SLAVERY master thread

Afriend sends a page of interesting APFN linx and one underscores somethingI related in a column on the book Don't Cary Me Back: that there were different CLASSES of slave during the slave era in this country, some of which bore no resemblance to the caricatures of it that most people carry around in their heads. Here, catch:


Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans?


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/op...ce.html?incamp =article_popular


By ANNE RICE Published: September 4, 2005 La Jolla, Calif.


The first literary magazine ever published in Louisiana was the work of black men, French-speaking poets and writers who brought together their work in three issues of a little book called L'Album Littéraire. That was in the 1840's, and by that time the city had a prosperous class of free black artisans, sculptors, businessmen, property owners, skilled laborers in all fields. Thousands of slaves lived on their own in the city, too, making a living at various jobs, and sending home a few dollars to their owners in the country at the end of the month.


.......................May I suggest we make this Forum thread the place to discuss slavery issues past and present? Good idea to aim for high reply-to-topic ratio. Edited by: nelson

[Scronx]

Smithsonian is distinguishing itself as one mag interested in getting the "other side" of slavery on the record -- even that which exists today, most famouslyin Africa. This just in per the Rebel Underground newsletter (Oct 05) which I've quoted many times in Dixie Diary:


Born into Bondage


Despite denials by government officials, slavery remains a way of life in the African nation of Niger


http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smi...ssues05/sep05/ niger.html


Lightning and thunder split the Saharan night. In northern Niger, heavy rain and wind smashed into the commodious goatskin tent of a Tuareg tribesman named Tafan and his family, snapping a tent pole and tumbling the tent to the ground.


Huddling in a small, tattered tent nearby was a second family, a man, a woman and their four children. Tafan ordered the woman, Asibit, to go outside and stand in the full face of the storm while holding the pole steady, keeping his tent upright until the rain and wind ceased.


Asibit obeyed because, like tens of thousands of other Nigerians, she was born into a slave caste that goes back hundreds of years. As she tells it, Tafan's family treated her not as a human, but as chattel, a beast of burden like their goats, sheep and camels. [THE PRINT VERSION CONTINUES:] Her eldest daughter, Asibit says, was born after Tafan raped her, and when the child turned 6, he gave her as a present to his brother -- a common practice among Niger's slave owners. Asibit, fearful of whipping, watched in silence as her daughter was taken away.............


Edited by: nelson

[Scronx]

Felt sure I'd posted this but can't seem to find it. Rich -- and damning, even with the L2E that follows! /\/
<H2 =posttitle>The North's Convenient Amnesia About Slavery</H2>


www.nytimes.com/2005/12/15/opinion/15thu3.html


http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/19370.html


Americans typically grow up believing that slavery was confined to the cotton fields of the South and that the North was always made up of free states. The fact that slavery was practiced all over the early United States often comes as a shock to people in places like New York, where the myth of the free North has been surprisingly durable. The truth is that New York was at one time a center of the slave trade, with more black people enslaved than any other city in the country, with the possible exception of Charleston, S.C.

The New-York Historical Society in Manhattan has set out to make all this clear in its pathbreaking "Slavery in New York," which ends in March. It is being described as the first exhibition by a major museum that focuses on the long-neglected issue of slavery in the North.

New York's central position in the slave trade was partially exposed back in 1991, when workers excavating for an office tower in Lower Manhattan uncovered a long-forgotten burial ground that may have originally spread for as much as a mile. It served as the final resting place for thousands of enslaved New Yorkers.

Among the bodies exhumed and examined, about 40 percent were of children under the age of 15; the most common cause of death was malnutrition. Some enslaved mothers appear to have committed infanticide, rather than bringing their children into what was clearly a hellish environment. Adults typically died of hard labor, dumped into their graves by owners who simply went out and bought more slaves.

Slavery was no less brutal in New York than in the South - and just as pervasive. At one point, about four in 10 New York households owned human beings. The free human labor that ran the city's most gracious homes also helped to build its early infrastructure and supplied the muscle needed by the beef, grain and shipping interests, which forestalled emancipation until 1827 - making New York among the last Northern states to abolish slavery....

* * * * * * *


To The Editor (12-19-05):


Like Brent Staples, I hope that collective "amnesia" about slavery in New York will be cured by the present exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, which is, as he says, pathbreaking ("A Convenient Amnesia About Slavery," The City Life, editorial, Dec. 15). I have to take issue, however, with some of his comments about the African Burial Ground.


There is no archaeological evidence of infanticide, though a mother's awareness that her child would likely be sold away by age 4 into a life of drudgery and abuse, the hellish environment Mr. Staples speaks of, may have driven some to this grim act. Nor is there any evidence that either adults or children were ever "dumped into their graves" by owners.


On the contrary, those whose graves were excavated and studied had all been laid to rest with care, in coffins and shrouded or clothed, with their heads placed toward the west. Infants and young children were typically placed in or near the graves of adults, both men and women. Some of the youngest were buried adorned with strings of beads or other jewelry, and had their winding cloths fastened with rows of brass pins, suggesting the loving and protective care of the adults who mourned them. Kin, friends and fellow captive Africans would have seen to the funerals, not "owners."


In the face of unspeakable hardship, enslaved New Yorkers who buried their dead in this cemetery forged a community that, to the extent possible, took care of its own.


Jean Howson
New York, Dec. 15, 2005
The writer is associate director for archaeology, African Burial Ground Project, Howard University.

[Michael]

One likely reason for the north reducing their number of slaves was they couldn’t handle the slaves’ rebellions.

[Scronx]

Ghana's tragicomic experience trying to lure the black diaspora "home"........


Ghana's Uneasy Embrace of Slavery's Diaspora


.............Taking Israel as its model, Ghana hopes to persuade the descendants of enslaved Africans to think of Africa as their homeland - to visit, invest, send their children to be educated and even retire here.


"We want Africans everywhere, no matter where they live or how they got there, to see Ghana as their gateway home," J. Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey, the tourism minister, said on a recent day. "We hope we can help bring the African family back together again."


.................Many African-Americans who visit Africa are unsettled to find that Africans treat them - even refer to them - the same way as white tourists. The term "obruni," or "white foreigner," is applied regardless of skin color.


To African-Americans who come here seeking their roots, the term is a sign of the chasm between Africans and African-Americans. Though they share a legacy, they experience it entirely differently.


"It is a shock for any black person to be called white," said Ms. Mann, who moved here two years ago. "But it is really tough to hear it when you come with your heart to seek your roots in Africa." ...............


Many Africans, meanwhile, often fail to see any connection at all between them and African-Americans, or feel African-Americans are better off for having been taken to the United States. Many Africans strive to emigrate; for the past 15 years, the number of Africans moving to the United States has surpassed estimates of the number forced there during any of the peak years of the slave trade...............


http://travel2.nytimes.com/2005/12/2...ional/africa/2 7ghana.html?ex=1140238800&amp;en=e24b0ad2e668f258& amp;ei=507 0

One likely reason for the north reducing their number of slaves was they couldn’t handle the slaves’ rebellions.

I can't back this up with documentation, but perhaps slaves were not as cost effective and productive in the colder north, with its short growing season. I have read that slavery was becoming economically unfeasable in the South. More so in the north, I would assume.


Also, the climate up north was harder on the Negro. The slave owner was responsible for the health, feeding, housing and general welfare of the slave. And that can get expensive if the slave is sick or unproductive.


Whites up north did not want slaves putting them out of their factory and farm jobs. Slaves did that to some extent in the South.

[Scronx]

These were undoubtedly important factors, but I believe the yankees phased slavery out because their economy became moreheavily industrialized. THEN the stuff hit the fan: slavery was evil, the South was guilty and condemned to die for it -- after the North had spent 250 years selling the South virtually all the slaves it ever had.


http://www.seacoastnh.com/blackhistory/whittier.html


"Poet John Greenleaf Whittier praised
NH for its abolitionist stand in 1846.
But did we deserve it?"..................................


Like its southern cousins, NH started out as a slave state. Some of its stately seaport homes were built from slave trade profits. By the Revolution, African-American slaves served white Seacoast owners in most prestigious families -- the Cutts, the Whipples, the Ladds, the Lears, the Langdons, the Wentworths. Slave owning, North and South, was a sign of affluence and power. Although the "business" of slavery was outlawed in NH soon after the Revolution, no formal emancipation was ever issued.


Throughout most of the 1800s, NH's anti-slavery efforts were tepid. Many early abolitionists were clergymen opposed to the immorality of bondage, rather than the inequality of races. The state had its own abolitionist newspaper, two of them in fact, but the issue was mired in politics and infighting. Whigs, Federalists, anti-Federalists, Independents, Democrats, Democratic Independents and Democratic Republicans tossed the abolition issue around like a hot potato, defining and redefining themselves around this key issue........................


Edited by: nelson

"Throughout most of the 1800s, NH's anti-slavery efforts were tepid. Many early abolitionists were clergymen opposed to the immorality of bondage,...."


Unitarian and Quaker clery?


I need to read how they arrived at the "immorality of bondage" idea.


If slave owners were violating scriptural guidelines for treatment of slaves, then they have a point. But, I find nowhere in Scripture where God condemns slavery. IMO, this gets to the heart of the issue.


It's far better to teach men how to avoid slavery, than to condemn what happened in the past.

[Scronx]

That's a hot topic these days and one on which I differ with a lot of our best people. But I think semantics are the problem, e.g. the the sloppiness with which they often expound on the subject, and the huge range ofthings the word slavery signifies both in the Scriptures and today.*


You must understand though, that Quakers andUnitarians are among theChristian (?) denominations that have the least interest in the Bible. I don't know what sanity they ever may have had in the past, but today it's the Quakers who have cracked the whip for desegregation the hardest, and Unitarians are on the wrong side of every moral issue -- berserk liberalism with stained glass, that's all.


Now, here's one on the 14th Amendment, the infamous measure that produced "civli rights" as known today, pretending to enfranchise the ex-slaves after the WBtS but actually making all of us slaves on the federal plantation. Somebody's filed a brief on its illegality.


http://www.supremelaw.org/cc/knudson/judnot09.htm#dyett


* More importantly by far, our people must come to understand that TODAY'S DISCUSSIONS ABOUT SLAVERY ARE NOTHING BUT A LIBERAL RED HERRING. The people who constantly throw slavery up to Southerners and other Dixie defenders are total shysters themselves, who care neither about past slavery or about the way it's growing today, righ here in the supposed "land of the free." Yes, literal slavery is coming back in this country, a product of unchecked "immigration" from -- interestingly enough -- Africa. Forced prostitutionisan age-old custom there!


Liberals never engage in serious discussion about anything. How could they when their entire program mandates destroying the public's thought processes and getting it hooked onliberal fantasy trips? All they want to do is bully, baffle and buffalo people into submission, and the ridiculous slavery bugaboo is one of the easiest ways for them to do it --the state of education having slid into the cesspool.


How about forcingthe shystersto address the very real slavery embodied by IRS, BATF, OSHA, and EPA today? No, they don't want to go there, and they've got a neat little racket going called "civil rights" and "black empowerment" based on the hatred they've churned up against whites, especially Southern whites, on the basis of things ALLEGED to have happened centuries years ago.


They know what they're doing -- we must, as well. Compared to the serious emergiencies and crisis governing these times -- most of which amount the the fedgov's drive to ENSLAVE US -- all slavery issues of the past are merest nothings. History matters and the slavery record needs to be set straight, but let's insist on putting first things first and see how long the slavery rap holds up after that.


Edited by: nelson

[Michael]

I have heard estimates of the number of slaves/indentured servants imported into the USA as high as 50,000 a year. A lot of Asians are known to be brought in to work in the sweatshops and other places to pay off their expenses coming to the USA. We know of the outright slavery of Slavic women some that are imported into the USA. And with the rates smugglers charge to bring illegal aliens into the USA how could people who are reportedly coming for economic reasons afford to pay those high fees unless they are drug dealers, terrorist, or are indenturing themselves. Of course, some may be involved in the drug trade to pay off their indenture.

[Scronx]

I'm talking about the outright kind you mention. Africans are coming here "to find a better life" and setting up prostitution rings in which women are held captive and forced to put out for their keepers' customers. This was not reported to me in a "far right wing nut hate sheet" but a program that comes on public radio every night here in SC -- PowerPoint, about how great black people are and whites stink.[img]smileys/smiley2.gif[/img]


There was also the casewhich was reported in some major newspaper about an African "immigrant" family where the mother sold the daughter to another African "immigrant" family -- for a plaything and household slave for their son, don't you know. The daughter rebelled and the mother whipped her, because this was simply the "culture" of where they came from. Evidently the daughter had heard that it doesn't have to be like that.


Perhaps the government of the state they were living in allowed the people involved to handle it according to their own imported code of justice ......you know, like breaking an arm off the girl or beating her with a red hot poker or something?


"Diversity is our greatest strength"............[img]smileys/smiley7.gif[/img]

[Michael]

American Renaissance has an article on South Koreans being indenture servants to pay for passage to the USA. These Koreans were being used as prostitutes. http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives...ex_slave_traff .php

[Scronx]

It's starting to become clear that everybody on earthshares the shame of a "racist" past -- you know, guilt over your ancestors' (or your country's) practice of slavery, discrimination, apartheid or whatever. Well, thinking people have know the true history of these things and the uselessness of trying to "apologize" or "atone" for them in the modern liberal mold -- but the ongoing stream of news headlines should make it obvious enough for even liberals to detect before long.


Here's a perfect case from Religious News Service which was reprinted in the current Rebel Underground (thanks, Leonard!). The Anglican church was one of the main forces that destroyed South Africa over the historical issue of apartheid........ but now (for some reason) it's coming clean about its own history of slave owning, trading, and branding.


Will all decent people leave the Church of England now that this heinous truth is revealed?Or "boycott" it in other words -- you know, like people did to all those corporations that did business in South Africa in order to bring the country to its knees?


Will there be holy demandsfor sanctions and martyrdom for this august religious body -- and Hollywood movies to warp its past record beyond recognition?


And above all, I trust there will be a "program" of handing over the total assets of the Church to descendants of the slaves in question. Let the churches, cathedrals, endowments, and residences be awarded to whatever black persons choose to claim them. We can't tell exactly which of the latter are descended from the slaves in question, so it's only right to open the door to the entire ethnicity -- don't you think? I hope Al Sharpton gets Westminster Abbey!


But let's not have the Church's staff goscurrying awayjust because of a change of management. They must remember that there have been "450 years of oppression" and only about 60 years of chest-beating and mea culpas about it so far! The clergy, bureaucracy, janitorial and support staff should show due humility and tolerance by remaining in place to serve their new owners' every whim. Their pay may fall as contributions dry up, but justice must be served. Right? Right.


Church of England apologizes for role in slave trade


LONDON — Two centuries after profiting from the venture, the Church of England has apologized for its role in the global slave trade, which included running a Caribbean island sugar plantation and branding the blacks who worked it. The church’s general synod voted 238–0 Feb. 8 to acknowledge its involvement in human trafficking and to apologize to the descendants of its victims 199 years after Britain’s Slave Trade Act of 1807 outlawed the practice. “We were at the heart of it,” Simon Bessant of Blackburn, England, told the synod during debate on the motion. “We were directly responsible for what happened. … We can say we owned slaves, we branded slaves. “That is why I believe we must actually recognize our history and offer an apology.” Bessant cited one case in which the church’s missionary arm, the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Foreign Parts, owned and operated the Codrington Plantation in Barbados and used a red-hot iron to brand its slaves with the word “society” on their chests. The motion that the synod passed, with the backing of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, specifically acknowledged the “dehumanizing and shameful” consequences of the slave trade.


http://www.thealabamabaptist.org/ip_...sp?upid=10028& amp; amp;ctid=2


Edited by: nelson

[Colonel_Reb]

What do these apologies really do? I know of individual churches who have apologized to local black congregations who came out of their church after the war. In one case, the white church helped the black church get started on its own. Seems to me that action back in the 1860s is enough of an "apology" without the church doing it in the 1990s. While I see nothing wrong with it, it makes no sense to me to apologize for something that you had no control over. I think this particular pastor wanted the church as a body to apologize for the role of some of its members back in those days. I guess what I struggle with is the ability to apologize for something that you have no part in. To me, you cannot really do it. To acknowledge you had a part in it does nothing either, except make it known to the current population. What will happen in 2100 when all the people who remember the apology are dead? Will it be necessary to do it again? What do ya'll think about all this? I would appreciate some feedback.

[John T. Dilberger]

nelson - Colonel Reb


I think all this apologizing is a bunch of baloney. In the case of the Church of England, their days are numbered anyway. It was never a religion anyway. It was the brainchild of Henry the VIII and nothing more. He had women problems and figured he could kill two birds with one stone by starting a new religion.


Let me just say this about slavery as well. I've read enough about it to know thatit was always a loosing proposition. There was nothing but constant heartache involved. Who wants to have to watch over a bunch of people who constantly malinger. Wasn't Motecello falling apart at the end of Jeffersons life because of the indolence of the slaves?


John...

[Michael]

Mr. Dilberger

And the decedents of those black slaves are still destroying everything they touch in this country. And the current crop of non-white slaves (they call them immigrants both legal and illegal) that they are importing aren’t much better and if one looks the middle and working classes have to support them on welfare so the rich can pay them next to nothing off the books. But slaves do concentrate wealth in the hands of a few while the majority of the society pays the cost so the rich can make lots of money off their slaves. If we could deduce the real cost of importing these non-whites into this country, it would almost undoubtedly be discovered that all the non-whites together have over the last few centuries cost more money to maintain and repair the damage done by the non-whites than the non-whites have produced via labor.

[John T. Dilberger]

Michael


I'd say by your response, we pretty much agree.


John...

[Scronx]

Look at the big 'un Gail Jarvis just reeled in!


Isn't it just like a gentleman like him to call it "complicity" when he's actually talking about Northern leadership, gangesterism and rapacity in the slaving industry? As a player and great admirer of Steinway pianos, I'm undone to learn what suffering was involved in getting ivory for keyboards in the old days.


http://www.lewrockwell.com/jarvis/jarvis97.html
<H1 align=center>The Complicity of the North</H1>


Each year, the New York Times and other national journals sift through the year's books and make their selections of the so-called "best books." The 2005 history books honored were primarily retellings of familiar historical events, including yet another glowing tribute to Abraham Lincoln. However, one of the 2005 history books that I found especially intriguing was not on any of the listings. And I am a little surprised because it is an attention-grabber. The authors sail into largely uncharted seas by presenting facts that many historians, until fairly recently, have ignored.


The book I'm referring to is; Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jennifer Frank. The facts they present are not normally found in school textbooks or fashionable history books. However, with diligent research, they can be discovered in the files of historical societies, museum archives, college libraries, certain encyclopedias and various scholarly journals


Those of you who have not delved deeply into the subject of slavery in America might be surprised by what you read in this book – indeed, its authors claim to have been staggered by their findings. Their book is an important one and it is disappointing, but not surprising, that it was ignored by the New York Times as well as the Claremont Institute's review of books.


The initial impetus for the book occurred a few years ago when Aetna, one of Connecticut's oldest and largest insurance companies, formally apologized for "insuring slaves." This prompted The Hartford Courant, a newspaper founded in 1764, to see if it had also aided or abetted slavery. Much to its embarrassment, the newspaper discovered ads not only for the sale of slaves but also for the capture of runaway slaves.


As a result of these events, three Hartford Courant journalists – the authors listed above – began an in-depth investigation into Connecticut's involvement with slavery. What their research uncovered was that Connecticut's initial economic development was a result of slavery; its continued growth was based on a dependence on slavery, and Connecticut's complicity in the institution of slavery was immense and long-standing. The authors describe their shock at these discoveries in the book's preface: "We were now looking at nothing less than an altered reality. Our first response was confusion: Hold on, weren't we the good guys in the Civil War? Wasn't the South to blame for slavery? After all, Southerners had plantations, we had the Underground Railroad. They had Simon Legree, we had his abolitionist creator – Harriet Beecher Stowe's house is literally up the street from the Courant."


Their unearthing of Connecticut's complicity with the institution of slavery led them to expand their research to other Northern states. Their findings are reported in this book. Again, from the authors' comments in the preface: "We have all grown up, attended schools, and worked in Northern states, from Maine to Maryland. We thought we knew our home. We thought we knew our country. We were wrong."


This book is not written for pedants but for laymen. The narrative flows well and I'm surprised that such a wealth of information could be conveyed in roughly 200 pages. Although the book is primarily about slavery in the North, especially the North's economic dependence on slavery, you don't have to have an interest in slavery to enjoy it. (I appreciated the book's interplay of history with commerce and market forces.)


You will read about slaves and slave rebellions in New York; the treatment of slaves in the North, New England slave traders, including excerpts from actual logs of slave ships, and you will read about the huge fortunes amassed by Northern industrialists that were derived from slave labor, and how the North deviously continued the slave trade long after it had been outlawed.


Some interesting revelations in the book include:


The manufacture of pianos in Connecticut that relied on slave labor in Africa to manually transport elephant tusks and teeth from the interior to the coast. Slaves were yoked together and marched hundreds of miles weighted down with cargoes of ivory. Many died in the process and others were left crippled for life. Ironically, the owners of the piano factories were also ardent abolitionists who assisted runaway slaves from Southern plantations.


The scientific justification for slavery that was advanced by Northern scientists in the 1800s. Various pseudo-scientific arguments were put forth to imply the inferiority of blacks and rationalize their use as slaves. The authors include a famous quote from Abraham Lincoln arguing for the superiority of the white race.


The reverse underground railroad wherein freed blacks in the North were falsely accused of being runaway slaves, kidnapped and sold illegally. The most notorious gang of kidnappers was brought to justice when two Mississippi plantation owners advised authorities in Philadelphia that members of the gang had offered to sell them undocumented slaves.


The Northern rage against abolitionists. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison chased down and captured by a mob, roped and paraded through Boston. An anti-slavery Missouri newspaper editor murdered by a mob, and the white head of a school for black females in Canterbury, Connecticut, chased out of town, her school burned.


The authors demonstrate that the economic development of the North began with the New England slave traders who were financed by Northern bankers and insured by Northern insurance companies. The slave trade benefited the entire Northern economy, especially the ship building industry. Following the invention of the cotton gin, there was a rapid growth of mill villages throughout the North, a prime example being the enormous textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. Southern plantations, financed and insured by Northern enterprises, shipped cotton to Northern textile mills or to Northern shipping firms who in turn shipped it to other countries.


The North and the South were both content with this arrangement. In fact, the authors make it clear that, in the mid 1800s, there was far more support in the North for the Southern states than for abolitionists, a relatively small movement. The financial stability of New York City was so dependent on cotton imported from the South that in January 1861, its Mayor suggested that if the South seceded, New York City should also secede. Evidence of the camaraderie between North and South is found throughout the book and it calls into question the North's moral opposition to slavery suggested in public school textbooks.


I don't want to leave you with the impression that the authors are indifferent to the institution of slavery. They are vehemently opposed to it. In the afterword, they state their goal this way: "Our intention as journalists has been not so much to debunk the myth of the virtuous North as to set the record straight." I would hope that this book and others like it might prompt those who publish textbooks to also set the record straight in their school books so that future generations of students will be presented a less lopsided version of American history.

April 21, 2006
Gail Jarvis [send him mail] is a free-lance writer.
Edited by: nelson

[Scronx]

Sometimes an email comes in that gets a rating of "IT!!!!" from me in the subject line, as in this is it.


And, folks, this is "IT."


Old North: Recalling the Real Slaves of New York


NEW YORK -- One fine morning in 1720, George Clarke sent his agent off to the market in downtown Manhattan. At the top of his shopping list was a good field slave.


Alas, the market offered spare pickings. There was a house slave, too soft for fieldwork. Another, a strapping fellow, was overpriced. But the day was not lost. As Clarke's agent wrote in fine olde script, "I was able to find some garlic."


It's the workaday language of the unspeakable, and for almost two centuries it was the daily argot of New York, arguably the slave capital of the New World. This wealthiest and most mercantile of American cities was constructed on the backs of African slaves. The elegant old New-York Historical Society -- itself founded by a slave owner -- has lifted a curtain and mounted the first expansive exploration of slavery in New York City, running through March 5.


The distinct impression is of an Up-South city. When the Civil War loomed, New York's mayor suggested that business common sense dictated seceding and joining the Confederacy. "New York's whole economy was built on the cotton industry," said Richard Rabinowitz, who curated the 9,000-square foot exhibition. "New York was in every sense a slave city."


Slaves built the walls of Wall Street, the first city hall and Trinity Church. Slaves accounted for 20 percent of the population of Colonial New York, compared with 6 percent in Philadelphia and 2 percent in Boston. Forty percent of New York households owned slaves. Slaves dredged ponds, cleared Harlem woods and constructed Fraunces Tavern, which was owned by "Black Sam" Fraunces, a West Indian. George Washington, a slaveholder, bade farewell to his lieutenants at that tavern.


There were peculiarities to the slave experience in New York. The great cost of tiny real estate plots meant the typical white New York family owned but a single slave. Black women who bore children were not desired and were often sold to farms.


"More New Yorkers owned slaves than whites in the antebellum South," says Leslie Harris, a professor of history at Emory University, who edited a book on the exhibit. "We need to acknowledge that our history is much more complicated than a benighted racist South and a free North."


Nor was urbanized slavery necessarily more benign. Blacks in New York worked from dawn to well after dark. They could not own property and could not meet in groups of more than three. Any hint of defiance was met with unyielding violence. One reads of rebellious blacks burned, stretched on racks and run through..............


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...rticle/2005/10 /08/AR2005100801298.html


</NITF>

[Scronx]

today in SHNV


Northern Slavers
<DIV>From: bill_rappleye@hotmail.com </DIV>
<DIV></DIV>
<DIV>http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/074...d=1147659803/s r=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-0226700-1047152?s=books&amp;v=glance&am p;am p;n=283155</DIV>
<DIV></DIV>
<DIV>The book's called 'sons of providence', reviewed in the New York Times today... It shows how involved the north was in the slave trade, and how merchants managed to keep slavery out of the constitution. Be interested in your reaction if you get a chance to read it.</DIV>
<DIV></DIV>
<DIV>Bill</DIV>
<DIV></DIV>
<DIV>LATER. "When Arabs Enslaved Europeans And Africans"</DIV>
<DIV></DIV>
<DIV>...................The Arab piracy and slave trafficking that afflicted the Mediterrnean Sea between early 16th and early 19th centuries make a thrilling stuff. Sea-Wolves of the Mediterrranean -The Grand Period of Moslem Corsairs by commander E. Hammiltan Curry (John Murray London 1910) recaptured that turbulent era. The piracy emanating from the Barbary (North African) Coast viz.Morocco, Tunis, Algiers and Triplotania had paralyzed Christian maritime commerce. More importantly over three centuries it had taken over a million of White European Christian men and women as slave and concubines. The European ships, coasts and islands on the Mediterranean were subject to constant slave-raids.


Mark Twain toured the Mediterranean the fruit of which was the book The Innocents Abroad (1869). In spain he saw (chapter VII )-At short intervals along the Spanish shore were quaint-looking old stone towers-moorish we thought--but learned better afterwards. In former times the Morocco rascals used to coast along the Spanish Main in their boats till a safe opportunity seemed to present itself and then dart in and capture a Spanish village and carry off all the pretty women they could find. It was a pleasant business and was very popular. The Spaniards built these watchtowers on the hills to enable them to keep a sharper lookout on the Moroccan speculators.


Miguel de Cervantes who wrote Adventure of Don Quixote, worlds first novel, spent five years as salve in Algeria between 1575 and 1580 until he was ransomed back by Christian monkish order of Trinitarians .In his writings he has left a realistic portrayal of Algiers including its slave-markets and slave enclosures.


The daring Barbary Pirates raided costly as far as England and Iceland to carry off men and women. Icelands historians and poets have much to say about a raid of Barbary corsairs who descended upon their coasts in 1627 and carried off hundreds of captives to slave markets of Algiers. One captive a Lutheran pastor by the name of Oluf Eligilsson who was subsequently ransomed and returned to native land wrote a book describing adventures as slave in North Africa.... the discovery that his maidservant had fetched a much higher price than he had upset him as much as anything else(Islam and the West p.74).


Modern dhimmi academicians have tried to ignore the Mediterranean slavery while focussing on American slave trade. It is heartening to see that Robert Davis a hintorian in Ohio State University has broken the spell with his book Christian Slaves Muslim Masters-White Slavery in the Mediterranean. The Barbary Coast and Italy 1500-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan 2003) Davis says- Indeed if we consider the entire 250 years over which corsair slaving was a significant factor in the Mediterranenan the total number of slaves soon exceeds a million( p23).


http://www.aina.org/news/2007020693019.htm


(Priyadarsi Dutta in Assyrian International News Agency -- http://www.janasangh.com/)





</DIV>Edited by: nelson