Here in London, many people are making a pretty big deal out of an Act passed by Parliament in March 1807 that outlawed the involvement of British ships in the slave trade. Just a block or two from I’m staying, the British Museum has a lot of special events relating to this bicentennial (e.g., this one, on Sunday.) There’s a movie coming out called Amazing Grace, that is based on the life of the abolitionist MP William Wilberforce. I see the British Quakers have put together an interesting little on-line exhibition to mark this bicentennary, featuring some texts and other items from the collections of Friends House Library.
I think it’s excellent to remember this anniversary, and to find ways to reconnect with the strong ethical and religious sense of all those who worked and organized to end the transatlantic slave trade. As far as I understand the long, long global history of that ghastly institution, the enslaved persons in the Americas were about the first slaves in history whose condition of bondage and status as chattel was passed down from parent to child. And in fact, in a cruel irony, as the transatlantic trade in enslaved persons of African origin died out– due to laws being passed against it on both sides of the Atlantic, not just one– the value of the slaves who were already in place, working under horrendous conditions in the US, many Caribbean islands, and some South American nations, merely rose… And there was a strong incentive, until the whole institution of slavery was outlawed, which took many further decades, for slave-“owners” to try to breed their slave-stock as much as much possible, a matter to which many white men in slave-owning communities made a big personal contribution.
If you look at the (US Census Bureau-derived) demographic table in this section of the relevant Wikipedia page, you can see that between 1810 and 1860 the number of enslaved persons in the US rose from 1.2 million to nearly 4.0 million– despite the fact that the importation of additional slaves had been outlawed by Congress in 1808.
Imagine how many enslaved women were raped by white men and boys as part of that “breeding” program. Yes, another proportion of them doubtless bore children from relationships with enslaved men, and I hope that many of those relationships were marked by affection… But whether there was affection or no, the practitioners of the institution of slavery gave almost no recognition to ties of marriage or any other kinds of family ties among the “slaves” whom they owned. As many slave testimonies told, husbands and wives among the enslaved persons could be (and were) as easily separated as parents and children. A man, woman, or child could be “sold down the river” at a moment’s notice; or whole families could be split up when the “property” of a deceased slave-“owner” was divided among his heirs…
I started traveling towards becoming a Quaker some ten-plus years ago, spurred overwhelmingly by my reading of the journal of John Woolman, who was a mid-18th-century Quaker who grew up in a strongly Quaker community near Philadelphia. Woolman pursued many very important ministries of justice and conscience during his life, including by calling attention to the status of the native Americans, and by agitating against Pennsylvania’s raising of a war tax. (This was in the 1750s– quite a long time before the secessionist UDI movement called by its participants the “American Revolution.”)
But one of the most important ministries he pursued was undoubtedly the one against the institution of slavery.
By that point, many, many portions of the white settler community in the US were heavily involved in the institution of slavery… including some portion of just about all the many Christian denominations that had proliferated in the settler communities by then– and yes, that included the Quakers— and also a portion of the Jewish settlers. As far as I know it was only the Mennonites, among the Christians (and perhaps the other Anabaptists?) who had never participated in the owning or trading of enslaved persons. But many, many Quakers certainly had.
Actually, if you go back and read what the founder of Quakerism, George Fox, had written about the institution of slavery in the 1670s, you will see it is far from being any kind of forthright protest against the whole institution. See what he wrote, for example, here:
- ‘…if you were in the same condition as the Blacks are…now I say, if this should be the condition of you and yours, you would think it hard measure, yea, and very great Bondage and Cruelty. And therefore consider seriously of this, and do you for and to them, as you would willingly have them or any other to do unto you…were you in the like slavish condition.’
There were huge hyper-profits to be made in the business; and some were made by Quaker plantation owners in the southern states or Quaker slave-traders in Rhode Island and other states to the north.
Eighty years after George Fox was writing, John Woolman came along. He saw at first hand the misery and inequity of the institution of slavery. He heard all the allegedly “do-gooding” claims of the slave-holders and slave-traders among the Quakers… that they were “saving these poor souls from the misery of wars in Africa”, etc etc… and he slowly confronted them with his witness, one-by-one, and also in small groups and at impassioned meetings for worship and business.
He was not alone. There were other American Quaker abolitionists who joined him in his campaign. But he was the one who kept an extremely moving journal of all his efforts… And between them, these Quaker men and women made a big difference. They managed to persuade all the Quakers of the US to dissociate themselves from the institution; and it was on the basis of that achievement that many Quakers of later decades then became leaders in the broad national movement against what the Americans have often called the “peculiar institution.”
Too bad that, come the 1860s, it was only through the waging of an extremely fierce and bloody war that slavery was finally ended forever in the country. (More on that, perhaps, later: I really think that war was the biggest test for the pacifism of US Quakers– much more so than the distant war against Hitlerism some 80 years later.) Anyway, I guess the ferocity with which the southern whites fought in that war was a marker of just how very profitable the whole institution had been for them…
Back home in Charlottesville, Virginia,my good friend Bill Anderson– who’s an Anglican peace activist and an African-American— has a couple of times said to me, “Helena, I always have a soft spot for Quakers: Your people freed my family back in the 1830s.” I never know what to say. I feel much more ashamed that back at one point, Quakers in Virginia may well have actually “owned” some of Bill’s ancestors, than I feel happy that they eventually helped to “free” some of them.
I guess I wish the events here in Britain being held to mark the bicentennary of this country’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807 had a little less smug self-satisfaction, and a little more real reflectiveness to them. After all, should we really be doing much celebrating if someone stops beating his wife??
When I say “reflectiveness”, I just want to note that I’ve seen nothing in all the many newspaper articles and other items of commentary on this anniversary which looks at how many of the fine institutions of the “Enlightenment” here in Britain, as in the rest of Europe and also, certainly, in the Americas, were financed with the hyper-profits from the slave trade… And then, absolutely no reflection at all on the degree to which the legacies of the slave trade and other crimes of colonialism still live on in Africa; or, on whether these very rich and settled former slave-trading societies of northern Europe should not take seriously the task of effecting some real form of reparations to those ravaged home-communities of Africa.
… I do just want to put in links to two really excellent resources for anyone studying this subject. One is this book, Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews With Virginia Ex-Slaves, reprinted by the University of Virginia Press from a series of excellent interviews made by (generally) African-American interviewers, with some of the last living ex-slaves in the 1930s. The other is Hugh Thomas’s The Slave Trade, The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870.
But what I really want to say here is this. By the time John Woolman got around to visiting his fellow-Quakers up and down the east coast of America in the 1750s, many of those he visited had succeeded in becoming quite strongly convinced that the institution of slavery was not just acceptable, but also good and ethical. It took Woolman and his friends many years of persistent persuasion to convince them of the error of their ways.
From today’s perspective, the error of their ways seems blindingly obvious!
So what practices are we engaged in today– practices that we may well think are not just acceptable, but beyond that, actively good and ethical– that future generations will look back and say “Unbelievable! How could people back then do such terribly damaging things???”
Hi Helena:
I think you and others considering the topic of the Friends and slavery will be keenly interested in my friend (Friend) Marshall Massey’s recent four-part blog on the subject in his earthwitness journal: The First Friends and Slavery
The war between the states was not about slavery until Lincoln shrewdly embellished this to gain more recruits for his union army.
As far as I understand the long, long global history of that ghastly institution, the enslaved persons in the Americas were about the first slaves in history whose condition of bondage and status as chattel was passed down from parent to child.
This was also the case in Rome, and in at least parts of ancient Greece.
Helena,
Splendid post. Since you’ve been gone, that movie “Amazing Grace has been out now for about a month. Alas, the TV airwaves have been dominated, suspiciously in my opinion, by outrageous (historically) ads for that garbage, “uber” fiction called “300.”
300 is #1 in terms of box office stats. Never mind my conspiracy theory on the timing of this anti-Persian outrage, Americans, it seems, still love a gore filled movie that makes the world seem so simple, a battle between the evil “them” (e.g. “Iran”) vs. the “democratic” us (“US”).
By contrast, Amazing Grace, (which has not been promoted much) is barely scraping by in the top 10, having grossed just a tenth of what 300 raked in:
http://movies.yahoo.com/mv/boxoffice/weekend/
Here’s a “local” blog review of the movie that I rather like:
http://willvaus.blogspot.com/2007/02/amazing-grace.html
I am curious to learn how the mainstream media reviewed Wilberforce/Amazing Grace.
I think I better go see it with the family before it leaves the big screen. It also happens to feature one of my favorite actors – Ioan Gruffudd (“Yo-an Griffith”) – e.g. “Horatio Hornblower”.
By the way Helena, what’s a “secessionist UDI movement” — (called by its participants the “American Revolution.”) ??
Are you by chance one of those many who doubt there was anything “revolutionary” about the American “seccession”? :-} (never mind that the entire field of “comparative revolution” studies has essentially “died” in academia — curiously.)
I checked the “rottentomatoes” compilation of movie reviews. The big shot “cream of the crop” seem to be whining about the movie being too “preachy” — but don’t want to quite say that…. Average review is a weak 6.5 or so out of 10….
Peter Rainer of the Christian Science Monitor trashed the movie in one paragraph, giving it a C-
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0223/p14s02-almo.html
(more evidence for my “grist” that the Monitor has lost its way)
One reviewer complained that the movie, on such an obvious “black and white issue,” couldn’t possibly have much relevance to today….. (He’s obviously unaware how some sections of the anti-abortion/pro-life movement have long invoked Wilberforce as a model….)
A far more useful review – and positive – is found in the New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2007/03/05/070305crci_cinema_denby
I’ll take slight comfort in that at least the critics have been much harsher in their arrows aimed at 300 — saying nice things only about the visuals, but not the presumed “history.” Even the neocon media trash it – the New York Post critic invoked “Slate’s Mickey Kaus’ Hitler Rule – never compare anything to Hitler – it isn’t a stretch to imagine Adolf’s boys at a “300” screening, heil-fiving each other throughout and then lining up to see it again. ”
http://www.nypost.com/seven/03092007/entertainment/movies/persian_shrug_movies_kyle_smith.htm
Now that’s what I call an “interesting” comment on the most “popular” movie now in America.
There is an article by Peter Linebaugh lambasting the film he calls “An Amazing Disgrace”, and rightfully so. It is at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/linebaugh02282007.html
Slavery gave way to capitalism.
Escott is wrong. The Anglo-Saxon colony in America was no less of a colony for the fact of being autonomous (as you put it Helena, achieving “UDI”).
The real US revolution was the Civil War, and there Henriks is wrong. The Civil War was a bourgeois revolution in the colony, which would not tolerate the previous ascendency. It insisted on a wage-labour market.
Concerning the super- or hyper- profits made during the institution of slavery, this is a complex question. A more modern working of the same arguments occurs in the South African case of “migrant labour” and the hostel system.
It becomes a matter of argument among capitalists, even to the point of war, as to whether the older system is better for business, or whether a purer form of market is imperative.
Anyway…
Helena, I think this post is really great. Well, I often think that, actually, on JWN. Maybe I should say so more often.
There are a couple of fascinating angles. One is the vicarious guilt of a Quaker convert, on behalf of the Quakers of the past! At least, it comes across like that in places. Surely you don’t need to feel that?
In other places, when you are reminding us of the continued presence of the effects of slavery, I’m with you 100%.
The other is the extent to which the Friends (and other – what’s the PC word – denominations? Non-conformists?) are devoted to capitalism. The success of Quakers as bourgeois is legendary, and that is much more of a contemporary reality. I bet there is not one single slave-owning Quaker in the world, but there are plenty of respectable Quaker business people still, I presume.
What I would like to hear in the way of reflectiveness from the religious people on this Anniversary is a rejection of all systems of class division as ungodly. What religion has generally done is to endorse slavery, feudalism, and capitalism in turn. They have been followers of fashion (like in Jonathan Swift’s “Tale of a Tub”) and they still are. Let them instead denounce class division of all kinds, including the clear and present example: capitalism.
gasp. Thanks for the link Dominic – though I gagged on the assertion that the “English abolitionist movement owed its beginning, its thrust, and its ending to the activity of the slaves themselves.”
So slavery only persisted because it was profitable. And only died when it stopped being so…. No doubt.
You’ve reminded me that I must not be a “radical” afterall. So in your outlook, if its not rooted in economic self-interest, it wasn’t real?
So we can dismiss any of the motivations that might have come from one’s understanding of morality drawn from faith? (They were just “opiates”)
And as for the Civil War, you write, “The Civil War was a bourgeois revolution in the colony, which would not tolerate the previous ascendency. It insisted on a wage-labour market.”
Say what? So the civil war was about class? Those Yankees were fired to lay down their lives for better wages? And all those abolitionist preachers then merely had crass self-interest as their sole guiding light?
And, back to the American “revolt” from Britain, were all those (understudied) preachers (across the board) who argued loudly for the American “cause” really just slaveholders or self-deluded closet defenders of the same…. ??
Let me guess, by the standard you (and ?) are propounding, the events in Iran in 1979 weren’t revolutionary either…. (unless we focus merely on the Tudeh et. al. who indeed were driven by class issues — ah, but then what was a “true” revolution got hijacked by counter-revolutionaries wearing black…. but being just as “capitalist” as the Shah’s cadres.)
And since I’m already in the dog-house, Helena makes reference to the growth of the slave population in America even after the end of the British slave trade. (and then throws in a reference to rape – which no doubt was rampant)
Yet it happens I read/heard a half dozen presentations on related subjects last fall at Monticello’s Jefferson Studies Center…. One emeritus visiting professor (Andrew’s mentor)raised the question of just why was it that slave populations in the mid-atlantic grew so quickly, whereas by contrast they declined in the deep south and especially in the West Indies. Part of the suggested answer was climate, but more of the explanation was suggested to be in relatively better “treatment.” (Ok, slavery is slavery; evil at its moral core…. I’m no doubt doing injustice to a complex, highly delicate subject — but the significant growth in Virginia’s enslaved population wasn’t simply about “rape.”)
And before anyone throws in a swipe at Monticello, I’d argue that Monticello and ICJS, by staffing alone, has devoted extraordinarily greater resources (more than anything else) to getting the slave story there and in period better understood. (much to the consternation of the Jefferson’s white descendants….)
As the fruit of such work, see the interactive data base recently made public on Jefferson’s slaves and their lives…. It’s an interesting “work in progress.”
http://plantationdb.monticello.org/nMonticello.html
Hi Escott.
That’s more than I can cope with, and some of it has quote marks around words that I did not write.
Let me just say again that I support Helena’s descriptiption “secessionist UDI movement” for what is “called by its participants the ‘American Revolution'”.
There was no change in the nature of the ruling class at that stage. That came later. The full-on bourgeois dictatorship in the USA dates from the Civil War.
These are simple and basic truths. It is a waste of time for you to shuffle huge amounts of detail and to make absurd comparisons and false quotations.
Unless you care to tell why you are doing all that? It would be fascinating to know exactly why people think they are obliged to deny class in the USA.
“It would be fascinating to know exactly why people think they are obliged to deny class in the USA.”
Simple – a classless society is our founding myth.
Too bad that, come the 1860s, it was only through the waging of an extremely fierce and bloody war that slavery was finally ended forever in the country. (…) Anyway, I guess the ferocity with which the southern whites fought in that war was a marker of just how very profitable the whole institution had been for them…
Some of the most fascinating research to have been published in recent times on the subject of slavery and emancipation is Degrees of Freedom by Rebecca J. Scott. Her scholarship focuses on the so-called post emancipation period in two distinct regions – Cuba and Louisiana:
Louisiana had taken the path of disenfranchisement and state-mandated racial segregation; Cuba had enacted universal manhood suffrage and had seen the emergence of a transracial conception of the nation. What might explain these differences?
Those who struggle through what is at times an uneasy read will not only gain a feel for the enduring impact of the slave plantation system and the highly complex process of “emancipation”, but (much more importantly) the insufficiently explored roots of the Cuban-US discord, originating with the “Spanish American” War and persisting to some extent to the present. I should add (emphatically) that in order to get to the latter, you must read Rebecca J. Scott’s book in conjunction with Ada Ferrer’s Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898. Both are first rate researchers.
O.k., J.C.
Have it your way. Call it the founding myth. But isn’t that kind of begging the question?
The egalitarian Founding Fathers were the very ones who acquiesced to and then embraced slavery. You know that. So why do you all keep on with the myth, knowing that this myth was based on a lie?
Are you saying that it was a lie at first but we made it true? The trouble is, I don’t believe that. The Original Lie was replaced with another lie, and the new lie is still around, causing wars and all sorts of mayhem.
Hi Helena,
I always enjoy your blog.
I’m afraid I don’t understand the point of reparations for slavery to African “home communities.” Now reparations to the descendants of slaves here in the US and elsewhere, I can understand and support. But those “home communities” in Africa were all too commonly participants in the slave trade. In fact, it would have been scarcely possible for the Europeans to have regularly taken slaves from Africa without this local support. There is a scholar here in the US who works on the issue of reparations for slavery, and I recall his response to the call for reparations to these “home communities” being both sarcastic and to the point: “You mean they want to get paid AGAIN?”
There have certainly been many harms of colonialism to these communities in Africa, and for those reparations are surely owed. But it only blurs the issue if we are ahistorical about who slavery really wronged.