Monthly Archives: February 2022

The fault lines of todays political chasm go back to the decades that preceded the Civil War. One can see them in our geographymost of the states that will recriminalize abortion, for example, are in the old Confederacy and the rural or deindustrialized regions it influencedand in our racial division, which continues to render the country into, more or less, two camps.

A democratic society might resolve its conflicts by counting heads. But the rigid Constitution, written to protect the regressive elements of the past, still thwarts majority rule. The Senate and the Electoral College favor rural states, often producing minority rule in the Senate and the White House, which together select the Supreme Court. In the House of Representatives, the constitutional provision to count enslaved people as three-fifths of a person long supercharged the power of southern slaveholders; now gerrymandering and voter suppression, left to the unchecked will of state legislatures, thwart the principle of one man, one vote. No wonder the abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison called the founding charter a pact with the devil. When, finally, a serious political forcethe Republican Partyarose in the 1850s to address enslavement, the Supreme Court tried to freeze out abolitionism forever with the hateful Dred Scott decision.

Todays challenges are differentand no offense can be compared with the slavocracy of the antebellum periodbut anyone who cares about basic principles of democracy can see that our struggle is much the same. In 2013, the Supreme Court put the Democrats at an enormous disadvantage by gutting the Voting Rights Act and handing back elections to the minority-party-dominated rural-state legislatures. Despite repeated efforts of most of the Democratic senators, Congress has refused to pass a new voting-rights act. In several key states, Republican legislatures have set up new systems that may overturn future election results. Sometime in June, the Supreme Court is likely to rule that American women no longer have a constitutional right to refuse to bear a child, despite the fact that polls regularly show that the overwhelming majority of Americans support some level of abortion rights.

Martha S. Jones: The real origins of birthright citizenship

These are dark times, but dark times do not always prevail. Four decades after Black spokesmen told their white so-called friends in the execrable American Colonization Society that they would not be returned to Africa, and just 30-plus years after the Black activist David Walker published an appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World promising that the blacks, once started, would form a gang of tigers and lions, the newborn Republican Party won the presidency on a platform of restricting slavery. Ten years after Garrison torched his copy of the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. How did they do it?

The specifics of their fight are not identical to what prodemocracy Americans now face. But the work of the abolitionist movement is comprehensible and replicable. It is the closest thing we have to a blueprint for how to rescue our democracy.

Almost every tactic the mostly white abolitionists used derived from methods that Black organizers tried first. Walkers appeal, published in 1829, inspired Garrison. There was a Black convention and Lodge movement well before the first white or interracial antislavery society. But one lesson emerges loudly from history: Neither Black nor white Americans could have done it alone.

They made an alliance, and they dug in for the long haul. And they left a playbook.

I. Ideasand publishing themmatter.

In 1814, The Times of London became the first paper of note to publish off a steam machine, which ran at more than four times the speed of a manual press Less than two decades later, shortly after Garrison started The Liberator in 1831, entrepreneurial types in the antislavery movement decided to use the new technology to cheaply send copies of four antislavery publications to thousands of postal recipients all over the United States. In Georgia, enslavers set the missives on fire.

The obvious comparison is to social media today. Starting, roughly, with the Howard Dean campaign in 2004 and then Barack Obamas in 2008, the Democrats took an early lead in using the new technology of the day. But antidemocratic forces have been savvy with these tools as well. Equipped since 1998 with a captive cable-television network, Fox News, conservatives moved rapidly during the Obama era to expand into newer social media. Armies of bots, with a complete disregard for fact and extensive funding, helped the right dominate in the all-important arena of political communication; that dominance has only increased since the 2020 election.

The current climate is exhausting, but there is no reason to despair. For most of the abolitionist movement, the publications were few and subscribers scarce. The Liberator depended on the subscriptions of free Black Americans not in need of persuasion. Frederick Douglasss paper struggled to stay afloat. Most mainstream newspapers were, until the Civil War, hostile to abolition, accurately predicting that it would split the Union. The South persuaded the southern-dominated federal government to close the United States Postal Service to abolitionist literature. But with the development of the telegraph in the 1840s, national newspapers increased their reach and weighed in on the struggle. The activists just kept starting new papers, exploring different approaches and generating content until some things worked.

Read: The truth about abolition

2. Weekly meetings build solidarity.

Abolitionists quickly realized that they needed to organize in person. They had a model; a generation before, a wave of religious revival, the Second Great Awakening, had swept across the North, leaving a legacy of social activismand frequent meetings. Garrisons New England (later Massachusetts) Anti-Slavery Society met regularly for 35 years.

Because there were meetings, the members could take strength from one anothers company. When the societies dispatched speakers far and wide, those speakers had a self-perpetuating takeaway message: Start another society. Because there were meetings, new people could bring new ideas. A couple of years after the New England societys founding, a woman so beautiful and well dressed that the modest antislavery activists thought she was a spy walked into one such meeting. Lets have a fashionable bazaar, the socialite Maria Weston Chapman proposed. For a long time, it was the biggest moneymaker abolition had.

The past five years have seen a lot of reform societies: Indivisible, to organize politically across the board; Justice Democrats, to pull the Democratic Party to the left; the Sunrise Movement, to protect the environment. George Floyds murder gave new fuel to Black Lives Matter, an older organization. The left would have its own Tea Party, Indivisible proclaimed.

What is now clear is that they are in for not one election cycle but trench warfare. The antislavery societies did not have the good fortune of winning any elections for a long time, so they provide a better model than the Tea Party for how to organize in political trench warfare. Abolition had a primary goal: the immediate end of chattel slavery everywhere in the United States, and its related issue of racial equality. From time to time, other causes surfaced: defiance of the clergy as inadequately opposed to slavery, temperance, womens suffrage. The most divisive issue turned out to be whether to engage in politics or even violent resistance versus moral suasion and passive nonresistance. The lesson is clear: The branch of abolition that eschewed other causes and narrowly focused on its singular goal won out.

Knowing they were in it for the long haul and that all the institutions of government were arrayed against them, they turned to the only resource that remained: leaving their cozy meetings and organizing the people.

3. Talk and knock, far and wide.

They modeled themselves on the quintessential movement of the disenfranchisedthe middle-class British campaign to expand voting rights, which had always been limited to the landed upper classes. The British reformers used petition campaigns, gathering signatures on massive rolls of paper to pressure Parliament to let them in. In 1832, the movement succeeded. And there was a bonus. The moneyed sugar enslavers had been paying off the corrupt landowners who dominated Parliament before the suffrage reform. The newly admitted industrial and urban middle classes, uncorrupted by planter money, immediately formed the backbone of British abolition.

Why cant we use the petition like that? Garrison asked his right-hand woman, Maria Weston Chapman. Within two years, American women had more than doubled the British numbers in petitions to Congress. The regiments of women walked the sidewalks of small towns all over the North, catching a woman at home and, through her, reaching her male family members. Kitchen-table politics fed the nascent antislavery societies. When the petitions reached Congress, the southerners responded with the gag rule, refusing to accept their own citizens pleas. People who didnt care at all for abolition made alliance with the radicals in defense not of human freedom but of freedom of speech. It was the abolitionists first political victory.

Voter registration is the contemporary petition campaign. Last January, a newly enfranchised Black electorate in Georgia helped send two Democrats to the Senate. Because even Black Georgians were formally entitled to vote, and because they were not facing a monolithic two-party system of resistance, the project actually looks easier than the abolitionists venture into retail politics in the 1830s. But as the abolitionists learned, touching a new supporter is only the first step. The abolitionists established a lecture corps, the Seventy, and trained its members in preaching abolition to the communities they sought to organize. The Democrats face a worse problem than the abolitionists did, because their opponents are not only trying to govern from above, like the southern enslavers did; they are also playing their own turnout game.

The story of the great petitioner Chapman is also a cautionary tale. In the late 1830s, she followed her purist colleague Garrison into attacking the local churches as inadequately supportive of abolition. She learned a hard lesson about getting ahead of her troops when the more conventional churchgoing women in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society pushed her out. Ultimately, the dynamic of antislavery shifted to the New Yorkcentered antislavery societies run by much more conventional leaders who did not require their members to leave their churches, however imperfect those churches were.

Read: How did we get here?

4. Make injustice visible to the public.

By the late 1840s, the little movement had won some elections, and in 1846, one congressman, David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, proposed banning slavery from the new territory conquered in the Mexican War. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina began again to talk of secession. To paper it over, the slave-owning moderate Henry Clay proposed a compromise. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 established a system of rendition of fugitive enslaved people from the free states back into the slave states, under the control of the proslavery federal administration and bypassing all protections the free states had thrown up. Northerners were conscripted into helping hunt them down. Within weeks, the streets of Boston and New York were electrified, as long-term residents of these northern cities were dragged in chains back to slavery. Abolitionists gathered to demonstrate everywhere fugitives were being pursuedaround courthouses and jails, and in the streets that lined the routes taking them to the docks for their return to slavery. Sometimes the protesters even managed to free or buy out the captives, and when they did, they celebrated.

The return of illegal abortions may offer an opportunity for a return of these sorts of demonstrations. If Roe v. Wade is reversed, a tidal wave of severe restrictions will ensue. States will try to stop delivery of abortion pills into restrictive states and then to stop their citizens from leaving to seek abortions outside their borders. A resistance movement that truly draws from the abolition example will openly defy the state laws, encouraging abortion clinics to operate until patients are dragged, clanking, through the streets of Dallas or Detroit. Mobs of feminists, like the crowds of abolitionists and free Black rescuers did for the fugitives, can fight to defend abortion providers and the people who seek their services.

5. Get control of the Supreme Court.

The prospect of the Court gutting Roe v. Wade and returning women to reproductive conscription in half the states is bad enough, but the current Supreme Court could go far beyond that, overreaching as their predecessors did in 1857. Confronted with Dred Scott, a man whose enslaver had taken him to free territory, seven justices, led by the former slaveholder Chief Justice Roger Taney, ruled that Congress had no power to bar slavery from the territories. Taney thought the preemptive Supreme Court ruling would end the rising sectional tension. Instead, Dred Scott torpedoed the uneasy regional-nonaggression pact. Although the heated rhetoric of nonpersonhood in Taneys opinion is Dred Scotts most dramatic legacy, the threat of the slave empire imposing slavery on the rest of the country really fueled the Republican Partys rise. If the Constitution forbade Congress from excluding slavery from the territories, the same arguments would protect slaveowners rights to travel and reside in free states with the people they held. Lemmon v. New York, which raised that very issue, was on its way to the Supreme Court when Lincoln won.

Most white northerners may not have cared that much about the personhood of the Negro, as Taney called him, but they cared a lot about what Dred Scott meant for the expansion of slavery to the new territories. White working men of the North considering a move to the frontier surely werent going to tolerate competing with the enslaved people brought by their holders there as Dred Scott was maintained, or, worse, see slavery brought into their little towns in upstate New York and New England. When, after Lincoln was elected, the same slavery-loving chief justice ordered the new president to stop protecting the rail yards around Washington, D.C., by arresting Confederate insurgents and spies, Lincoln simply ignored the order. Lincoln took the very public occasion of his first inauguration to warn the Court that it had provoked resistance. If the Court had the last word, the new president announced, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having handed too much power to unelected justices. After three proslavery Democrats stepped off the Court early in his first term, Lincoln replaced them with antislavery Republicans. The next hot case went for the president, by a vote of 54. In 1863, the Republican-led Congress created a Tenth Judicial Circuit to include newly admitted Oregon and, using the enlarged judiciary as an opportunity, it packed the Court with a tenth justice.

On January 13, 2022, the Supreme Court struck down President Joe Bidens program of mandatory vaccines or testing. (The Court narrowly upheld a mandate for the recipients of federal health-care funds.) Soon, the Court is likely to confront the claim that a fetus is a person and thus protected against abortion by the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. As in Lemmon v. New York, a decision to that effect would impose the sexist regime largely centered in the southern and rural states from coast to coast. Will that all-powerful electoral demographic of white suburban women agree once again to fly away, as their mothers once flew to places like Sweden, for their abortions? The liberal movement needs to lay the groundwork so that when conservative overreach comes, it triggers a reaction like the one that greeted Dred Scott. By the time the feckless Chief Justice Taney deployed the unrepresentative power of the Supreme Court to douse abolition politics, the fire was too well laid.

6. Dont be intimidated.

Like todays right, supporters of slavery dominated the vigilante landscape during much of abolition. Pistol-wielding southerners in Congress threatening duels often drove abolition-inclined northern congressmen into retirement, lest they have to choose between their honor and their lives. In northern cities, anti-abolitionist mobs were particularly prominent when abolition started to get some traction in the 1830s. The balance of violence began to shift after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was enacted. The crucial change started, as usual, with the Black abolitionist forces, such as vigilance committees, formed to warn fugitives of the prospect of slave catchers. Led by Black leaders of the abolitionist movement, the reluctant followers of passive nonresistance one by one came to accept the need for force, as nonresistance looked more and more like a strategy only white men could afford to indulge. During the campaign of 1860, white forces of antislavery emerged on the street in brigades of caped young male Republicans called Wide Awakes. Although not expressly violent, the Wide Awakes adopted elaborate military rhetoric and uniforms and participated eagerly in clashes in places with close races.

By 1860, antislavery forces could see the constitutional order shifting to their side. If the future could be determined by the election rather than by who had the most firepower, they could anticipate victory ahead. On November 6, historians report, the Wide Awakes policed the polls. The Confederate states refused to accept the outcome of the election, and bloodshed unknown in America before or since ensued. But as Lincoln said, sorrowfully, in his second inaugural address, on the eve of the Confederate surrender at the Battle of Appomattox Court House, If God wills that it continue until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

After the 2020 presidential election, the rights vigilantism focused on the certification of the results, and it ultimately failed. The past year has been full of reports of local election officials who have retired rather than face the ongoing threats directed at them. The lesson from 1860 is that ultimately the forces of democratic self-governance must stand up to the vigilantes. Hopefully, law enforcement will play its proper role in keeping order and protecting the democratic process during the fraught years to come. But the hard lesson of abolition is that it never pays to yield to bullies. In The Liberators early years, when murderous mobs were a constant threat, Black allies guarded Lloyd Garrisons journey home from the office. We dont know if he even knew they were there.

7. Never give up.

This is the most important lesson of all. In 1838, the enslaved Marylander Frederick Bailey donned a nautical outfit and slipped aboard a train headed north, disguised as a free seaman on leave. He drew his first real breath, he later reported, when he reached New York. Just 27 years later, renamed Frederick Douglass, he appeared at the White House, the first Black man to try to attend an inaugural celebration. Show him in, President Lincoln told the scandalized guards. There is no one, he said to Douglass, whose opinion means more to me.

See more here:

The Fight for Democracy Will Be a Long, Long Haul - The Atlantic

If your early history education was anything like mine, we didnt learn much about the transatlantic slave trade before college. It was a Very Bad Thing that operated in a triangular fashion, that was made clear, but pedagogically speaking the late 18th through mid-19th century was little more than the quick intake of breath between weeks of waxing rhapsodic on wars for the soul of the nation. Past the ratification of the Constitution, there might be a little Monroe Doctrine here, some slavery and abolition there, occasional forays into the Second Great Awakening and Seneca Falls, but generally the nearly six-decade intermission between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars never seemed to merit more than a few hours of hasty overview.

However briefly, the slave trade did at least come up regularly, or at least biannually, usually in the form of a short reading about the Middle Passage. The images of abolitionist literature that accompanied this homework were likewise perennial: an enslaved man begging his freedom, chained, kneeling, a supplicant (aka Josiah Wedgwoods Am I not a man and a brother) or neatly diagrammed cross-sections of hand-drawn boats, their precise outlines filled to bleeding over with hundreds of cramped Black figures rendered small enough to stay abstractions. Less often, all of this was accompanied by a date, 1808, the year legislation banning U.S. participation in the international slave trade went into effect, the very earliest moment the Constitution would allow. I got my Black American history at home, but if someone had asked Young Me a question as simple on its face as when the slave trade ended, I would have somewhat confidently guessed 1808.

Much has been written detailing what students in the United States dont learn about slavery and the slave trade in school. In our contentious educational landscape, speculating on how history curricula might be reimagined to explicitly discuss the transatlantic tradeboth as context for U.S. slavery and in its own rightmight sound indulgent, or outright laughable. But feasibility can be a dangerous metric. It has the power to replace what ought to be done with individual perceptions of, and limitations on, what can be done. It's the cudgel of the status quo, beating back those who are willing to imagine a different world.

In 1808, ending the United States de facto participation in the transatlantic slave trade wasnt feasible. And it certainly wasnt the end of the transatlantic slave trade, in the U.S. or anywhere else.

There was plenty of political support for the new law, passed in 1807. Most states had banned the international slave trade decades earlier when they were still colonies in revoltby this time South Carolina was the only state that permitted it. For over a decade, ships flying American colors had been prohibited from engaging in the trade. Despite being an enslaver himself, addressing a body filled with plenty more, in 1806 President Jefferson had urged Congress to end the violations of human rights that was the international slave trade as quickly as allowed, acknowledging that, although no law you may pass can take prohibitory effect till [sic] the first day [of 1808], yet the intervening period is not too long to prevent, by timely notice, expeditions which cannot be completed before that day.

If that seems optimistic, it was. Though subsequent legislation would build on and strengthen the 1807 act, adding teeth to policy one law at a time was slow going, and those who couldnt envision a way of life or economic system without enslavement continued trafficking. The international trade in the enslaved to the United States persisted, illicitly, and sharply increased in the decade before 1860. Though building slave ships had been illegal since 1794, the Chesapeake region, particularly in and around Baltimore, was a ready supplier of the best slave ships on the water until at least the 1820s. And even without unlawful international slave trading, the United States maintained an extensive, remorseless domestic slave trade until the Civil War.

Not entirely effective then, and also not firstDenmark abolished the slave trade in 1792, though they opted to gradually phase it out so as not to disrupt colonial plantation economies in the West Indies, meaning the restriction didnt take full effect until 1803. This unlikely pair of early adopters did share one quality, thoughthey both understood that while slave trading was certainly profitable, it was nothing compared to the potential of slave breeding.

And that, at least in the United States, is where cotton comes in.

Harvesting the quintessential crop of U.S. slavery was backbreaking, incredibly onerous work, but sugar, the commodity that ruled plantations in southern Louisiana and farther south throughout the Caribbean and Americas, provided a litany of ways to die. The most vicious driver was arguably not a man in a field, but figures in a distant ledger; sugar planters found it both expedient and profitable to simply accept the maiming, burning, and dying and budget for replacement labor accordingly. (Under the plantation system, the average life expectancy for an enslaved sugar mill worker was seven years, and harvesting remains dangerous work today). Sugar production was also frequently, though not exclusively, regarded as mens work. This perception, alongside the rapid turnover required by all the untimely death and sustained by the ongoing import of the enslaved, created massive gender imbalances on most sugar producing plantations.

By contrast, most states produced cotton, not sugar. Enslavement still murdered untold numbers in the U.S.; it just wasnt producing cotton that killed them. Harvesting and processing cotton did not carry the same risks as sugar, nor was it thought to require exclusively (or even majority) male labor. A balanced enslaved population enabled the United States to maintain and expand its enslaved population through natural increase, meaning that even reproduction rates reduced by the conditions of enslavement were such that a once-trafficked labor force had become self-sustaining. What the blandness of the phrase obscures is a system in which enslaved reproduction was frequently anything but naturalreadily coerced, often forced, and yes, bred. Add to this (a rather tortured interpretation of) the English legal principle of partus sequitur ventrem that which is born follows the wombmeaning in the United States, enslaved women passed their status as human chattel to their infants and, well, no imports required.

Over the course of two and a half centuries British slave traders trafficked well over 3 million enslaved people, second only to Portugal and Brazil combined.

Natural increase wasnt happening for European empires and their increasingly fractious colonial holdingsat least not those whose coffers relied on the production of sugarand many within the planter class wholeheartedly believed they would never, could never, afford to give up enslaved labor. Towards the end of the 18th century, as abolitionist campaigns in Britain surged, slave traders and profiteers in Spain and colonial Cuba, Portugal, and colonial Brazil, even Jamaica, Englands most profitable slaving colony, likely assumed that though a few small reforms to satisfy the rabble-rousers might be forthcoming, not much would fundamentally change.

Though the English werent the first transatlantic slave tradersthat dubious distinction belongs to Prince Henry the Navigator and the Portugueseby the end of the 1700s, they had become the most prolific. John Hawkins ushered England into the slave market in the mid-1500s, snagging a knighthood from Elizabeth I in the process, and over the course of the next two and a half centuries British slave traders trafficked well over 3 million enslaved people, second only to Portugal and Brazil combined. By the beginning of the 1800s, the value added by the slave trade likely exceeded a tenth of the entire British economy. And yet, in 1807, Britain banned the slave trade. If Denmark and the United States, whom Britain slips between in the order of slave trade abolition, were comparatively small players whose shifts lacked much worldwide market impact, Britain was quite the opposite. Despite the timingthe empires ban went into effect little more than a half a year before its former coloniesthe two nations could not have arrived at the new policy more differently.

Nineteenth century African liberation, as conceived of by the British and emulated elsewhere, was not a freedom project.

The English campaign for slave trade abolition was a contentious, prolonged, and grassroots affair. Beginning in the late 1700s, a diverse coalition of British abolitionists used everything from boycotts, petitions, bills, anti-slavery literature, even the 18th century version of data analytics to try to turn the tide against this vast, inexorable, and well-funded oppression. Winning the legislative battle in 1807 didnt effectively stop the trade; those unwilling to outright defy the law could still profit indirectly. Though the quantity of British slave ships dropped precipitously, they were soon replaced by ships from nations that scrupled less, or not at all. The money was just too good.

Passionate anti-slavery advocates and the policymakers theyd (somewhat) successfully convinced found themselves strangely and suddenly united. Those who believed the trade was a moral wrong and those, less high-minded, motivated by economic concerns agreed that the deed was done and that having given up the British market share in slave trading, other nations should be encouraged to do likewise. If Britain couldnt have a slave trade, nobody could.

Enforcing the law fell to the Royal Navyturns out, for the slave trade to stop, someone had to actually stop slavers. The U.S. ban had authorized their Navy to detain slavers, but there it ended; the States wouldnt even authorize a suppression force until 1819. By contrast, the British had two ships off the African coast within months of their 1807 ban and wished them happy hunting. British ships in the Caribbean didnt even have to be sent patrolling for slavers, as their station was already a major battleground in the Napoleonic Wars. The conflict was the perfect pretext, as slavers flying enemy colors could be boarded and captured under the rules of war.

Of course wars, even wars against Napoleon, do eventually end, and in the wake of Waterloo in 1815, Britain was left with a problem: It didnt actually have the right to board foreign ships, as doing so during peace time was a possible prelude right back to war. The Royal Navy could still detain ships under British colors, but what about everyone else? The Congress of Vienna, begun in November the previous year, presaged years of inducements, cajoling, and threats on the part of Britain to obtain the right to detain, inspect, and condemn slavers, no matter what their country of origin, all while the Royal Navy continued to patrol. The crux was the right of search, the right to police the seas, and though both France and the U.S., still fresh from wars with England, refused outright, treaties would emerge between Britain and an increasing number of countries. Armed with these agreements, a squadron made up of six to eight Royal Navy vesselsand, when those often proved too slow to keep up with their quarry, supplemented by repurposed slave shipseventually coalesced along the coast of Western Africa, a place so inexorably tied up with the trade that it had for centuries simply been known as the Slave Coast.

Suppression still took decades of work on multiple fronts. Support for active suppression from England, though still vocal, waned over the years in the face of the trades seeming indefatigabilitymillions of pounds had been thrown at the problem, the lives of British sailors had been lost, and for what? Crucially, by the mid-19th century, efforts to dismantle the trade coincided with the rise of scientific racism in Europe, and though Britain would treat with some European powers (and the U.S.) as equals, using remuneration to lure the more cash-strapped empires of continental Europe into compliance, there was little compunction about deploying embargo and naval blockade when newly-formed states in the Americas or the leaders of African tribal nations did not comply. By the 1850s, thanks to renewed effort and a hodgepodge of treaties and agreements (both mutual and unilateral) with British hands all over them, the international slave trade could be said to no longer exist on the industrial scale of the previous few centuries, though it did continue on a smaller scale until the first multilateral general treaty to suppress the slave trade was signed in 1890 at the Brussels Conference.

There was no mechanism of enforcement in this new agreement, but other disruptive elements were at play. By the late 19th century, the Scramble for Africathe partitioning of nearly the entire continent between seven European powers (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Britain)was on, and though each of these nations would approve the Brussels Act, the overarching concern of these signatories was less human rights and more colonial might. Its not entirely bleak: Some historians have sourced the origins of the United Nations to the Brussels Conference and found the foundations of international human rights law in the international courts convened to adjudicate the fate of captured slave ships. And what we now think of as the transatlantic slave trade did, ultimately, end. However, the moral ambivalence, the racism, and the greed shared by colonialist powers would ultimately bring nations divided by the battle over continuing the licit slave trade into consensus, patting themselves on the collective back for exploiting the resources and residents of Africa without the expedient of chains.

Its difficult to fathom how men made rich by enslaved people assumed others were keen to give the practice up.

Its not surprising, really, that suppression paved the way for modern colonialism; 19th century African liberation, as conceived of by the British and emulated elsewhere, was not a freedom project. In fact, during the first half of the 1800s, at the height of suppression, those liberated by British suppression efforts soon found that they were actually recaptives, neither technically owned nor free to leave. Their choices if liberated in then-British colony Sierra Leone were resettlement in the colony to be assigned farms or menial work, conscription into a segregated regiment of the Royal Marines (for the men), and apprenticeship. The unfortunates slated for apprenticeship were shipped to where theyd been headed when the British captured their slaver-prisonsthe Caribbean. Held for a term not to exceed fourteen years and often longer, apprenticeship ruthlessly extended the lag between freedom promised and freedom delivered, and these apprentices toiled and died in the sugar cane fields of Britains island holdings until the system was abolished in 1838, five years after slavery was abolished in most of the empire and persisted elsewhere even longer. (In 1833 the British government passed a slavery ban that in 1837 also threw appeasement money at enslavers to compensate them for their losses, passing the bill to British taxpayers, who finally paid it off in 2015.)

So when did the slave trade end? Speaking broadly, the international slave trade never ended. It was driven underground, it changed and evolved and made some geographic shifts, but the trade in non-free people continues to this day.

Looking specifically to the transatlantic slave trade, it depends on how you measure results: by the standards of the treaty-makers or the exploited, according to the law or to realitybut it definitely wasnt 1808. Understanding that the slave trade did not magically disappear with the flick of a few quills and the snap of (American) fingers helps illuminate the long legacy of that oppression, as it manifests in the commodities we consume daily and for those still reckoning with the economic and political repercussions of European mercantilism, capitalism, paternalism, and racism.

There are other things we dont learn when this history isnt taught. The fact that at least some of the American politicians who enacted the 1808 ban believed that it would eventually starve the life out of Southern American slavery is striking in its naivet and shortsightedness. Its difficult to fathom how men made rich by enslaved people assumed others were keen to give the practice up. Its easy to assume why they didnt do more.

When history is gutted of accuracy for comfort or convenience, were robbed of the knowledge that wishing for better isnt enough. Maybe thats the point. But see: no system, no matter how longstanding or entrenched, is inevitable and unchangeable. Systemic problems require multi-faceted solutions, and a less abridged retelling of the transatlantic slave trade demonstrates that even in the face of epic, unmitigated suffering, the effort to craft those solutions is going to be unpopular, contentious, questionably executed, unbearably prolongedand still entirely vital. That were here, even now, is proof that the cost is worth it; its also proof that the work is not done.

Im honestly not sure if its comforting or daunting to accept that that redressing oppression is struggle measured in generations and counted in days.

But it is history.

A.E. Rooks is a two-time Jeopardy! champion with completed degrees in theater, law, and library and information science, and forthcoming degrees in education and human sexuality. Her/their new book THE BLACK JOKE: The True Story of One Ship's Battle Against the Slave Trade is published by Scribner.

Link:

Did You Study the Slave Trade in School or Were You Out That Day? - The Daily Beast

SARATOGA SPRINGS Good things come to those who wait just a little bit.

Jacqueline Madison, president of the North Country Underground Railroad Historical Association (NCUGRHA), made a pitch for a documentary about the historic Haff/Smith property in Peru to the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative (MDOCS) hosted second Community Pitch Session in November 2021.

The historical documentary will span across the generations of the Union Road farm inhabitants/abolitionists, the Rev. Abraham Haff, son of an enslaver, and Stephen Keese Smith, a documented Underground Railroad station master and Quaker.

Although we dont have any documentary evidence that shows Abraham Haff used the facilities, if he was an abolitionist, my guess is that some place on that farm was used to hide slaves, Madison said.

Even if it was just temporary.

CREATIVE PITCHES

Ten community organizations and collectives vied to become the new MDOCS Co-Creation Initiative Round I Partners.

With so many excellent pitches, it was a difficult decision, Angela Beallor, Documentarian in Community Co-Creation, MDOCS, said in a press release.

The selection committee was comprised of representatives of MDOCS along with Jamel Mosely, an award-winning visual storyteller in the mediums of video and photography, and co-founder of Collectiveffort, a Troy-based creative agency and coworking space, and Krystle Nowhitney Hernandez, deputy director of LifeWorks Community Action in Saratoga Springs.

We are excited to announce the new MDOCS Co-Creation Initiative Round I partners, Beallor said.

The MDOCS Co-Creation Initiative supports collaborations that connect community groups with Skidmore faculty and staff as they pursue documentary projects.

SUPPORTED GROUPS

The four organizations that will join the first Round I partner cohort and will work closely with MDOCS and other Skidmore faculty/staff in the coming year:

Harm Reduction Works - HRW a project of HRH43, Harm Reduction Works-HRW is a fully scripted, harm reduction-based self-help/mutual aid group originally conceived as an alternative to abstinence only types of organizations like 12 step etc.

Kanatsiohareke Mohawk Community the sustainable, living Onkwehon:we community grounded in Rotinonhsionni culture - its language, land, and social structure.

North Country Underground Railroad Historical Association a center that researches, preserves and interprets the history of the Underground Railroad, slavery and abolition in upstate New York.

The Peoples Voice a not-for-profit news media group addressing the concerns of marginalized groups in Saratoga Springs, NY and the greater Capital Region.

These organizations will receive $5,000 to support a year of collaborative documentary project development alongside relationship building with Skidmore faculty and staff, Beallor said.

MDOCS will also provide other in-kind support including production resources, facilitation, consultation from members of the MDOCS team, and participation in other CCI programming.

ADDOMS HISTORY

NCUGRHA will use its monetary award to publish an update of late Clinton County Historian and Beekmantown Town Historian Addie Shields 1979 book on the the Rev. John Townsend Addoms (1782-1869) homestead and the Underground Railroad in Clinton County.

We wanted to update that book because more information has come out. In doing so, because the book sort of parallels what were doing with this documentary video, Madison said.

We will take those funds and utilize them for publishing the book, so kind of a joint effort in that case. The book, though, will showcase others. It will not focus on John Haff or even Stephen Keese Smith. It will talk about the area before Europeans arrived, which will include the Indigenous people who lived here, and move into the proprietors and those who were enslavers and from there to those individuals that participated in the Abolitionist Movement and finally into people of color, free and enslaved, in the area. This will be all up until the Civil War ended, so around 1865.

This will be an expansion of what we have learned since Addie wrote the book, which really focused on John Townsend Addoms. He was an abolitionist in the Beekmantown area.

Shields mission was to get the Addoms homestead listed on the National Historic Register.

But unfortunately, the house burned down around that time, Madison said.

In addition, MDOCS will support collaborations by Sanctuary Radio | Hudson Mohawk Magazine related to the oral history of labor and radio production as well as a documentary collaboration between Saratoga Black Lives Matter and Professor Yelena Biberman-Ocakli.

OTHER PROJECTS

The Co-Creation Initiative invites community members, organizations, collectives, and interest groups of any stripe or type to form a collaborative working group or cluster collaborative with Skidmore faculty or staff partners, to brainstorm and ultimately develop projects that:

1. Have an element of nonfiction storytelling in any medium photo, video, theater etc.

2. Enrich and complicate our local, regional and global dialogues, by addressing important issues and especially those that need a deeper examination

3. Bring people into new relationships, across disparate organizations, communities and other lines of difference, cemented by making together, or co-creating.

Ultimately, we will have a documentary, Madison said.

It can be used not just for us to do presentations, but it can be utilized and available to schools and places that want to learn about the local history and maybe even beyond because like I said, this is a complete story that goes from enslaver all the way down to protector.

Email Robin Caudell:

rcaudell@pressrepublican.com

Twitter:@RobinCaudell

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