Especially the "didn't have time" comment.

Cheers,
Tom

Paula, that is indeed interesting, and very American. Where were your parents born? Do you know any of their family surnames?

You seem to be saying here that the importation of Africans was a solution to a pre-existing problem: "Where are we going to find slaves to work our land?"

In fact, well before the English began to settle North America, the slave trade was already running vigorously. The enslavement of Africans by Europeans got its serious start when the Portuguese developed Madeira and the Azores for sugar production early in the fifteenth century. These islands were uninhabited, and the Portuguese imported slaves from the markets of West Africa to do the brutal (and generally fatal) work in the canefields.

When the Spanish opened the New World for exploitation (and the Portuguese followed), African slave-labor in the sugar fields was an essential part of the business model. When the English came to America, they brought the model with them.

Naturally, Spanish, Portuguese, and English occupiers attempted to enslave the Indians that they found in the new lands 96 slaves would be much cheaper if you did't have to pay for their shipping. But the real issue was that sugar slavery was deadly: a sugar slave's life expectancy under the lash was only a year or two; and would need to be replaced. There simply weren't enough Indians to do the job.

(Source: Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade, Simon & Schuster, 1997)

My sense is that American racism is inextricably linked with the historic institution of slavery, that it is a product of the institution, not a cause. The values and ideology of the slave states and the Confederacy are also products.

I don't know for sure, but I suspect the North didn't break any treaties during the Civil War, either. If they did, I would be somewhat surprised that they had the time or resources to bother.

As an aside, my wife's father likely has Mulengeon blood. We've traced his family back to the 1700s and still haven't got them out of Tennessee yet. Anyway, it's like the Mulngeons strains of his mother and father were condensed into him. He is dark skinned, dark haired, dark eyed, without a single visible body hair. By mid-summer, he is a deep ruddy brown. We suspect his father's family were Melungeon because nowhere in documented or oral family history is there any obvious indication of Native American blood, unlike her mother's side of the family, where a great-great-grandmother was kidnapped and married into an Illinois tribe.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16917

"Here was the unexpected and rather unwelcome truth: Joseph was 57 percent Indo-European, 39 percent Native American, 4 percent East Asian 96 and zero percent African. After a lifetime of assuming blackness, he was now being told that he lacked even a single drop of black blood to qualify."

(Though I am skeptical of the precision of the test's claims.)

Then there's the Stono rebellion, led by *Catholic* Kongolese prisoners of war sold into slavery in South Carolina. Contemporary observers feared eeeevil Jesuits sneaking in by boat and stirring things up, the first mention of civil rights "outside agitator" paranoia I have come across in Southern history.

C.

The whole damned thing can be found via this link:

http://docsouth.unc.edu/fitzhughcan/menu.html

C.

Not a guy worthy of what might be the most-used bill in the US. Blech.

Don't lots of twenties get contaminated with cocaine and other drugs, though?!

Most general histories give the impression that the American colonists just up and decided to enslave blacks. This isn't true. There was a long weird muddled initial period where they tried all kinds of things. Indian slavery was one of the things they tried, but Indians escaped too readily, and had a high disease rate. The fact that the colonists turned to other sources of labor doesn't mean they didn't enslave large numbers of Indians. It just meant the ones they managed to enslave weren't sufficient to their needs.

Early on, there were far more white slaves than black. I know the arrangement gets referred to as indentured servitude, but that's something of a fiction. First, in many cases the arrangement was indistinguishable from the deal blacks got. In the beginning, the colonists didn't regard their imported blacks as slaves for life. They were indentured servants too, and after their term of service were paid off and set free just like the whites were.

Second, the laws laid down that the penalty for a perfectly phenomenal number of offenses on the part of indentured servants was to have the term of their indenture extended. (These offenses included things like "Being female and having a baby by your master.")

Third, a lot of slaves in the Caribbean -- and these were explicitly slaves, with not even the fiction that they were indentured servants who were going to be given tools and land when their term was up -- were Irish. The only people who appear to have been upset by this were the Irish.

Fourth, IIRC, the death rate among poor white boys bound over as indentured servants in the colonies was something like 50%.

FIfth, many of the indentured white servants had been kidnapped from Europe every bit as ruthlessly and informally as the blacks had been taken from Africa.

Sixth, children of European families who'd taken passage on credit stood a good chance of being sold out of hand on their arrival in the New World.

Here are a couple of early accounts you may find interesting.

When you read early documents, it's startling how colorblind everyone is. The underlying principle of slavery wasn't race. That was a later invention. Early on, the basic principle was more like "Gotcha, sucker."

But indentures were troublesome. They wore out, and after that you had to replace the servant. White indentures were particularly troublesome. They were hard to distinguish from the rest of the European settlers. They were fractious and sullen when the big planters tried to keep them from settling near their big plantations. And their attitude toward runaways was inadequately propertarian. They were getting uppity. A bunch of them burned Jamestown.

That was when the idea that American slavery was racially based really got going. Poor whites were divided from poor blacks, Indians, and Mestees -- their natural allies -- by laws that gave them significantly different legal standing. For instance, as of 1717 in Maryland, no person of color was permitted to testify against a white Christian:

Be it Therefore Enacted, by the right honourable the Lord Proprietary, by and with the advice and consent of his Lordship's Governor, and the Upper and Lower Houses of Assembly, and by the authority of the same, That from and after the end of this present session of assembly, no Negro or mulatto slave, free Negro, or mulatto born of a white woman, during his time of servitude by law, or any Indian slave, or free Indian natives, of this or the neighbouring provinces, be admitted and received as good and valid evidence in law, in any matter or thing whatsoever depending before any court of record, or before any magistrate within this province, wherein any christian white person is concerned.

Here's another two sites you might find interesting. There are heaps of them out there. You just have to know the subject exists.

(...)

Robert, Nancy, I'll get back to you later.

I assume this is very early on you're talking about. By the late 18th century when the slave trade was going strong, many Southern plantations, particularly those that grew rice and indigo, were virtual death camps; they'd ship the live slaves in to replace those that died after a brief period. It was these conditions that led to the Constitution's putting a deadline on the slave trade--a compromise of sorts that on the one hand ended some of the worst abuses (and made rice and indigo less economical as crops), but on the other gave slavery a more institutionalized position in the culture. Just how "slave" came to be virtually equal to "Negro," and vice versa, in the South was, on the other hand, a gradual process that varied considerably from state to state. And since the racial codes of the South generally looked at someone with one ancestor out of eight or sixteen who was African as a "Negro," this of necessity meant that a lot of people who had little African in the way of ancestry were going to end up classified thus. A perfect example of this is bluesman Charley Patton--take a look at the only known photo of him, and you'll see a light-skinned man with straight hair and a great deal of Indian ancestry (this known from oral history) who was classified as "black."

Since much of this was known to the person to whom I was talking--we were living only a hop, a skip, and a jump from Pea Ridge--I suppose my real question is this:

What do you say to someone with a grievance held so dearly that fact and reason don't get through?

I'm reading up on the last (we hope) Balkan War.

It seems to me that the sort of long-dormant grudges (I'm getting convinced the "ancient hatreds" line is a crock) which were fanned into murderousness there have their parallels today.

There isn't anything. By definition. You can sometimes maneuver such people into corners, but they seldom thank you for it. Sometimes they have a collision with reality; I was good at arranging those back when I was a software tester.

Many people's epistemology contains large elements of "because I wish it were so."

Now if you're really good at it, the collisions you arrange are more like sideswiping bushes with your car to slow it down when the brakes fail, in order to avoid running a red light across a busy highway. Though sometimes, that's not enough, and you have to aim the car for a solid wall.

Adamsj, the only suggestion I can think of is prolonged gentle exposure to other points of view. It's really unlikely that any one exposure, even (especially?) if abrupt and intense, will change their mind. But if you can keep exposing them to other aspects of the situation, eventually it may be easier for them to change their mind than to ignore the additional information. The trick is to do so without annoying them to the point that they decide the easiest course is to shut you out.

My folks come from Northeastern Oklahoma, dad was born and grew up in Afton, OK and mom was born in Muskogee, but I think her family lived in Miami.

Mom's family is almost certainly Cherokee, the kind that had farmed, tried to blend in and were most traumatized by the forced march to OK. Courtney and Daniel are the most common family names I can recall, grandma remarried after Mr. Daniel absconded to California, living her with four kids...

Dad's family, grandma is an unknown and may at least be part Hispanic, her first name, which I didn't know until I saw the birth certificate, was Reyna, and maiden name Angel. Grandfather was English and German, with one side of the family going back to the Mayflower, and the Helm (formerly Wilhelm) side coming from a guy who enlisted in the German Merchant Marine rather than being impressed in the Prussian army, got to New York and beat feet to as remote a place from authority as possible. Which was a German community in Northeastern Oklahoma.

(Hi, Jim. You never write... ;-) )

Randolph, that's an excellent description of a software tester's job: arranging collisions with reality for the developers!

Wow. That's 100% Florida Orange Truth there. With pulp.