Posts Tagged ‘slavery’
“I think of reading a book as no less an experience than traveling or falling in love”*…
Via Why Is This Interesting, a reading list from the man who created The Library of Babel…
Jorge Luis Borges, the consummate reader & librarian of the infinite, left behind an unfinished gift in the form of his Biblioteca Personal, meant to be 100 selections of personally-prized literature. Each was to have a written prologue and the entries were a kaleidoscopic collection of remembrances, lyrical passages, and warm regards…
In 1985, Argentine publisher Hyspamerica asked Borges to create A Personal Library — which involved curating 100 great works of literature and writing introductions for each volume. Though he only got through 74 books [64 individual titles, 6 to be issued in two volumes] before he died of liver cancer in 1988, Borges’s selections are fascinating and deeply idiosyncratic. He listed adventure tales by Robert Louis Stevenson and H.G. Wells alongside exotic holy books, 8th century Japanese poetry and the musing of Kierkegaard…
[Borges said] “I want this library to be as diverse as the unsatisfied curiosity that has led me, and continues to lead me, to explore so many languages and so many literatures”…
Borges’ personal book picks– remembrances and warm regards: “The Biblioteca Personal Edition,” from @WhyInteresting.
Download a PDF of Borges’ list here.
* Jorge Luis Borges
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As we browse, we might recall that today is Juneteenth.
Though the Emancipation Proclamation was issued on September 22, 1862 (effective January 1, 1863), word was slow to spread. Indeed, in Texas (which had been largely on the sidelines of hostilities in the Civil War, had continued its own state constitution-sanctioned practice of slavery, and so had become a refuge for slavers from more besieged Southern states) it took years… and federal enforcement.
On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger, who’d arrived in Galveston, Texas, with 2,000 federal troops to take possession of the state and enforce the emancipation of its slaves, read “General Order No. 3” from a local balcony:
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.
Former slaves in Galveston celebrated in the streets; Juneteenth observances began across Texas the following year, and are now recognized as state holidays by 41 states– and as of 2021, as a federal holiday.
“Our new Constitution is now established, everything seems to promise it will be durable; but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.”*…
Franklin’s caution was, of course, premonitory. David W. Blight explains why in his review of James Oakes‘ new book, The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution…
Historians can and do change their minds about interpretations of events and the uses of evidence. We may be dead certain, or even mildly sure, about facts and the stories we tell about them, but our craft requires us to remain open to new persuasions, new truths. James Oakes used to believe that the United States Constitution was essentially proslavery in its foundations, and that any attempt to breathe antislavery meaning into it was strained or rhetorical and not textually supported. But no more. In his remarkable and challenging book The Crooked Path to Abolition, he makes the case that there were effectively two constitutions written in Philadelphia that summer of 1787, one proslavery and one antislavery, which would be in conflict with each other for more than the next fourscore years.
Oakes, a distinguished professor of history at the CUNY Graduate Center, is not the only historian to have changed his view on this matter. In my first book, in 1989, I treated Frederick Douglass’s development of an antislavery interpretation of the Constitution as a slowly evolving perspective on his road to becoming a pragmatic political abolitionist and as a form of wish fulfillment in the absence of alternatives. I called his antislavery constitutionalism “dubious”—a search for political and moral ground on which he could stand to avoid embracing violent revolution by the 1850s. But I have come to see him as a deeply committed political thinker who argued his way, through what he called “careful study,” using legal and moral logic, to a vision of an antislavery Constitution. Guided by the natural rights tradition, Douglass found the core meaning of the American crisis. “Liberty and Slavery—opposite as Heaven and Hell,” he wrote in 1850, “are both in the Constitution.” What divided the nation was a Constitution “at war with itself.”
It has long been understood that without the compromises that were struck to bolster the interests of the slave states, there might have been no constitution achieved in 1787, and the thirteen original states might have careened off into regional coalitions at best…
he original Constitution reeked of complicity with the peculiar institution. It contained prominent proslavery features: a fugitive slave clause requiring retrieval of escaped bondspeople (although ambiguous about adjudication), the provision that the end of the foreign slave trade would be postponed until at least 1808 (both sides claimed victory in this matter), and the numerous elements that embedded federalism deeply into the document, enabling the doctrine of states’ rights to flourish. Above all, the three-fifths clause counting enslaved people in such a robust fraction for the purpose of representation in Congress and the Electoral College, which enhanced significantly the slave states’ power in the legislative branch and presidential elections, explicitly gave the United States, it seemed, a permanent proslavery future.
Proslavery advocates made the Fifth Amendment’s guaranteed protection of property ownership their “linchpin,” Oakes shows, in one crisis after another in the antebellum era, including the dangerous controversy around the admission of Missouri as a state in 1820. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 drew its power, at least slaveholding southerners believed, from original, if vague, constitutional guarantees of the return of escapees. But so did the passionate resistance to that hated provision in the North because of the Constitution’s equally explicit guarantee in the Fifth Amendment of due process to “all persons.”
Southerners would, of course, claim that the Constitution permitted their secession in 1861, following the argument of John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who maintained that the United States had been from its inception a contractual arrangement balanced between slave- and free-state interests. And they confidently held that, according to the Tenth Amendment, all powers not delegated to the federal government were reserved to the states. The proslavery Constitution had previously sustained slaveholders’ faith in their power within the Union, and in “King Cotton” as economic leverage, down to the late 1850s, despite their increasing minority status.
On the other hand, Oakes identifies several parts of the Constitution as inherently antislavery. The preamble’s call for a “more perfect union” inspired abolitionists, who also pointed to section 4 of article 4 and its “guarantee to every state in this Union a republican form of government.” Section 2 of article 4 buttressed a growing antebellum claim of Black citizenship, rooted in the privileges and immunities clause. Antislavery constitutionalists also found support for their principles in the Fourth Amendment: the rights of Americans to be “secure in their persons…against unreasonable searches and seizures” offered language to protect fugitive slaves and promote human rights.
The Fifth Amendment served both sides, but abolitionists drew increasingly on its stricture that no “person” shall be “deprived of life, liberty…without due process of law.” They avoided the word “property,” which followed “liberty” in the text, not just out of convenience but because of their long-standing legal and moral rejection of the idea of “property in man.”…
The combination of all these clauses and principles allowed some abolitionists to declare the Constitution a bulwark for human equality and not merely, as Oakes says, a “hypocritical fantasy” crushed by white supremacy and a larger history. Some modern readers who are now conditioned to see the United States only as a progenitor of racial inequality may, misguidedly, find this claim on behalf of abolitionists a bridge too far...
[There follows an illuminating recounting of the arguments between the two sides over the nexts several decades, then of Lincoln’s reading and the Civil War…]
We still have two Constitutions on many issues: the nature of federalism, voting rights, election laws, the right to bear arms, and much more. We have a majority on the Supreme Court determined to return every power possible to the states, reverting the “Union” to many decades ago when it was a collection of battling legal sovereigns with common borders. The historical template for these and other future debates may always be the profound failures and triumphs of antislavery constitutionalism’s struggle against proslavery constitutionalism in the 1850s and 1860s. The heat in our public history wars today needs the light of this kind of scholarship, however difficult it is to sustain faith in truth, persuasion, and historical consciousness itself…
Too timely: “The Two Constitutions,” @davidwblight1 in @nybooks.
An apposite piece on the several ways that American’s “read” the founder of modern economics: “America’s Adam Smith” from Branko Milanovic (@BrankoMilan).
* Benjamin Franklin, in a November, 1789 letter to French scientist Jean-Baptiste Le Roy
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As we choose a side, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated Solicitor-General Thurgood Marshall to become the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. A storied civil rights attorney and jurist (Federal Court of Appeals), Marshall served on the highest bench from 1967 until his retirement in 1991.
“Freight mobility and movement, while not a sexy policy issue, is a highly important one”*…
… and a hugely profitable one. Shipping rates, which have contributed to inflation, are coming down– but remain high– and massively profitable for carriers…
The results are in. The container shipping industry earned profits of $58.9 billion in the third quarter, breaking a streak of seven straight record quarters for the sector and further confirmation that the industry’s earnings peak is now firmly in the rear-view, according to industry veteran John McCown.
While the $58.9 billion profit is 22.4% higher than the $48.1 billion profit from last year’s third quarter, it is 6.6% lower than the “mind-altering” $63.7 billion earned in this year’s second quarter, making for a slight sequential earnings downturn that is expected to continue in the months and quarters ahead as aggregate overall pricing in the sector continues to ease, McCown said in his latest container shipping quarterly report…
Throughout the pandemic, container shipping has benefitted from significant price increases across most lanes as strong consumer demand combined with widespread port congestion drove freight rates to records.
“The sharp upturn in the quarterly bottom line performance of the container shipping industry over the last two years is one of the most pronounced performance changes ever by an overall industry,” McCown writes. “It comes on the heels of results in the more than ten years following the financial crisis and preceding the pandemic that results in a negative overall bottom line. The container shipping industry has literally gone from being at the bottom related to overall industry performance to being at the top related to overall industry performance.”
McCown attempts to put the container shipping’s recent performance into perspective by comparing the industry’s profits to FANG, an acronym he uses for Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google.
“Container shipping industry profits were 14% higher than total FANG profits in 4Q21, 103% higher than FANG profits in 1Q22 and 145% higher than FANG profits in 2Q22. For 3Q22, that gap has expanded even more as container shipping industry profits have swelled to being 158% above total FANG profits.”…
The invisible behemoth– container shipping, from @MikeSchuler.
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As we contemplate containers, we might recall that it was on this date in 1860 that the slave ship Erie was sold at government auction at Red Hook, Brooklyn:
The ship was sold, after being captured and impounded by the US Government, for enslaving and importing Africans, a business banned by the federal government under the Piracy Law of 1820, which followed The Slave Trade Act of 1794, two steps in the USA’s long, slow process of devolving and banning the slave trade (the shipping of captured people) and slavery. Slavery was finally banned in 1865. The case of the ERIE was chosen by a US Attorney, a judge, and by President Lincoln himself to signal a major change in policy on slavery and their commitment to end it.
The owner and captain of the Erie, Nathaniel Gordon of Maine, did not get off free as was usually the case. He was tried and found guilty of running a slave ship – and the Piracy Law of 1820 said the punishment was execution. Gordon’s supporters, including members of Congress and even friends of President Lincoln, sought a presidential pardon; but Abraham Lincoln refused due to his conviction that a point about slavery needed to be made with the ERIE and Captain Gordon.
Captain Gordon was distressed, in jail, and attempted suicide. He was resuscitated and was hanged at the Tombs in Manhattan and became the first – and only – importer of slaves to be executed for the crime in the USA. Soon after Gordon’s execution, Abraham Lincoln presented his first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. Several months later, the Proclamation was finalized, followed by the 13th Amendment which abolished slavery.
Slaver Captain Arrested – Ship Sold at Auction in Red Hook – 1860
“Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves”*…
It’s all too easy to believe that slavery is a thing of the past. The reality is different…
Slavery officially ended in 1981, when Mauritania became the last country to ban forced labour. But in practice it remains surprisingly common. On any given day, at least 49m people are in modern slavery, according to a new report by the UN and Walk Free, a human-rights group. The report defines modern slavery as people either forced to work or forced to marry. Such issues are often seen as a problem confined to the world’s poorest countries. But the authors of the report reckon that more than half of the global incidents of forced labour last year happened in what the World Bank defines as upper-middle and high-income countries (though poorer countries had a higher rate per 1,000 people).
To estimate the prevalence of forced labour, the authors interviewed around 78,000 people from 68 countries. In some places, such as North Korea, it is impossible to conduct such surveys, so estimates are less reliable than in more developed countries. According to the report, countries in Asia and the Pacific are host to more than half of all incidents of forced labour. Though as a proportion of the population Arab states were the worst offenders, with the equivalent of 1% of their populations enslaved.
The already grim situation is getting worse. Between 2016 and 2021 an additional 2.7m people worked in forced labour, taking the total to nearly 28m—more than 3m were children, though the data show that number is falling. Forced marriages increased by 6.6m over the same period, to a total of 22m. That may be an undercount: respondents were asked if they consented to their marriage, meaning that people who were forced into a relationship but later accepted it would not be counted in the data. Women and girls made up the biggest share of forced marriages, though one-third of those coerced into wedlock were male.
The most common type of coercion faced by workers is non-payment of wages. The fact that covid-19 lockdowns decimated many people’s incomes made it easier to exploit that vulnerability. In wealthier countries, sectors including agriculture, construction, domestic work and fishing were found to have the highest rates of forced work, with the private sector responsible for the majority of cases…
The plague is getting worse: “The number of people in modern slavery is increasing,” from @ECONdailycharts.
* Abraham Lincoln
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As we stamp out servitude, we might send free birthday greetings to David Walker; he was born on this date in 1796. The North Carolina born son of a slave father and a free African American mother, he was born free and made his way to Boston, where he became an outspoken abolitionist. From 1827-29, he was the Boston representative and correspondent for New York City’s short-lived but influential Freedom’s Journal, the first newspaper owned and operated by African Americans.
In 1829, he published An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, a call for black unity and a fight against slavery. African Americans throughout the South got hold of Walker’s Appeal, enraging Southern governments. Less than one year after the publication of the Appeal, Walker was found dead of unknown causes. A $1,000 reward had been offered for his death.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand”*…
It’s painfully obvious that America is a divided nation. The reasons are many, and have deep roots. Alan Jacobs contemplates three of the most fundamental…
The American Civil War was not that long ago. The last surviving Civil War veteran died two years before my birth. A conflict of that size and scope and horror leaves marks — marks on the land and marks on the national psyche — not readily erased.
I have come to believe that certain habits of mind arising directly from the Civil War still dominate the American consciousness today. I say not specific beliefs but rather intellectual dispositions; and those dispositions account for the form that many of our conflicts take today. Three such habits are especially important.
1. Among Southerners – and I am one – the primary habit is a reliance on consoling lies. In the aftermath of the Civil War Southerners told themselves that the Old South was a culture of nobility and dignity; that slaves were largely content with their lot and better off enslaved than free; that the war was not fought for slavery but in the cause of state’s rights; that Robert E. Lee was a noble and gentle man who disliked slavery; and so on. Such statements were repeated for generations by people who knew that they were evasive at best – the state’s right that the Confederacy was created to defend was the right to own human beings as chattel – and often simply false, and if the people making those statements didn’t consciously understand the falsehood, they kept such knowledge at bay through the ceaseless repetition of their mantras. (Ty Seidule’s book Robert E. Lee and Me is an illuminating account, from the inside, of how such deceptions and self-deceptions work.) And now we see precisely the same practice among the most vociferous supporters of Donald Trump: a determined repetition of assertions – especially that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen, but also concerning COVID–19 and many other matters – that wouldn’t stand up even to casual scrutiny, and therefore don’t receive that scrutiny. It’s easy to fall into a new set of lies when you have a history of embracing a previous set of lies.
2. Among Northerners, the corresponding habit is a confidence in one’s own moral superiority. Because the North was right and the South wrong about the institution of slavery, it was easy for the North then to dismiss any evidence of its own complicity in racism. Our cause is righteous – that is all we know on earth, and all we need know. (But if our cause is righteous, doesn’t that suggest that we are too?) And then, later, whenever there were political conflicts in which the majority of Northerners were on one side and the majority of Southerners on the other – about taxation, or religious liberty, or anything – the temptation was irresistible to explain the disagreement always by the same cause: the moral rectitude of the one side, the moral corruption of the other. The result (visible on almost every page of the New York Times, for instance) is a pervasive smugness that enrages many observers while remaining completely invisible to those who have fallen into it.
3. And among Black Americans, the relevant disposition is a settled suspicion of any declarations of achieved freedom. Emancipation, it turns out, is not achieved by proclamation; nor is it achieved by the purely legal elimination of slavery. Abolition did not end discrimination or violence; indeed, it ushered in a new era of danger for many (the era of lynching) and a new legal system (Jim Crow) that scarcely altered the economic conditions of the recently enslaved. After this happens two or three times you learn to be skeptical, and you teach your children to be skeptical. Brown v. Board of Education produces equal educational opportunity for blacks and whites? We have our doubts. The Civil Rights Act outlaws racial discrimination? We’ll see about that. I wonder how many times Black Americans have heard that racism is over. They don’t, as far as I can tell anyway, believe that things haven’t gotten better; but they believe that improvement has been slow and uneven, and that many injustices that Americans think have died are in fact alive and often enough thriving.
I think these three persistent habits of mind explain many of the conflicts that beset Americans today. And if I were to rank them in order of justifiability, I would say: the first is tragically unjustifiable — and the chief reason why, to my lasting grief, we Southerners have so often allowed our vices to displace our virtues —; the second is understandable but dangerously misleading; and the third … well, the third is pretty damn hard to disagree with.
As the man [William Faulkner] said: The past is not dead; it is not even past.
From Jabob’s always-illuminating blog, Snakes and Ladders, “habits of the American mind.” You can follow him at @ayjay.
[Image above: source]
* Abraham Lincoln (in his speech to the Illinois Republican State Convention, Springfield, Illinois June 16, 1858)
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As we dwell on division, we might recall that it was on this date in 1787 that an organic act of the Congress of the Confederation of the United States, the Northwest Ordinance. It created the Northwest Territory, the new nation’s first organized incorporated territory, from lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains, between British North America and the Great Lakes to the north and the Ohio River to the south. The upper Mississippi River formed the territory’s western boundary; Pennsylvania was the eastern boundary.
Considered one of the most important legislative acts of the Confederation Congress, it established the precedent by which the federal government would be sovereign and expand westward with the admission of new states, rather than with the expansion of existing states and their established sovereignty under the Articles of Confederation. It also protected civil liberties and outlawed slavery in the new territories and set legislative precedent with regard to American public domain lands.
The prohibition of slavery in the territory had the practical effect of establishing the Ohio River as the geographic divide between slave states and free states from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River, an extension of the Mason–Dixon line, helping set the stage for later federal political conflicts over slavery during the 19th century until the Civil War.
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