Annette Gordon-Reed, in the New Yorker, on “Twelve Years A Slave”:
American history is a contentious subject, familiar terrain for culture wars that dispute the meaning of the past and what it says about the nature of our country. Who gets to write our history? How should it be written? What do we accept as evidence? Which historical voices should be deemed legitimate? These questions are particularly fraught when one is dealing with past atrocities, like America’s racially based system of chattel slavery. Guilt, denial, shame, anger, and fear are just a few of the emotions that permeate discussions of the topic, as the legacies of slavery continue to shape the race relations and political structure of our nation.
Then there is history’s cruel irony: the individuals who bore the brunt of the system—the enslaved—lived under a shroud of enforced anonymity. The vast majority could neither read nor write, and they therefore left behind no documents, which are lifeblood of the historian’s craft. The voices that we would most like to hear—the voices that we most need to hear—are silent. This is why the narratives of the relatively few enslaved people who managed to tell their story loom large: Olaudah Equiano, in the eighteenth century, and Henry Bibb, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Solomon Northup, in the nineteenth century.
Northup’s narrative, “Twelve Years a Slave,” which the director Steve McQueen has brought to life on the big screen, to stunning effect, vividly conveys the realities of life within the peculiar institution…
Omnes Omnibus
The cliche that history is written by the victors is probably better expressed as history is written by the literate. If your voice isn’t recorded, scholars can’t hear your voice.
FlipYrWhig
Olaudah Equiano’s narrative is great stuff. I’ve been saying it should be a movie for, like, 10 years. He’s very, VERY patriotically British.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
Sorry, you guys, but I have to practice for a big work presentation tonight, so someone else is going to have to battle our new troll.
I’m looking forward to the movie, but I’ll throw this bit of red meat out there: is it weird that this movie about the United States was made by a British director and stars a mostly British cast? Or did we need an outsider to take the story on for us?
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Yeah, this is Drex bait. And outsiders frequently have a better view.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Eh, it ain’t like the Brits weren’t knee deep in the slave trade for centuries themselves. Maybe an American crew can make the movie of the Zong incident.
Tommy
My father’s PhD is in Civil War history. He jokes I am the most photographed child next to a Civil War cannon.
When maybe you went to Disney World for summer vacation, I went to Civil War battle fields. We walked them with my father the most animated I ever saw him telling me and my mom what happened.
I don’t recall the place, maybe Antieum, we went into a house and he told me it was the “hospital.” That out of the second story window the legs and arms they hacked off came up to the window.
I think the neo-confederates think fondly of those times. They were not “fun” times. As Ken Burns says in the open of his series on this topic “Americans slaughtered each other wholesale ….”
My family years and years ago owned slaves (I hate to admit that). But at some point we got a clue. This was wrong. I am about the most non-violent person you will find, but when I see a Confederate flag, I want to throw a punch.
Omnes Omnibus
@FlipYrWhig: Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and outlawed slavery in 1833. They got the drop on us.
Liquid
I saw Gravity in 3d at the IMAX. Ho-lee…shit, it was absolutely goddamn awesome! But I suppose 12 Years A Slave will win everything.
lamh36
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): I posted a video a while back from McQueen where is was at a round table of directors all American and white I believe except McQueen and the subject came up about diversity in American cinema.
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yeah. But the much bigger difference, in my opinion, is that when the British government finally outlawed slavery, that didn’t cause half of Britain to rise up in revolution. (Heck, our bigots didn’t even wait that long – the mere election of an anti-slavery candidate was all it took to trigger the war).
FlipYrWhig
@Omnes Omnibus: True, but, you know, before they curtailed it, they had already perfected it. They had the foresight to keep the worst stuff thousands of miles away from home. Then they turned humanitarian — yay! — in no small part to stick it to the French: “Oh yeah, you think you’re so much freer and equal-er than us? Well we just finally had a successful vote about regulating the slave trade, so there!”
mclaren
It’s possible that a British director & stars were more easily able to get financing for this kind of movie because they would prove less vulnerable to threats of boycotts from southern moviegoers and corporations based in the deep South of America.
Then again, Quentin Tarantino seems to have had no trouble getting financing for his film, so I’m not sure that a hypothetical southern boycott is realistic.
It remains a fact, though, that American history as taught today in the deep South continues to emphasize the assertion that the Civil War (which they call “The war of Northern aggression,” ignoring the inconvenient fact that the South fired first on the Union outpost at Fort Sumter) allegedly resulted from a struggle for “states’ rights” and supposedly had nothing to do with slavery. So historically accurate films about slavery probably won’t win a lot of friends in the deep South.
Omnes Omnibus
@FlipYrWhig: Can you point out a society before the 19th century that did not depend on slaves or serfs?
FlipYrWhig
@Chris: Revolution was a dirty word in Great Britain. They were cracking down on radicals left and right, rooting out activists, accusing them of conspiring with revolutionary France (probably because a lot of them WERE conspiring with revolutionary France)… Basically the conservative mobs were already busy smashing up pro-French intellectuals and reformers to get angry all over again about slavery that was happening thousands of miles away.
mclaren
@Omnes Omnibus:
Because Britain got started on the Industrial Revolution much earlier than America. The Maudslay Lathe, first machine tool precise enough to build other machine tools, was invented in Britain in 1798 and kick-started the Industrial Revolution. America was relatively late to that game.
FlipYrWhig
@Omnes Omnibus: no, but that wasn’t the point. I just don’t want Britain to get a pass as an outsider to the whole subject of black slavery. And I’m like a raving Anglophile!
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: The move from owning to oppressing was actually progress.
FlipYrWhig
@Chris: maybe the difference is that early c19 British reactionaries were more consumed by anti-left hatred and early c19 US reactionaries by racist hatred.
James E. Powell
@Omnes Omnibus:
Can you point out a society before the 19th century that did not depend on slaves or serfs?
I am sure we could find a few so long as we keep the definitions of “a society” and “depend on” flexible.
But your larger point is correct. The pre-industrial economies featured forced labor of all kinds. See, e.g., Corvée systems.
mclaren
@FlipYrWhig:
Not if you were a Puritan, bucko.
We Americans tend to forget that Britain underwent a relatively peaceful revolution (compared to France, Russia, et al.) which deposed their king and set up a republican form of government under the quasi-military dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell in 1649.
The Glorious Revolution: England in the 17th century
There remains a great movie to be made about Oliver Cromwell. Alas, the 1969 film wasn’t it.
FlipYrWhig
@Omnes Omnibus: how they pulled it off is really pretty amazing, politically speaking, with the inside/outside campaign, involving women and evangelicals, cranking out testimonials… Cool stuff.
Omnes Omnibus
@FlipYrWhig: Okay, they just started fixing the problem before we did. OTOH, what the Chartists wanted around 1840, the US has already done.
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren:
We don’t often agree, but here we do.
FlipYrWhig
@mclaren: Well, there’s also 1688, which sets up all the stuff Americans say about their/our revolution (limited government, power of the people, etc.). But during the debate over the slave trade, abolitionists had to try pretty hard to distance themselves from Jacobins and radicals, who were under surveillance, restricted by law, all kinds of stuff. Revolutions were something frogs and Yanks did.
mclaren
@Omnes Omnibus:
Easily. For the vast majority of human history, humans formed societies made up of hunter-gatherers. No private property, no salaries, no money, no work, people spent a couple of hours per day picking berries and the rest of the time having sex, making music, etc. Slavery, or, indeed, bosses and work, represent very recent and highly aberrant novelties.
A post-capitalist society may well resemble the hunter-gatherer societies of the distant past.
Gian
@mclaren:
which is why Cromwell is remembered in Ireland to this day?
FlipYrWhig
@Omnes Omnibus: yes, good point!
I always like how muddled slavery gets as a concept for c18 Anglophones, because it’s both this plantation labor system and the opposite of liberty. All that Tea Party stuff about Obama the enslaver… that hits the same weird seam.
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: Let me substitute civilization for society. Okay? Anyway, you got my point from the start.
FlipYrWhig
@mclaren: Conflict-free, non-competitive hunter-gatherer societies? I’m not so sure about that.
FlipYrWhig
Anyhoo, on that note, I’m outski.
Omnes Omnibus
@FlipYrWhig: God, I expected that tonight’s faux-intellectual troll was going to be Drexiiya. I guess I was wrong.
mclaren
@FlipYrWhig:
Depends which group of hunter-gatherers you discuss. The Sioux practice of counting coup seems fairly non-violent. It’d be fun if sometime in the future, world militarities “fought” wars that way, by digitally counting coup. But if you’re talking about the Yanomamo, that’s a different story.
mclaren
@Omnes Omnibus:
I think Paul Ryan has already retired that jersey permanently.
mclaren
Speaking of trollery…here’s a glimpse of the awesomeness that was the Clinton years.
And I’m outa here…
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: Nah, you are still in the running.
SarahT
So has anyone here actually SEEN the movie yet ? I’m going today and pretty much can’t wait.
Origuy
@mclaren: The Glorious Revolution was the ascension of William of Orange as William III in 1688, but Cromwell’s revolution was from 1642-1651 and hundreds of thousands died in Britain and Ireland from war and disease during that time. As Gian alluded, it is often referred to as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, because it took place in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Over 600,000 people died in Ireland alone from war, disease, and famine.
On another matter, while it’s true that the United Kingdom outlawed slavery in 1833, British companies continued to operate in Cuba and Brazil, owning slaves until those countries outlawed it in 1886 and 1888, respectively.
JordanRules
@lamh36: Yep I remember you posting that and it was interesting that the subjects of American diversity in that industry and how him being British played into getting this movie made, came up.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@FlipYrWhig:
Yep. When neighboring groups of hunter-gatherers bumped into each other and disputed whose right it was to hunt and/or gather in the borderalands, things did not always end happily. Hell, get to close to North Sentinel Island today and the hunter-gatherers there are probably just going to start firing arrows at your ass.
Radio One
as far as history goes, I’d love to see a tv show or movie about Irene of Athens from the Byzantine era dark ages..http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_of_Athens
Why hasn’t this story been told yet in a modern way?
Spaghetti Lee
@mclaren:
Well gee, McL, you paint such a pretty picture.
handsmile
@Omnes Omnibus:
Just strolling on through here, but I left you (and Valdivia) a fiction recommendation on the Cambridge Five at the unspooled end of AL’s “Security Theatrics” post thread.
Spaghetti Lee
Everything I’ve heard about 12 Years makes it sound like an absolutely brutal experience. Call me a wimp, but I think I’d rather avoid it.
Omnes Omnibus
@handsmile: Thanks. I will look for it.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Spaghetti Lee:
Oh, I dunno. It’s been close to 400 years since the institution was introduced to these shores, and we’re still living with brutal after-effects of it even though we outlawed it nearly 150 years ago. Better to confront it than to avoid it, IMO.
Spaghetti Lee
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
“Need” is a strong word, but a new perspective is never a bad thing.
Matthew B.
@FlipYrWhig: As a descendant of Grenadian slaves, I’d say Steve McQueen in particular does get a pass.
JordanRules
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Agreed about facing the music and really listening to it. We’re still living with the brutal after-effects and benefits.
Though I’m weary of seeing any movie that dredges up lots of stuff so I get it.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Liquid:
Sandra Bullock will still win best actress. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a Best Picture/Best Director split with “12 Years” getting Best Picture and Cuaron getting Best Director. The Academy might figure that McQueen still has his whole career ahead of him and it’s time for Cuaron to win for his body of work up until now.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@JordanRules:
From what I’ve read, the film does a lot to damage the myth of the “good” slave-master. If for that alone, it’s going to get my money.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@JordanRules:
I’ve been running around recommending people give the 1943 film “I Walked With A Zombie” a second look because the underlying theme of the film is that the Holland family is rotting from within because they built their wealth on owning slaves and continue to manipulate their descendants for the family’s benefit. It’s pretty blatant for 1943, and the great Theresa Harris gets a meaty part for once. Plus it’s a fun, spooky little movie in itself.
The prophet Nostradumbass
There hasn’t been a recent open thread, so.. have you seen this Daily Show segment from last night? Amazing.
? Martin
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Nobody who needs to see the film will see the film. And if they do, they’ll toss it on the Holocaust denial pile.
Drexciya
Thank you for posting about this, Anne. I think there are (and will be) other articles to highlight in the future and that it’s a discussion that shouldn’t stop here. I’m too tired to argue and defend myself anymore today, guys, so I’ll just share these discussions on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show and offer a reminder that, regardless of McQueen’s nationality (which is an important issue, actually), this is the first film about slavery that was directed by a black person. And the first film about slavery that was based on an actual first hand account of the subject.
This is how long it took. And American blacks are still restricted from doing it themselves.
ETA: I think some of you who are reluctant to see it owe it to more than your own sensibilities to view it and to absorb the black discussion surrounding it. You should also be mindful of the emotional reaction that your fellow countrymen have to seeing it and why it’s there, what it’s based on, and what makes it so raw. Your progress is not our progress.
TheMightyTrowel
I’ll talk your ears bloody about pre-20th century societies which did not feature slavery, but I could talk equally long about how there is/was no such thing as utopia and all societies at all levels of industrialisation have featured and continue to feature some variation of coerced labour – whether that coercion took/takes place through social stimatisation, violence or economic marginalisation depends on the people, the place and the era.
That said, chattel slavery as introduced in the post-medieval period and perfected during the dawn of the industrial era has no match before or since and is among the ugliest of our human innovations.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@TheMightyTrowel:
IIRC (I think from David Blight’s Civil War class on iTunes U), what the US came up with was the “innovation” of race-based slavery. No previous society had made it easy to identify who was or was not a slave based solely on race (which is why it was easy for a free black man like Solomon Northup to be sold into slavery — everyone assumed he must be a slave because he was of African descent). Did I hear that correctly?
Drexciya
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
No, we didn’t.
scav
I seem to remember some nicely elevated rates of murder in hunter-gather societies and enough studies into same that one could get an entire animated course out of it. Granted, Chagnon spent a fair bit of it going after the it’s all about the protein theories (he going through a phase of blaming it on women I seem to remember) but anyone with an experience of small towns is probably well-versed in the issue of festering and long memories in a small society. But ah yes, the happy golden age of peace and environmental H&G balance. Ag is hard work, but it’s not exactly the single bite that doomed us all.
JordanRules
@TheMightyTrowel: The peculiar institution indeed.
Emerald
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): I don’t think they cared whether blacks were free or not. Remember that the sainted Robert E. Lee captured about 200 free blacks and shipped them south into slavery during his little sojourn into Pennsylvania when he supposedly was looking for shoes.
Kinda give you some perspective about his wrenching decision of whether to join the north or the south, doesn’t it?
And yeah, that David Blight Yale course is outstanding! Everybody should watch, or listen, to that.
JordanRules
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): I’d love a modern interpretation of that. Pre-code right? Another fascinnating angle of wonder WRT how the story-telling industry progressed and what could have been moved into the pop culture cloud.
JordanRules
@TheMightyTrowel: Am I mistaken in believing there was some big shift to societal patriarchies? I’ve often wondered where that shift fits in with fuedalism and industrialism.
TheMightyTrowel
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): the other major innovation of the post-medieval period (or the European imperialist period as many non Europeans style it) is the chattel end of chattel slavery – the idea that a person could become a thing and would exist as a thing with no chance of freedom unless under extraordinary circumstances. Prior to the invention of chattel slavery, slaves, as such, were often only slaves for a period of time – it was recognised that the state of slavery was not final and that many would pass into and out of that state. the children of slaves were rarely slaves in their own right (although that depended on the society) and their reproductive capacity was not controlled in the way African originating chattel slaves were treated.
ETA: serfdom under feudal societies operated more like chattel slavery than earlier slave systems did, but was also a totally different thing in its own right and really can’t be compared without dismissing a great deal of what made chattel slavery so horrific.
TheMightyTrowel
@JordanRules: you’re mistaken. there’s a lot of bad feminist hoo haw from the 1960s about matriarchal utopias and then bang agriculture and bang patriarchy. it’s all rubbish.
Anne Laurie
@Spaghetti Lee:
That’s what DVDs are for. I’ll admit there’s some movies (including documentaries like Inside Job) that I have to watch in ten-minute snatches, even though I strongly believe I should watch them.
Spaghetti Lee
@Emerald:
Even limiting it to people who aren’t neo-confederate sympathizers or slavery apologists, I don’t understand the patina of nobility that the Confederacy seems to have acquired. They broke up the country rather than give up their right to own human beings as property. It should not be hard to identify who the good guys and bad guys were here. If you, say, read a book about two fictional countries and one of them was a rigid aristocracy that practiced chattel slavery, you wouldn’t expect the author to cast them as the good guys and mount a passionate defense of how justified they were and how noble they were.
One particular case that I remember even years later is a high school history teacher who was the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who survived Stalin’s attempted genocide, and who could talk passionately and at length about how horrible that was. I point that out because she should at least have a little perspective, more than her 15-year-old charges, about how it feels to know that your entire ethnic group was once marked for death by the forces of tyranny. She once said that Robert E. Lee was the most admirable figure in the Civil War, a real tragic hero. Never wanted to spill blood but felt honor-bound to protect his homeland, and all that. And I cannot hear those arguments without pointing out, again and again, that Lee’s (or anyone’s) tragic hero-ness came from their desire to keep owning slaves. That should be, in any civilized world, a discussion killer. I do not understand-it literally does not make sense to me-how so many otherwise decent people (and this teacher wasn’t otherwise crazy or mean) fall for this stuff.
JordanRules
@TheMightyTrowel: Word. Makes sense and I’m aware of why I kept coming back to thinking about it. ‘When we were Queens’ comfort.
JordanRules
@Spaghetti Lee: Blind spots, we all have them. It’s just that sooo many have this one. Makes you wonder if there is something gained from it as a communal blind spot.
TheMightyTrowel
@JordanRules: There’s a lot of self-empowering wish fulfillment 2nd wave feminist fist shaking around it. Subsequent waves of feminist thought – and particularly the adoption of intersectional and gender non-essentialist perspectives – have highlighted that the idea that Ladies=peaceful is just as damaging as Dudes=Violent because it traps women in traditionally (white, western) female roles. Also, it excludes kick ass ladies like Boudicca from our Pantheon of hot shit lady leaders. There’s a lot of shit written about gender in the ancient past, I try to do my best to navigate through it and since my specialist areas of study are weapons and ornaments i do a lot of shouting.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@JordanRules:
“Zombie” is not Pre-Code, but it was a B-movie, and B movies could often sneak things under the radar because they were less scrutinized than the A movies. Especially when the director and actors were able to convey some of the subtext that couldn’t be put on the page through the performances.
I wish Pre-Code movies were just as modern about race as they were about sex but, sadly, they generally were not. I can’t force myself through to the end of “The Bitter Tea of General Yen” just because the racial politics are so creepy. The most you can hope for in a Pre-Code movie is that you won’t throw your back out cringing at the stereotypes.
Spaghetti Lee
@JordanRules:
Makes you wonder if there is something gained from it as a communal blind spot.
Interesting way of putting it. Much of the South is getting more diverse and cosmopolitan these days, so people who are experiencing that think it doesn’t match up with the ‘blood-soaked slavedriver’ image and induce that the Southerners back in the day must not have been that bad either. And if you’re from the South or have lots of friends and family there, obviously you don’t want to see them as monsters and the traditions and culture you have as evil and built on suffering, so you compartmentalize. That’s a pretty universal human thing to do, it seems. And we couldn’t function day to day as a culture if Northerners and Southerners were literally at each other’s throats. So I suppose that’s a pragmatic benefit. Probably some combination of that.
Emerald
@Spaghetti Lee: They think it’s romantic. The Lost Cause, and all that.
And many of them will argue forever that the war was never about slavery.
Yeah. Right. Just read the documents the states produced when they seceded. South Carolina’s mentions slavery 18 times (a factoid I learned from that David Blight course). They only cared about one “state’s right” –their “right” to own slaves.
Just as the neo-confederates care about only one thing: keeping Those People in their place. Look at every one of their policies. That’s what it’s about.
Matthew B.
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
You should probably give The Bitter Tea of General Yen another shot. It’s the only film of its era I’ve seen that actually confronts and satirises stereotypes of Asian men; it doesn’t completely escape stereotyping of its own, but it’s a lot more thoughtful than you might expect. It’s actually the only Capra film I really like.
fuckwit
@lamh36: For some reason, I thought Steve McQueen had blue eyes. And wrecked Mustangs in San Francisco in the 1970s.
NotMax
@Matthew B.
While a product of its time, the film does make stabs at deconstructing cliche and stereotype, probably a strong reason why it was not a success at the box office.
My beef with it is that there are occasions when Stanwyck seems to be floundering about, unsure or undecided on her character (those scenes seem also to be when her Brooklyn accent becomes more prominent).
NotMax
@fuckwit
That was Steve McQueen, not Steve McQueen.
/Zathras
JPL
@Emerald: A good friend bought into the states’ rights crap and finally I told her to read the secession papers from individual states. State’s rights was used as an excuse to honor the Confederate Flag. Laws mandated the return of slaves to the rightful owner. In 1850 legislation was passed to tighten up on the return of slaves. There was no protection for non-slaves to be returned to free states, at least, that I know of.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
The US didn’t come up with it. It was a Portuguese invention- in the 1440s they started bringing African slaves up from the slave markets in the Lagos as they were exploring the coast of Africa. Then they and the Spanish brought those African slaves to the Western Hemisphere in the first half of the 16th century because the natives were dying off from their lack of immunity to Old World diseases- their belief was that sub-Saharan Africans were better suited to the tropical conditions than enslaved peoples from Europe and the Mediterranean Basin.
What is an American invention is racism. In case you haven’t seen Tim Wise speaking on it, here he is.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@JPL:
Damned straight. “States Rights” as a cause for the insurrection was a post-war fabrication, a fallback to Calhoun’s nullification arguments during his 1832 campaign for his eventual Senate seat. That argument was all about tariffs. Andrew Jackson was no fan of the tariffs, but he was dead-set against nullification, and threatened the use of military force should South Carolina work to nullify the laws. South Carolina backed off a bit, and Henry Clay came up with a compromise.
Big difference though is that there was never a serious discussion in South Carolina during that crisis concerning secession. Revolution was mentioned by the hotheads, but not secession. And slavery didn’t come into play at all.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@The prophet Nostradumbass: The interviewee, the “Rush Limbaugh of Western North Carolina”, has been forced out of his position as a precinct chair. Again.
xenos
@scav: Getting in before the professional Anthropologists, I have got to correct a few things: 1) the Yanomamo were not hunter-gatherers, but horticulturalists (who are often much more prone to violence and warfare than agriculturalists – see, eg. highland PNG), 2) Chagnon, intentionally and unintentionally, stimulated most of the violence he witnessed, 3) Hunter-gatherers are notable for a lack of intra-group violence. Inter-group violence is not unusual, especially when limited resources are at stake.
xenos
@TheMightyTrowel:
You really ought to break it down into to categories, the sugar plantations of the 16-18th centuries, which was as much about genocide as it was commodity production in a mercantalist world economy, and the post-cotton gin plantation economy in the US South, which was more a matter of an internal colonialism in support of the industrial revolution and the growth of capitalism. The financial bubble of slave prices in the 1830s to 1850s ended up implicating many more people in the slave economy than just the big plantation owners.
Betty Cracker
@Spaghetti Lee:
Universal and human, as you noted. If you’re an American — from any state — you owe your incredibly luxurious (by global standards) lifestyle in part to a bipartisan international loot and pillage campaign that has been waged on your behalf for many decades. Governments have been toppled, villages wiped out, fledgling democracies undermined, etc., all so corporations can sell you cheap fruit at a profit.
And yet people get all misty about the shining example of freedom that is America. And let’s not forget the genocide perpetrated against Native Americans, repackaged and romanticized as the taming of the West by plucky American pioneers.
xenos
@Betty Cracker:
Which brings us around to Ender’s Game, just a week before release. But that is another bucket of formics, really.
Matt McIrvin
@Spaghetti Lee: Isn’t that patina of Confederate nobility partly the result of the takeover of American Civil War/Reconstruction historiography by the Dunning School in the early 20th century (which itself came out of the same cultural trends that produced Birth of a Nation and the revival of the KKK)? It’s an interesting case of history being written by the losers.
Patricia Kayden
@FlipYrWhig: Never heard of this incident before. Thanks for sharing. But no, I wouldn’t want to watch a film about something so depressing.
Cassidy
@mclaren: This is just stupid. No one here calls it the “War of Northern Aggression”. That’s a myth perpetuated by too much tv. While there have been people in modern times who called it that, they are increasingly rare and old. There are plenty of problems in the South. Making shit up and perpetuating tv stereotypes is just dumb.
The biggest problem you run into is the evangelical and libertarian types who become teachers and teach the “states rights” angle without the proper context.
Woodrowfan
The WPA recorded oral history interviews with some elderly ex-slaves in the 1930s. You can find them online at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snintro00.html
One of the most interesting is a set of two, one recorded by a white interviewer, one (apparently) by an AA interviewer. The ex-slave’s account of what her former master was like is very different in each case…
Woodrowfan
@Cassidy: How about “The Late Unpleasantness”?? ;)
Paul in KY
@mclaren: The ‘Taker’ society, that supplanted the ‘Leaver’ society.
Paul in KY
@mclaren: Most American Indian tribes also practiced ‘torture for sport’. The Leaver society wasn’t all fun & edenlike.
dr. luba
@Spaghetti Lee: I too am the Ukrainian daughter of a genocide survivor; my grandfather was shot as a kurkul after survivng the Holdomor (famine-genocide).
I’ve never understood why so many of my fellow Ukrainians have fallen for the GOP line and why so many are racists (and not just the older generation). They were discriminated against when they came over, as immigrants and “hunkies,” and the GOP actively worked to prevent their immigration in the post-war period. I uess everyone needs someone to feel superior to.
I had one (otherwise nice) younger immigrant woman tell me that she couldn’t understand why the US wouldn’t let in more white Ukrainian doctors instead of all those (black) Indian doctors. It’s becasue they’re competent and speak English was my response.
handsmile
@Matt McIrvin:
The success of the Dunning School was an important factor in burnishing the “patina of Confederate nobility,” but it was part of a broader intellectual and social movement, both in the North and the South, committed to that objective in the decades following the Civil War.
Several commenters above cited the historian David Blight. His magisterial book, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, examines how the desire for reconciliation engendered a “culture of reunion” in which myths were created and memories distorted, romantic representations and sentimental interpretations replacing reality on the causes and consequences of the Civil War. With impressive, indeed comprehensive, detail, Blight analyzes the formation of the now-conventional national memory of the Civil War and its adverse impact upon race relations in the US. Groundbreaking upon its publication in 2001, the book remains influential (Drew Gilpin Faust’s recent This Republic of Suffering is openly indebted to it).
http://www.amazon.com/Race-Reunion-Civil-American-Memory/dp/0674008197
Thanks to many commenters above for such an enjoyable and informative thread!
Cassidy
@Woodrowfan: Post-Civil War people did use that kind of terminology, but it’s very rare in our more modern time. It’s a tv trope. Honestly, in my 35 years, I’ve yet to meet someone who actually used those kinds of terms in serious conversation and I’ve been all over the South. Hell, my current job involves a bunch of South Georgia boys and casual racial slurs and they don’t call it that.
Woodrowfan
@Cassidy: I know, my mother’s family is southern. i was teasing. :)
Chris
@Spaghetti Lee:
Yeah. I fucking hate the whole “Civil War as tragedy” meme. It’s a tragedy in the sense that every war is a tragedy – you know, all the dead people and other forms of damage that inevitably come from war, however righteous – but beyond that there’s nothing unusually “tragic” about it. It’s on a level with World War Two in “just war” terms, arguably even more so.
If you really, really, REALLY want a rebellion against the U.S. government to cheer for, virtually every other one in history from the Indian wars on through the labor rebellions of the 20th century had a better justification behind it than “I want to keep owning slaves.”
Betty Cracker
@Cassidy: Didn’t some yahoo make a joke about “the War of Northern Aggression” in Congress recently? Maybe I’m mis-remembering, but I could swear that exact phrase was used in connection with some kind of public buffoonery fairly recently.
Still, your point stands: I’ve never heard anyone who isn’t an avowed and widely acknowledged crank use that term without irony, and I’ve spent my entire life in the South (rural FL counts), including during interactions with self-described redneck relatives from Alabama to the Carolinas.
Chris
@dr. luba:
I don’t know about Ukrainians specifically, but historically white Southerners and white urban immigrants have been on the same side a lot (they were the two pillars of the Democratic Party from the Civil War until the Great Depression).
I’ve always thought it was a “common enemies” thing. Southerners and white immigrants both disliked Yankees (e.g. Northern WASPs), the Southerners for obvious reasons, the immigrants because of the way they were treated when they got off the boat. And they both disliked black people, Southerners because they used to own them, urban white immigrants because they had to compete with them for the same low-wage jobs.
Joel
@Omnes Omnibus: Spain? Of course, they got their brutality on pretty seriously in South America. But they did abolish slavery in the 16th century.
schrodinger's cat
The British had indentured servitude, that is just a shade better than slavery, isn’t it? Plus they sent their undesirables to Australia, not to speak of what they did to the subjects of the Empire. So, not all that wonderful actually.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: I think we can safely say that no European country or its offshoots come of this discussion with any glory.
Matt McIrvin
@Cassidy:
I just encountered some fool on Facebook calling it that the day before yesterday. He was trying to cast Southern whites as a colonized people under the imperialist bootheel.
Mnemosyne
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
I think Wise and I are talking about the same thing, because he’s citing some of the same sources I’ve read. Basically, most slavery systems had some kind of escape route for the enslaved, whether it was being able to purchase their freedom, have children who were not automatically slaves, etc. The American system slowly closed off all of those avenues and created a race-based permanent slave class that was easily identifiable by their skin color. That was the unique innovation that the US created and, yes, it essentially caused us to have a race-based social class system even after slavery officially ended that still fucks with us to this day.
Aimai recommended a really fascinating book a few months ago called The Lost German Slave Girl. The case became a major cause celebre and is well-documented because it involved several different trials and lawsuits, and the whole thing hinged on whether Sally Miller was “really” white.
drkrick
Ta Nehisi Coates has talked about the Civil War as a phase in the 400 year American war on people of African descent, and how telling it is that the war becomes a tragedy only when white people are dying in large numbers.
schrodinger's cat
@Mnemosyne: The caste system is remarkably similar, the original Sanskrit word for caste, varna, literally means skin color. Centuries of living together has diluted the racial aspect in India but it is still remarkably difficult to get out the system.
ETA: There have been lower castes which suddenly gained stature in the hierarchy by being cannon fodder. The Nairs in Kerala come to mind.
schrodinger's cat
deleted since WP horked up the original comment.
Cassidy
@Woodrowfan: I hear ya. It’s just one of those things of living here. I don’t defend them. My honest opinion is that if you’re black or a woman, get the fuck out as fast as you can because these people have unofficially been told they can kill you and get away with it for years and just recently reaffirmed. There are so many problems and so much wrong shit down here on a daily basis and there is no fix to it short of a significant economic boom to everyone’s life. With all that’s wrong and easily documented, there is no need to play to stereotypes.
@Betty Cracker: That’s entirely possible, but I will say that even the people I know who are unashamed bigots would look at someone funny for using that phrase.
opiejeanne
@schrodinger’s cat:
I ran across this last week.
The Ethnic Cleansing Of Ireland. Between James I (he of the King James Version fame) and Oliver Cromwell, literally hundreds of thousands of Irish men, women, and children were sold as slaves to “the Americas”. By the mid 1600’s there were more Irish slaves living in areas that were to become the U.S. than there were native born residents.
THE IRISH SLAVES
At the beginning of the 17th Century, in the reign of James I of England, England faced a problem: what to do with the Irish. They had been practicing genocide against the Irish since the reign of Elizabeth, but they could The Ethnic Cleansing Of Ireland. Between James I (he of the King James Version fame) and Oliver Cromwell, literally hundreds of thousands of Irish men, women, and children were sold as slaves to “the Americas”. By the mid 1600’s there were more Irish slaves living in areas that were to become the U.S. than there were native born residents.
THE IRISH SLAVES
At the beginning of the 17th Century, in the reign of James I of England, England faced a problem: what to do with the Irish. They had been practicing genocide against the Irish since the reign of Elizabeth, but they couldn’t kill them all. Some had been banished, and some had gone into voluntary exile, but there were still just too many of them.
So James I encouraged the sale of the Irish as slaves to the New World colonies, not only America but Barbados and South America. The first recorded sale of Irish slaves was to a settlement along the Amazon in South America in 1612. However, before that there were probably many unofficial arrangements, since the Irish were of no importance and details of how they were dealt with were not deemed necessary.
In 1625, the King issued a proclamation that all Irish political prisoners were to be transported to the West Indies and sold as slave labor to the planters there. In 1637, a census showed that 69% of the inhabitants of Monsarrat in the West Indies were Irish slaves. The Irish had a tendency to die in the heat, and were not as well suited to the work as African slaves, but African slaves had to be bought. Irish slaves could be kidnapped if there weren’t enough prisoners, and of course, it was easy enough to make Irish prisoners by manufacturing some petty crime or other. This made the Irish the preferred “livestock” for English slave traders for 200 years.
In 1641, one of the periodic wars in which the Irish tried to overthrow the English misrule in their land took place. As always, this rebellion eventually failed. As a result, in the 12 years following the revolt, known as the Confederation War, the Irish population fell from 1,466,000 to 616,000. Over 550,000 Irishmen were killed, and 300,000 were sold as slaves. The women and children who were left homeless and destitute had to be dealt with , so they were rounded up and sold, too.
But even though it did not seem that things could get worse, with the advent of Oliver Cromwell, they did. In the 1650’s, thousands more Irish were killed, and many more were sold into slavery. Over 100,000 Irish Catholic children were taken from their parents and sold as slaves, many to Virginia and New England. Unbelievably but truly, from 1651 to 1660 there were more Irish slaves in America than the entire non-slave population of the colonies!
In 1652, Cromwell instigated the Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland. He demanded that all Irish people were to resettle west of the Shannon, in arid, uninhabitable land, or be transported to the West Indies. The Irish refused to relocate peaceably, for the most part, since they couldn’t survive if they did.
A law, published in 1657, read:
“Those who fail to transplant themselves into Connaught
(Ireland’s Western Province) or (County) Clare within six
months… Shall be attained of high treason… Are to be sent
into America or some other parts beyond the seas…”(1)
Any who attempted to return would
“suffer the pains of death as
felons by virtue of this act, without benefit of Clergy.”(2)
The soldiers were encouraged to kill the Irish who refused to move; it was certainly not considered a crime. But the slave trade was so profitable that it was much more lucrative to round them up and sell them. Gangs went out to fill quotas by capturing whoever came across their path; they were so industrious that they accidentally captured a number of French and English and several thousand Scots in the process. By Cromwell’s death, at least 100,000 Irish men, women, and children had been sold in the West Indies, Virginia, and New England. While most were sold to the sugar planters in Barbados, Jamaica and throughout the West Indies, some writers assert that at least 20,000 were sold to the American colonies. (3) The earliest record of Irish slaves in America was in 1620, with the arrival of
200 slaves. Most of the documentation, however, comes from the West Indies.
In 1742, a document entitled Thurloe’s State Papers, published in London, opined that:
“..It was a measure beneficial to Ireland, which was
thus relieved of a population that might trouble the planters; it
was a benefit to the people removed, which might thus be made
English and Christians … a great benefit to the West India
sugar planters, who desired men and boys for their bondsmen, and
the women and Irish girls… To solace them.”(4)
Note the chilling insouciance of the purpose stated for the women and Irish girls. . to “solace” the sugar planters. Also, to our way of thinking, the Irish were Christians, but to the Protestant English, Catholics were considered Papist, and Papists weren’t Christians.
So for the entire 17th Century, from 1600 until 1699, there were many more Irish sold as slaves than Africans. There are records of Irish slaves well into the 18th Century.
Many never made it off the ships. According to written record, in at least one incident 132 slaves, men, women, and children, were dumped overboard to drown because ships’ supplies were running low. They were drowned because the insurance would pay for an “accident,” but not if the slaves were allowed to starve. Typical death rates on the ships were from 37% to 50%.
In the West Indies, the African and Irish slaves were housed together, but because the African slaves were much more costly, they were treated much better than the Irish slaves. Also, the Irish were Catholic, and Papists were hated among the Protestant planters. An Irish slave would endure such treatment as having his hands and feet set on fire or being strung up and beaten for even a small infraction. Richard Ligon, who witnessed these things first-hand and recorded them in a history of Barbados he published in 1657, stated:
“Truly, I have seen cruelty there done to servants as I did not think one Christian could
have done to another.”(5)
According to Sean O’Callahan, in To Hell or Barbados, Irish men and women were inspected like cattle there, just as the Africans were. In addition, Irish slaves, who were harder to distinguish from their owners since they shared the same skin color, were branded with the owner’s initials, the women on the forearm and the men on the buttocks. O’Callahan goes on to say that the women were not only sold to the planters as sexual slaves but were often sold to local brothels as well. He states that the black or mulatto overseers also often forced the women to strip while working in the fields and often used them sexually as well.(6)
The one advantage the Irish slaves had over the African slaves was that since they were literate and they did not survive well in the fields, they were generally used as house servants, accountants, and teachers. But the gentility of the service did not correlate to the punishment for infractions. Flogging was common, and most slave owners did not really care if they killed an easily replaceable, cheap Irish slave.
While most of these slaves who survived were eventually freed after their time of service was completed, many leaving the islands for the American colonies, many were not, and the planters found another way to insure a free supply of valuable slaves. They were quick to “find solace” and start breeding with the Irish slave women. Many of them were very pretty, but more than that, while most of the Irish were sold for only a period of service, usually about 10 years assuming they survived, their children were born slaves for life. The planters knew that most of the mothers would remain in servitude to remain with their children even after their service was technically up.
The planters also began to breed the Irish women with the African male slaves to make lighter skinned slaves, because the lighter skinned slaves were more desirable and could be sold for more money. A law was passed against this practice in 1681, not for moral reasons but because the practice was causing the Royal African Company to lose money. According to James F. Cavanaugh, this company, sent 249 shiploads of slaves to the West Indies in the 1680’s, a total of 60,000 African and Irish, 14,000 of whom died in passage.(7)
While the trade in Irish slaves tapered off after the defeat of King James in 1691, England once again shipped out thousands of Irish prisoners who were taken after the Irish Rebellion of 1798. These prisoners were shipped to America and to Australia, specifically to be sold as slaves.
No Irish slave shipped to the West Indies or America has ever been known to have returned to Ireland. Many died, either in passage or from abuse or overwork. Others won their freedom and emigrated to the American colonies. Still others remained in the West Indies, which still contain an population of “Black Irish,” many the descendents of the children of black slaves and Irish slaves.
In 1688, the first woman killed in Cotton Mather’s witch trials in Massachusetts was an old Irish woman named Anne Glover, who had been captured and sold as a slave in 1650. She spoke no English. She could recite The Lord’s Prayer in Gaelic and Latin, but without English, Mather decided her Gaelic was discourse with the devil, and hung her.(8)
It was not until 1839 that a law was passed in England ending the slave trade, and thus the trade in Irish slaves.
It is unfortunate that, while the descendents of black slaves have kept their history alive and not allowed their atrocity to be forgotten, the Irish heritage of slavery in America and the West Indies has been largely ignored or forgotten. It is my hope that this article will help in some small way to change that and to commemorate these unfortunate people.
NOTES:
(1) John P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, Dublin, ?, 1865
(2) Ibid.
(3) See, for example, Thomas Addis Emmet, Ireland Under English Rule, NY & London,
Putnam, 1903
(4) Prendergast, The Conwellian Settlment of Ireland
(5) Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of Barbadoes, London,
Cass, 1657, reprinted 1976
(6)Sean O’Callaghan, To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland, (Dingle, Ireland: Brandon, 2001)
(6) James F. Cavanaugh, Clan Chief Herald
(7) For Mather’s account of the case, see Cotton Mather, Memorable Providences, Relating To
Witchcrafts And Possessions (1689)
Source: rhettaakamatsu.com