Category Archives: slavery

by | 24 September 2009 · 9:42 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Paying the Crimp

From Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples, by Alastair Couper (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), p. 105:

At these growing Pacific port towns, beachcombers established themselves as crimps and arranged girls and ships for sailors of all nationalities. Richard Copping walked off the whaler Endeavour in April 1840 at the Bay of Islands along with several other sailors and three harpooners, as “she was leaking badly.” They sought other berths through the agency of a notorious lodging house in the Bay:

Of all the orgies imaginable it was here. There were nearly 100 men, mainly deserters from different ships, drinking, singing and dancing, and fighting. The captains used to come ashore and get their men but dare not touch one. So when a ship wanted hands, two or three captains would come ashore and be hail fellow well met, call for a quantity of their detestable grog, get them nearly all drunk; and at night kidnapped as many as they wanted.

Sailors would waken outward bound and in debt to the captain, who had paid the crimp. They would need to purchase more clothing, tobacco, and drinks from the captain’s slop chest at inflated prices against future earnings:

The next I remember I woke in the morn,
On a three skys’l yarder bound south round Cape Horn,
With an ol’ suit of oilskins, an’ two pair o’ sox,
An’ a bloomin’ big head, an’ a dose of the pox.

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Filed under labor, language, migration, Pacific, slavery

by | 26 August 2009 · 6:09 pm

Fractured Historiography of the Confederacy

In the latest issue of Civil War History (Project MUSE subscription required), University of Virginia professor Gary W. Gallagher reviews major trends in the historiography of the Confederacy. Here are a few excerpts about some of the key earlier trendsetters. Explaining defeat is always more challenging than explaining victory.

Thirty years have passed since Emory M. Thomas’s The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865 appeared on the historiographical landscape. Some of its themes had been present in his earlier The Confederacy as Revolutionary Experience, and together the two books heralded the emergence of a major figure in the field. Factors weakening the Confederacy loomed larger than evidence of Rebel persistence or strength in the scholarly literature at that time, but Thomas took seriously the idea of national sentiment in the seceding states. When defeat apparently stalked the slaveholding republic in the spring of 1862 and “their national experiment seemed almost a failure, Confederate Southerners began to respond to their circumstances by redefining themselves—or, more precisely, by defining themselves as a national people.”…

David Williams’s Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War traverses much of the same ground as Thomas’s work, offering a convenient point of departure to consider the trajectory of recent scholarship on the Confederacy. The author or editor of four previous books dealing with various aspects of Confederate history, Williams complains that generations of historians have emphasized the war “waged with the North” rather than exploring how the “South was torn apart by a violent inner civil war, a war no less significant to the Confederacy’s fate than its more widely known struggle against the Yankees.” Resolutely focused on that “inner civil war,” Bitterly Divided creates an impression of overwhelming internal fracturing that renders the presence of U.S. armies strangely irrelevant….

Internal fissures serve as the interpretive touchstone of a rich body of older work, a brief review of which reveals that Bitterly Divided plows in deep existing furrows. As early as 1867, editor Edward A. Pollard of Richmond’s Examiner denied that northern manpower and resources had settled the issue. “The great and melancholy fact remains,” Pollard observed in The Lost Cause, “that the Confederates, with an abler Government and more resolute spirit, might have accomplished their independence.”…

In 1937, while Margaret Mitchell’s pro-Confederate epic Gone with the Wind sold in huge numbers, pioneering African American historian Charles H. Wesley challenged the Lost Cause narrative of noble Rebels struggling against impossible odds. “Historians of the Confederacy have based their works mainly upon the military subjugation of the South and the heroic actions of its defenders and have neglected the contributing social factors,” maintained Wesley in The Collapse of the Confederacy….

Twenty-eight years later, Carleton Beals reprised much of Wesley’s argument in War within a War: The Confederacy against Itself. “This book is about those people who resisted, because of their love for the Union, or civil rights, or because they believed the struggle to be a ‘rich man’s war, poor man’s fight,’” wrote Beals, who featured “mountain people,” opponents of conscription, African Americans, and others at odds with the Confederate government….

Two historiographical waves established a durable framework within which many advocates of internal failure have examined the Confederacy. Between the mid-1920s and the mid-1940s, a number of scholars joined Wesley to mount a powerful collective assault on Lost Cause mythology. Although they sometimes deployed simplistic class models to support the idea of a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight, their findings contributed importantly to topics such as conscription, state rights as a divisive ideology, desertion, persistent unionism, resistance among slaves (what W. E. B. Du Bois called “The General Strike”), class tensions, and corrosive guerrilla warfare. The fact that all major titles by these authors have been reprinted at least once suggests their continuing influence.

A flurry of studies in the 1970s and 1980s, spurred in part by the new social history’s emphasis on people outside the traditional power structure, expanded on the earlier literature. Some of this work can be read as a direct or indirect response to Thomas’s The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865. Authors and editors drove home the point that no one should think of the Confederacy as a society united across boundaries of region, class, race, and gender. In a category by itself was Why the South Lost the Civil War, by Richard E. Berenger, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still—a detailed and thoughtful, if not ultimately persuasive, brief for the centrality of internal causes of Confederate failure. This prize-winning study attributed defeat to the impact of southern religion, an absence of nationalism, and, despite a level of commitment that absorbed the deaths of approximately one-quarter of all military-age white males in the Confederacy [emphasis added], weak popular will….

Drew Gilpin Faust weighed in on the topic of Confederate nationalism at the end of the 1980s. Suggesting that the “creation of Confederate nationalism was the South’s effort to build a consensus at home, to secure a foundation of popular support for a new nation and what quickly became an enormously costly war,” she identifies religion as critical to a conception of nation predicated on defining Confederates as God’s chosen people. Faust also notes the centrality of slavery to the Confederate consciousness and warns against working backward from Appomattox to yoke discussions of nationalism to those about why the Rebels failed. Her conclusions, however, stress the ultimate weakness of nationalistic sentiment in the southern republic….

The more recent “cutting-edge” literature on internal dissent … has appeared at a steady rate over the past dozen years. A full discussion lies beyond the scope of this essay, but some trends are evident. It has long been a commonplace that the hill country and mountains of the Confederacy functioned as centers of antiwar and anti-Davis administration activity. An array of recent scholarship has examined the war in Appalachia, confirming deep divisions in mountainous regions but also finding evidence of strong support for the Confederacy. Works on North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia create a composite picture affirming John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney’s observation that “within the southern highlands, the war played out in very different ways for western North Carolinians than it did for East Tennesseans or north Georgians or western Virginians or Eastern Kentuckians.” The authors might have added that within each of these five populations the variety of reactions to the war and its trials also defy easy characterization.

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Filed under nationalism, scholarship, slavery, U.S., Virginia, war

by | 22 January 2009 · 6:43 am

Slave Diasporas Within Africa

From “Horrid Journeying: Narratives of Enslavement and the Global African Diaspora,” by Pier M. Larson in Journal of World History 19: 438-440, 463-464 (Project MUSE edition, footnote references removed):

According to published estimates, roughly the same number of sub-Saharan Africans—some eleven to twelve million—were coercively moved across the Sahara and into the Indian Ocean and were sent as captives into the Atlantic between about 650 and 1900. But many captives never departed sub-Saharan Africa, as historians of Africa have long demonstrated. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the volume of sub-Saharan Africa’s external slave trades reached their apogee, as many or more slaves were newly captured and retained within the continent as were sent beyond sub-Saharan Africa into external exile. The combined volume of sub-Saharan Africa’s several external slave trades, estimated at over twenty million between 650 and 1900, also serves as a rough order of magnitude for the number of new slaves captured and retained within sub-Saharan Africa.

“A large number of slaves, probably a majority, were kept within Africa even during the peak years of the Atlantic trade,” Martin Klein has written in his history of slavery in West Africa. For sub-Saharan Africa’s trade across the Sahara, Ralph Austen, its foremost estimator, has noted that “it is harder to count slaves settled in the areas of transit, although these probably exceeded (as they did on the Indian Ocean coast) the number who traveled farther.” In his study of the demography of enslavement, Patrick Manning found that “The slave population in Africa was roughly equal in size to the New World slave population from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. … After about 1850, there were more slaves in Africa than in the New World.” Herbert Klein has written that the number of slaves held in Africa during the early eighteenth century was on the order of three to five million. The domestic impact of the ending of the transatlantic slave trade was so great that “by 1850 there were more slaves in Africa than there were in America—probably now numbering close to 10 million.”

These may be understatements. Lovejoy, for example, has estimated the slave population of the western and central Sudan in about 1900 at between three and four million, not counting slaves held in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa such as in the Sokoto caliphate of northern Nigeria, once among the largest slaveholding states in the world, where some two million were bound in captivity in about 1890. On the East African islands of Zanzibar and Pemba alone, more than 100,000 persons were claimed as slaves in the late nineteenth century, nearly half as many as in all of mainland North America in 1750 or similar to the number in the single US state of Arkansas—fifty-four times their combined size—in 1860. Even in the early nineteenth century, probably more African slaves were held in sub-Saharan Africa than in the rest of the world. Africa south of the Sahara was a source of slaves and constituted a major destination for new captives….

The African diaspora as concept must be expanded, geographically recentered, and reworked to reflect the experiences of all Africans in dispersion from their homes, or it will remain a parochial tool. Making room in the African diaspora for the diverse experiences of Africa’s forced migrants conscious of their displacement and yearning for specific homes will require scholars to think and work in new and fresh ways, to employ new data, to expand beyond familiar American locations and languages, and to adopt an explicitly global-comparative approach that does not eliminate Africa from the African diaspora. This will require transforming many current assumptions about the demography and consciousness of African communities in dispersion to appreciate how Mississippi, Martinique, Senegal, Tunisia, Hausaland, southern Somalia, the Swahili coast, the Hijaz, Oman, Baluchistan, Gujarat, and the Mascarene islands each provide unique examples of African communities and self-conceptions abroad.

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Filed under Africa, migration, slavery

by | 25 August 2008 · 8:47 pm

End of the Americo-Liberian Aristocracy, 1980

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 545-548:

In his book Journey Without Maps, an account of his travels in Liberia in the 1930s, the English writer Graham Greene recorded that ‘Liberian politics were like a crap game played with loaded dice’. It was a game that Liberia’s ruling elite – the descendants of some 300 black settler families from the United States who set up an independent republic in 1847 – played among themselves with considerable relish. For more than 100 years – from 1877 to 1980 – Liberia was governed under a one-party system in which the same party, the True Whig Party, controlled by the same elite group, held office continuously, dispensing patronage, deciding on public appointments and retaining a monopoly on power – a record equalled by no other political party anywhere in the world. Elections were nevertheless taken seriously, if only to determine which family – the Barclays, the Kings, the Tubmans – emerged on top. ‘The curious thing about a Liberian election campaign,’ wrote Greene, ‘is that, although the result is always a foregone conclusion, everyone behaves as if the votes and the speeches and the pamphlets matter.’ However, he added, the system was more complicated than it seemed. ‘It may be all a question of cash and printing presses and armed police, but things have to be done with an air. Crudity as far as possible is avoided.’

As members of a ruling aristocracy, the Americo-Liberians, as they called themselves, were immensely proud of their American heritage. They developed a lifestyle reminiscent of the antebellum South, complete with top hats and morning coats and masonic lodges. They built houses with pillared porches, gabled roofs and dormer windows resembling the nineteenth-century architectural styles of Georgia, Maryland and the Carolinas. They chose as a national flag a replica of the American Stars and Stripes, with a single star, and used the American dollar as legal tender.

Just like white settlers in Africa, the Americo-Liberians constructed a colonial system subjugating the indigenous population to rigid control and concentrating wealth and privilege in their own hands. Despite their origins as descendants of slaves from the Deep South, they regarded black Liberians as an inferior race, fit only for exploitation. The nadir of Americo-Liberian rule came in 1931 when an international commission found senior government officials guilty of involvement in organised slavery.

When other West African states shed colonial rule in the 1960s, the Liberian system stayed much the same. Liberian law stipulated that only property owners were entitled to the vote, so the vast majority of indigenous Africans were effectively left without one. Small numbers were assimilated into the ranks of the ruling elite: ‘country boys’ adopted by coastal families; girls selected as wives or concubines; ambitious ‘hinterlanders’ climbing the ladder. During the 1970s a few were co-opted into government. Local administration in the ‘hinterland’ was largely run by indigenous officials. But essentially Liberia remained an oligarchy where 1 per cent of the population controlled the rest – some 2 million people.

The last of the line of Americo-Liberian presidents was William Tolbert, the grandson of freed South Carolina slaves who had served as vice-president for twenty years. A Baptist minister, he attempted a series of cautious reforms, abandoning the top hat and tail-coat traditions favoured by his predecessor, William Tubman, selling the presidential yacht and abolishing a compulsory ‘tithe’ of 10 per cent of every government employee’s salary that went to the True Whig Party. But much of Tolbert’s efforts were also devoted to amassing a personal fortune and promoting the interests of family members in the traditional manner. One brother was appointed minister of finance; another was chosen as president of the senate; a son-in-law served as minister of defence; other relatives filled posts as ministers, ambassadors and presidential aides. The crap game of Liberian politics was as highly profitable in the 1970s as in the 1930s.

Economic development in the 1960s and 1970s helped underpin the system, as well as provide new opportunities for the elite’s self-enrichment. The mainstay of the economy had initially been rubber. In 1926 the Firestone Tyre and Rubber Company leased a million acres for ninety-nine years at six cents an acre to meet the American demand for car tyres. But iron ore exports from massive, high-grade deposits in the Bomi hills then overtook rubber as the major source of foreign investment and government income. By 1970 Firestone and the Liberian Iron Mining Company were providing the government with 50 per cent of greatly increased revenues. A third source of income came from registration fees from the world’s largest ghost fleet of ships: Liberia possessed only two ships of its own, but allowed more than 2,500 vessels plying the seas to fly Liberia’s flag of convenience without the bother of inspection, for a suitable fee.

Liberia ‘s economic advances, however, served only to highlight the growing disparity between the ostentatious lifestyle of the rich elite and the overwhelming majority of impoverished tribal Africans. In 1979 – the same year that Tolbert spent an amount equivalent to half the national budget while acting as host to an OAU heads of state conference – demonstrators took to the streets in protest against a 50 per cent increase in the price of rice, the staple food of most Liberians. The price increase had been authorised by Tolbert in the hope of encouraging local production. But since one of the chief beneficiaries was the president’s cousin, Daniel Tolbert, who owned the country’s largest rice-importing firm, it was seen as another move to enrich the elite. On Tolbert’s orders armed police and troops opened fire on the demonstrators, killing dozens of them.

In the following months Tolbert struggled to contain a rising tide of discontent, colliding not just with the poor but with a new generation of the educated elite. He allowed the formation of an opposition party, but when opposition politicians called for a general strike, he had them arrested on charges of treason and sedition and banned the party.

On the night of 12 April 1980 a group of seventeen dissident soldiers led by a 28-year-old master sergeant named Samuel Doe, scaled the iron gate of the president’s seven-storey Executive Mansion, overpowered the guards and found Tolbert in his pyjamas in an upstairs bedroom. They fired three bullets into his head, gouged out his right eye and disembowelled him. His body was dumped in a mass grave along with twenty-seven others who died defending the palace. Ministers and officials were rounded up, taken before a military tribunal and sentenced to death.

Amid much jubilation, watched by a crowd of thousands laughing and jeering and filmed by camera crews, thirteen high-ranking officials were tied to telephone poles on a beach in Monrovia and executed by a squad of drunken soldiers, firing volley after volley at them. A great shout arose from the mob. ‘Freedom! We got our freedom at last!’ The soldiers rushed forward to kick and pummel the corpses.

Thus the old order ended.

Thus begins the chapter entitled “Blood Diamonds,” in which the barbarism only gets worse and worse. Few societies have solved the problem of how to overthrow recalcitrant aristocrats without descending into a period of barbarism that only serves to unduly enhance nostalgia for prerevolutionary times, as Theodore Dalrymple observes in his retrospective on Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

The Russian satirical writer Vladimir Voinovich satirized Solzhenitsyn’s Russian nationalism by depicting someone resembling him having his employees flogged in Vermont. This satirical scene, in fact, made a profound criticism of Solzhenitsyn’s political thought. Voinovich was alluding to the fact that, were it not for the horrors of Bolshevism, the pre-revolutionary Russian political tradition would be regarded as so brutal that no sensitive person of good will could be a Russian nationalist. As it was, the Bolsheviks regularly killed in a few minutes more people than the Romanovs managed in a century, giving pre-revolutionary Russian history the retrospective luster of decency, wisdom, and compassion that it did not in the least deserve. For Voinovich—and the distinguished historian of Russia Richard Pipes—Leninism had its roots in the Russian tradition as well as the Marxist one. This meant that Solzhenitsyn, while absolutely right in his uncompromising attitude to Marxist-Leninism and all its works, belonged in the category of Dostoevsky: a brilliant seer who would nevertheless have made a very bad guide.

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Filed under democracy, Liberia, nationalism, Russia, slavery, U.S., war

by | 13 July 2008 · 10:31 pm

Sudan’s Second Civil War, 1980s

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 358-360:

As in the case of Chad, Sudan’s second civil war drew in an array of foreign players. Mengistu‘s regime in Ethiopia supported the cause of the southern Sudanese in retaliation for Khartoum’s support for Eritrean secessionists and Tigrayan rebels. In Libya, Gaddafi, who had once supported the Eritreans but who switched sides when Mengistu came to power, joined Mengistu in supporting the southern Sudanese. Numeiri meanwhile supported an anti-Gaddafi Libyan group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, which set up offices in Khartoum in 1981 and broadcast propaganda programmes attacking Gaddafi. Numeiri also gave assistance to anti-Gaddafi groups from Chad. The United States, for its part, despite the repression Numeiri unleashed in southern Sudan, invested heavily in his regime to bolster him as a counter-weight to Gaddafi and Mengistu, both of whom it regarded as pro-Soviet activists; US assistance to Numeiri totalled $1.5 billion.

With American support, Numeiri was confident he could deal with any threat posed by rebels in the south. But he was beset by a host of other difficulties. Hoping to establish Sudan as the ‘breadbasket’ of the Middle East, Numeiri had encouraged massive investment in mechanised agriculture, but the overall result was a decline in agricultural production and a foreign debt of $12 billion that Sudan had no means of repaying. When drought struck in 1983 and again in 1984, causing mass hunger, Numeiri, like Mengistu in Ethiopia, ignored the consequences, desperately trying to avoid jeopardising Sudan’s image as a suitable destination for agricultural investment. Only after an estimated quarter of a million people had died was he prevailed upon to take action. Forced by foreign creditors to accept austerity measures, Numeiri found his grip on power slipping. Shortages, inflation, unemployment, deteriorating social services and rampant corruption caused widespread discontent. The famine itself provided a rallying point for organised protest. A coalition of trade unions and professional groups, including lawyers, doctors and civil servants, led the opposition. When urban strikes, riots and demonstrations erupted, not even the army was willing to stand by Numeiri. In April 1985, after sixteen years in power, he was overthrown.

An election in 1986 brought to power northern politicians fully committed to the establishment of an Islamic state. As prime minister, Sadiq al-Mahdi, the leader of the Umma Party, pronounced himself in favour of ‘the full citizen, human and religious rights’ of non-Muslims. But he also declared: ‘Non-Muslims can ask us to protect their rights – and we will do that – but that’s all they can ask. We wish to establish Islam as the source of law in Sudan because Sudan has a Muslim majority.’ The sharia code introduced by Numeiri in 1983 remained in force.

Under Sadiq’s regime the north experienced many of the benefits of liberal democracy – parliamentary debate, a vigorous press, an independent judiciary, active trade unions and professional associations. But for the south there was unrelenting warfare. The SPLM refused to accept a ceasefire or to take part in the election, demanding a constitutional convention. Sadiq responded by arming Baggara Arab militias in western Sudan – murahalin – licensing them to raid and plunder at will in the Dinka and Nuer areas of Bahr-al-Ghazal, just as their forefathers had done in the nineteenth century. Dinka and Nuer villages were attacked and burned, their livestock stolen, their wells poisoned; men, women and children were killed or abducted and taken back to the north where they were traded or kept as slaves. Atrocities were commonplace. In revenge for an SPLM attack on a Rizeigat militia group in March 1987, Rizeigat survivors attacked Dinka men, women and children in the town of Al Diein in southern Darfur, setting fire to six railway carriages where they were sheltering, killing more than 1,000; those who were not burned to death were stabbed and shot as they tried to escape. A report on the massacre, written by two Muslim academics at the University of Khartoum, blamed the killing on the government. ‘Government policy has produced distortions in the Rizeigat community such as banditry and slavery, which interacted with social conflicts in Diein to generate a massacre psychosis … Armed banditry, involving the killing of Dinka villagers, has become a regular activity for the government-sponsored militia.’ Rizeigat militias, they said, made a practice of selling Dinka women and children to Arab families for use as servants, farm workers and sex slaves. ‘All this is practised with the full knowledge of the government.’

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Filed under Darfur, religion, slavery, Sudan, war

by | 15 June 2007 · 8:19 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Haint Blue

In Savannah, Georgia, last month the Far Outliers toured the Telfair Museum of Art‘s Owens-Thomas House, where we saw haint blue paint on the walls and rafters of the former slave quarters that now serves as a gift shop, waiting room, and exhibit (upstairs). Such blue paint is common in areas influenced by slaves from Africa.

The blue paint is said to ward off evil spirits and, by some accounts, insects. I lean toward the more practical explanation, for reasons elaborated below, but first I want to note an odd set of sound correspondences, where one member of each pair is not just nonstandard, but highly stigmatized.

  • haint ~ haunt
  • aint ~ aunt
  • ain’t ~ aren’t (in r-less dialects)
  • cain’t ~ can’t

I don’t know anyone who pronounces every member of the set with the ai vowel. Nor do I know anyone who has the same vowel in each member of the set. Nowadays, I pronounce each with a different vowel: (roughly) hawnt, ahnt, arnt, kænt. As a kid, I used to say cain’t (as my father still does), but I made a conscious effort to expel such (self-)stigmatized regionalisms from my speech during my youth. Worse yet, I used to tease my Southern Baptist missionary kid cohorts who returned from their furlough years with their regional accents in full flower. Some of my southern Virginia relatives also pronounce aunt the way Andy Griffith did in the name of Aunt Bee on Mayberry RFD (said to be based on Mt. Airy, NC), but I don’t know anyone who pronounces haunt the same way, except in jest.

Has anyone else noticed this odd correspondence set? Are there other possible members of the set?

Enough linguistics; now back to insects. Last year in Japan, I heard that indigo dye had mosquito-repellent properties, among other magical qualities. Historian and librarian Jennifer Payne has compiled some interesting evidence for the beneficial effects of indigo plantations, not just its blue dye. Here are a few excerpts (omitting footnotes).

Agriculture, disease, and slavery were three basic and interconnected aspects of life in Colonial South Carolina. Where one existed, the other two were sure to follow within a very short time. By the mid eighteenth century, rice culture, slavery, malaria and yellow fever were well established as a self-perpetuating cycle which had an adverse effect upon the life spans of the colonists. This study examines the establishment of the “rice-slavery-disease” cycle, speculates on how this cycle was broken by the introduction of indigo, and postulates how indigo effected the yellow fever/malaria mortality rates of Colonial South Carolina….

During the very same fifty years in which indigo took hold in South Carolina, an interesting phenomenon occurred. Persons in Berkeley County near Charleston began to live longer; the number of persons dying during the malarial months [August through November] began to drop. Furthermore, the frequent outbreaks of yellow fever in Charleston began to slow down and eventually, for a time, discontinue entirely….

The most dramatic change occurred between 1760 and 1800 during the years in which indigo gained its height. Only 20% of the males died before forty and some 45% lived to be sixty or more. Moreover, only 18% of adult women died before fifty and some 70% survived beyond seventy. Those statistics involving women are especially revealing for women tended to become victims to malaria during their childbearing years. The fact that a greater percentage of the female population survived past fifty is significant. Thus, according to this evidence, something was enabling the people of Christchurch and St. Johns parishes in Berkeley county to survive malaria and malarial complications during the last forty years of the eighteenth century….

Why was there a decline in malarial mortality and a cessation of yellow fever epidemics? One medical historian jokingly suggested that perhaps the Mosquitoes simply went away for forty years. This might be true. Interestingly, the yellow fever epidemics ended just as indigo gained ground as a staple cash crop. Even more fascinating is the fact that the yellow fever epidemics resumed as indigo culture was rapidly phased out after the Revolution. Although in 1788, 833,500 pounds of indigo were being exported, in 1790, only 1694 casks of the stuff were exported. By 1796, indigo had been virtually eliminated from the agricultural economy. Conversely, the epidemics raged within three years of this decline. Thus, it is quite possible that the introduction, rise, and subsequent fall of indigo production had an effect upon mortality rates in colonial South Carolina….

Was it simply coincidence that yellow fever and malaria experienced a decline during indigo’s rise, or are the two related in some manner[?] Whatever the connection between indigo and the mosquito is, the is little doubt that during the years of indigo’s sudden and swift rise in cultivation, the number of people dying from malaria related complications and those dying from yellow fever dropped markedly. Eliza Lucas Pinckney introduced a new cash crop which helped to make South Carolina one of England’s wealthiest colonies. However, her actions might have also helped the population of South Carolina reduce the fever mortality rates. The introduction of indigo broke the vicious cycle of rice cultivation, slavery, and fever by introducing a method of agriculture which did not rely on large amounts of standing water. Furthermore, the return of yellow fever epidemics in the mid 1790’s coincided with the rapid decline of indigo production due to the loss of the incentive of the bounty. Although the exact nature of indigo’s influence on the mosquito can only be speculated, research conducted to date indicates the probability of a connection between the two.

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Filed under Africa, language, slavery, travel, U.S.

by | 14 December 2006 · 10:10 am

Pirate Communes in the Late 1600s

The buccaneers are better documented than the pirates of the early seventeenth century, there being several surviving books and journals written by people who had themselves sailed with them, such as the buccaneer surgeon Alexander Exquemelin and the great navigator and travel writer William Dampier, as well as much comment from their captives and by observers ashore, especially the French who were fascinated by these early denizens of their West Indian colonies. This material shows that there had been several interesting developments in pirate customs and mentality. What has most intrigued the modern observer is the evidence of a degree of democracy and egalitarianism which ran quite counter to the norm anywhere else in the late seventeenth-century world. This is perhaps most striking among the true hunting buccaneers, a community of exiles who scorned the laws of all nations but honoured their own rules, ‘the custom of the coast’, and were so determined to forget the social hierarchy of the outside world that it was forbidden to speak of a man’s origins, and surnames which might have given those origins away were replaced by noms de guerre or nicknames.

The privateers did not go so far as this, but they were still remarkably egalitarian by the standards of their day. They respected the governments of Jamaica and Tortuga from which they drew their commissions and were prepared to pay a share of their prizes for the right to operate from these safe ports, just as the corsairs of the Mediterranean did. They were also sufficiently capitalistic in their mentality to recognise the rights of the owners of their vessels, most of which were owned and fitted out by investors ashore. But they did this with reluctance and the Jamaican privateers were notorious for cheating the owners of their ships, refusing to count as spoil to be shared with investors much that would have been shared by a privateer operating from a European port. Significantly, this included the goods, money and slaves seized in raids ashore, their most important source of booty, but they also had a very liberal interpretation of what was known as ‘free enterrance and plunder’, goods seized from a prize at sea and divided at the mast before the privateer returned to port? And, once they had become out-and-out pirates, as most of them had by the 1680s, they of course no longer recognised owners at all and shared everything among themselves.

This share was ‘a very exact and equal dividend’, ‘man for man’, with the exception that boys got half a share and slaves got nothing, for the buccaneers were not so egalitarian that they would forgo the opportunity to retain ‘negroes to do our work’, as one of them noted in the journal he kept of his voyage. Captains and other senior officers got more than a man, but not very much more, ‘five or six portions’ for a captain according to one account, ‘a double lot’ according to another, while the French missionary Jean-Baptiste Labat reported that even this was not a right but ‘a gift which is given them by the rest of the crew’? There were also arrangements for compensation for those who had been wounded or maimed, such as 500 pieces of eight (about £100) or five slaves for the loss of an arm or a leg, slightly more if it should be the right arm or leg, and 100 pieces of eight or one slave for an eye or a finger, while one account says that ‘if a man has a wooden leg or a hook for his arm and these happen to be destroyed, he receives the same amount as if they were his original limbs’. Extra payments were also made to those who first sighted a ship later taken, the first to board or the first to storm a fortification, rewards for the sharp-eyed and the brave which were very similar to those accorded by the ‘Custom of the Corsairs’ in the Mediterranean.

The management of a privateer ship was as egalitarian as its division of prizes. Captains were chosen by the vote or acclamation of their men, and articles of association or chasse parties were agreed between captains and crew. In Morgan‘s time the crew elected two representatives to speak for them, but later there evolved an elected officer whose function was to speak on the men’s behalf, to see that they were treated correctly and that the division of booty was really equal. This was the quartermaster, described by Dampier as ‘the second place in the ship, according to the Law of Privateers’, though a minor office on a merchant ship, and this was a position that the quartermaster would retain among the pirates of the early eighteenth century. Consultations in which decisions on the next move would be made by majority vote were frequent, every day according to one account, and there were also meetings to determine collective codes of behaviour, as on the occasion recorded by the French buccaneer Raveneau de Lussan in his journal. ‘We then drew up regulations condemning anyone to forfeit his share of our loot if convicted of cowardliness, rape, drunkenness, disobedience, larceny, and failure to obey orders.’ Both ships and men were free to opt out if they so wished, a ship by the collective vote of the men and a man by his own choice. ‘Privateers are not obliged to any ship,’ wrote William Dampier, ‘but free to go ashore where they please, or to go into any other ship that will entertain them,’ a freedom which would certainly not have been accorded by the rules of later pirates who bound a man to the ship once he had joined, whether willingly or unwillingly.

SOURCE: The Pirate Wars, by Peter Earle (Thomas Dunne Books, 2003), pp. 100-102

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by | 14 September 2006 · 9:12 pm

Origins of Sharecropping in Mississippi

THE DELTA had always been too wild for one man or one family to subdue, and from the first, settlers had brought slaves and organization with them. Immediately after the Civil War, Mississippi and other southern states tried to resolve labor and racial questions by passing a “Black Code” that effectively reestablished slavery. One Mississippi provision required blacks to sign annual labor contracts or be arrested for vagrancy; the local government would then sell their services to contractors. Congress reacted to such laws with anger and instituted “Radical Reconstruction,” setting up new state governments that threw out those laws and putting a buffer of federal power between southern whites and blacks.

[MS Senator Charles] Percy recognized both the economic problems and the need to accept a new order, and advocated a solution. Planters had land but no cash. Blacks had labor but no land; they also resisted working in gangs under a foreman, which smacked of slavery and overseers. So Percy, who understood both the capital shortage and the importance of making labor content in order to maximize efficiency, advocated sharecropping. One man even credited Percy with inventing the system, and contemporaneous reports in other southern states did attribute the system’s beginnings to Mississippi. Planters supplied land; blacks supplied labor and gained some independence. Profits were theoretically split fifty-fifty (the cropper got more if he had his own mules), making blacks and whites partners and by implication comparable if not equal. However abusive sharecropping later became, because of the system’s implied partnership of white and black, initially whites resisted it while blacks welcomed it.

Sharecropping may have helped alleviate the Delta’s desperate shortage of labor in another way. Planters and their labor agents were scouring the rest of the state and the South recruiting former slaves, promising—and delivering—better pay and treatment than elsewhere. The new system may have helped attract blacks, for in a steady stream they came. From one Mississippi county outside the Delta, a single Delta plantation recruited 500 workers. From Columbus, Mississippi, near the Alabama line, 100 black workers left for the Delta in a single week. From Uniontown, Alabama, 250 blacks boarded a single train, heading for the Delta. From Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia as well, thousands of blacks came.

SOURCE: Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, by John M. Barry (Touchstone, 1998), pp. 102-103 (reviewed here)

My paternal grandfather was a (white) tenant farmer in southeastern Virginia. He sometimes managed the farms of landowning relatives, but never owned a farm himself. Not one of his children remained a farmer.

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by | 8 May 2006 · 1:38 am

European Attitudes toward the Confederacy

Although Napoleon III of France wished to recognize the Confederacy from almost the beginning, he was unwilling to take this step except in tandem with Britain. (All other European powers except perhaps Russia would have followed a British or French lead.) British policy on recognition of a revolutionary or insurrectionary government was coldly pragmatic. Not until it had proved its capacity to sustain and defend its independence, almost beyond peradventure of doubt, would Britain risk recognition. The Confederate hope, of course, was for help in gaining that independence.

Most European observers and statesmen believed in 1861 that the Union cause was hopeless. In their view, the Lincoln administration could never reestablish control over 750,000 square miles of territory defended by a determined and courageous people. And there was plenty of sentimental sympathy for the Confederacy in Britain, for which the powerful Times of London was the foremost advocates. Many Englishmen professed to disdain the vulgar materialism of money-grubbing Yankees and to project a congenial image of the Southern gentry that conveniently ignored slavery. Nevertheless, the government of Prime Minister Viscount Palmerston was anything but sentimental. It required hard evidence of the Confederacy’s ability to survive, in the form of military success, before offering diplomatic recognition. But it would also require Union military success to forestall that possibility. As Lord Robert Cecil told a Northern acquaintance in 1861: “Well, there is one way to convert us all—Win the battles, and we shall come round at once.”

But in 1861 the Confederacy won most of the battles—the highly visible ones, at least, at Manassas [Virginia], Wilson’s Creek (Missouri), and Balls Bluff. And by early 1862 the cotton famine was beginning to hurt….

The Times stated that if England could not “stop this effusion of blood by mediation, we ought to give our moral weight to our English kith and kin [Southern whites], who have gallantly striven so long for their liberties against a mongrel race of plunderers and oppressors.” The breakup of the United States, said the Times in August, would be good “riddance of a nightmare.”

SOURCE: Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam: The Battle That Changed the Course of the American Civil War, by James M. McPherson (Penguin, 2003), pp. 37-38, 58. Originally published by Oxford University Press in its series, Pivotal Moments in American History, which seeks “to encourage interest in problems of historical contingency,” according to the editor’s note by David Hackett Fischer, who continues:

Ideas of contingency are drawing more attention in historical scholarship, for several reasons. They offer a way forward, beyond the “old political history” and the “new social and cultural history,” by a reunion of process and event. They also restore a lost element of narrative tension to historical writing. A concept of contingency makes history more teachable and learnable, more readable and writable, more important and even urgent in our thinking about the world, and most of all more true to itself.

UPDATE: Jim Bennett leaves a well-informed comment that makes me want to add a few more points about the contingencies that McPherson’s account highlights:

It has become almost an article of faith in alternate histories that Britian was chomping at the bit to recognize the Confederacy. However, the balance of forces between the pro-Confederate and pro-Union forces was more nearly even than is sometimes recognized. The legacy of the British abolitionist movement was very strong, particularly in the Liberal Party, and in the powerful evangelical movement (to the extent that these three phenomena were not entirely congruent…). The subject cannot be discussed without reference to the mass pro-Union rallies in places like Birmingham and Manchester, by cotton workers who were often unemployed because of the Union blockade and who had every economic incentive to be pro-Confederate. Sympathetic Britons had explained many times to high-ranking Confederates that recognition would almost certainly have to entail a committment to emancipation, however gradual and compensated it might be. Yet the Condererates never took the hint. Once the Emancipation Proclamation had been made, the door to recognition was closed in terms of the realities of British politics.

Here’s a bit more from McPherson on European attitudes toward slavery:

Next to events on the battlefield and the worsening cotton famine [due to Southern embargoes as well as the Northern blockade], the slavery issue influenced European attitudes. Something of a paradox existed on this question, however. The American cotton wanted by British and French mills was nearly all grown by slaves. Yet most Europeans were antislavery. Britain had abolished slavery in its New World colonies in 1833 and France had done the same in 1848. The British were proud of their navy’s role as the world’s police against the African slave trade. Many in Britain who were inclined to sympathize with the Confederacy found slavery a large stumbling block.

McPherson stresses that Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation was contingent upon an important Union victory, specifically, the very costly one at Antietam/Sharpsburg. (Lincoln didn’t want the Proclamation to be seen as a measure of desperation.) That victory in turn was contingent partly on Union officers intercepting Gen. Lee’s Special Order 191, which revealed how he had divided his forces; on the success of both Gen. McClellan and the citizens of northern Maryland in raising the morale of dispirited Federal troops; and on the general failure of Marylanders to rally to the Confederate cause, even though Maryland was a slave state. Finally, Lee’s decision to invade the north in the fall of 1862 reflected a desire to deal a knockout blow in the east to follow on a series of Union losses there and Confederate counteroffensives in Kentucky and Tennessee after the loss of New Orleans and most of the Mississippi River (except Vicksburg) in the spring of 1862. McPherson continually emphasizes the pendulum swings in domestic morale, political momentum, and foreign diplomacy that hinged on a web of contingencies that could have gone either way.

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Filed under Europe, slavery, U.S., war

by | 26 September 2005 · 2:35 pm

All the Benefits and None of the Screams

I haven’t lately been checking as many non-Asia blogs as I used to before spending the past two months in Japan, but now that I have to get back to my workplace, I’ve started to broaden my horizens a bit more. Today I checked in with a favorite history blog, Rhine River, where I found a post that really struck me, as a person of rural white Southern heritage (with a daughter in college in Connecticut). Connecticut’s leading newspaper has been running an enlightening series that still resonates today. Kudos to the Hartford Courant. Mark Twain would be proud.

Here’s a bit of what Nathanael quotes.

Connecticut became an economic powerhouse in the 18th century, far out of proportion to its tiny size, because we grew and shipped food to help feed millions of slaves, in the West Indies.

The rivers and streams of Connecticut in the 19th century were crowded with more than a hundred textile mills that relied on cotton grown by hundreds of thousands of slaves, in the South.

Up to the edge of the 20th century, two towns on the Connecticut River were a national center for ivory production, milling hundreds of thousands of tons of elephant tusks procured through the enslavement or death of more than a million people, in Africa.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hartford’s most famous abolitionist, said this was slavery the way Northerners like it:

All of the benefits and none of the screams.

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