Whip hand: the free-thinking Carlyle Club abolishes Whig history, serves up some primary sources, and cottons on to a south-side view in this, our masterful third issue. It’s bound to please!

Table of Contents

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Jefferson Memorial, Washington, D.C.

… Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Thomas Jefferson

Question: what’s wrong with slavery?

Yes, I know, it’s beneath you and your sophisticated understanding of history. Indulge me. Pretend I’m an alien from Neptune, and explain to me why this thing you call “slavery” was bad. Feel free to cite primary sources. And we’ll restrict our attention to American slavery, so you needn’t wrestle with Aristotle, if you don’t want to. On second thought, don’t answer just yet: first I want to make you wade through some quotes. Don’t worry, this will be fun! Just make sure to pay close attention…

We’ll start by just opening up a newspaper (2013):

As Detroit recorded its highest homicide rate in nearly two decades, city and police officials pledged to try to stem the tide of violence. Authorities recognized the spiraling problem of gun play and homicide in Detroit during a news conference Thursday — a recognition that comes as the city kicks off the new year with violence. Already this week, a mother has been charged with fatally stabbing her 8-year-old daughter, and a cab driver was shot to death. “We’ve lost respect of each other,” Mayor Dave Bing said. “We’ve lost respect for life.”

The good news is, lots of kind-hearted philanthropic types want to help out (2011):

The National Institute for Literacy estimates that 47% of adults (more than 200,000 individuals) in the City of Detroit are functionally illiterate, referring to the inability of an individual to use reading, speaking, writing, and computational skills in everyday life situations. […] Low-income and low-skilled adult learners require a range of supports to ensure they can participate in education and training (like transportation, childcare, food and shelter, disability services). Current programs lack the internal capacity to offer these services.

Boy, that sounds like a lot of support. Could Japan have the answer? (2009)

“Japan’s success — and there is no precedent for it in history — very largely rested on organized immobility — the immobility of ‘lifetime employment,’” asserted Drucker, who first visited Japan in 1959 and was among the earliest observers to predict the nation’s rise as a world economic power. […] What worried Drucker — and what the Japanese election underscores — is that the flip side of mobility is instability, especially for those workers lacking the skills and education to be in high demand. […] “I very much hope,” he added, “that Japan will find a solution that preserves the social stability, the community — and the social harmony — that lifetime employment provided, and yet creates the mobility that knowledge work and knowledge workers must have.”

On an unrelated note, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services explains the benefits of adoption:

Adoption is the best choice for a child in CPS care when it’s not safe for the child to return home and for the relative or close family friend who wishes to be a permanent home for the child. It gives the child a stable and permanent home and lifelong support. It also gives the adoptive family legal protection because adoptive parents have the same legal rights as birth parents. Adoption can give children a sense of belonging and security because they know they will have a lifelong relationship with the adoptive family.

(It’s also true, of course, that a few parents — adoptive and biological — do treat their children badly. But that doesn’t mean adoption is worse than the alternative, and it certainly doesn’t suggest that we should ban adoption — let alone ban parenthood!)

You know, it sounds like the good people of Detroit would benefit a lot from some sort of a combination of adoption, which provides stability, security, and lifelong support, and lifetime employment, which provides stability, community, and social harmony, especially for low-skilled workers (like in Detroit). Now, if only American history could furnish us with an example of a social arrangement combining adoption and lifetime employment… But I digress.

Allow me, at last, to introduce Ms. Tempe Durham, a real-life emancipated slave:

Freedom is all right, but de niggers was better off befo’ surrender, kaze den dey was looked after an’ dey didn’ get in no trouble fightin’ an’ killin’ like dey do dese days. If a nigger cut up an’ got sassy in slavery times, his Ole Marse give him a good whippin’ an’ he went way back an’ set down an’ ’haved hese’f. If he was sick, Marse an’ Mistis looked after him, an’ if he needed store medicine, it was bought an’ give to him; he didn’ have to pay nothin’. Dey didn’ even have to think ’bout clothes nor nothin’ like dat, dey was wove an’ made an’ give to dem. Maybe everybody’s Marse and Mistis wuzn’ good as Marse George and Mis’ Betsy, but dey was de same as a mammy an’ pappy to us niggers.

And we’re back. So: what’s wrong with slavery? Why was it bad? Never mind the aliens from Neptune; explain it in a way Ms. Durham can understand — because a question this obvious really should have a straightforward answer, shouldn’t it? And sure enough, everyone assures me it does have a straightforward answer. Then they open their mouths, and out comes the most tremendous nonsense. From the nonsense emerge two basic ideas.

The first idea is that slavery was bad because of what slavery was actually like, which boils down to slaves, who cost an average of $40,000 apiece in today’s money, getting whipped and beaten ceaselessly for no good reason by their owner, whose livelihood depended on the slaves’ ability to perform agricultural labor. This argument, you may be relieved to learn, is supported by neither history nor basic logic. Yes, I’m sure it was hard work, but Lincoln didn’t emancipate anyone from hard work, did he? No, he didn’t.

That reminds me of something Thomas Carlyle wrote in Shooting Niagara (1867), a pamphlet considered extreme even by Victorian standards:

Servantship, like all solid contracts between men (like wedlock itself, which was once nomadic enough, temporary enough!), must become a contract of permanency, not easy to dissolve, but difficult extremely, — a “contract for life,” if you can manage it (which you cannot, without many wise laws and regulations, and a great deal of earnest thought and anxious experience), will evidently be the best of all. […] Of all else the remedy was easy in comparison; vitally important to every just man concerned in it; and, under all obstructions (which in the American case, begirt with frantic “Abolitionists,” fire-breathing like the old Chimaera, were immense), was gradually getting itself done.

In other words, if you are a “just man” and do not want the slaves abused, what you need are better (or better-enforced) laws against abusing slaves. So what did the abolitionists do instead?

A continent of the earth has been submerged, for certain years, by deluges as from the Pit of Hell; half a million (some say a whole million, but surely they exaggerate) of excellent White Men, full of gifts and faculty, have torn and slashed one another into horrid death, in a temporary humour, which will leave centuries of remembrance fierce enough: and three million absurd Blacks, men and brothers (of a sort), are completely “emancipated”; launched into the career of improvement, — likely to be ‘improved off the face of the earth’ in a generation or two!

Actually, only a few hundred thousand slaves, or perhaps a million, were killed by the “freedom” they never asked for, but we’ll talk about that later…

It’s also worth noting, for the record, that “U.S. slaves had much longer life expectations than free urban industrial workers in both the United States and Europe” (Time on the Cross, 1974).

Anyway, since the practical, day-to-day realities of slavery were much better than you have been led to believe, this idea makes no sense, and you need to re-assess slavery. Maybe it wasn’t bad after all.

Are you re-assessing slavery?

You’re not re-assessing slavery, are you?

Okay, try the second idea: slavery was bad regardless of what it was actually like, because slavery contradicts Liberty, Equality, and other, miscellaneous abstractions (Human Dignity springs to mind), which are to be considered good regardless of how much misery they have created over the centuries. In that case, congratulations: you, like the abolitionists, have got religion. Kindly keep your Church far away from the State.

If neither idea suits you, it might be a combination of the two, sort of circular in shape: everyone knows slavery was bad, because the slaves weren’t Free and Equal, which was terrible for them, because they were whipped and beaten ceaselessly for no reason, and if you say they weren’t, why, you’re just excusing slavery, which everyone knows was bad, because the slaves weren’t Free and Equal — and round and round we go, abandoning even the pretense of straightforwardness, and always returning to Liberty, Equality, and we might as well throw in Fraternity, so ultimately the argument turns out to be a popular late 18th century murderous insurrectionary war cry.

I direct your attention to the English judge James F. Stephen’s Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1874):

The object of this work is to examine the doctrines which are rather hinted at than expressed by the phrase “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” This phrase has been the motto of more than one Republic. It is indeed something more than a motto. It is the creed of a religion. […] The Religion of Humanity is perhaps as good a name as could be found for it. […] It is one of the commonest beliefs of the day that the human race collectively has before it splendid destinies of various kinds, and that the road to them is to be found in the removal of all restraints on human conduct, in the recognition of a substantial equality between all human creatures, and in fraternity or general love. These doctrines are in very many cases held as a religious faith. They are regarded not merely as truths, but as truths for which those who believe in them are ready to do battle, and for the establishment of which they are prepared to sacrifice all merely personal ends. Such, stated of course in the most general terms, is the religion of which I take “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” to be the creed. I do not believe it. I am not the advocate of Slavery, Caste, and Hatred, nor do I deny that a sense may be given to the words, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, in which they may be regarded as good. I wish to assert with respect to them two propositions. First, that in the present day even those who use those words most rationally — that is to say, as the names of elements of social life which, like others, have their advantages and disadvantages according to time, place, and circumstance — have a great disposition to exaggerate their advantages and to deny the existence, or at any rate to underrate the importance, of their disadvantages. Next, that whatever signification be attached to them, these words are ill-adapted to be the creed of a religion, that the things which they denote are not ends in themselves, and that when used collectively the words do not typify, however vaguely, any state of society which a reasonable man ought to regard with enthusiasm or self-devotion.

You know, that reminds me of something else Carlyle wrote in Shooting Niagara:

Our accepted axioms about “Liberty,” “Constitutional Government,” “Reform,” and the like objects, are of truly wonderful texture: venerable by antiquity, many of them, and written in all manner of Canonical Books; or else, the newer part of them, celestially clear as perfect unanimity of all tongues, and Vox populi vox Dei, can make them: axioms confessed, or even inspirations and gospel verities, to the general mind of man. To the mind of here and there a man, it begins to be suspected that perhaps they are only conditionally true; that taken unconditionally, or under changed conditions, they are not true, but false and even disastrously and fatally so. Ask yourself about “Liberty,” for example; what you do really mean by it, what in any just and rational soul is that Divine quality of liberty? That a good man be “free,” as we call it, be permitted to unfold himself in works of goodness and nobleness, is surely a blessing to him, immense and indispensable; — to him and to those about him. But that a bad man be “free,” — permitted to unfold himself in his particular way, is contrariwise, the fatallest curse you could inflict on him; curse and nothing else, to him and all his neighbours. Him the very Heavens call upon you to persuade, to urge, induce, compel, into something of well-doing; if you absolutely cannot, if he will continue in ill-doing, — then for him (I can assure you, though you will be shocked to hear it), the one “blessing” left is the speediest gallows you can lead him to. Speediest, that at least his ill-doing may cease quàm primùm.

Ms. Durham, meet Mr. Carlyle. I think the two of you are going to get along fine.

In this issue of Radish, we’ll be taking a closer look at slavery as it actually existed in the United States of America. Consider it our own, small contribution to the battle — not exactly raging these days — against that great disposition to exaggerate the advantages, and deny the disadvantages, of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity/Diversity: the Holy Trinity of Progressivism, the “Religion of Humanity.”

I do not believe it.

In 1854, the Reverend Nehemiah Adams, a Unitarian Universalist minister and staunch abolitionist living in Boston, which makes him about as left-wing as you could get in the 1850s, was forced to spend the winter in Georgia for health reasons. He took it as an opportunity to see firsthand the condition of the slaves he was trying so hard to emancipate. The result was a remarkable book: A South-Side View of Slavery. Likely you have never heard of it. Well, I offer it to you, my open-minded friend, as a first step towards understanding that peculiar institution.

An excerpt from Chapter 1, ‘Feelings and Expectations on Going to the South’:

He who proposes to write or speak at the present time on the subject which has so long tried the patience of good men as the subject of slavery has done, is justified in asking attention only by the conviction which it is supposed he feels that he can afford some help. The writer has lately spent three months at the south for the health of an invalid. Few professional men at the north had less connection with the south by ties of any kind than he, when the providence of God made it necessary to become for a while a stranger in a strange land. He was too much absorbed by private circumstances to think of entering at all into a deliberate consideration of any important subject of a public nature; yet for this very reason, perhaps, the mind was better prepared to receive dispassionately the impressions which were to be made upon it. The impressions thus made, and the reflections which spontaneously arose, the writer here submits, not as a partisan, but as a Christian; not as a northerner, but as an American; not as a politician, but as a lover and friend of the colored race. […] I will relate the impressions and expectations with which I went to the south; the manner in which things appeared to me in connection with slavery in Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia; the correction or confirmation of my northern opinions and feelings, the conclusions to which I was led; the way in which our language and whole manner toward the south have impressed me; and the duty which it seems to me, as members of the Union, we at the north owe to the subject of slavery and to the south, and with the south to the colored race. I shall not draw upon fictitious scenes and feelings, but shall give such statements as I would desire to receive from a friend to whom I should put the question, “What am I to believe? How am I to feel and act?” In the few instances in which I do not speak from personal observation, I shall quote from men whom, in many places at home and abroad, I have learned to respect very highly for their intellectual, moral, and social qualities—I mean physicians. Associated with all classes at all times, knowing things not generally observed, and being removed by their profession from any extensive connection with slavery as a means of wealth, they seemed to me unusually qualified to testify on the subject, and their opinions I have found to be eminently just and fair. Very early in my visit at the south, agreeable impressions were made upon me, which soon began to be interspersed with impressions of a different kind in looking at slavery. The reader will bear this in mind, and not suppose, at any one point in the narrative, that I am giving results not to be qualified by subsequent statements. The feelings awakened by each new disclosure or train of reflection are stated without waiting for any thing which may follow. […] Just before leaving home, several things had prepared me to feel a special interest in going to the south. The last thing which I did out of doors before leaving Boston was, to sign the remonstrance of the New England clergymen against the extension of slavery into the contemplated territories of Nebraska and Kansas. I had assisted in framing that remonstrance. The last thing which I happened to do late at night before I began my journey was, to provide something for a freed slave on his way to Liberia, who was endeavoring to raise several thousand dollars to redeem his wife and children from bondage. My conversations relating to this slave and his family had filled me with new but by no means strange distress, and the thought of looking slavery in the face, of seeing the things which had so frequently disturbed my self-possession, was by no means pleasant. To the anticipation of all the afflictive sights which I should behold there was added the old despair of seeing any way of relieving this fearful evil, while the unavailing desire to find it, excited by the actual sight of wrongs and woe, I feared would make my residence at the south painful. […] In the growth of the human mind, fancy takes the lead of observation, and-through life it is always running ahead of it. Who has not been greatly amused, sometimes provoked, and sometimes, perhaps, been made an object of mirth, at the preconceived notions which he had formed of an individual, or place, or coming event? Who has not sometimes prudently kept his fancies to himself? Taking four hundred ministers of my denomination in Massachusetts, and knowing how we all converse, and preach, and pray about slavery, and noticing since my return from the south the questions which are put, and the remarks which are made upon the answers, it will be safe to assert that on going south I had at least the average amount of information and ignorance with regard to the subject. Some may affect to wonder even at the little which has now been disclosed of my secret fancies. I should have done the same in the case of another; for the credulity or simplicity of a friend, when expressed or exposed, generally raises self-satisfied feelings in the most of us. Our southern friends, on first witnessing our snow storms, sleigh rides, and the gathering of our ice crops, are full as simple as we are in a first visit among them. We “suffer fools gladly, seeing” that we ourselves “are wise.”

So far, so good: our narrator does not exactly appear to be consumed by fear and hatred of “the colored race.” Going forward, please forgive and enjoy the occasional interjection of reviews of the Quentin Tarantino film Django Unchained, on which more will be said later.

From Chapter 2, ‘Arrival and First Impressions’:

The steam tug reached the landing, and the slaves were all about us. One thing immediately surprised me; they were all in good humor, and some of them in a broad laugh. The delivery of every trunk from the tug to the wharf was the occasion of some hit, or repartee, and every burden was borne with a jolly word, grimace, or motion. The lifting of one leg in laughing seemed as natural as a Frenchman’s shrug. I asked one of them to place a trunk with a lot of baggage; it was done; up went the hand to the hat—“Any thing more, please sir?” What a contrast, I involuntarily said to myself, to that troop at the Albany landing on our Western Railroad! and on those piles of boards, and on the roofs of the sheds, and at the piers, in New York! I began to like these slaves. I began to laugh with them. It was irresistible. Who could have convinced me, an hour before, that slaves could have any other effect upon me than to make me feel sad? One fellow, in all the hurry and bustle of landing us, could not help relating how, in jumping on board, his boot was caught between two planks, and “pulled clean off”; and how “dis ole feller went clean over into de wotter,” with a shout, as though it was a merry adventure. One thing seemed clear; they were not so much cowed down as I expected. Perhaps, however, they were a fortunate set. I rode away, expecting soon to have some of my disagreeable anticipations verified. […]

Meanwhile, in fantasyland: “The journey takes them ultimately to the world of Calvin Candie (Leonard DiCaprio), the charming Mississippi aristocrat and committed racial supremacist. His vicious personal fiefdom of Candyland becomes a symbol for the sadism, oppression, theft of identity, false assertion of enduring superiority and the corruption of the human spirit that lie behind slavery. He represents the self-deception and viciousness underlying the south’s much vaunted hospitality and chivalry that has for so long been the subject of sentimental celebration, not least by Hollywood movies” (Philip French, The Guardian).

The city of Savannah abounds in parks, as they are called—squares, fenced in, with trees. Young children and infants were there, with very respectable colored nurses—young women, with bandanna and plaid cambric turbans, and superior in genteel appearance to any similar class, as a whole, in any of our cities. They could not be slaves. Are they slaves? “Certainly,” says the friend at your side; “they each belong to some master or mistress.” In behalf of a score of mothers of my acquaintance, and of some fathers, I looked with covetous feelings upon the relation which I saw existed between these nurses and children. These women seemed not to have the air and manner of hirelings in the care and treatment of the children; their conversation with them, the degree of seemingly maternal feeling which was infused into their whole deportment, could not fail to strike a casual observer. Then these are slaves. Their care of the children, even if it be slave labor, is certainly equal to that which is free. “But that was a freeman who just passed us?” “No; he is Mr. W.’s servant, near us.” “He a slave?” Such a rhetorical lifting of the arm, such a line of grace as the hand described in descending easily from the hat to the side, such a glow of good feeling on recognizing neighbor B., with a supplementary act of respect to the stranger with him, were wholly foreign from my notions of a slave. “Where are your real slaves, such as we read of?” “These are about a fair sample.” […]

“Foxx applies a sheen of nobility to the character from the second he is freed and begins moving through the air with his shoulders back and his head high, his dignity shining. In a repeated motif, Django rides into towns atop a horse, his body language singing of pride and strength, a sight that causes people to rear back in shock, unused to seeing a Black [sic] person cloaked in dignity” (Touré Neblett, MSNBC).

Without supposing that I had yet seen slavery, it was nevertheless true that a load was lifted from my mind by the first superficial look at the slaves in the city. It was as though I had been let down by necessity into a cavern which I had peopled with disagreeable sights, and, on reaching bottom, found daylight streaming in, and the place cheerful. A better-looking, happier, more courteous set of people I had never seen, than those colored men, women, and children whom I met the first few days of my stay in Savannah. It had a singular effect on my spirits. They all seemed glad to see me. I was tempted with some vain feelings, as though they meant to pay me some special respect. It was all the more grateful, because for months sickness and death had covered almost every thing, even the faces of friends at home, with sadness to my eye, and my spirits had drooped. But to be met and accosted with such extremely civil, benevolent looks, to see so many faces break into pleasant smiles in going by, made one feel that he was not alone in the world even in a land of strangers. How such unaffected politeness could have been learned under the lash I did not understand. It conflicted with my notions of slavery. I could not have dreamed that these people had been “down trodden,” “their very manhood crushed out of them,” “the galling yoke of slavery breaking every human feelings, and reducing them to the level of brutes.” It was one of the pleasures of taking a walk to be greeted by all my colored friends. I felt that I had taken a whole new race of my fellow-men by the hand. I took care to notice each of them, and get his full smile and salutation; many a time I would gladly have stopped and paid a good price for a certain “good morning,” courtesy, and bow; it was worth more than gold; its charm consisted in its being unbought, unconstrained, for I was an entire stranger. Timidity, a feeling of necessity, the leer of obliged deference, I nowhere saw; but the artless, free, and easy manner which burdened spirits never wear. It was difficult to pass the colored people in the streets without a smile awakened by the magnetism of their smiles.

“These are powerful, taboo-breaking characters with a perverse but somehow believable relationship redolent of the deep weirdness of race relations in the Old South: DiCaprio’s poncey, Van Dyke-wearing Calvin Candie is actually under the thumb of Jackson’s grinning, jiving Stephen, […] but both are hopelessly doomed by the soul-crushing institution of white supremacy” (Andrew O’Hehir, Salon).

From Chapter 3, ‘New Views of the Relations of the Slaves’:

The gentleman at whose house I was guest commanded the military battalion. The parade day occurred during my visit. Three bands came successively within an hour in the morning to salute him. These bands were composed of slaves, so called; but never did military bands suggest the idea of involuntary servitude less, or feel servitude of any kind for the time less, than these black warriors. […] There was nothing grotesque in their appearance, nothing corresponding to Ethiopic minstrelsy in our northern caricatures; any military company at the north would have feelings of respect for their looks and performances. […]

“The horrors of human bondage… traumatic cultural experience of a marginalized people… the day-to-day suffering slaves endured… benevolent white people equally complicit in the ills of slavery… slavery is this terrible, looming thing… inescapable” (Roxane Gay, Buzzfeed).

If it be less romantic, it is more instructive, to see the fire department of a southern city composed of colored men in their company uniforms, parading, and in times of service working, with all the enthusiasm of Philadelphia or Boston firemen. Thus it is given to the colored population of some cities and towns at the south to protect the dwellings and stores of the city against fire—the dwellings and property of men who, as slaves owners, are regarded by many at the north with feelings of commiseration, chiefly from being exposed, as we imagine, to the insurrectionary impulses of an oppressed people. To organize that people into a protective force, to give them the largest liberty at times when general consternation and confusion would afford them the best opportunities to execute seditionary and murderous purposes, certainly gave me, as a northerner, occasion to think that whatever is true theoretically, and whatever else may be practically true, with regard to slavery, the relations and feelings between the white and colored people at the south were not wholly as I had imagined them to be. These two instances of confidence and kindness gave me feelings of affection for the blacks and respect for their masters. Not a word had been said to me about slavery; my eyes taught me that some practical things in the system are wholly different from my anticipations. “I saw it, and received instruction.”

“American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust” (Spike Lee).

Law and Order

“When we find ourselves to have been under wrong impressions,” wrote the Reverend Adams, “and begin to have our notions corrected, our disposition is to reach an opposite extreme, and to see things in a light whose glare is as false as the previous twilight. I resolved to watch my feelings in this respect, and take the true gauge of this subject.” Bearing that in mind, let’s look at Chapters 4 through 6, ‘Favorable Appearances in Southern Society and in Slavery.’ From Section 1, ‘Good Order’:

The streets of southern cities and towns immediately struck me as being remarkably quiet in the evening and at night. “What is the cause of so much quiet?” I said to a friend. “Our colored people are mostly at home. After eight o’clock they cannot be abroad without a written pass, which they must show on being challenged, or go to the guard house. The master must pay fifty cents for a release. White policemen in cities, and in towns patrols of white citizens, walk the streets at night.” Here I received my first impression of interference with the personal liberty of the colored people. The white servants, if there be any, the boys, the apprentices, the few Irish, have liberty; the colored men are under restraint. But though I saw that this was a feature of slavery, I did not conclude that it would be well to dissolve the Union in order to abolish it. Apart from the question of slavery, it was easy to see that to keep such a part of the population out of the streets after a reasonable hour at night, preventing their unrestrained, promiscuous roving, is a great protection to them, as well as to the public peace. In attending evening worship, in visiting at any hour, a written pass is freely given; so that, after all, the bondage is theoretical, but still it is bondage. Is it an illustration, I asked myself, of other things in slavery, which are theoretically usurpations, but practically benevolent? From the numbers in the streets, though not great, you would not suspect that the blacks are restricted at night; yet I do not remember one instance of rudeness or unsuitable behavior among them in any place. Around the drinking saloons there were white men and boys whose appearance and behavior reminded me of “liberty and pursuit of happiness” in similar places at the north; but there were no colored men there: the slaves are generally free as to street brawls and open drunkenness. I called to mind a place at the north whose streets every evening, and especially on Sabbath evenings, are a nuisance. If that place could enforce a law forbidding certain youths to be in the streets after a certain hour without a pass from their employers, it would do much to raise them to an equality with in good manners with their more respectable colored fellow-men at the south. I had occasion to pity some white southerners, as they issued late at night from a drinking-place, in being deprived of the wholesome restraint laid upon the colored population. The moral and religious character of the colored people at the south owes very much to this restraint. Putting aside for the time all thoughts of slavery, I indulged myself in thinking and feeling, here is strong government. It has a tonic, bracing effect upon one’s feelings to be in its atmosphere; and as Charles Lamb tells us not to inquire too narrowly of every mendicant whether the “wife and six young children” are a fiction, but to give, and enjoy it, so there was a temptation to disregard for the time the idea of slavery, and, becoming a mere utilitarian, to think of three millions of our population as being under perfect control, and in this instance indisputably to their benefit.

And from Section 5, ‘Personal Protection’:

A strong public sentiment protects the person of the slave against annoyances and injuries. Boys and men cannot abuse another man’s servant. Wrongs to his person are avenged. It amounts in many cases to a chivalric feeling, increased by a sense of utter meanness and cowardice in striking or insulting one who cannot return insult for insult and blow for blow. Instances of this protective feeling greatly interested me. One was rather singular, indeed ludicrous, and made considerable sport; but it shows how far the feeling can proceed. A slave was brought before a mayor’s court for some altercation in the street; the master privately requested the mayor to spare him from being chastised, and the mayor was strongly disposed to do so; but the testimony was too palpably against the servant, and he was whipped; in consequence of which the master sent a challenge to the mayor to fight a duel. A gentleman, whose slave had been struck by a white mechanic with whom the servant had remonstrated for not having kept an engagement, went indignantly to the shop with his man servant to seek explanation and redress, and in avenging him, had his arm stripped of his clothing by a drawing knife in the hands of the mechanic. It is sometimes asserted that the killing a negro is considered a comparatively light offense at the south. In Georgia it is much safer to kill a white man than a negro; and if either is done in South Carolina, the law is exceedingly apt to be put in force. In Georgia I have witnessed a strong purpose among lawyers to prevent the murderer of a negro from escaping justice. A slave had recently set fire to a cotton house, after the crop was in, and the loss was great. He was arraigned, and plead guilty. The judge asked who was his master. He pointed to him. The judge inquired if he had provided counsel for him. The master honestly replied that as the slave was to plead guilty, and there was no question in any mind of his guilt, he had not thought it necessary. The judge told the clerk not to enter the negro’s plea, and informed the master, that unless he preferred to provide counsel, he would do it, as the law allowed him to do, at the master’s expense. The master brought forward two young lawyers. The judge said, with due respect to the young gentlemen, that the master knew how grave was the offense, and that experienced men ought to manage the case. He appointed two of the ablest men at the bar to defend the negro. But the evidence, as all knew it would be, was overwhelming, and the jury convicted the prisoner. Whereupon one of the counsel rose, and reminded the judge at what disadvantage the defense had been conducted, and moved for a new trial. It was granted. The case was pending at my last information. I asked myself, where at the North would a white culprit meet with greater lenity and kindness? If the administration of justice is any good index of the moral feeling in a community, I began to see that it was wrong to judge such a community as the one in question merely by their slave code, or by theoretical views of slavery however logically true.

Work

More ‘Favorable Appearances’ in Section 4, ‘Labor and Privileges’:

Life on the cotton plantations is, in general, as severe with the colored people as agricultural life at the north. I have spent summers upon farms, however, where the owners and their hands excited my sympathy by toils to which the slaves on many plantations are strangers. Every thing depends upon the disposition of the master. It happened that I saw some of the best specimens, and heard descriptions of some of the very bad. In the rice swamps, malaria begets diseases and destroys life; in the sugar districts, at certain seasons, the process of manufacture requires labor, night and day, for a considerable time. There the different dispositions of the master affect the comfort of the laborers variously, as in all other situations. But in the cotton-growing country, the labor, though extending in one form and another nearly through the year, yet taking each day’s labor by itself, is no more toilsome than is performed by a hired field hand at the north; still the continuity of labor from February to the last part of December, with a slight intermission in midsummer, when the crop is “laid by,” the stalks being matured, and the crop left to ripen, makes plantation life severe. Some planters allow their hands a certain portion of the soil for their own culture, and give them stated times to work it; some prefer to allow them out of the whole crop a percentage equal to such a distribution of land; and some do nothing of the kind; but their hearts are made of the northern iron and the steel. It is the common law, however, with all who regard public opinion at the south, to allow their hands certain privileges and exemptions, such as long rest in the middle of the day, early dismission from the field at night, a half day occasionally, in addition to holidays, for which the colored people of all denominations are much indebted to the Episcopal church, whose festivals they celebrate with the largest liberty. They raise poultry, swine, melons; keep bees; catch fish; peddle brooms, and small articles of cabinet making; and, if they please, lay up the money, or spend it on their wives and children, or waste it for things hurtful, if there are white traders desperate enough to defy the laws made for such cases, and which are apt to be most rigorously executed. Some slaves are owners of bank and railroad shares. A slave woman, having had three hundred dollars stolen from her by a white man, her master was questioned in court as to the probability of her having had so much money. He said that he not unfrequently had borrowed fifty and a hundred dollars of her, and added, that she was always very strict as to his promised time of payment. It is but fair, in this and all other cases, to describe the condition of things as commonly approved and prevailing; and when there are painful exceptions, it is but just to consider what is the public sentiment with regard to them. By this rule a visitor is made to feel that good and kind treatment of the slaves is the common law, subject, of course, to caprices and passions. One will find at the south a high tone of feeling on this subject, and meet with some affecting illustrations of it. You may see a wagon from a neighboring town in the market-place of a city or large place, filled with honeycombs, melons, mops, husk mats, and other articles of manufacture and produce, and a white man with his colored servant selling them at wholesale or retail. It will interest your feelings, and give you some new impressions of slave owners, to know that these articles are the property of that servant, and that his master, a respectable gentleman, with disinterested kindness, is helping his servant dispose of them, protecting him from imposition, making change for him, with the glow of cheerfulness and good humor such as acts like these impart to the looks and manner of a real gentleman, who always knows how to sustain himself in an equivocal position. Had that master overworked his servant in the sugar season, or killed him in the field, we might have heard of it at the north; but this little wagon has come and gone for more than a year on the market days, the master and servant chatting side by side, counting their net profits, discussing the state of the markets, inventing new commodities, the master stepping in at the Savings Bank, on the way home, and entering nine or ten dollars more in Joe’s pass-book, which already shows several hundred dollars; and all this has not been so much as named on the platform of any society devoted to the welfare of the slaves. True, there are masters, who, as the psalm sung by the colored choir says, “never raise their thoughts so high”; but it is gratifying to know that such things as these characterize the intercourse of masters and servants at the south. Nameless are they, in a thousand cases, and noiseless; but the consciousness of them, and of the disposition and feelings which prompt them, it was easy to see, gives to our wholesale denunciations of slavery a character of injustice which grieves and exasperates not a little.

From Section 10, ‘Absence of Pauperism’:

Pauperism is prevented by slavery. This idea is absurd, no doubt, in the apprehension of many at the north, who think that slaves are, as a matter of course, paupers. Nothing can be more untrue. Every slave has an inalienable claim in law upon his owner for support for the whole of life. He can not be thrust into an almshouse, he can not become a vagrant, he can not beg his living, he can not be wholly neglected when he is old and decrepit. I saw a white-headed negro at the door of his cabin on a gentleman’s estate, who had done no work for ten years. He enjoys all the privileges of the plantation, garden, and orchard; is clothed and fed as carefully as though he were useful. On asking him his age, he said he thought he “must be nigh a hundred”; that he was a servant to a gentleman in the army “when Washington fit Cornwallis and took him at Little York.” At a place called Harris’s Neck, Georgia, there is a servant who has been confined to his bed with rheumatism thirty years, and no invalid has more reason to be grateful for attention and kindness. Going into the office of a physician and surgeon, I accidentally saw the leg of a black man which had just been amputated for an ulcer. The patient will be a charge upon his owner for life. An action at law may be brought against one who does not provide a comfortable support for his servants.

And from Section 11, ‘Wages of Labor’:

One error which I had to correct in my own opinions was with regard to wages of labor. I will illustrate my meaning by relating a case. A young colored woman is called into a family at the south to do work as a seamstress. Her charge is, perhaps, thirty-seven and a half cents per day. “Do you have your wages for your own use?” “No; I pay mistress half of what I earn.” Seamstresses in our part of the country, toiling all day, you will naturally think, are not compelled to give one half of their earnings to an owner. This may be your first reflection, accompanied with a feeling of compassion for the poor girl, and with some thoughts, not agreeable, concerning mistresses who take from a child of toil half her day’s earnings. You will put this down as one of the accusations to be justly made against slavery. But, on reflecting further, you may happen to ask yourself, How much does it cost this seamstress for room rent, board, and clothing? The answer will be, nothing. Who provides her with these? Her mistress. Perhaps, now, your sympathy may he arrested, and may begin to turn in favor of the mistress. The girl does not earn enough to pay her expenses, yet she has a full support, and lays up money. […] The accusation against slavery of working human beings without wages must be modified, if we give a proper meaning to the term wages. A stipulated sum per diem is our common notion of wages. A vast many slaves get wages in a better form than this—in provision for their support for the whole of life, with permission to earn something, and more or less according to the disposition of the masters and the ability of the slaves. A statement of the case, which perhaps is not of much value, was made by a slaveholder in this form: You hire a domestic by the week, or a laborer by the month, for certain wages, with food, lodging, perhaps clothing; I hire him for the term of life, becoming responsible for him in his decrepitude and old age. Leaving out of view the involuntariness on his part of the arrangement, he gets a good equivalent for his services; to his risk of being sold, and passing from hand to hand, there is an offset in the perpetual claim which he will have on some owner for maintenance all his days. Whether some of our immigrants would not be willing to enter into such a contract, is a question which many opponents of slavery at the north would not hesitate to answer for them, saying that liberty to beg and to starve is better than to have all your present wants supplied, and a competency for life guarantied, in slavery.

Leisure

We’ll take one last look at those ‘Favorable Appearances.’ From Section 2, ‘The Dress of the Slaves’:

To see slaves with broadcloth suits, well-fitting and nicely-ironed fine shirts, polished boots, gloves, umbrellas for sunshades, the best of hats, their young men with their blue coats and bright buttons, in the latest style, white Marseilles vests, white pantaloons, brooches in their shirt bosoms, gold chains, elegant sticks, and some old men leaning on their ivory and silver-headed staves, as respectable in their attire as any who that day went to the house of God, was more than I was prepared to see. As to that group of them under the trees, had I been unseen, I would have followed my impulse to shake hands with the whole of them, as a vent to my pleasure in seeing slaves with all the bearing of respectable, dignified Christian gentlemen. As it was, I involuntarily lifted my hat to them, which was responded to by them with such smiles, uncovering of the head, and graceful salutations, that, scribe or Pharisee, I felt that I did love such greetings in the market-places from such people. Then I fell into some reflections upon the philosophy of dress as a powerful means of securing respect, and thought how impossible it must soon become to treat with indignity men who respected themselves, as these men evidently did; nay, rather, how impossible it already was for masters who would so clothe their servants to treat them as cattle. Further acquaintance with that place satisfied me that this inference was right. There is one southern town, at least, where it would be morally as impossible for a good servant to be recklessly sold, or to be violently separated from his family, or to be abused with impunity, as in any town at the north. On seeing these men in their Sabbath attire, and feeling toward them as their whole appearance compelled me to do, I understood one thing which before was not explained. I had always noticed that southerners seldom used the word slaves in private conversation. I supposed that it was conscience that made them change the word, as they had also omitted it in the Constitution of the United States. But I was soon unable to use the word myself in conversation, after seeing them in their Sabbath dress, and as my hearers, and in families; their appearance and condition in so great a proportion making the idea connected with the word slave incompatible with the impressions received from them. Let no one draw sweeping conclusions from these remarks, but wait till we have together seen and heard other things, and in the mean time only gather from what has been said that our fancies respecting the colored people at the south, as well as their masters, are not all of them, probably, correct. But the women, the colored women, in the streets on the Sabbath, put my notions respecting the appearance of the slaves to utter discomfiture. At the north an elegantly-dressed colored woman excites mirth. Every northerner knows that this is painfully true. Gentlemen, ladies, boys, and girls never pass her without a feeling of the ludicrous; a feeling which is followed in some—would it were so in all—by compunction and shame. It was a pleasant paradox to find that where the colored people are not free, they have in many things the most liberty, and among them the liberty to dress handsomely, and be respected in it.

And from Section 3, ‘The Children of the Slaves’:

But of all the touching sights of innocence and love appealing to you unconsciously for your best feelings of tenderness and affection, the colored young children have never been surpassed in my experience. Might I choose a class of my fellow-creatures to instruct and love, I should be drawn by my present affection toward them to none more readily than to these children of the slaves; nor should I expect my patience and affection to be more richly rewarded elsewhere. Extremes of disposition and character, of course, exist among them, as among others; but they are naturally as bright, affectionate, and capable as other children, while the ways in which your instructions impress them, the reasonings they excite, the remarks occasioned by them, are certainly peculiar. Their attachments and sympathies are sometimes very touching. One little face I shall never forget, of a girl about seven years old, who passed us in the street on an errand, with such a peculiarly distressed yet gentle look, that I inquired her name. A lady with me said that she belonged to a white family, in which a son had recently killed a companion in a quarrel, and had fled. The natural anguish of a sister at some direful calamity in a house could not have been more strikingly portrayed than in that sweet little dark face. It had evidently settled there. Going to meeting one Sabbath morning, a child, about eight years old, tripped along before me, with her hymn book and nicely-folded handkerchief in her hand, the flounces on her white dress very profuse, frilled ankles, light-colored boots, mohair mits, and sunshade, all showing that some fond heart and hand had bestowed great care upon her. Home and children came to mind. I thought of the feelings which that flower of the family perhaps occasioned. Is it the pastor’s daughter? Is it the daughter of the lady whose garden I had walked in, but which bears no such plant as this? But my musings were interrupted by the child, who, on hearing footsteps behind, suddenly turned, and showed one of the blackest faces I ever saw. It was one of the thousands of intelligent, happy colored children, who on every Sabbath, in every southern town and city, make a northern visitor feel that some of his theoretical opinions at home, with regard to the actual condition of slavery, are much improved by practical views of it.

There’s more of this, and I urge you to read the entire book, but as the Reverend Adams points out:

We have thus far looked at the slaves apart from the theory of slavery and from slave laws, and from their liability to suffering by being separated and sold. These features of slavery deserve to be considered by themselves; we can give them and things of that class a more just weight, and view the favorable circumstances of their condition with greater candor.

So let us now consider them.

Revolting Features

Chapter 7, ‘Revolting Features of Slavery,’ features a tale from that rare, possibly rarest intersection of literary genres: the heartwarming child slave auction comedy of errors based on a true story.

Passing up the steps of a court-house in a southern town with some gentlemen, I saw a man sitting on the steps with a colored infant, wrapped in a coverlet, its face visible, and the child asleep. It is difficult for some who have young children not to bestow a passing look or salutation upon a child; but besides this, the sight before me seemed out of place and strange. “Is the child sick?” I said to the man, as I was going up the steps. “No, master; she is going to be sold.” “Sold! Where is her mother?” “At home, master.” “How old is the child?” “She is about a year, master.” “You are not selling the child, of course. How comes she here?” “I don’t know, master; only the sheriff told me to sit down here and wait till twelve o’clock, sir.” It is hardly necessary to say that my heart died within me. Now I had found slavery in its most awful feature—the separation of a child from its mother. “The mother is at home, master.” What are her feelings? What were they when she missed the infant? Was it taken openly, or by stealth? Who has done this? What shape, what face had he? The mother is not dead; “the mother is at home, master.” What did they do to you, Rachel, weeping and refusing to be comforted? Undetermined whether I would witness the sale, whether I could trust myself in such a scene, I walked into a friend’s law office, and looked at his books. I heard the sheriff’s voice, the “public outcry,” as the vendue is called, but did not go out, partly because I would not betray the feelings which I knew would be awakened. One of my friends met me a few minutes after, who had witnessed the transaction. “You did not see the sale,” he said. “No. Was the child sold?” “Yes, for one hundred and forty dollars.” I could take this case, so far as I have described it, go into any pulpit or upon any platform at the north, and awaken the deepest emotions known to the human heart, harrow up the feelings of every father and mother, and make them pass a resolution surcharged with all the righteous indignation which language can express. All that any speaker who might have preceded me, supposing the meeting to be one for discussion, might have said respecting the contentment, good looks, happy relations of the slaves, I could have rendered of no avail to his argument by this little incident. No matter what kindness may be exercised in ten thousand instances; a system in which the separation of an infant from its mother is an essential element can not escape reprobation. On relating what I had seen to some southern ladies, they became pale with emotion; they were silent; they were filled with evident distress. But before remarking upon this case, I will give another. My attention was arrested by the following advertisement:— Guardian’s Sale. Will be sold before the court-house door in——, on the first Tuesday in May next, agreeably to an order of the ordinary of——county, the interest of the minors of——, in a certain negro girl named——, said interest being three fourths of said negro. Three fourths of a negro girl to be sold at auction! There was something here which excited more than ordinary curiosity: the application of vulgar fractions to personal identity was entirely new. I determined to witness this sale. An hour before the appointed time, I saw the girl sitting alone on the steps of the court-house. She wore a faded but tidy orange-colored dress, a simple handkerchief on her head, and she was barefoot. Her head was resting upon her hand, with her elbow on her knee. I stood unperceived and looked at her. Poor, lonely thing, waiting to be sold on the steps of that court-house! The place of justice is a bleak promontory, from which you look off as upon a waste of waters—a dreary, shoreless waste. What avails every mitigation of slavery? Had I become a convert to the system, here is enough to counterbalance all my good impressions. The sheriff arrived at noon, and the people assembled. The purchaser was to have the services of the girl three fourths of the time, a division of property having given some one a claim to one fourth of her appraised value. The girl was told to stand up. She had a tall, slender form, and was, in all respects, an uncommonly good-looking child. The bidding commenced at two hundred dollars, and went on in an animated and exciting manner. The girl began to cry, and wiped her tears with the back of her hand; no one replied to her; the bidding went on; she turned her back to the people. I saw her shoulders heave with her suppressed crying; she said something in a confused voice to a man who sat behind the auctioneer. When I was young I was drawn, by mingling with some older schoolmates, strongly against my will, and every moment purposing an escape, to see a youth executed for arson. I resolved that I would never look upon such a sight again. But here I was beholding something which moved me as I had not been moved for all these long years. She was fourteen years old. A few days before I had sent to a child of mine, entering her fourteenth year, a birthday gift. By this coincidence I was led to think of this slave girl with some peculiar feelings. I made the case my own. She was a child to parents, living or dead, whose hearts, unless perverted by some unnatural process, would yearn over her and be distracted by this sight. Four hundred and forty-five dollars was the last bid, and the man sitting behind the sheriff said to her kindly, “Well, run and jump into the wagon.” A large number of citizens had assembled to witness the sale of this girl; some of them men of education and refinement, humane and kind. On any question of delicacy and propriety, in every thing related to the finest sentiments, I would have felt it a privilege to learn of them. How then, I said to myself as I watched their faces, can you look upon a scene like this as upon an ordinary business transaction, when my feelings are so tumultuous, and all my sensibilities are excruciated? You are not hard-hearted men; you are gentle and generous. In my intercourse with you I have often felt, in the ardor of new friendships, how happy I should be to have you in my circle of immediate friends at home; what ornaments you would be to any circle of Christian friends. Some of you are graduates of Yale College; some of Brown University: you know all that I know about the human heart: I hesitate to believe that I am right and you wrong. If to sell a human being at auction were all which I feel it to be, you must know it as well as I. Yet I cannot yield my convictions. Why do we differ so in our feelings? Instances of private humanity and tenderness have satisfied me that you would not lay one needless burden upon a human being, nor see him suffer without redress. Is it because you are used to the sight that you endure it with composure? or because it is an essential part of a system which you groan under but cannot remove? To begin with the sale of the infant. During my stay in the place, three or four estimable gentlemen said to me, each in private, “I understand that you saw that infant sold the other day. We are very sorry that you happened to see it. Nothing of the kind ever took place before to our knowledge, and we all feared that it would make an unhappy impression upon you.” The manner in which this was said affected me almost as much as the thing which had given occasion to it. Southern hearts and consciences, I felt reassured, were no more insensible than mine. The system had not steeled the feelings of these gentlemen; the presence of a northerner, a friend, retaining his private, natural convictions, as they perceived, without unkindness of words or manner, made them look at the transaction with his eyes; every kind and generous emotion was alive in their hearts; they felt that such a transaction needed to be explained and justified. How could they explain it? How could they justify it? With many, if not with all of my readers, it is a foregone conclusion, as it had been with me, that the case admits of no explanation or justification. I received, as I said, three or four statements with regard to the case, and this is the substance of them:— The mother of this infant belonged to a man who had become embarrassed in his circumstances, in consequence of which the mother was sold to another family in the same place, before the birth of the child; but the first owner still laid claim to the child, and there was some legal doubt with regard to his claim. He was disposed to maintain this claim, and it became a question how the child should be taken from him. A legal gentleman, whose name is familiar to the country, told me that he was consulted, and he advised that through an old execution the child should be levied upon, be sold at auction, and thus be removed from him. The plan succeeded. The child was attached, advertised, and offered for sale. The mother’s master bought it, at more than double the ratable price, and the child went to its mother. Nor was this all. In the company of bidders there was a man employed by a generous lady to attend the sale, and see that the infant was restored to its mother. The lady had heard that the sale was to take place, but did not fully know the circumstances, and her purpose was to prevent the child from passing from the parent. Accordingly her agent and the agent of the mother’s master were bidding against each other for some time, each with the same benevolent determination to restore the child to its mother. Rachel was comforted. Rather she had had no need of being comforted, for the sheriff was in this case to be her avenger and protector. Here was slavery restoring a child to its mother; here was a system which can deal in unborn children, redressing its own wrong. Moreover, the law which forbids the sale of a child under five years was violated, in order to keep the child with its mother. Had I not known the sequel of the story, what a thrilling, effective appeal could I have made at the north by the help of this incident. Then what injustice I should have inflicted upon the people of that place; what stimulus might I have given to the rescue of a fugitive slave ; what resuscitation to the collapsing vocabulary of epithets. How might I have helped on the dissolution of the Union; how have led half our tribes to swear that they would have war with the rest forever, when in truth the men and women who had done this thing had performed one of the most tender arid humane actions, and did prevent, and, if necessary, with their earthly all, (for I knew them well,) would have prevented that from ever taking place to which, in my ignorance and passion, I should have sworn that I could bear witness ‚ an infant taken from its mother s breast and sold.

Or maybe it was another racist, sadistic horror of the soul-crushing, hot-boxing holocaust. Or whatever.

The “three fourths” of the girl were bought by the owner of the other fourth, who already had possession of her. The sale took place that he might be her sole owner. That word which followed the sale, “Well, run and jump into the wagon,” was music to the child. I understood afterward why she turned her back to the crowd, and looked at the man who sat behind the sheriff. He was her master, and he owned her mother; the girl heard the bidding from the company, and heard her master bidding; the conflict she understood; she was at stake, as she felt, for life; it took some time for the bidding to reach four hundred dollars; hope deferred made her heart sick; she turned and kept her eye on her master, to see whether he would suffer himself to be defeated. He sat quietly using his knife upon a stick, like one whose mind was made up; the result of the sale in his favor excited no new feeling in him; but the ready direction, “Well, run and jump into the wagon,” was as much as to say, I have done what I meant to do when I came here.

The Reverend Adams got to know the slave auctions pretty well:

The sale of slaves at auction in places where they are known—and this is the case every where except in the largest cities—excites deep interest in some of the citizens of that place. They are drawn to the sale with feelings of personal regard for the slaves, and are vigilant to prevent unprincipled persons from purchasing and carrying them away, and even from possessing them in their own neighborhood. I know of citizens combining to prevent such men from buying, and of their contributing to assist good men and women in purchasing the servants at prices greatly increased by such competition. In all such cases the law requiring and regulating public sales and advertisements of sales prevents those private transfers which would defeat the good intentions of benevolent men. It is an extremely rare case for a servant or servants who have been known in town to be removed into hands which the people of the place generally would not approve. The sale of a negro at public auction is not a reckless, unfeeling thing in the towns at the south, where the subjects of the sale are from among themselves. In settling estates, good men exercise as much care with regard to the disposition of the slaves as though they were providing homes for white orphan children; and that too when they have published advertisements of slaves in such connections with horses and cattle, that, when they are read by a northerner, his feelings are excruciated. In hearing some of the best of men, such as are found in all communities, largely intrusted with the settlement of estates, men of extreme fairness and incorruptible integrity, speak of the word “chattel” as applied to slaves, it is obvious that this unfeeling law term has no counterpart in their minds, nor in the feelings of the community in general. Slaves are allowed to find masters and mistresses who will buy them. Having found them, the sheriffs’ and administrators’ sales must by law be made public, the persons must be advertised, and every thing looks like an unrestricted offer, while it is the understanding of the company that the sale has really been made in private. Sitting in the reading-room of a hotel one morning, I saw a colored woman enter and courtesy to a gentleman opposite. “Good morning, sir. Please, sir, how is Ben?” “Ben—he is very well. But I don’t know you.” “Ben is my husband. I heard you were in town, and I want you to buy me. My mistress is dead these three weeks, and the family is to be broken up.” “Well, I will buy you. Where shall I inquire?” All this was said and done in as short a time as it takes to read it; but this woman was probably obliged by law, in the settlement of the estate, to be advertised and described.

Oscar Wilde, James Redpath, and John Brown

We are now prepared to ask, at least, if not answer, three questions about American slavery. First, did the slaves want to be free? Second, did the slaves try to become free? Third, were the slaves glad to be free? In general, I mean: disregarding rare exceptions, like the barbarous murderer Nat Turner.

Answers courtesy of Oscar Wilde, of all people, in The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891):

Slavery was put down in America, not in consequence of any action on the part of the slaves, or even any express desire on their part that they should be free. It was put down entirely through the grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators in Boston and elsewhere, who were not slaves themselves, nor owners of slaves, nor had anything to do with the question really. It was, undoubtedly, the Abolitionists who set the torch alight, who began the whole thing. And it is curious to note that from the slaves themselves they received, not merely very little assistance, but hardly any sympathy even; and when at the close of the war the slaves found themselves free, found themselves indeed so absolutely free that they were free to starve, many of them bitterly regretted the new state of things.

“Grossly illegal conduct.” Speaking of lit torches, you might recall Carlyle’s “frantic ‘Abolitionists,’ fire-breathing like the old Chimaera.” Is this a fair description? Not according to PBS:

Radicals. Agitators. Troublemakers. Liberators. Called by many names, the abolitionists tore the nation apart in order to make a more perfect union. Men and women, black and white, Northerners and Southerners, poor and wealthy, these passionate antislavery activists fought body and soul in the most important civil rights crusade in American history. What began as a pacifist movement fueled by persuasion and prayer became a fiery and furious struggle that forever changed the nation. […] In the face of personal risks—beatings, imprisonment, even death—abolitionists held fast to their cause, laying the civil rights groundwork for the future and raising weighty constitutional and moral questions that are with us still. […] What aspect of the abolitionist movement moves you the most? Is there an event you wish you could have witnessed in person? A story you love? A person you admire or can relate to? Share your story with American Experence [sic].

Not according to your teacher, either (Scholastic):

In the 1800s, the abolition movement grew steadily in the North. Abolitionists organized meetings and gave speeches against slavery. They wrote and distributed anti-slavery books, pamphlets, and newsletters. They formed abolitionist societies, signed petitions, and even murdered a bunch of people.

Wait, sorry, I’ve copied that down wrong: “… and even boycotted goods made with slave labor.”

Compare an actual abolitionist: James Redpath. “He would write passionately against the institution, using his words to influence opinion throughout the North” (PBS) and blah blah blah more abolitionist propaganda. Consider this passage from The Roving Editor: Talks with Slaves in the Southern States (1859), which he dedicated to the abolitionist and murderer John Brown (“something of a romantic ideal to Redpath,” says PBS):

In order that no man, or body of men, may be injured or misrepresented by unfair presentations or perversions of my creed, or induced to peruse the pages that follow, under false impressions or pretences, I will here briefly state my political, or rather my revolutionary Faith: I am a Republican—and something more. I am inflexibly opposed to the extension of slavery; but equally do I oppose the doctrine of its protection in States where it already exists. Non-intervention and protection are practically synonymous. Let slavery alone, and it lives a century. Fight it, and it dies. Any weapons will kill it, if kept ever active: fire or water—bayonets or bullion—the soldier’s arm or the writer’s pen. To prevent its extension merely, will never destroy it. If it is right that slavery should exist in Georgia, it is equally right to extend it into Kansas. If the inter-state traffic in human beings is right, equally just is the demand for re-opening the slave trade. I am an Emancipationist—and something more. I believe slavery to be a curse, which it is desirable to speedily abolish. But to Gradual Emancipation I am resolutely antagonistic. For I regard property in man as robbery of man; and I am not willing that our robbers should give notes on time—for freedom and justice at thirty days, or thirty years, or any other period: rather let them be smitten down where they stand, and the rights that they have wrested from their slaves, be wrested—if necessary—with bloodshed and violence, with the torch and the rifle, from them.

They do so love their torches. Note that Redpath would rather invade, enslave, and destroy the South than emancipate the slaves over thirty days—no, really: the whole point of this passage is to correct “false impressions or pretences” about Redpath’s “revolutionary Faith.” Does he actually care at all about the slaves? If so, why would he choose “bloodshed and violence” over “Gradual Emancipation”? (The former were by no means guaranteed to bring about “freedom and justice” for anyone!) Is he, in fact, fighting slavery—or just attacking the South?

“But what shall we do with the slaves?” Make free men of them. “And with the slaveholding class?” Abolish them. “And with the Legrees of the plantations?” Them, annihilate! Drive them into the sea, as Christ once drove the swine; or chase them into the dismal swamps and black morasses of the South. “Anywhere—anywhere—out of the world!”

Now we’re talking about a fictional character in a propaganda novel written by a woman who had never seen a plantation. Since “Simon Legree” doesn’t actually exist, who is the author pledging to “annihilate”? What would constitute reasonable self-defense? Again, does Redpath appear to be attacking slavery here?

I am a Peace-Man—and something more. I would fight and kill for the sake of peace. Now, slavery is a state of perpetual war. I am a Non-Resistant—and something more. I would slay every man who attempted to resist the liberation of the slave. I am a Democrat—and nothing more. I believe in humanity and human rights. I recognize nothing as so sacred on earth. Rather than consent to the infringement of the most insignificant or seemingly unimportant of human rights, let races be swept from the face of the earth—let nations be dismembered—let dynasties be dethroned—let laws and governments, religions and reputations be cast out and trodden under feet of men! This is my creed. For myself, I am an earnest man. If you think proper, now, to accompany me—come on; if not, au revoir—and may the Lord have mercy on your soul!

“I believe in humanity and human rights,” so “let races be swept from the face of the earth.” It’s the Religion of Humanity again, ready to burn the world in the name of Human Rights—and perhaps tomorrow it will be some other, equally appealing unexamined abstraction demanding that nations be dismembered. “I would fight and kill for the sake of peace.” Thanks, we wouldn’t want to harbor any “false impressions” about your “revolutionary Faith.”

Of course, we mustn’t lose sight (not that progressives will ever let us) of what the abolitionists actually accomplished: forcing the “liberty to beg and starve” (Adams) on millions of people who never asked for it, didn’t want it, and indeed “bitterly regretted” the whole thing (Wilde). Allow me to introduce Mr. Charlie Davenport, another real-life emancipated slave:

Us Niggers didn’ know nothin’ ’bout what was gwine on in de outside worl’. All us knowed was dat a war was bein’ fit. Pussonally, I b’lieve in what Marse Jefferson Davis done. He done de only thing a gent’man could a-done. He tol’ Marse Abe Lincoln to ’tend to his own bus’ness an’ he’d ’tend to his’n. But Marse Lincoln was a fightin’ man an’ he come down here an’ tried to run other folks’ plantations. Dat made Marse Davis so all fired mad dat he spit hard ’twixt his teeth an’ say, “I’ll whip de socks off den dam Yankees.” Dat’s how it all come ’bout. My white folks los’ money, cattle, slaves, an’ cotton in de war, but dey was till better off dan mos’ folks. Lak all de fool Niggers o’ dat time I was right smart bit by de freedom bug for awhile. It sounded pow’ful nice to be tol’: “You don’t have to chop cotton no more. You can th’ow dat hoe down an’ go fishin’ whensoever de notion strikes you. An’ you can roam ’roun’ at night an’ court gals jus’ as late as you please. Aint no marster gwine a-say to you, ‘Charlie, you’s got to be back when de clock strikes nine.’” I was fool ’nough to b’lieve all dat kin’ o’ stuff. But to tell de hones’ truf, mos’ o’ us didn’ know ourse’fs no better off. Freedom meant us could leave where us’d been born an’ bred, but it meant, too, dat us had to scratch for us ownse’fs. Dem what lef’ de old plantation seamed so all fired glad to git back dat I made up my min’ to stay put. I stayed right wid my white folks as long as I could. My white folks talked plain to me. Dey say real sad-lak, “Charlie, you’s been a dependence, but now you can go if you is so desirous. But if you wants to stay wid us you can share-crop. Dey’s a house for you an’ wood to keep you warm an’ a mule to work. We aint got much cash, but dey’s de lan’ an’ you can count on havin’ plenty o’ vit’als. Do jus’ as you please.” When I looked at my marster an’ knowed he needed me, I pleased to stay. My marster never forced me to do nary thing ’bout it. Didn’ nobody make me work after de war, but dem Yankees sho’ made my daddy work. Dey put a pick in his han’ stid o’ a gun. Dey made ’im dig a big ditch in front o’ Vicksburg. He worked a heap harder for his Uncle Sam dan he’d ever done for de marster. I hear’d tell ’bout some Nigger sojers a-plunderin’ some houses: Out at Pine Ridge dey kilt a white man named Rogillio. But de head Yankee sojers in Natchez tried ’em for somethin’ or nother an’ hung ’em on a tree out near de Charity Horspital. Dey strung up de ones dat went to Mr. Sargent’s door one night an’ shot him down, too. All dat hangin’ seemed to squelch a heap o’ lousy goin’s-on. Lawd! Lawd! I knows ’bout de Kloo Kluxes. I knows a-plenty. Dey was sho’ ’nough devils a-walkin’ de earth a-seekin’ what dey could devour. Dey larruped de hide of’n de uppity Niggers an’ driv de white trash back where dey b’longed. […] My granny tol’ me ’bout a slave uprisin’ what took place when I was a little boy. None o’ de marster’s Niggers ’ud have nothin’ to do wid it. A Nigger tried to git ’em to kill dey white folks an’ take dey lan’. But what us want to kill old Marster an’ take do lan’ when dey was de bes’ frien’s us had? Dey caught de Nigger an’ hung ’im to a limb. […] De young Niggers is headed straight for hell. All dey think ’bout is drinkin’ hard likker, goin’ to dance halls, an’ a-ridin’ in a old rattle trap car. It beats all how dey brags an’ wastes things. Dey aint one whit happier dan folks was in my dey. I was as proud to git a apple as dey is to git a pint o’ likker. Course, schools he’p some, but looks lak all mos’ o’ de young’n’s is studyin’ ’bout is how to git out o’ hones’ labor. I’se seen a heap o’ fools what thinks ’cause they is wise in books, they is wise in all things. Mos’ all my white folks is gone, now. Marse Randolph Shields is a doctor ’way off in China. I wish I could git word to ’im, ’cause I know he’d look after me if he knowed I was on charity. I prays de Lawd to see ’em all when I die.

And I think Mr. Henry Murray has something to add:

Freedom made colored folks to lazy to work fo’ a livin’. They was a heep better off in slavery days. People gettin’ worse all de time. Some dese days they’s gon-a have to answer fo’ their sins tho’. I’s tellin ’em now but don’t do no good. As fo’ me I allus tries to live right; does what de Bible say do an’ I’s gon-a get rewarded fo it sho. I belongs to de Baptist church. Am de oldest member in our church.

Needless to say, this version of American history isn’t taught in college or made into movies, so it couldn’t possibly be true. On the other hand (The Guardian, 2012):

Hundreds of thousands of slaves freed during the American civil war died from disease and hunger after being liberated, according to a new book. The analysis, by historian Jim Downs of Connecticut College, casts a shadow over one of the most celebrated narratives of American history, which sees the freeing of the slaves as a triumphant righting of the wrongs of a southern plantation system that kept millions of black Americans in chains. But, as Downs shows in his book, Sick From Freedom, the reality of emancipation during the chaos of war and its bloody aftermath often fell brutally short of that positive image. Instead, freed slaves were often neglected by union soldiers or faced rampant disease, including horrific outbreaks of smallpox and cholera. Many of them simply starved to death. After combing through obscure records, newspapers and journals Downs believes that about a quarter of the four million freed slaves either died or suffered from illness between 1862 and 1870. He writes in the book that it can be considered “the largest biological crisis of the 19th century” and yet it is one that has been little investigated by contemporary historians. Downs believes much of that is because at the time of the civil war, which raged between 1861 and 1865 and pitted the unionist north against the confederate south, many people did not want to investigate the tragedy befalling the freed slaves. Many northerners were little more sympathetic than their southern opponents when it came to the health of the freed slaves and anti-slavery abolitionists feared the disaster would prove their critics right. […]

You see how bad northerners could be: many of them were almost as bad as everyone in the South.

Yet Downs believes that his book takes nothing away from the moral value of the emancipation. Instead, he believes that acknowledging the terrible social cost born by the newly emancipated accentuates their heroism. “This challenges the romantic narrative of emancipation. It was more complex and more nuanced than that. Freedom comes at a cost,” Downs said.

So, to sum up: “freedom” is good, even though it killed hundreds of thousands of slaves, and presumably even if it had killed all of them; slavery is bad, because something something “black Americans in chains,” and don’t ask stupid questions; finally, any emancipated slaves who (ever so bravely) failed to die from disease and hunger now get to join their attempted murderers, the abolitionists, in the pantheon of American heroes.

Narrative: intact. Lessons learned: none.

Django Unchained—ah, fake history! (1, 2, 3)

I have not seen, I will not see, and I recommend wholeheartedly that no one else see Quentin Tarantino’s long, violent, irredeemably stupid film Django Unchained—but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy a good laugh at anyone who did and took it seriously. Will somebody please give these straight-A students of Whig history a library card?

To The Guardian, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Calvin Candie, a “charming Mississippi aristocrat and committed racial supremacist,” represents “the self-deception and viciousness underlying the south’s much vaunted hospitality and chivalry,” while his home symbolizes “the sadism, oppression, theft of identity, false assertion of enduring superiority and the corruption of the human spirit that lie behind slavery.” Do you think the Reverend Adams would agree? Bear in mind, he was actually there at the time.

According to The Washington Post, “Tarantino doesn’t shrink from the inhumane realities of life for enslaved people in 19th century America.” For example, “when he shows a man being castrated, the scene plays less like a cheap stunt than a weirdly honest confrontation with a painful, unresolved past.” Is being weirdly honest anything like being not honest?

The Wall Street Journal calls the film “wildly extravagant, ferociously violent, ludicrously lurid and outrageously entertaining, yet also, remarkably, very much about the pernicious lunacy of racism and, yes, slavery’s singular horrors.” Not only that, “this seriously crazed comedy is also a crazily serious disquisition on enslavement.” (Is being crazily serious…?) Candie’s plantation “takes the story into a wickedly astute parody of antebellum drama, with all of its lace and grace and happy slaves.” Well, thank goodness Sherman fixed all that.

Cinema Blend explains how the director “holds back nothing in his portrayal of slavery’s cruelty, unabashedly showing unspeakable acts like brandings, whippings, beatings and even dog attacks.” Sounds like he actually added one or two things there. “But it’s anything but gratuitous. By showing the true-life unspeakable acts that were committed against innocent people during that era, the director earns a powerful emotional response from the audience. … Without the brutality we’d be cheering for Django getting his vengeance anyway, but by including it the movie actually gives you a sense of closure and personal satisfaction,” which makes Django Unchained a Two Minutes Hate dragged out for a full three hours.

Speaking of closure and personal satisfaction, The New Yorker notes that “an apocalypse of blood” is “the least that Candie deserves, together with other defenders of the Southern status quo: such, at any rate, will be the claim of Tarantino’s fans, although I was disturbed by their yelps of triumphant laughter, at the screening I attended, as a white woman was blown away by Django’s gun.” (For “Tarantino’s fans,” read black moviegoers.) The Houston Chronicle seems to agree with them: “There’s a place for violence on screen, and this is the place.”

To the Denver Post, Tarantino has “crafted a parable of decency versus evil for a generation that never saw ‘Roots,’” in which “the sight of plantation owner and slave is… an image from a house of horrors.” Good point: Roots, too, was a pack of vicious lies; we’ll talk more about that later.

Communist newsletter Salon notes that Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson’s characters, plantation owner and “house slave” respectively, with their “perverse but somehow believable relationship redolent of the deep weirdness of race relations in the Old South,“ are both “hopelessly doomed by the soul-crushing institution of white supremacy.” In a scene in which Django and a bounty hunter “shoot a farmer who’s plowing his field, right in front of his son,” O’Hehir recognizes a “moral argument,” namely that “Tarantino is suggesting that white Americans who benefited from a slave economy were guilty of historical crimes whether or not they personally owned slaves.” Making it, in fact, a “moral argument” for murdering every white American.

“Kill white folks and they pay you for it?” Django asks at one point. “What’s not to like?” Time magazine calls this “a tantalizing question.”

Cinema Autopsy characterizes the film’s setting as “one of the darkest and most shameful periods of American history. When depicting the type of daily brutality that black slaves experienced, some scenes based on historical record, some based more on hearsay, Tarantino conveys the gut-wrenching horror of some of the acts without revelling in the acts, to create a profound contrast between the styles of violence in the film. One style is gleeful and based on the fantasy of a slave rising up against his tormentors, the other is gruelling and demands the audience recognise and respect the history that the film is engaging with.” If only it were.

I think Rolling Stone speaks for all of us: “Welcome to alternative History 101 with Professor Quentin Tarantino,” and “fuck the facts.”

Touré Neblett

Not to be outdone, the absurd Touré Neblett (MSNBC) rejoices that Tarantino, far from “trivializing” slavery, offers “an unsparing look at its horrors, from Mandingo fighting to hot boxes to facial branding to brutal whipping to all sorts of frightening headgear,” none of which bears any resemblance to reality. Neblett’s alternative history of slavery is particularly amusing when we put it side by side with A South-Side View of Slavery.

Compare, if you will, the fantasy…

In a repeated motif, Django rides into towns atop a horse, his body language singing of pride and strength, a sight that causes people to rear back in shock, unused to seeing a Black [sic] person cloaked in dignity.

… the history…

It was a pleasant paradox to find that where the colored people are not free, they have in many things the most liberty, and among them the liberty to dress handsomely, and be respected in it.

… and, of course, the modern reality:

(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

“Cloaked in dignity”! Oh, do go on, Mr. Neblett.

In a critical moment Leonardo DiCaprio’s slavemaster Calvin Candie points out that there are more Blacks than whites [sic] on his plantation and wonders, “Why don’t they kill us?” He explains via phrenology—Black brains are lesser—which is now obviously and hysterically false.

I don’t want to take us too far off topic, but phrenology, which doesn’t work, is not the same as directly measuring someone’s brain volume, which has been done quite a few times over the years…

Average brain volume (in cubic centimeters) for some indigenous populations

… or testing someone’s cognitive ability (Lynn, 2006), also known as general intelligence…

Average IQ score for some indigenous populations

… or just, y’know, looking at people’s skulls:

Typical skull shape of a (modern adult male) European, Asian, African, and aboriginal Australian

By the way, there is a 40 percent correlation between brain volume and IQ score (because apparently brains are involved in thinking). Yes, these are facts. They will not go away. This is the actual universe we both have to live in.

(“Something something Flynn effect.” No.)

Frankly, it is not at all clear to me how the idea that black brains are lesser than white brains could be obviously false, let alone hysterically false. Quick, name a Congolese astrophysicist. No? A Liberian philosopher, then. A Haitian Fields medalist? A Rwandan chess master?—What’s that? “Something something oppression, something something white people won’t let them”? See, this is why it’s important not to confuse evidence (like, say, a Rwandan chess master) with excuses for why all the evidence is against you—but I digress.

Even when Candie is outsmarted by one of his slaves who must explain to Candie that he’s being played for a fool, his certainty in white intellectual superiority goes unchallenged. Early on, Django excises white supremacy from his mind and eventually destroys white supremacy in his tiny corner of the world. Yes, white supremacy relates to a national (if not global) matrix that no one man could conquer. There’s no telling what could happen to Django after the screen fades to black. But his self-love propels him through the universe of this film, making him heroic before he even begins killing slavemasters.

“A better-looking, happier, more courteous set of people I had never seen, than those colored men, women, and children whom I met the first few days of my stay in Savannah,” the Reverend Adams wrote; and “every slave has an inalienable claim in law upon his owner for support for the whole of life.”

Django is heroic not just for rescuing his wife but also for spreading justice by putting slavemasters in the grave. It’s honestly baffling to me that smart people could find Django’s slavemaster killings as anything other than heroic. The moral calculus between slave and master is clear and unambiguous. The slave, cinematic or real, who doesn’t want to kill his master may be psychotic and still in the grip of white supremacy.

“I do not remember one instance of rudeness or unsuitable behavior among them in any place.”

Killing a slavemaster does not reduce the slave to the slavemaster’s moral level. Nothing short of becoming a slavemaster could do that. Murder is the only fitting punishment and given the generations-long pain and chaos that slavery had and would cause, for a slavemaster to die only once is to get off easy.

Truly vile. Sounds a bit like James Redpath, doesn’t he? These people never change.

Roxane Gay

There’s more of this nonsense, of course: The New York Times, USA Today, NPR, etc., etc. The nadir, if not Mr. Neblett, must be Roxane Gay (Buzzfeed). At each of the film’s 110 anachronistic uses of the word “nigger,” Ms. Gay

felt a stab of anger because it felt so needless and so gratuitous. Had Tarantino used historical accuracy to guide every aspect of Django Unchained, one might accept his explanation. But this is a movie that includes, among other oddities, a slave merrily enjoying herself on a tree swing of Big Daddy’s plantation.

Ms. Gay is holding up a slave ever having fun as a prime example of historical inaccuracy. “But of all the touching sights of innocence and love appealing to you unconsciously for your best feelings of tenderness and affection, the colored young children have never been surpassed in my experience.”

Certainly, the N-word is part of our history as much as it is part of our present. The first documented instance of the word dates back to the 1600s and since then it has appeared in nearly every aspect of American life from legal documents to music and movies to our vernacular. And still, Roots manages to depict the realities of slavery without using the N-word once and it’s nearly ten hours long.

Roots, “nigger” or no “nigger,” manages to depict no such thing, but we’ll get to that soon enough.

Tarantino spends an inordinate amount of time depicting the suffering of the slaves, but he is rather selective in these depictions. There is little evidence of the sexual violence slave women faced or the day-to-day suffering slaves endured.

There is indeed little evidence of it.

Sometimes, like on Big Daddy’s plantation, it seemed like maybe slavery wasn’t so bad, with slaves well dressed and roaming the grounds, leisurely.

“To see slaves with broadcloth suits, well-fitting and nicely-ironed fine shirts, polished boots, gloves, umbrellas for sunshades, the best of hats, their young men with their blue coats and bright buttons, in the latest style, white Marseilles vests, white pantaloons, brooches in their shirt bosoms, gold chains, elegant sticks, and some old men leaning on their ivory and silver-headed staves, as respectable in their attire as any who that day went to the house of God, was more than I was prepared to see. As to that group of them under the trees, had I been unseen, I would have followed my impulse to shake hands with the whole of them, as a vent to my pleasure in seeing slaves with all the bearing of respectable, dignified Christian gentlemen. As it was, I involuntarily lifted my hat to them, which was responded to by them with such smiles, uncovering of the head, and graceful salutations, that, scribe or Pharisee, I felt that I did love such greetings in the market-places from such people.”

At other times, we see chained slaves headed to the slave market in Mississippi or slaves forced to fight to fight each other like animals for the white man’s amusement, or, in a particularly gruesome scene, a runaway slave is thrown to wild dogs. We see how his body is torn apart. We hear his screams.

Well, thank goodness for that bit of realism. I was worried we’d never cover the period in American history when runaway slaves were thrown to wild dogs. (Aisha Harris of Slate has the minimal honesty, unusual among journalists, to admit that “Mandingo fighting” never existed in America.)

In Haiti where my family is from, January 1 not only ushers in a new year, it is the day Haitians recognize as Independence Day. On that day in 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti a free nation, the first of its kind in Latin America, ending a thirteen-year slave rebellion. As a first generation American, I was raised with stories of how my ancestors fought for freedom, and how no matter what burdens we may suffer as a Haitian people, we know we set ourselves free. As I’ve thought about Django Unchained, I’ve thought about this freedom, and what it has cost and how what Django Unchained lacked, above all, was any understanding of how people can and will fight for their freedom under any circumstance.

Haiti! Oh, well chosen, Ms. Gay! Haiti: from the richest colony in the world (the leading producer of both sugar and coffee) to the poorest country in the hemisphere, all thanks to that one slave rebellion—after which Ms. Gay’s hero, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, had all the white people murdered. Here we see Ms. Gay’s ancestors hanging white soldiers en masse, then murdering all the other white people, including the children, on Dessalines’ orders; and Dessalines himself, displaying a white woman’s severed head :

(1 and 2, 3)

At one point, Dessalines proclaimed an amnesty for any surviving whites—but anyone who came out of hiding was murdered too. It’s all very Tarantino.

Today, having “fought for freedom” and “set ourselves free,” the proud people of Haiti live in shacks, eat dirt, and are incapable of cleaning up the rubble from a single earthquake after one, two, three years and counting, even with nine billion dollars in foreign aid:

(1, 2, 3)

To be fair, the Haitians were already incapable of this in 1842 (Hayti: The Black Republic, 1889):

Cap Haïtien never recovered from the effects of the fearful earthquake of 1842, when several thousands of its inhabitants perished. To this day they talk of that awful event, and never forget to relate how the country-people rushed in to plunder the place, and how none lent a helping-hand to aid their half-buried country-men. Captain Macguire and myself used to wander about the ruins, and we could not but feel how little energy remained in a people who could leave their property in such a state. It was perhaps cheaper to build a trumpery house elsewhere. One of those that suffered the most during that visitation wrote, before the earth had ceased trembling, “Against the acts of God Almighty no one complains,” and then proceeded to relate how the dread earthquake shook down or seriously injured almost every house; how two-thirds of the inhabitants were buried beneath the fallen masonry; how the bands of blacks rushed in from mountain and plain, not to aid in saving their wretched countrymen, whose cries and groans could be heard for two or three days, but to rob the stores replete with goods; and—what he did complain of—how the officers and men of the garrison, instead of attempting to keep order, joined in plundering the small remnants of what the surviving inhabitants could save from the tottering ruins. What a people!

Still, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that now, at long last, the Haitian people are “free,” which is, of course, unquestionably good—whatever this word “freedom” actually means in the context of living in huts, eating dirt, roaming machete gangs, frenzied looting (along Boulevard Jean Jacques Dessalines, no less), and so on.

In her eagerness to help the poor, oppressed people of Haiti, Amanda Kijera made a slight miscalculation

Haitian Aside

Some of the “foreign aid” Haiti has received over the years has been, shall we say, less than consensual. What do I mean by that? Consider the fascinating report by white “civic journalist and activist” Amanda Kijera, ‘We are not your weapons—we are women’ (AlterNet, 2010; discussed here, here, here, and here):

Two weeks ago, on a Monday morning, I started to write what I thought was a very clever editorial about violence against women in Haiti. The case, I believed, was being overstated by women’s organizations in need of additional resources. Ever committed to preserving the dignity of Black [sic] men in a world which constantly stereotypes them as violent savages, I viewed this writing as yet one more opportunity to fight “the man” on behalf of my brothers. That night, before I could finish the piece, I was held on a rooftop in Haiti and raped repeatedly by one of the very men who I had spent the bulk of my life advocating for. It hurt. The experience was almost more than I could bear. I begged him to stop. Afraid he would kill me, I pleaded with him to honor my commitment to Haiti, to him as a brother in the mutual struggle for an end to our common oppression, but to no avail. He didn’t care that I was a Malcolm X scholar. He told me to shut up, and then slapped me in the face. Overpowered, I gave up fighting halfway through the night. […] Black men have every right to the anger they feel in response to their position in the global hierarchy, but their anger is misdirected. Women are not the source of their oppression; oppressive policies and the as-yet unaddressed white [sic] patriarchy which still dominates the global stage are. Because women—and particularly women of color—are forced to bear the brunt of the Black male response to the Black male plight, the international community and those nations who have benefitted from the oppression of colonized peoples have a responsibility to provide women with the protection that they need. […] I went to Haiti after the earthquake to empower Haitians to self-sufficiency. […] Not once did I envision myself becoming a receptacle [!] for a Black man’s rage at the white world, but that is what I became. While I take issue with my brother’s behavior, I’m grateful for the experience.

I’m speech