaper, insisted, a central issue for both free and enslaved blacks in the United States. African Americans of the time were not simply making general statements about colonization but very thoroughly critiqued the ACS’s positions in detail; these arguments are extant for scholars to study (and there is also secondary literature on the topic). If we are truly to understand the ACS’s effects on slavery and freedom, we must read antebellum blacks’ arguments against it. What emerges from such an examination is clear: the ACS cannot be considered antislavery unless a very narrow (and basically meaningless) definition of “antislavery” is adopted that would not fit with how most antebellum African Americans saw slavery or how most scholars of African American history view it. Slavery, black abolitionists stressed, was not just a matter of individual manumissions and terms of bondage — it was a system, an institution. So to say that any organization was antislavery that did not treat slavery as an institution is to adopt a narrow perspective that renders the term “antislavery” meaningless. As most of us know, individual judges in various locales freed some slaves sent into their courts and kept others in bondage. Were these judges “antislavery” when they freed certain slaves? No — they just saw each case individually and supported slaves in some cases, slaveholders in others. So, too, with the ACS HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE manumissions. African Americans made the point clearly and unequivocally that the ACS’s fundamental contention — that African Americans could never be full citizens of the United States — was offensive and racist. They also argued that it was a perspective that enabled, if not endorsed slavery. Because this perspective apologized for and enabled racism, it was part of the system of slavery that oppressed all African Americans, slave and free. They also argued clearly that even if some people were freed, the fact that they then were sent to Liberia meant that those still in bondage lost some potential support (since free blacks were advocates for slaves). It is problematic to suggest that the ACS could be antislavery even though there were slaveholders with prominent positions. Nineteenth-century African Americans responded to this argument, which was often made by ACS apologists, clearly and unequivocally: it was misleading and disingenuous. An early contributor to Freedom’s Journal remarked, “Any plan, which implies in our brethren or their descendants, inferiority, or carries with it the idea that they cannot be raised to respectable standing in this country . . . is wholly at war with our best interests, and we cannot view the Advocates of such sentiments, in any other light, than that of enemies, whatever their principles may be.” Because ACS rhetoric continually described African Americans negatively, this contributor said, it was “increasing prejudice” and “retarding the cause of emancipation.” Free blacks did not see themselves or their enslaved brethren as individuals whose bondage or freedom in each case stood alone. They saw themselves as part of a community, slave and free, with the effects on one group impinging on the lives and experiences of the other. African Americans believed fundamentally that even if some individual slaves were freed by the ACS, the overall prejudice and oppression that was at the root of the organization’s philosophy made the situation in the United States worse for all free and enslaved blacks. In addition, the coercive aspect of the organization should not be overlooked; by arguing that only in Africa could American blacks be free, whites apologized for oppression and excused themselves from trying to change the racist institutions of the United States. This view did not allow blacks to be seen as free agents or as citizens. As another contributor to Freedom’s Journal argued, there was no need to spend “money in colonizing free people in Africa,” since they are already “free at home” and can, “if not satisfied here,” on their own “go where they may think best.” It is troubling to me that despite the admonitions of prominent scholars such as Nathan Huggins and John Hope Franklin, scholarship about nineteenth-century reform efforts directed at blacks does not fully consider their views. Burin does look at the views of those who did emigrate about their own freedom and their prospects, but an understanding of blacks’ views on the larger issue are necessary if we are to make any generalizations about the organization. The majority of African Americans who opposed colonization addressed the central question we seem to be now focused on with the ACS — was it antislavery in theory, practice, or function? Free blacks did not stand by while the ACS argued about their futures — they argued back, and in their HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE full discussions we can learn about what effect the organization had on them, on prejudice, and on slavery. There is much that is interesting and useful in Burin’s account — particularly the individual stories of manumissions and the focus on local histories. Both of these areas (local histories, narratives of ordinary people) are important to historians and interesting to readers. But to make an assessment of the ACS as “antislavery” is to take a leap — a leap which requires ignoring African Americans’ strong arguments that prove otherwise. It also raises the question of why some seem to be, almost two hundred years after its formation, concerned with casting an organization in a positive light whose rhetoric and plans were (and continue to be in their modern iterations) so offensive and detrimental. Jacqueline Bacon, Independent Scholar www.jacquelinebacon.com ======From: Clayton E. Cramer [mailto:[email protected]] >From: Jackie Bacon [mailto:[email protected]] African Americans made the point clearly and unequivocally that the ACS’s fundamental contention — that African Americans could never be full citizens of the United States — was offensive and racist. They also argued that it was a perspective that enabled, if not endorsed slavery. Because this perspective apologized for and enabled racism, it was part of the system of slavery that oppressed all African Americans, slave and free. They also argued clearly that even if some people were freed, the fact that they then were sent to Liberia meant that those still in bondage lost some potential support (since free blacks were advocates for slaves). It is problematic to suggest that the ACS could be antislavery even though there were slaveholders with prominent positions. While I understand Jackie’s concern, her point seems to be that because the ACS was built on racist assumptions, and served the interests of slaveholders, it could not be an antislavery organization. I am not sure that this is correct. Even among those who strongly opposed slavery there were many (especially in the early Republic period) who held assumptions of black racial inferiority that caused them to back colonization. Today, these ideas seem frighteningly reactionary; at the time, with white racial superiority a rising idea among intellectuals across the Western world, it was not at all difficult for some opponents of slavery to see the prospect of full racial equality as impossible. Even Jefferson, prone to what I would call excessive optimism about the potential for rational behavior by the masses, made that point: that the history of abuse under slavery and the white fear of retribution would preclude a society free and equal. Now, you can ascribe that to a slaveholder trying to justify in his own mind the maintenance of a system that prepared his meals, grew his crops, and kept his bed warm at night, but even among abolitionists with nothing to prevent them from looking in the mirror in the morning, you can see this widespread belief that the races were unequal, and would always be so — and yes, I’m thinking of UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, whose most “manly” blacks are those of mixed blood. Here’s a suggestion for another way to consider the ACS: a HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE confederation of Americans who buried their differences about slavery long enough to concentrate on what they perceived as a worthy goal — returning blacks to Africa. This would not be the first time that unlikely allies have come together on such matters. Consider the way in which the 1808 ban on imports came about, with a devil’s brew of abolitionists (who were morally opposed to slavery); slave owners who managed to rationalize HOLDING slaves, and even selling them from state to state — but found international slave trading objectionable; and those slave breeders who expected to make a good bit of money by passing what was effectively protectionist legislation, wiping out the cheap competition of fresh imports. Clayton E. Cramer [email protected] ======>From: Jackie Bacon [mailto:[email protected]] I am concerned that much is being missed in this discussion of the ACS — mainly, the fact that African Americans (with a few exceptions that have been well documented) responded to the ACS very strongly, extensively, and negatively. Any discussion of the ACS’s efforts that does not try to understand black opposition on its own terms is incomplete. Burin mentions very briefly that most African Americans did not support colonization, but if we are asking whether it was an emancipatory organization, we must explore fully the critiques by free black spokespeople of the ACS. It is obvious that if most free blacks opposed it, it can hardly be called unequivocally antislavery; slavery was, as the editors of Freedom’s Journal, the first black newspaper, insisted, a central issue for both free and enslaved blacks in the United States. [much sensible material cut] >But to make an assessment of the ACS as “antislavery” is to take a leap — a leap which requires ignoring African Americans’ strong arguments that prove otherwise. It also raises the question of why some seem to be, almost two hundred years after its formation, concerned with casting an organization in a positive light whose rhetoric and plans were (and continue to be in their modern iterations) so offensive and detrimental. I think Jackie’s argument points to the problem of trying to make the issue “pro” or “anti” slavery. Certainly, African Americans saw the project as relentlessly proslavery, in the specific sense that it strengthened the racial and legal hierarchies necessary to slavery. Meanwhile, however, many defenders of slavery perceived the colonization movement as antithetical to slavery and synonymous with abolitionism. Their argument (when they made one) was that it accepted the premise that slavery was bad. Like most political issues, slavery is not one that is well- captured through any kind of binary opposition. Some scholars have used taxonomies like “anti-slavery,” “anti- anti-slavery,” “proslavery.” Colonization would be in the category of “anti- anti-slavery.” But, I’m not sure that really helps — it’s almost as though one needs a matrix. One axis would be for how bad one thinks slavery is; another axis for how committed one is to a pragmatic policy that might actually end it. So, colonization HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE would be medium in terms of criticism of slavery, but no higher than rabid proslavery rhetors in terms of a realistic policy. (Personally, I like Kenneth Burke’s use of the term “prim irony” (for southerners who bemoaned a racism from which they benefitted and about which they did nothing). In my snarkier moments, I use the term “conscience swot” for colonization because it enabled people to feel better about themselves while not actually having any impact on the institution of slavery. I think colonization bears the same relation to abolition that self-proclaimed “white moderates” had to the Civil Rights movement. They were in its way.) For the authors about whom Jackie is writing, abolition of slavery was necessarily connected to civic inclusion of African Americans; the goal of colonization was explicitly to keep those two policies separated. More profoundly, colonization was about dealing with slavery in a way that wouldn’t upset the apple cart — racially, economically, or politically. It may have been mildly anti-slavery in sentiment (a claim about which I’m dubious), but it was proslavery in consequence. — Trish Roberts-Miller [email protected] ======From: Mark E. Dixon [mailto:[email protected]] “More profoundly, colonization was about dealing with slavery in a way that wouldn’t upset the apple cart — racially, economically, or politically.” The problem with upsetting apple carts is that they tend to fall on people. Like most, perhaps, I have some knowledge of historical niches that have caught my interest, but can’t claim comprehensive knowledge of anything. My peculiar little passion is Quaker history, so I know something of how some Quakers were — for a time — involved in colonization and why they later withdrew. Let’s consider a brief outline of their involvement in ACS. Quakers were slaveholders — even slave traders — in the colonial period, but through the 18th Century gradually evolved toward anti-slavery. By the Revolutionary era, the yearly meetings up and down the East Coast were making slaveowning a disownable offense. This was comparatively easy in states like Pennsylvania where the idea that one could be both black and free was well- established and a sizeable community of free blacks existed. It was not so easy in southern states in which it was illegal to free a slave. When North Carolina Quakers began to free their slaves, for instance, the 1777 legislature toughened an earlier (1741) law that manumissions were permissible only for meritorious service and that the slaves thus freed had to leave the state within six months or be seized and resold. The 1777 amendment allowed illegally freed slaves to be picked up and resold immediately. For 50 years, North Carolina Quakers got around this law by making the church itself the blacks’ owner of record while allowing them to live freely — or at least as freely as possible, given the time and place. In 1827, however, a North Carolina Supreme Court decision broke through the subterfuge. Writing for the majority, the chief justice wrote, “When Quakers hold slaves, nothing but the name is wanting to render it at once a complete emancipation.” The HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE court ruled that, since Quakers’ opposition to slavery was well known, neither Quakers as individuals nor their meetings could be slaveowners. In the face of these facts, what were the North Carolina Quakers and their “property” to do in 1827? The Quakers didn’t want to be slaveowners and the blacks didn’t want to be slaves. Should the Quakers have swallowed their qualms to prevent the blacks from being sold to worse masters? Should the blacks have asked the Quakers to take them back for the same reason? Should the blacks have abandoned their family ties and moved to free states (which didn’t want them either)? Given the situation, I think it’s not surprising that North Carolina Quakers threw themselves into alliance with ACS. They sent agents to explain the colonization plan to blacks (who could choose to go, or not) and Quakers across the country helped raise money for it. According to 19th Century historian Stephen Weeks, relations with ACS were so intimate that North Carolina Yearly Meeting was practically its “collection agency.” Several Quaker-funded ships left North Carolina ports, including the “Nautilus” which, in 1832, carried 164 emigrants to Liberia from the counties of Perquimans, Pasquotank and Wayne. I have no doubt that black leaders of the era probably frowned on all this. They were focused on upsetting the “apple cart” — specifically on fighting slavery as an institution and creating a place for free blacks in America. Sending blacks out of the country wouldn’t further those goals. That’s what leaders do: Focus on the big picture and discount the effect on individuals. Individuals, however, do what is best for themselves. In the case of many North Carolina blacks “owned” by Quakers, colonization seemed like the best alternative. I can’t fault their decision, or those who helped them. Mark E. Dixon, www.markedixon.com HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2016. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: April 21, 2017 HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.