tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78021616517649639282024-03-05T10:37:12.912-08:00travel bookfield notes of a history studentJustin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-64334032477826605932012-02-16T08:32:00.000-08:002012-02-16T08:36:15.237-08:00Feudalism Readings<span style="font-weight:bold;">SUGGESTED READINGS FOR FEUDALISM<br /></span><br />Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (Princeton, 1925)<br /><br />Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1961)<br /><br />Georges Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century (Ithaca, 1974)<br /><br />Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)<br /><br />Georges Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West , <br /><br />F. L. Ganshof, Feudalism (New York, 1964)<br /><br />Lynn White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford, 1962) <br /><br />Jacques LeGoff, Medieval Civilization (Cambridge, MA, 1990) <br /><br />Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London, 1974)<br /><br />E. A. R. Brown, 'The Tyranny of a Construct', American Historical Review (79), 1974<br /><br />Gerald A J Hodgett, A Social and Economic History of Medieval Europe <br /><br />Henri Pirenne, Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe <br /><br />Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism Rodney Hilton, ed. The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism<br /><br />Harbans Mukhia, "Maurice Dobb's Explanation of the Decline of Feudalism in Western Europe - A Critique", The Indian Historical Review, vol. 6, nos. 1 -2, July 1979-January 1980, pp. 154-184.<br /> <br />Chris Wickham: 'The Other Transition: from the Ancient World to Feudalism', Past and Present 103, 1984.<br /><br /> Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800. 2006Justin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-62497547113951020562011-09-11T09:21:00.000-07:002011-09-11T09:23:59.827-07:00Food Production: Beginning of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry<span style="font-weight:bold;">Neolithic Societies<br /></span>Food Production: Beginnings of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry: <br /><br />Model Questions: <br />1) Examine the beginning and spread of food-producing economy in West Asia<br />2) What were the factors that led to the transition form hunting-gathering to food production in southwest Asia?<br />3) What would you consider to be some of the distinctive features of advanced Neolithic societies in Asia and Europe?<br />4) What were the causes for the shift from hunting-gathering to food production in early societies of southwest Asia? <br />5) 2011: Analyse the beginning of agriculture in the world with reference to principal centres of food production. <br /><br /><br />Essential Readings: <br />1) Brian Fagan, People of the Earth. Chapters 8,9 and 10.<br />2) Gordon Childe, What Happened in History, Chapter 3- Neolithic Revolution<br />3) History of Humanity Vol I: Chapter 36 From the Beginning of food production to the first state. <br />4) Graham Clark, World Prehistory in New Perspective. Chapter 2 Part II: Neolithic/Chalcolithic settlement. <br />5) Robert Wenke, Patterns in Prehistory, Chapter 6: The Origin of Agriculture. <br />6) Lewis Binford, Archeology in Cultural System. Chapter 16 Post-Pleistocene Adaptation. <br />7) C. Wesley, The Origin of Agriculture: An International Perspective. Chapter 1: IntroductionJustin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-45742884930982912692011-01-29T20:57:00.000-08:002011-01-29T20:58:39.285-08:00Industrial America<span style="font-weight:bold;">Growth of Capitalism and Big Business <br />Business Cycle: Depression <br /></span><br />1) Discuss the causes leading to the industrialization of the Untied States during the second half of the 19th century<br />2) Discuss the impact of the American Industrial Revolution on agriculture during the period 1870-1900<br />3) Account for the role of Big Business in America in the Post-Bellum Period <br />4) How did the technology and marketing innovation transformed the American economy in the late 19th Century?<br />5) Critically analyze the process of economic and industrial expansion that led to the rise of Big Business<br />6) Analyze the main reasons for the development of Big Business Organization in the US between 1870 to 1900<br />Readings: <br />1. 1) Howard Zinn. 1980. A Peoples History of the United States. New York: Harper Collins. Chapter 11: Robber Barons and Rebels <br />2) Paul A Baran and Paul Sweezy. 1966. Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order. New York: Monthly Review Press. <br />3) Harold Underwood Faulkner. 1960. American Economic History. New York: Harper & Brothers. Ch: 21: Consolidation of Business <br />4) George Brown Tindal and David Shi. 1992. America: A Narrative History. Vol. 2. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Ch: The Rise of Big Business<br />5) Grob andBillias, Interpretations of American History: Patterns and Perspectives. vol. 2, Chapter 2: The American Businessman<br />6) R P Kaushik, 1983. Significant Themes in American History. Delhi: Ajanta Publications. Chapter 8: The Beginning of Big Business in American History<br />7) Bernard Bailyn, 1977. The Great Republic: A History of the American People. New York: Coauthored college textbook; several editions. <br />General Readings <br />8) Eric Hobsbawm.1975. The Age of Capital 1848-1875. London: Abacus <br />9) Amiya Kumar Bagchi. 2005. Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital. New Delhi: OUP. <br />10) A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Second EditionJustin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-56419270906365489292011-01-29T20:39:00.000-08:002011-01-29T20:44:17.744-08:00A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Howard Zinn<span style="font-weight:bold;">Chapter 11: ROBBER BARONS AND REBELS</span><br />In the year 1877, the signals were given for the rest of the century: the blacks would be put back; the strikes of white workers would not be tolerated; the industrial and political elites of North and South would take hold of the country and organize the greatest march of economic growth in human history. They would do it with the aid of, and at the expense of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression-a skillful terracing to stabilize the pyramid of wealth.<br /><br />Between the Civil War and 1900, steam and electricity replaced human muscle, iron replaced wood, and steel replaced iron (before the Bessemer process, iron was hardened into steel at the rate of 3 to 5 tons a day; now the same amount could be processed in 15 minutes). Machines could now drive steel tools. Oil could lubricate machines and light homes, streets, factories. People and goods could move by railroad, propelled by steam along steel rails; by 1900 there were 193,000 miles of railroad. The telephone, the typewriter, and the adding machine speeded up the work of business.<br /><br />Machines changed farming. Before the Civil War it took 61 hours of labor to produce an acre of wheat. By 1900, it took 3 hours, 19 minutes. Manufactured ice enabled the transport of food over long distances, and the industry of meatpacking was born.<br /><br />Steam drove textile mill spindles; it drove sewing machines. It came from coal. Pneumatic drills now drilled deeper into the earth for coal. In 1860, 14 million tons of coal were mined; by 1884 it was 100 million tons. More coal meant more steel, because coal furnaces converted iron into steel; by 1880 a million tons of steel were being produced; by 1910, 25 million tons. By now electricity was beginning to replace steam. Electrical wire needed copper, of which 30,000 tons were produced in 1880; 500,000 tons by 1910.<br /><br />To accomplish all this required ingenious inventors of new processes and new machines, clever organizers and administrators of the new corporations, a country rich with land and minerals, and a huge supply of human beings to do the back-breaking, unhealthful, and dangerous work. Immigrants would come from Europe and China, to make the new labor force. Farmers unable to buy the new machinery or pay the new railroad rates would move to the cities. Between 1860 and 1914, New York grew from 850,000 to 4 million, Chicago from 110,000 to 2 million, Philadelphia from 650,000 to 1 1/2 million.<br /><br />In some cases the inventor himself became the organizer of businesses-like Thomas Edison, inventor of electrical devices. In other cases, the businessman compiled other people's inventions, like Gustavus Swift, a Chicago butcher who put together the ice-cooled railway car with the ice- cooled warehouse to make the first national meatpacking company in 1885. James Duke used a new cigarette-rolling machine that could roll, paste, and cut tubes of tobacco into 100,000 cigarettes a day; in 1890 he combined the four biggest cigarette producers to form the American Tobacco Company.<br /><br />While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad, and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of "rags to riches" were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control.<br /><br />Most of the fortune building was done legally, with the collaboration of the government and the courts. Sometimes the collaboration had to be paid for. Thomas Edison promised New Jersey politicians $1,000 each in return for favorable legislation. Daniel Drew and Jay Gould spent $1 million to bribe the New York legislature to legalize their issue of $8 million in "watered stock" (stock not representing real value) on the Erie Railroad.<br /><br />The first transcontinental railroad was built with blood, sweat, politics and thievery, out of the meeting of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads. The Central Pacific started on the West Coast going east; it spent $200,000 in Washington on bribes to get 9 million acres of free land and $24 million in bonds, and paid $79 million, an overpayment of $36 million, to a construction company which really was its own. The construction was done by three thousand Irish and ten thousand Chinese, over a period of four years, working for one or two dollars a day.<br /><br />The Union Pacific started in Nebraska going west. It had been given 12 million acres of free land and $27 million in government bonds. It created the Credit Mobilier company and gave them $94 million for construction when the actual cost was $44 million. Shares were sold cheaply to Congressmen to prevent investigation. This was at the suggestion of Massachusetts Congressman Oakes Ames, a shovel manufacturer and director of Credit Mobilier, who said: "There is no difficulty in getting men to look after their own property." The Union Pacific used twenty thousand workers-war veterans and Irish immigrants, who laid 5 miles of track a day and died by the hundreds in the heat, the cold, and the battles with Indians opposing the invasion of their territory.<br /><br />Both railroads used longer, twisting routes to get subsidies from towns they went through. In 1869, amid music and speeches, the two crooked lines met in Utah.<br /><br />The wild fraud on the railroads led to more control of railroad finances by bankers, who wanted more stability-profit by law rather than by theft. By the 1890s, most of the country's railway mileage was concentrated in six huge systems. Four of these were completely or partially controlled by the House of Morgan, and two others by the bankers Kuhn, Loeb, and Company.<br /><br />J. P. Morgan had started before the war, as the son of a banker who began selling stocks for the railroads for good commissions. During the Civil War he bought five thousand rifles for $3.50 each from an army arsenal, and sold them to a general in the field for $22 each. The rifles were defective and would shoot off the thumbs of the soldiers using them. A congressional committee noted this in the small print of an obscure report, but a federal judge upheld the deal as the fulfillment of a valid legal contract.<br /><br />Morgan had escaped military service in the Civil War by paying $300 to a substitute. So did John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Philip Armour, Jay Gould, and James Mellon. Mellon's father had written to him that "a man may be a patriot without risking his own life or sacrificing his health. There are plenty of lives less valuable."<br /><br />It was the firm of Drexel, Morgan and Company that was given a U.S. government contract to float a bond issue of $260 million. The government could have sold the bonds directly; it chose to pay the bankers $5 million in commission.<br /><br />On January 2, 1889, as Gustavus Myers reports:<br /><br />... a circular marked "Private and Confidential" was issued by the three banking houses of Drexel, Morgan & Company, Brown Brothers & Company, and Kidder, Peabody & Company. The most painstaking care was exercised that this document should not find its way into the press or otherwise become public.... Why this fear? Because the circular was an invitation ... to the great railroad magnates to assemble at Morgan's house, No. 219 Madison Avenue, there to form, in the phrase of the day, an iron-clad combination. ... a compact which would efface competition among certain railroads, and unite those interests in an agreement by which the people of the United States would be bled even more effectively than before.<br />There was a human cost to this exciting story of financial ingenuity. That year, 1889, records of the Interstate Commerce Commission showed that 22,000 railroad workers were killed or injured.<br /><br />In 1895 the gold reserve of the United States was depleted, while twenty-six New York City banks had $129 million in gold in their vaults. A syndicate of bankers headed by J. P. Morgan & Company, August Belmont & Company, the National City Bank, and others offered to give the government gold in exchange for bonds. President Grover Cleveland agreed. The bankers immediately resold the bonds at higher prices, making $18 million profit.<br /><br />A journalist wrote: "If a man wants to buy beef, he must go to the butcher.... If Mr. Cleveland wants much gold, he must go to the big banker."<br /><br />While making his fortune, Morgan brought rationality and organization to the national economy. He kept the system stable. He said: "We do not want financial convulsions and have one thing one day and another thing another day." He linked railroads to one another, all of them to banks, banks to insurance companies. By 1900, he controlled 100,000 miles of railroad, half the country's mileage.<br /><br />Three insurance companies dominated by the Morgan group had a billion dollars in assets. They had $50 million a year to invest-money given by ordinary people for their insurance policies. Louis Brandeis, describing this in his book Other People's Money (before he became a Supreme Court justice), wrote: "They control the people through the people's own money."<br /><br />John D. Rockefeller started as a bookkeeper in Cleveland, became a merchant, accumulated money, and decided that, in the new industry of oil, who controlled the oil refineries controlled the industry. He bought his first oil refinery in 1862, and by 1870 set up Standard Oil Company of Ohio, made secret agreements with railroads to ship his oil with them if they gave him rebates- discounts-on their prices, and thus drove competitors out of business.<br /><br />One independent refiner said: "If we did not sell out.... we would be crushed out.. .. There was only one buyer on the market and we had to sell at their terms." Memos like this one passed among Standard Oil officials: "Wilkerson & Co. received car of oil Monday 13th... . Please turn another screw." A rival refinery in Buffalo was rocked by a small explosion arranged by Standard Oil officials with the refinery's chief mechanic.<br /><br />The Standard Oil Company, by 1899, was a holding company which controlled the stock of many other companies. The capital was $110 million, the profit was $45 million a year, and John D. Rockefeller's fortune was estimated at $200 million. Before long he would move into iron, copper, coal, shipping, and banking (Chase Manhattan Bank). Profits would be $81 million a year, and the Rockefeller fortune would total two billion dollars.<br /><br />Andrew Carnegie was a telegraph clerk at seventeen, then secretary to the head of the Pennsylvania Railroad, then broker in Wall Street selling railroad bonds for huge commissions, and was soon a millionaire. He went to London in 1872, saw the new Bessemer method of producing steel, and returned to the United States to build a million-dollar steel plant. Foreign competition was kept out by a high tariff conveniently set by Congress, and by 1880 Carnegie was producing 10,000 tons of steel a month, making $1 1/2 million a year in profit. By 1900 he was making $40 million a year, and that year, at a dinner party, he agreed to sell his steel company to J. P. Morgan. He scribbled the price on a note: $492,000,000.<br /><br />Morgan then formed the U.S. Steel Corporation, combining Carnegie's corporation with others. He sold stocks and bonds for $1,300,000,000 (about 400 million more than the combined worth of the companies) and took a fee of 150 million for arranging the consolidation. How could dividends be paid to all those stockholders and bondholders? By making sure Congress passed tariffs keeping out foreign steel; by closing off competition and maintaining the price at $28 a ton; and by working 200,000 men twelve hours a day for wages that barely kept their families alive.<br /><br />And so it went, in industry after industry-shrewd, efficient businessmen building empires, choking out competition, maintaining high prices, keeping wages low, using government subsidies. These industries were the first beneficiaries of the "welfare state." By the turn of the century, American Telephone and telegraph had a monopoly of the nation's telephone system, International Harvester made 85 percent of all farm machinery, and in every other industry resources became concentrated, controlled. The banks had interests in so many of these monopolies as to create an interlocking network of powerful corporation directors, each of whom sat on the boards of many other corporations. According to a Senate report of the early twentieth century, Morgan at his peak sat on the board of forty-eight corporations; Rockefeller, thirty-seven corporations.<br /><br />Meanwhile, the government of the United States was behaving almost exactly as Karl Marx described a capitalist state: pretending neutrality to maintain order, but serving the interests of the rich. Not that the rich agreed among themselves; they had disputes over policies. But the purpose of the state was to settle upper-class disputes peacefully, control lower-class rebellion, and adopt policies that would further the long-range stability of the system. The arrangement between Democrats and Republicans to elect Rutherford Hayes in 1877 set the tone. Whether Democrats or Republicans won, national policy would not change in any important way.<br /><br />When Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, ran for President in 1884, the general impression in the country was that he opposed the power of monopolies and corporations, and that the Republican party, whose candidate was James Blaine, stood for the wealthy. But when Cleveland defeated Blaine, Jay Gould wired him: "I feel ... that the vast business interests of the country will be entirely safe in your hands." And he was right.<br /><br />One of Cleveland's chief advisers was William Whitney, a millionaire and corporation lawyer, who married into the Standard Oil fortune and was appointed Secretary of the Navy by Cleveland. He immediately set about to create a "steel navy," buying the steel at artificially high prices from Carnegie's plants. Cleveland himself assured industrialists that his election should not frighten them: "No harm shall come to any business interest as the result of administrative policy so long as I am President ... a transfer of executive control from one party to another does not mean any serious disturbance of existing conditions."<br /><br />The presidential election itself had avoided real issues; there was no clear understanding of which interests would gain and which would lose if certain policies were adopted. It took the usual form of election campaigns, concealing the basic similarity of the parties by dwelling on personalities, gossip, trivialities. Henry Adams, an astute literary commentator on that era, wrote to a friend about the election:<br /><br />We are here plunged in politics funnier than words can express. Very great issues are involved.. . . But the amusing thing is that no one talks about real interests. By common consent they agree to let these alone. We are afraid to discuss them. Instead of this the press is engaged in a most amusing dispute whether Mr. Cleveland had an illegitimate child and did or did not live with more than one mistress.<br />In 1887, with a huge surplus in the treasury, Cleveland vetoed a bill appropriating $100,000 to give relief to Texas farmers to help them buy seed grain during a drought. He said: "Federal aid in such cases .. . encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character." But that same year, Cleveland used his gold surplus to pay off wealthy bondholders at $28 above the $100 value of each bond-a gift of $45 million.<br /><br />The chief reform of the Cleveland administration gives away the secret of reform legislation in America. The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 was supposed to regulate the railroads on behalf of the consumers. But Richard Olney, a lawyer for the Boston & Maine and other railroads, and soon to be Cleveland's Attorney General, told railroad officials who complained about the Interstate Commerce Commission that it would not be wise to abolish the Commission "from a railroad point of view." He explained:<br /><br />The Commission ... is or can be made, of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads, at the same time that that supervision is almost entirely nominal. . . . The part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission, but to utilize it.<br />Cleveland himself, in his 1887 State of the Union message, had made a similar point, adding a warning: "Opportunity for safe, careful, and deliberate reform is now offered; and none of us should be unmindful of a time when an abused and irritated people . . . may insist upon a radical and sweeping rectification of their wrongs."<br /><br />Republican Benjamin Harrison, who succeeded Cleveland as President from 1889 to 1893, was described by Matthew Josephson, in his colorful study of the post-Civil War years, The Politicos: "Benjamin Harrison had the exclusive distinction of having served the railway corporations in the dual capacity of lawyer and soldier. He prosecuted the strikers [of 1877] in the federal courts . .. and he also organized and commanded a company of soldiers during the strike. ..."<br /><br />Harrison's term also saw a gesture toward reform. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed in 1890, called itself "An Act to protect trade and commerce against unlawful restraints" and made it illegal to form a "combination or conspiracy" to restrain trade in interstate or foreign commerce. Senator John Sherman, author of the Act, explained the need to conciliate the critics of monopoly: "They had monopolies ... of old, but never before such giants as in our day. You must heed their appeal or be ready for the socialist, the communist, the nihilist. Society is now disturbed by forces never felt before. . . ."<br /><br />When Cleveland was elected President again in 1892, Andrew Carnegie, in Europe, received a letter from the manager of his steel plants, Henry Clay Frick: "I am very sorry for President Harrison, but I cannot see that our interests are going to be affected one way or the other by the change in administration." Cleveland, facing the agitation in the country caused by the panic and depression of 1893, used troops to break up "Coxey's Army," a demonstration of unemployed men who had come to Washington, and again to break up the national strike on the railroads the following year.<br /><br />Meanwhile, the Supreme Court, despite its look of somber, black-robed fairness, was doing its bit for the ruling elite. How could it be independent, with its members chosen by the President and ratified by the Senate? How could it be neutral between rich and poor when its members were often former wealthy lawyers, and almost always came from the upper class? Early in the nineteenth century the Court laid the legal basis for a nationally regulated economy by establishing federal control over interstate commerce, and the legal basis for corporate capitalism by making the contract sacred.<br /><br />In 1895 the Court interpreted the Sherman Act so as to make it harmless. It said a monopoly of sugar refining was a monopoly in manufacturing, not commerce, and so could not be regulated by Congress through the Sherman Act (U.S. v. E. C. Knight Co.). The Court also said the Sherman Act could be used against interstate strikes (the railway strike of 1894) because they were in restraint of trade. It also declared unconstitutional a small attempt by Congress to tax high incomes at a higher rate (Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Company). In later years it would refuse to break up the Standard Oil and American Tobacco monopolies, saying the Sherman Act barred only "unreasonable" combinations in restraint of trade.<br /><br />A New York banker toasted the Supreme Court in 1895: "I give you, gentlemen, the Supreme Court of the United States-guardian of the dollar, defender of private property, enemy of spoliation, sheet anchor of the Republic."<br /><br />Very soon after the Fourteenth Amendment became law, the Supreme Court began to demolish it as a protection for blacks, and to develop it as a protection for corporations. However, in 1877, a Supreme Court decision (Munn v. Illinois) approved state laws regulating the prices charged to farmers for the use of grain elevators. The grain elevator company argued it was a person being deprived of property, thus violating the Fourteenth Amendment's declaration "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." The Supreme Court disagreed, saying that grain elevators were not simply private property but were invested with "a public interest" and so could be regulated.<br /><br />One year after that decision, the American Bar Association, organized by lawyers accustomed to serving the wealthy, began a national campaign of education to reverse the Court decision. Its presidents said, at different times: "If trusts are a defensive weapon of property interests against the communistic trend, they are desirable." And: "Monopoly is often a necessity and an advantage."<br /><br />By 1886, they succeeded. State legislatures, under the pressure of aroused farmers, had passed laws to regulate the rates charged farmers by the railroads. The Supreme Court that year (Wabash v. Illinois) said states could not do this, that this was an intrusion on federal power. That year alone, the Court did away with 230 state laws that had been passed to regulate corporations.<br /><br />By this time the Supreme Court had accepted the argument that corporations were "persons" and their money was property protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Supposedly, the Amendment had been passed to protect Negro rights, but of the Fourteenth Amendment cases brought before the Supreme Court between 1890 and 1910, nineteen dealt with the Negro, 288 dealt with corporations.<br /><br />The justices of the Supreme Court were not simply interpreters of the Constitution. They were men of certain backgrounds, of certain interests. One of them (Justice Samuel Miller) had said in 1875: "It is vain to contend with Judges who have been at the bar the advocates for forty years of railroad companies, and all forms of associated capital. . . ." In 1893, Supreme Court Justice David J. Brewer, addressing the New York State Bar Association, said:<br /><br />It is the unvarying law that the wealth of the community will be in the hands of the few. . . . The great majority of men are unwilling to endure that long self-denial and saving which makes accumulations possible . .. and hence it always has been, and until human nature is remodeled always will be true, that the wealth of a nation is in the hands of a few, while the many subsist upon the proceeds of their daily toil.<br />This was not just a whim of the 1880s and 1890s-it went back to the Founding Fathers, who had learned their law in the era of Blackstone's Commentaries, which said: "So great is the regard of the law for private property, that it will not authorize the least violation of it; no, not even for the common good of the whole community."<br /><br />Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is. And so, the schools, the churches, the popular literature taught that to be rich was a sign of superiority, to be poor a sign of personal failure, and that the only way upward for a poor person was to climb into the ranks of the rich by extraordinary effort and extraordinary luck.<br /><br />In those years after the Civil War, a man named Russell Conwell, a graduate of Yale Law School, a minister, and author of best-selling books, gave the same lecture, "Acres of Diamonds," more than five thousand times to audiences across the country, reaching several million people in all. His message was that anyone could get rich if he tried hard enough, that everywhere, if people looked closely enough, were "acres of diamonds." A sampling:<br /><br />I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich.... The men who get rich may be the most honest men you find in the community. Let me say here clearly .. . ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with money. That is why they carry on great enterprises and find plenty of people to work with them. It is because they are honest men. ...<br />... I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathised with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins ... is to do wrong.... let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings. ...<br /><br />Conwell was a founder of Temple University. Rockefeller was a donor to colleges all over the country and helped found the University of Chicago. Huntington, of the Central Pacific, gave money to two Negro colleges, Hampton Institute and Tuskegee Institute. Carnegie gave money to colleges and to libraries. Johns Hopkins was founded by a millionaire merchant, and millionaires Cornelius Vanderbilt, Ezra Cornell, James Duke, and Leland Stanford created universities in their own names.<br /><br />The rich, giving part of their enormous earnings in this way, became known as philanthropists. These educational institutions did not encourage dissent; they trained the middlemen in the American system-the teachers, doctors, lawyers, administrators, engineers, technicians, politicians- those who would be paid to keep the system going, to be loyal buffers against trouble.<br /><br />In the meantime, the spread of public school education enabled the learning of writing, reading, and arithmetic for a whole generation of workers, skilled and semiskilled, who would be the literate or force of the new industrial age. It was important that these people learn obedience to authority. A journalist observer of the schools in the 1890s wrote: "The unkindly spirit of the teacher is strikingly apparent; the pupils, being completely subjugated to her will, are silent and motionless, the spiritual atmosphere of the classroom is damp and chilly."<br /><br />Back in 1859, the desire of mill owners in the town of Lowell that their workers be educated was explained by the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education:<br /><br />The owners of factories are more concerned than other classes and interests in the intelligence of their laborers. When the latter are well-educated and the former are disposed to deal justly, controversies and strikes can never occur, nor can the minds of the masses be prejudiced by demagogues and controlled by temporary and factious considerations.<br />Joel Spring, in his book Education and the Rise of the Corporate State, says: "The development of a factory-like system in the nineteenth-century schoolroom was not accidental."<br /><br />This continued into the twentieth century, when William Bagley's Classroom Management became a standard teacher training text, reprinted thirty times. Bagley said: "One who studies educational theory aright can see in the mechanical routine of the classroom the educative forces that are slowly transforming the child from a little savage into a creature of law and order, fit for the life of civilized society."<br /><br />It was in the middle and late nineteenth century that high schools developed as aids to the industrial system, that history was widely required in the curriculum to foster patriotism. Loyalty oaths, teacher certification, and the requirement of citizenship were introduced to control both the educational and the political quality of teachers. Also, in the latter part of the century, school officials-not teachers-were given control over textbooks. Laws passed by the states barred certain kinds of textbooks. Idaho and Montana, for instance, forbade textbooks propagating "political" doctrines, and the Dakota territory ruled that school libraries could not have "partisan political pamphlets or books."<br /><br />Against this gigantic organization of knowledge and education for orthodoxy and obedience, there arose a literature of dissent and protest, which had to make its way from reader to reader against great obstacles. Henry George, a self-educated workingman from a poor Philadelphia family, who became a newspaperman and an economist, wrote a book that was published in 1879 and sold millions of copies, not only in the United States, but all over the world. His book Progress and Poverty argued that the basis of wealth was land, that this was becoming monopolized, and that a single tax on land, abolishing all others, would bring enough revenue to solve the problem of poverty and equalize wealth in the nation. Readers may not have been persuaded of his solutions, but they could see in their own lives the accuracy of his observations:<br /><br />It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure and refinement has been raised; but these gains are not general. In them the lowest class do not share... This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times. ... There is a vague but general feeling of disappointment; an increased bitterness among the working classes; a widespread feeling of unrest and brooding revolution.. . . The civilized world is trembling on the verge of a great movement. Either it must be a leap upward, which will open the way to advances yet undreamed of, or it must he a plunge downward which will carry us back toward barbarism. ...<br />A different kind of challenge to the economic and social system was given by Edward Bellamy, a lawyer and writer from western Massachusetts, who wrote, in simple, intriguing language, a novel called Looking Backward, in which the author fells asleep and wakes up in the year 2000, to find a socialistic society in which people work and live cooperatively. Looking Backward, which described socialism vividly, lovingly, sold a million copies in a few years, and over a hundred groups were organized around the country to try to make the dream come true.<br /><br />It seemed that despite the strenuous efforts of government, business, the church, the schools, to control their thinking, millions of Americans were ready to consider harsh criticism of the existing system, to contemplate other possible ways of living. They were helped in this by the great movements of workers and farmers that swept the country in the 1880s and 1890s. These movements went beyond the scattered strikes and tenants' struggles of the period 1830-1877. They were nationwide movements, more threatening than before to the ruling elite, more dangerously suggestive. It was a time when revolutionary organizations existed in major American cities, and revolutionary talk was in the air.<br /><br />In the 1880s and 1890s, immigrants were pouring in from Europe at a faster rate than before. They all went through the harrowing ocean voyage of the poor. Now there were not so many Irish and German immigrants as Italians, Russians, Jews, Greeks-people from Southern and Eastern Europe, even more alien to native-born Anglo-Saxons than the earlier newcomers.<br /><br />How the immigration of different ethnic groups contributed to the fragmentation of the working class, how conflicts developed among groups facing the same difficult conditions, is shown in an article in a Bohemian newspaper, Svornost, of February 27, 1880. A petition of 258 parents and guardians at the Throop School in New York, signed by over half the taxpayers of the school district, said "the petitioners have just as much right to request the teaching of Bohemian as have the German citizens to have German taught in the public schools.... In opposition to this, Mr. Vocke claims that there is a great deal of difference between Germans and Bohemians, or in other words, they are superior."<br /><br />The Irish, still recalling the hatred against them when they arrived, began to get jobs with the new political machines that wanted their vote. Those who became policemen encountered the new Jewish immigrants. On July 30, 1902, New York's Jewish community held a mass funeral for an important rabbi, and a riot took place, led by Irish who resented Jews coming into their neighborhood. The police force was dominantly Irish, and the official investigation of the riot indicated the police helped the rioters: ". .. it appears that charges of unprovoked and most brutal clubbing have been made against policemen, with the result that they were reprimanded or fined a day's pay and were yet retained upon the force."<br /><br />There was desperate economic competition among the newcomers. By 1880, Chinese immigrants, brought in by the railroads to do the backbreaking labor at pitiful wages, numbered 75,000 in California, almost one-tenth of the population. They became the objects of continuous violence. The novelist Bret Harte wrote an obituary for a Chinese man named Wan Lee:<br /><br />Dead, my revered friends, dead. Stoned to death in the streets of San Francisco, in the year of grace 1869 by a mob of halfgrown boys and Christian school children.<br />In Rock Springs, Wyoming, in the summer of 1885, whites attacked five hundred Chinese miners, massacring twenty-eight of them in cold blood.<br /><br />The new immigrants became laborers, housepainters, stonecutters, ditchdiggers. They were often imported en masse by contractors. One Italian man, told he was going to Connecticut to work on the railroad, was taken instead to sulfate mines in the South, where he and his fellows were watched over by armed guards in their barracks and in the mines, given only enough money to pay for their railroad fare and tools, and very little to eat. He and others decided to escape. They were captured at gunpoint, ordered to work or die; they still refused and were brought before a judge, put in manacles, and, five months after their arrival, finally dismissed. "My comrades took the train for New York. I had only one dollar, and with this, not knowing either the country or the language, I had to walk to New York. After forty-two days I arrived in the city utterly exhausted."<br /><br />Their conditions led sometimes to rebellion. A contemporary observer told how "some Italians who worked in a locality near Deal Lake, New Jersey, failing to receive their wages, captured the contractor and shut him up in the shanty, where he remained a prisoner until the county sheriff came with a posse to his rescue."<br /><br />A traffic in immigrant child laborers developed, either by contract with desperate parents in the home country or by kidnapping. The children were then supervised by "padrones" in a form of slavery, sometimes sent out as beggar musicians. Droves of them roamed the streets of New York and Philadelphia.<br /><br />As the immigrants became naturalized citizens, they were brought into the American two-party system, invited to be loyal to one party or the other, their political energy thus siphoned into elections. An article in L'ltalia, in November 1894, called for Italians to support the Republican party:<br /><br />When American citizens of foreign birth refuse to ally themselves with the Republican Party, they make war upon their own welfare. The Republican Party stands for all that the people fight for in the Old World. It is the champion of freedom, progress, order, and law. It is the steadfast foe of monarchial class role.<br />There were 5 1/2 million immigrants in the 1880s, 4 million in the 1890s, creating a labor surplus that kept wages down. The immigrants were more controllable, more helpless than native workers; they were culturally displaced, at odds with one another, therefore useful as strikebreakers. Often their children worked, intensifying the problem of an oversized labor force and joblessness; in 1880 there were 1,118,000 children under sixteen (one out of six) at work in the United States. With everyone working long hours, families often became strangers to one another. A pants presser named Morris Rosenfeld wrote a poem, "My Boy," which became widely reprinted and recited:<br /><br />I have a little boy at home,<br />A pretty little son;<br />I think sometimes the world is mine<br />In him, my only one. . . .<br /><br />'Ere dawn my labor drives me forth;<br />Tis night when I am free;<br />A stranger am I to my child;<br />And stranger my child to me. ...<br />Women immigrants became servants, prostitutes, housewives, factory workers, and sometimes rebels. Leonora Barry was born in Ireland and brought to the United States. She got married, and when her husband died she went to work in a hosiery mill in upstate New York to support three young children, earning 65 cents her first week. She joined the Knights of Labor, which had fifty thousand women members in 192 women's assemblies by 1886. She became "master workman" of her assembly of 927 women, and was appointed to work for the Knights as a general investigator, to "go forth and educate her sister working-women and the public generally as to their needs and necessities." She described the biggest problem of women workers: "Through long years of endurance they have acquired, as a sort of second nature, the habit of submission and acceptance without question of any terms offered them, with the pessimistic view of life in which they see no hope." Her report for the year 1888 showed: 537 requests to help women organize, 100 cities and towns visited, 1,900 leaflets distributed.<br /><br />In 1884, women's assemblies of textile workers and hatmakers went on strike. The following year in New York, cloak and shirt makers, men and women (holding separate meetings but acting together), went on strike. The New York World called it "a revolt for bread and butter." They won higher wages and shorter hours.<br /><br />That winter in Yonkers, a few women carpet weavers were fired for joining the Knights, and in the cold of February, 2,500 women walked out and picketed the mill. Only seven hundred of them were members of the Knights, but all the strikers soon joined. The police attacked the picket line and arrested them, but a jury found them not guilty. A great dinner was held by working people in New York to honor them, with two thousand delegates from unions all over the city. The strike lasted six months, and the women won some of their demands, getting back their jobs, but without recognition of their union.<br /><br />What was astonishing in so many of these struggles was not that the strikers did not win all that they wanted, but that, against such great odds, they dared to resist, and were not destroyed.<br /><br />Perhaps it was the recognition that day-to-day combat was not enough, that fundamental change was needed, which stimulated the growth of revolutionary movements at this time. The Socialist Labor party, formed in 1877, was tiny, and torn by internal arguments, but it had some influence in organizing unions among foreign workers. In New York, Jewish socialists organized and put out a newspaper. In Chicago, German revolutionaries, along with native-born radicals like Albert Parsons, formed Social Revolutionary clubs. In 1883, an anarchist congress took place in Pittsburgh. It drew up a manifesto:<br /><br />... All laws are directed against the working people. . .. Even the school serves only the purpose of furnishing the offspring of the wealthy with those qualities necessary to uphold their class domination. The children of the poor get scarcely a formal elementary training, and this, too, is mainly directed to such branches as tend to producing prejudices, arrogance, and servility; in short, want of sense. The Church finally seeks to make complete idiots out of the mass and to make them forego the paradise on earth by promising a fictitious heaven. The capitalist press, on the other hand, takes care of the confusion of spirits in public life. . .. The workers can therefore expect no help from any capitalistic party in their struggle against the existing system. They must achieve their liberation by their own efforts. As in former times, a privileged class never surrenders its tyranny, neither can it be expected that the capitalists of this age will give up their rulership without being forced to do it. ...<br />The manifesto asked "equal rights for all without distinction to sex or race." It quoted the Communist Manifesto: "Workmen of all lands, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains; you have a world to win!"<br /><br />In Chicago, the new International Working People's Association had five thousand members, published newspapers in five languages, organized mass demonstrations and parades, and through its leadership in strikes was a powerful influence in the twenty-two unions that made up the Central Labor Union of Chicago. There were differences in theory among all these revolutionary groups, but the theorists were often brought together by the practical needs of labor struggles, and there were many in the mid-1880s.<br /><br />In early 1886, the Texas & Pacific Railroad fired a leader of the district assembly of the Knights of Labor, and this led to a strike which spread throughout the Southwest, tying up traffic as far as St. Louis and Kansas City. Nine young men recruited in New Orleans as marshals, brought to Texas to protect company property, learned about the strike and quit their jobs, saying, "as man to man we could not justifiably go to work and take the bread out of our fellow-workmen's mouths, no matter how much we needed it ourselves." They were then arrested for defrauding the company by refusing to work, and sentenced to three months in the Galveston county jail.<br /><br />The strikers engaged in sabotage. A news dispatch from Atchison, Kansas:<br /><br />At 12:45 this morning the men on guard at the Missouri Pacific roundhouse were surprised by the appearance of 35 or 40 masked men. The guards were corralled in the oil room by a detachment of the visitors who stood guard with pistols .. . while the rest of them thoroughly disabled 12 locomotives which stood in the stalls.<br />In April, in East St. Louis, there was a battle between strikers and police. Seven workingmen were killed, whereupon workers burned the freight depot of the Louisville & Nashville. The governor declared martial law and sent in seven hundred National Guardsmen. With mass arrests, violent attacks by sheriffs and deputies, no support from the skilled, paid-paid workers of the Railway Brotherhoods, the strikers could not hold out. After several months they surrendered, and many of them were blacklisted.<br /><br />By the spring of 1886, the movement for an eight-hour day had grown. On May 1, the American Federation of Labor, now five years old, called for nationwide strikes wherever the eight-hour day was refused. Terence Powderly, head of the Knights of Labor, opposed the strike, saying that employers and employees must first be educated on the eight-hour day, but assemblies of the Knights made plans to strike. The grand chief of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers opposed the eight-hour day, saying "two hours less work means two hours more loafing about the corners and two hours more for drink," but railroad workers did not agree and supported the eight- hour movement.<br /><br />So, 350,000 workers in 11,562 establishments all over the country went out on strike. In Detroit, 11,000 workers marched in an eight-hour parade. In New York, 25,000 formed a torchlight procession along Broadway, headed by 3,400 members of the Bakers' Union. In Chicago, 40,000 struck, and 45,000 were granted a shorter working day to prevent them from striking. Every railroad in Chicago stopped running, and most of the industries in Chicago were paralyzed. The stockyards were closed down.<br /><br />A "Citizens' Committee" of businessmen met daily to map strategy in Chicago. The state militia had been called out, the police were ready, and the Chicago Mail on May 1 asked that Albert Parsons and August Spies, the anarchist leaders of the International Working People's Association, be watched. "Keep them in view. Hold them personally responsible for any trouble that occurs. Make an example of them if trouble occurs."<br /><br />Under the leadership of Parsons and Spies, the Central Labor Union, with twenty-two unions, had adopted a fiery resolution in the fall of 1885:<br /><br />Be it Resolved, That we urgently call upon the wage-earning class to arm itself in order to be able to put forth against their exploiters such an argument which alone can be effective: Violence, and further be it Resolved, that notwithstanding that we expect very little from the introduction of the eight-hour day, we firmly promise to assist our more backward brethren in this class struggle with all means and power at our disposal, so long as they will continue to show an open and resolute front to our common oppressors, the aristocratic vagabonds and exploiters. Our war-cry is "Death to the foes of the human race."<br />On May 3, a series of events took place which were to put Parsons and Spies in exactly the position that the Chicago Mail had suggested ("Make an example of them if trouble occurs"). That day, in front of the McCormick Harvester Works, where strikers and sympathizers fought scabs, the police fired into a crowd of strikers running from the scene, wounded many of them, and killed four. Spies, enraged, went to the printing shop of the Arbeiter-Zeitung and printed a circular in both English and German:<br /><br />Revenge!<br />Workingmen, to Arms!!!<br /><br />. . . You have for years endured the most abject humiliations; . . . you have worked yourself to death... your Children you have sacrificed to the factory lord-in short: you have been miserable and obedient slaves all these years: Why? To satisfy the insatiable greed, to fill the coffers of your thieving master? When you ask them now to lessen your burdens, he sends his bloodhounds out to shoot you, kill you!<br /><br />... To arms we call you, to arms!<br /><br />A meeting was called for Haymarket Square on the evening of May 4, and about three thousand persons assembled. It was a quiet meeting, and as storm clouds gathered and the hour grew late, the crowd dwindled to a few hundred. A detachment of 180 policemen showed up, advanced on the speakers' platform, ordered the crowd to disperse. The speaker said the meeting was almost over. A bomb then exploded in the midst of the police, wounding sixty-six policemen, of whom seven later died. The police fired into the crowd, killing several people, wounding two hundred.<br /><br />With no evidence on who threw the bomb, the police arrested eight anarchist leaders in Chicago. The Chicago Journal said: "Justice should be prompt in dealing with the arrested anarchists. The law regarding accessories to crime in this State is so plain that their trials will be short." Illinois law said that anyone inciting a murder was guilty of that murder. The evidence against the eight anarchists was their ideas, their literature; none had been at Haymarket that day except Fielden, who was speaking when the bomb exploded. A jury found them guilty, and they were sentenced to death. Their appeals were denied; the Supreme Court said it had no jurisdiction.<br /><br />The event aroused international excitement. Meetings took place in France, Holland, Russia, Italy, Spain. In London a meeting of protest was sponsored by George Bernard Shaw, William Morris, and Peter Kropotkin, among others. Shaw had responded in his characteristic way to the turning down of an appeal by the eight members of the Illinois Supreme Court: "If the world must lose eight of its people, it can better afford to lose the eight members of the Illinois Supreme Court."<br /><br />A year after the trial, four of the convicted anarchists-Albert Parsons, a printer, August Spies, an upholsterer, Adolph Eischer, and George Engel-were hanged. Louis Lingg, a twenty-one-year-old carpenter, blew himself up in his cell by exploding a dynamite tube in his mouth. Three remained in prison.<br /><br />The executions aroused people all over the country. There was a funeral march of 25,000 in Chicago. Some evidence came out that a man named Rudolph Schnaubelt, supposedly an anarchist, was actually an agent of the police, an agent provocateur, hired to throw the bomb and thus enable the arrest of hundreds, the destruction of the revolutionary leadership in Chicago. But to this day it has not been discovered who threw the bomb.<br /><br />While the immediate result was a suppression of the radical movement, the long-term effect was to keep alive the class anger of many, to inspire others-especially young people of that generation-to action in revolutionary causes. Sixty thousand signed petitions to the new governor of Illinois, John Peter Altgeld, who investigated the facts, denounced what had happened, and pardoned the three remaining prisoners. Year after year, all over the country, memorial meetings for the Haymarket martyrs were held; it is impossible to know the number of individuals whose political awakening-as with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, long-time revolutionary stalwarts of the next generation-came from the Haymarket Affair.<br /><br />(As late as 1968, the Haymarket events were alive; in that year a group of young radicals in Chicago blew up the monument that had been erected to the memory of the police who died in the explosion. And the trial of eight leaders of the antiwar movement in Chicago around that time evoked, in the press, in meetings, and in literature, the memory of the first "Chicago Eight," on trial for their ideas.)<br /><br />After Haymarket, class conflict and violence continued, with strikes, lockouts, blacklisting, the use of Pinkerton detectives and police to break strikes with force, and courts to break them by law. During a strike of streetcar conductors on the Third Avenue Line in New York a month after the Haymarket Affair, police charged a crowd of thousands, using their clubs indiscriminately: "The New York Sun reported: "Men with broken scalps were crawling off in all directions...."<br /><br />Some of the energy of resentment in late 1886 was poured into the electoral campaign for mayor of New York that fall. Trade unions formed an Independent Labor party and nominated for mayor Henry George, the radical economist, whose Progress and Poverty had been read by tens of thousands of workers. George's platform tells something about the conditions of life for workers in New York in the 1880s. It demanded:<br /><br />that property qualifications be abolished for members of juries.<br />that Grand Jurors be chosen from the lower-class as well as from the upperclass, which dominated Grand Juries.<br />that the police not interfere with peaceful meetings.<br />that the sanitary inspection of buildings be enforced.<br />that contract labor be abolished in public works.<br />that there be equal pay for equal work for women.<br />that the streetcars be owned by the municipal government.<br />The Democrats nominated an iron manufacturer, Abram Hewitt, and the Republicans nominated Theodore Roosevelt, at a convention presided over by Elihu Root, a corporation lawyer, with the nominating speech given by Chauncey Depew, a railroad director. In a campaign of coercion and bribery, Hewitt was elected with 41 percent of the vote, George came second with 31 percent of the vote, and Roosevelt third with 2 7 percent of the vote. The New York World saw this as a signal:<br /><br />The deep-voiced protest conveyed in the 67,000 votes for Henry George against the combined power of both political parties, of Wall Street and the business interests, and of the public press should be a warning to the community to heed the demands of Labor so far as they are just and reasonable. . ..<br />In other cities in the country too, labor candidates ran, polling 25,000 out of 92,000 votes in Chicago, electing a mayor in Milwaukee, and various local officials in Fort Worth, Texas, Eaton, Ohio, and Leadville, Colorado.<br /><br />It seemed that the weight of Haymarket had not crushed the labor movement. The year 1886 became known to contemporaries as "the year of the great uprising of labor." From 1881 to 1885, strikes had averaged about 500 each year, involving perhaps 150,000 workers each year. In 1886 there were over 1,400 strikes, involving 500,000 workers. John Commons, in his History of the Labor Movement in the United States, saw in that:<br /><br />... the signs of a great movement by the class of the unskilled, which had finally risen in rebellion.. . . The movement bore in every way the aspect of a social war. A frenzied hatred of labour for capital was shown in every important strike.. .. Extreme bitterness toward capital manifested itself in all the actions of the Knights of Labor, and wherever the leaders undertook to hold it within bounds, they were generally discarded by their followers. . ..<br />Even among southern blacks, where all the military, political, and economic force of the southern states, with the acquiescence of the national government, was concentrated on keeping them docile and working, there were sporadic rebellions. In the cotton fields, blacks were dispersed in their work, but in the sugar fields, work was done in gangs, so there was opportunity for organized action. In 1880, they had struck to get a dollar a day instead of 75 cents, threatening to leave the state. Strikers were arrested and jailed, but they walked the roads along the sugar fields, carrying banners: "A DOLLAR A DAY OR KANSAS." They were arrested again and again for trespassing, and the strike was broken.<br /><br />By 1886, however, the Knights of Labor was organizing in the sugar fields, in the peak year of the Knights' influence. The black workers, unable to feed and clothe their families on their wages, often paid in store scrip, asked a dollar a day once more. The following year, in the fall, close to ten thousand sugar laborers went on strike, 90 percent of them Negroes and members of the Knights. The militia arrived and gun battles began.<br /><br />Violence erupted in the town of Thibodaux, which had become a kind of refugee village where hundreds of strikers, evicted from their plantation shacks, gathered, penniless and ragged, carrying their bed clothing and babies. Their refusal to work threatened the entire sugar crop, and martial law was declared in Thibodaux. Henry and George Cox, two Negro brothers, leaders in the Knights of Labor, were arrested, locked up, then taken from their cells, and never heard from again. On the night of November 22, shooting broke out, each side claiming the other was at fault; by noon the next day, thirty Negroes were dead or dying, and hundreds wounded. Two whites were wounded. A Negro newspaper in New Orleans wrote:<br /><br />. . . Lame men and blind women shot; children and hoary-headed grandsires ruthlessly swept down! The Negroes offered no resistance; they could not, as the killing was unexpected. Those of them not killed took to the woods, a majority of them finding refuge in this city.. . .<br />Citizens of the United States killed by a mob directed by a State judge. .. . Laboring men seeking an advance in wages, treated as if they were dogs! . ..<br /><br />At such times and upon such occasions, words of condemnation fall like snow-flakes upon molten lead. The blacks should defend their lives, and if needs must die, die with their faces toward their persecutors fighting for their homes, their children and their lawful rights.<br /><br />Native-born poor whites were not doing well either. In the South, they were tenant farmers rather than landowners. In the southern cities, they were tenants, not homeowners. C. Vann Woodward notes (Origins of the New South) that the city with the highest rate of tenancy in the United States was Birmingham, with 90 percent. And the slums of the southern cities were among the worst, poor whites living like the blacks, on unpaved dirt streets "choked up with garbage, filth and mud," according to a report of one state board of health.<br /><br />There were eruptions against the convict labor system in the South, in which prisoners were leased in slave labor to corporations, used thus to depress the general level of wages and also to break strikes. In the year 1891, miners of the Tennessee Coal Mine Company were asked to sign an "iron- clad contract": pledging no strikes, agreeing to get paid in scrip, and giving up the right to check the weight of the coal they mined (they were paid by the weight). They refused to sign and were evicted from their houses. Convicts were brought in to replace them.<br /><br />On the night of October 31, 1891, a thousand armed miners took control of the mine area, set five hundred convicts free, and burned down the stockades in which the convicts were kept. The companies surrendered, agreeing not to use convicts, not to require the "ironclad contract/' and to let the miners check on the weight of the coal they mined.<br /><br />The following year, there were more such incidents in Tennessee. C. Vann Woodward calls them "insurrections." Miners overpowered guards of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, burned the stockades, shipped the convicts to Nashville. Other unions in Tennessee came to their aid. An observer reported back to the Chattanooga Federation of Trades:<br /><br />I should like to impress upon people the extent of this movement. I have seen the written assurance of reinforcements to the miners of fully 7500 men, who will be on the field in ten hours after the first shot is fired. . .. The entire district is as one over the main proposition, "the convicts must go". I counted 840 rifles on Monday as the miners passed, while the vast multitude following them carried revolvers. The captains of the different companies are all Grand Army men. Whites and Negroes are standing shoulder to shoulder.<br />That same year, in New Orleans, forty-two union locals, with over twenty thousand members, mostly white but including some blacks (there was one black on the strike committee), called a general strike, involving half the population of the city. Work in New Orleans came to a stop. After three days-with strikebreakers brought in, martial law, and the threat of militia-the strike ended with a compromise, gaining hours and wages but without recognition of the unions as bargaining agents.<br /><br />The year 1892 saw strike struggles all over the country: besides the general strike in New Orleans and the coal miners' strike in Tennessee, there was a railroad switchmen's strike in Buffalo, New York, and a copper miners' strike in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. The Coeur d'Alene strike was marked by gun battles between strikers and strikebreakers, and many deaths. A newspaper account of July 11, 1892, reported:<br /><br />... The long-dreaded conflict between the forces of the strikers and the nonunion men who have taken their places has come at last. As a result five men are known to be dead and 16 are already in the hospital; the Frisco mill on Canyon Creek is in ruins; the Gem mine has surrendered to the strikers, the arms of its employees have been captured, and the employees themselves have been ordered out of the country. Flushed with the success of these victories the turbulent element among the strikers are preparing to move upon other strongholds of the non-union men... .<br />The National Guard, brought in by the governor, was reinforced by federal troops: six hundred miners were rounded up and imprisoned in bullpens, scabs brought back, union leaders fired, the strike broken.<br /><br />In early 1892, the Carnegie Steel plant at Homestead, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh, was being managed by Henry Clay Frick while Carnegie was in Europe. Frick decided to reduce the workers' wages and break their union. He built a fence 3 miles long and 12 feet high around the steelworks and topped it with barbed wire, adding peepholes for rifles. When the workers did not accept the pay cut, Frick laid off the entire work force. The Pinkerton detective agency was hired to protect strikebreakers.<br /><br />Although only 750 of the 3,800 workers at Homestead belonged to the union, three thousand workers met in the Opera House and voted overwhelmingly to strike. The plant was on the Monongahela River, and a thousand pickets began patrolling a 10-mile stretch of the river. A committee of strikers took over the town, and the sheriff was unable to raise a posse among local people against them.<br /><br />On the night of July 5, 1892, hundreds of Pinkerton guards boarded barges 5 miles down the river from Homestead and moved toward the plant, where ten thousand strikers and sympathizers waited. The crowd warned the Pinkertons not to step off the barge. A striker lay down on the gangplank, and when a Pinkerton man tried to shove him aside, he fired, wounding the detective in the thigh. In the gunfire that followed on both sides, seven workers were killed.<br /><br />The Pinkertons had to retreat onto the barges. They were attacked from all sides, voted to surrender, and then were beaten by the enraged crowd. There were dead on both sides. For the next several days the strikers were in command of the area. Now the state went into action: the governor brought in the militia, armed with the latest rifles and Gatling guns, to protect the import of strikebreakers.<br /><br />Strike leaders were charged with murder; 160 other strikers were tried for other crimes. All were acquitted by friendly juries. The entire Strike Committee was then arrested for treason against the state, but no jury would convict them. The strike held for four months, but the plant was producing steel with strikebreakers who were brought in, often in locked trains, not knowing their destination, not knowing a strike was on. The strikers, with no resources left, agreed to return to work, their leaders blacklisted.<br /><br />One reason for the defeat was that the strike was confined to Homestead, and other plants of Carnegie kept working. Some blast furnace workers did strike, but they were quickly defeated, and the pig iron from those furnaces was then used at Homestead. The defeat kept unionization from the Carnegie plants well into the twentieth century, and the workers took wage cuts and increases in hours without organized resistance.<br /><br />In the midst of the Homestead strike, a young anarchist from New York named Alexander Berkman, in a plan prepared by anarchist friends in New York, including his lover Emma Goldman, came to Pittsburgh and entered the office of Henry Clay Frick, determined to kill him. Berkman's aim was poor; he wounded Frick and was overwhelmed, then was tried and found guilty of attempted murder. He served fourteen years in the state penitentiary. His Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist gave a graphic description of the assassination attempt and of his years in prison, when he changed his mind about the usefulness of assassinations but remained a dedicated revolutionary. Emma Goldman's autobiography, Living My Life, conveys the anger, the sense of injustice, the desire for a new kind of life, that grew among the young radicals of that day.<br /><br />The year 1893 saw the biggest economic crisis in the country's history. After several decades of wild industrial growth, financial manipulation, uncontrolled speculation and profiteering, it all collapsed: 642 banks failed and 16,000 businesses closed down. Out of the labor force of 15 million, 3 million were unemployed. No state government voted relief, but mass demonstrations all over the country forced city governments to set up soup kitchens and give people work on streets or parks.<br /><br />In New York City, in Union Square, Emma Goldman addressed a huge meeting of the unemployed and urged those whose children needed food to go into the stores and take it. She was arrested for "inciting to riot" and sentenced to two years in prison. In Chicago, it was estimated that 200,000 people were without work, the floors and stairways of City Hall and the police stations packed every night with homeless men trying to sleep.<br /><br />The Depression lasted for years and brought a wave of strikes throughout the country. The largest of these was the nationwide strike of railroad workers in 1894 that began at the Pullman Company in Illinois, just outside of Chicago.<br /><br />Annual wages of railroad workers, according to the report of the commissioner of labor in 1890, were $957 for engineers, the aristocrats of the railroad-but $575 for conductors, $212 for brakemen, and $124 for laborers. Railroad work was one of the most dangerous jobs in America; over two thousand railroad workers were being killed each year, and thirty thousand injured. The railroad companies called these "acts of God" or the result of "carelessness" on the part of the workers, but the Locomotive Firemen's Magazine said: "It comes to this: while railroad managers reduce their force and require men to do double duty, involving loss of rest and sleep . . . the accidents are chargeable to the greed of the corporation."<br /><br />It was the Depression of 1893 that propelled Eugene Debs into a lifetime of action for unionism and socialism. Debs was from Terre Haute, Indiana, where his father and mother ran a store. He had worked on the railroads for four years until he was nineteen, but left when a friend was killed after falling under a locomotive. He came back to join a Railroad Brotherhood as a billing clerk. At the time of the great strikes of 1877, Debs opposed them and argued there was no "necessary conflict between capital and labor." But when he read Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, it deeply affected him. He followed the events at Homestead, Coeur d'Alene, the Buffalo switchmen's strike, and wrote:<br /><br />If the year 1892 taught the world any lesson worthy of heed, it was that the capitalist class, like a devilfish, had grasped them with its tentacles and was dragging them down to fathomless depths of degradation. To escape the prehensile clutch of these monsters, constitutes a standing challenge to organized labor for 1893.<br />In the midst of the economic crisis of 1893, a small group of railroad workers, including Debs, formed the American Railway Union, to unite all railway workers. Debs said:<br /><br />A life purpose of mine has been the federation of railroad employees. To unify them into one great body is my object. . . . Class enrollment fosters class prejudices and class selfishness. ... It has been my life's desire to unify railroad employees and to eliminate the aristocracy of labor ... and organize them so all will be on an equality. ...<br />Knights of Labor people came in, virtually merging the old Knights with the American Railway Union, according to labor historian David Montgomery.<br /><br />Debs wanted to include everyone, but blacks were kept out: at a convention in 1894, the provision in the constitution barring blacks was affirmed by a vote of 112 to 100. Later, Debs thought this might have had a crucial effect on the outcome of the Pullman strike, for black workers were in no mood to cooperate with the strikers.<br /><br />In June 1894, workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company went on strike. One can get an idea of the kind of support they got, mostly from the immediate vicinity of Chicago, in the first months of the strike, from a list of contributions put together by the Reverend William H. Carwardine, a Methodist pastor in the company town of Pullman for three years (he was sent away after he supported the strikers): <br /><br />Typographical Union #16<br />Painters and Decorators Union #147<br />Carpenters' Union No. 23<br />Thirty- fourth Ward Republican Club<br />Grand Crossing Police<br />Hyde Park Water Department<br />Picnic at Gardener's Park<br />Milk Dealer's Union<br />Hyde Park Liquor Dealers<br />Fourteenth Precinct Police Station<br />Swedish Concert <br />Chicago Fire Department<br />German Singing Society<br />Cheque from Anaconda, Montana <br />The Pullman strikers appealed to a convention of the American Railway Union for support:<br /><br />Mr. President and Brothers of the American Railway Union. We struck at Pullman because we were without hope. We joined the American Railway Union because it gave us a glimmer of hope. Twenty thousand souls, men, women and little ones, have their eyes turned toward this convention today, straining eagerly through dark despondency for a glimmer of the heavensent message you alone can give us on this earth... .<br />You all must know that the proximate cause of our strike was the discharge of two members of our grievance committee.... Five reductions in wages.. .. The last was the most severe, amounting to nearly thirty per cent, and rents had not fallen. .. .<br /><br />Water which Pullman buys from the city at 8 cents a thousand gallons he retails lo us at 500 percent advance. .. . Gas which sells at 75 cents per thousand feet in Hyde Park, just north of us, he sells for $2.25. When we went to tell him our grievances he said we were all his "children.".. .<br /><br />Pullman, both the man and the town, is an ulcer on the body politic. He owns the houses, the schoolhouses, and churches of God in the town he gave his once humble name....<br /><br />And thus the merry war-the dance of skeletons bathed in human tears-goes on, and it will go on, brothers, forever, unless you, the American Railway Union, stop it; end it; crush it out.<br /><br />The American Railway Union responded. It asked its members all over the country not to handle Pullman cars. Since virtually all passenger trains had Pullman cars, this amounted to a boycott of all trains-a nationwide strike. Soon all traffic on the twenty-four railroad lines leading out of Chicago had come to a halt. Workers derailed freight cars, blocked tracks, pulled engineers off trains if they refused to cooperate.<br /><br />The General Managers Association, representing the railroad owners, agreed to pay two thousand deputies, sent in to break the strike. But the strike went on. The Attorney General of the United States, Richard Olney, a former railroad lawyer, now got a court injunction against blocking trains, on the legal ground that the federal mails were being interfered with. When the strikers ignored the injunction, President Cleveland ordered federal troops to Chicago. On July 6, hundreds of cars were burned by strikers.<br /><br />The following day, the state militia moved in, and the Chicago Times reported on what followed:<br /><br />Company C. Second Regiment . . . disciplined a mob of rioters yesterday afternoon at Forty-ninth and Loomis Streets. The police assisted and . . . finished the job. There is no means of knowing how many rioters were killed or wounded. The mob carried off many of its dying and injured.<br />A crowd of five thousand gathered. Rocks were thrown at the militia, and the command was given to fire.<br /><br />... To say that the mob went wild is but a weak expression.. . . The command to charge was given. . .. From that moment only bayonets were used. ... A dozen men in the front line of rioters received bayonet wounds. . ..<br />Tearing up cobble stones, the mob made a determined charge.... the word was passed along the line for each officer to take care of himself. One by one, as occasion demanded, they fired point blank into the crowd.. .. The police followed with their clubs. A wire fence enclosed the track. The rioters had forgotten it; when they turned to fly they were caught in a trap.<br /><br />The police were not inclined to be merciful, and driving the mob against the barbed wires clubbed it unmercifully. .. . The crowd outside the fence rallied to the assistance of the rioters.... The shower of stones was incessant. . ..<br /><br />The ground over which the fight had occurred was like a battlefield. The men shot by the troops and police lay about like logs.. ..<br /><br />In Chicago that day, thirteen people were killed, fifty-three seriously wounded, seven hundred arrested. Before the strike was over, perhaps thirty-four were dead. With fourteen thousand police, militia, troops in Chicago, the strike was crushed. Debs was arrested for contempt of court, for violating the injunction that said he could not do or say anything to carry on the strike. He told the court: "It seems to me that if it were not for resistance to degrading conditions, the tendency of our whole civilization would be downward; after a while we would reach the point where there would be no resistance, and slavery would come."<br /><br />Debs, in court, denied he was a socialist. But during his six months in prison, he studied socialism and talked to fellow prisoners who were socialists. Later he wrote: "I was to be baptized in Socialism in the roar of conflict... in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed. ... This was my first practical struggle in Socialism."<br /><br />Two years after he came out of prison, Debs wrote in the Railway Times:<br /><br />The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough. Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization. The time has come to regenerate society-we are on the eve of a universal change.<br />Thus, the eighties and nineties saw bursts of labor insurrection, more organized than the spontaneous strikes of 1877. There were now revolutionary movements influencing labor struggles, the ideas of socialism affecting labor leaders. Radical literature was appearing, speaking of fundamental changes, of new possibilities for living.<br /><br />In this same period, those who worked on the land-farmers, North and South, black and white-were going far beyond the scattered tenant protests of the pre-Civil War years and creating the greatest movement of agrarian rebellion the country had ever seen.<br /><br />When the Homestead Act was being discussed in Congress in 1860, a Senator from Wisconsin said he supported it:<br /><br />.. . because its benign operation will postpone for centuries, if it will not forever, all serious conflict between capital and labor in the older free States, withdrawing their surplus population to create in greater abundance the means of subsistence.<br />The Homestead Act did not have that effect. It did not bring tranquility to the East by moving Americans to the West. It was not a safety valve for discontent, which was too great to be contained that way. As Henry Nash Smith says (Virgin Land), and as we have seen: "On the contrary, the three decades following its passage were marked by the most bitter and widespread labor trouble that had yet been seen in the United States."<br /><br />It also failed to bring peace to the farm country of the West. Hamlin Garland, who made so many Americans aware of the life of the farmer, wrote in the preface to his novel Jason Edwards: 'Tree land is gone. The last acre of available farmland has now passed into private or corporate hands." In Jason Edwards a Boston mechanic takes his family West, drawn by advertising circulars. But he finds that all land within 30 miles of a railroad has been taken up by speculators. He struggles for five years to pay off a loan and get title to his farm, and then a storm destroys his wheat just before harvest.<br /><br />Behind the despair so often registered in the farm country literature of that day, there must have been visions, from time to time, of a different way to live. In another Garland novel, A Spoil of Office, the heroine speaks at a farmers' picnic:<br /><br />I see a time when the farmer will not need to live in a cabin on a lonely farm. I see the farmers coming together in groups. I see them with time to read, and time to visit with their fellows. I see them enjoying lectures in beautiful halls, erected in every village. I see them gather like the Saxons of old upon the green at evening to sing and dance. I see cities rising near them with schools, and churches, and concert halls and theaters. I see a day when the farmer will no longer be a drudge and his wife a bond slave, but happy men and women who will go singing to their pleasant tasks upon their fruitful farms. When the boys and girls will not go west nor to the city; when life will be worth living. In that day the moon will be brighter and the stars more glad, and pleasure and poetry and love of life come back to the man who tills the soil.<br />Hamlin Garland dedicated Jason Edwards, written in 1891, to the Farmers Alliance. It was the Farmers Alliance that was the core of the great movement of the 1880s and 1890s later known as the Populist Movement.<br /><br />Between 1860 and 1910, the U.S. army, wiping out the Indian villages on the Great Plains, paved the way for the railroads to move in and take the best land. Then the farmers came for what was left. From 1860 to 1900 the population of the United States grew from 31 million to 75 million; now 20 million people lived west of the Mississippi, and the number of farms grew from 2 million to 6 million. With the crowded cities of the East needing food, the internal market for food was more than doubled; 82 percent of the farm produce was sold inside the United States.<br /><br />Farming became mechanized-steel plows, mowing machines, reapers, harvesters, improved cotton gins for pulling the fibers away from the seed, and, by the turn of the century, giant combines that cut the grain, threshed it, and put it in bags. In 1830 a bushel of wheat had taken three hours to produce. By 1900, it took ten minutes. Specialization developed by region: cotton and tobacco in the South, wheat and corn in the Midwest.<br /><br />Land cost money, and machines cost money-so farmers had to borrow, hoping that the prices of their harvests would stay high, so they could pay the bank for the loan, the railroad for transportation, the grain merchant for handling their grain, the storage elevator for storing it. But they found the prices for their produce going down, and the prices of transportation and loans going up, because the individual farmer could not control the price of his grain, while the monopolist railroad and the monopolist banker could charge what they liked.<br /><br />William Faulkner, in his novel The Hamlet, described the man on whom southern farmers depended:<br /><br />He was the largest landholder ... in one county, and Justice of the Peace in the next, and election commissioner in both.... He was a farmer, a usurer, a veterinarian.... He owned most of the good land in the county and held mortgages on most of the rest. He owned the store and the cotton gin and the combined grist mill and blacksmith shop.. ..<br />The farmers who could not pay saw their homes and land taken away. They became tenants. By 1880, 25 percent of all farms were rented by tenants, and the number kept rising. Many did not even have money to rent and became farm laborers; by 1900 there were 4 1/2 million farm laborers in the country. It was the fate that awaited every farmer who couldn't pay his debts.<br /><br />Could the squeezed and desperate farmer turn to the government for help? Lawrence Goodwyn, in his study of the Populist movement (The Democratic Promise), says that after the Civil War both parties now were controlled by capitalists. They were divided along North-South lines, still hung over with the animosities of the Civil War. This made it very hard to create a party of reform cutting across both parties to unite working people South and North-to say nothing of black and white, foreign-born and native-born.<br /><br />The government played its part in helping the bankers and hurting the farmers; it kept the amount of money-based on the gold supply- steady, while the population rose, so there was less and less money in circulation. The farmer had to pay off his debts in dollars that were harder to get. The bankers, getting the loans back, were getting dollars worth more than when they loaned them out-a kind of interest on top of interest. That is why so much of the talk of farmers' movements in those days had to do with putting more money in circulation-by printing greenbacks (paper money for which there was no gold in the treasury) or by making silver a basis for issuing money.<br /><br />It was in Texas that the Farmers Alliance movement began. It was in the South that the crop-lien system was most brutal. By this system the farmer would get the things he needed from the merchant: the use of the cotton gin at harvest time, whatever supplies were necessary. He didn't have money to pay, so the merchant would get a lien-a mortgage on his crop-on which the farmer might pay 25 percent interest. Goodwyn says "the crop lien system became for millions of Southerners, white and black, little more than a modified form of slavery." The man with the ledger became to the farmer "the furnishing man," to black farmers simply "the Man." The farmer would owe more money every year until finally his farm was taken away and he became a tenant.<br /><br />Goodwyn gives two personal histories to illustrate this. A white farmer in South Carolina, between 1887 and 1895, bought goods and services from the furnishing merchant for $2,681.02 but was able to pay only $687.31, and finally he had to give his land to the merchant. A black farmer named Matt Brown, in Black Hawk, Mississippi, between 1884 and 1901, bought his supplies from the Jones store, kept falling further and further behind, and in 1905 the last entry in the merchant's ledger is for a coffin and burial supplies.<br /><br />How many rebellions took place against this system we don't know. In Delhi, Louisiana, in 1889, a gathering of small farmers rode into town and demolished the stores of merchants "to cancel their indebtedness," they said.<br /><br />In the height of the 1877 Depression, a group of white farmers gathered together on a farm in Texas and formed the first "Farmers Alliance." In a few years, it was across the state. By 1882, there were 120 suballiances in twelve counties. By 1886, 100,000 farmers had joined in two thousand suballiances. They began to offer alternatives to the old system: join the Alliance and form cooperatives; buy things together and get lower prices. They began putting their cotton together and selling it cooperatively-they called it "bulking."<br /><br />In some states a Grange movement developed; it managed to get laws passed to help farmers. But the Grange, as one of its newspapers put it, "is essentially conservative and furnishes a stable, well- organized, rational and orderly opposition to encroachments upon the liberties of the people, in contrast to the lawless, desperate attempts of communism." It was a time of crisis, and the Grange was doing too little. It lost members, while the Farmers Alliance kept growing.<br /><br />From the beginning, the Farmers Alliance showed sympathy with the growing labor movement. When Knights of Labor men went on strike against a steamship line in Galveston, Texas, one of the radical leaders of the Texas Alliance, William Lamb, spoke for many (but not all) Alliance members when he said in an open letter to Alliance people: "Knowing that the day is not far distant when the Farmers Alliance will have to use Boycott on manufacturers in order to get goods direct, we think it is a good time to help the Knights of Labor. . .." Goodwyn says: "Alliance radicalism- Populism-began with this letter."<br /><br />The Texas Alliance president opposed joining the boycott, but a group of Alliance people in Texas passed a resolution:<br /><br />Whereas we see the unjust encroachments that the capitalists are making upon all the different departments of labor ... we extend to the Knights of Labor our hearty sympathy in their manly struggle against monopolistic oppression and ... we propose to stand by the Knights.<br />In the summer of 1886, in the town of Cleburne, near Dallas, the Alliance gathered and drew up what came to be known as the "Cleburne Demands"-the first document of the Populist movement, asking "such legislation as shall secure to our people freedom from the onerous and shameful abuses that the industrial classes are now suffering at the hands of arrogant capitalists and powerful corporations." They called for a national conference of all labor organizations "to discuss such measures as may be of interest to the laboring classes," and proposed regulation of railroad rates, heavy taxation of land held only for speculative purposes, and an increase in the money supply.<br /><br />The Alliance kept growing. By early 1887, it had 200,000 members in three thousand suballiances. By 1892 farmer lecturers had gone into forty-three states and reached 2 million farm families in what Goodwyn calls "the most massive organizing drive by any citizen institution of nineteenth century America," It was a drive based on the idea of cooperation, of farmers creating their own culture, their own political parties, gaining a respect not given them by the nation's powerful industrial and political leaders.<br /><br />Organizers from Texas came to Georgia to form alliances, and in three years Georgia had 100,000 members in 134 of the 137 counties. In Tennessee, there were soon 125,000 members and 3,600 suballiances in ninety-two of the state's ninety-six counties. The Alliance moved into Mississippi "like a cyclone," someone said, and into Louisiana and North Carolina. Then northward into Kansas and the Dakotas, where thirty-five cooperative warehouses were set up.<br /><br />One of the leading figures in Kansas was Henry Vincent, who started a journal in 1886 called The American Nonconformist and Kansas Industrial Liberator, saying in the first issue:<br /><br />This journal will aim to publish such matter as will tend to the education of the laboring classes, the farmers and the producer, and in every struggle it will endeavor to take the side of the oppressed as against the oppressor.. ..<br />By 1889, the Kansas Alliance had fifty thousand members and was electing local candidates to office.<br /><br />Now there were 400,000 members in the National Farmers Alliance. And the conditions spurring the Alliance onward got worse. Corn which had brought 45 cents a bushel in 1870 brought 10 cents a bushel in 1889. Harvesting wheat required a machine to bind the wheat before it became too dry, and this cost several hundred dollars, which the farmer had to buy on credit, knowing the $200 would be twice as hard to get in a few years. Then he had pay a bushel of corn in freight costs for every bushel he shipped. He had to pay the high prices demanded by the grain elevators at the terminals. In the South the situation was worse than anywhere-90 percent of the farmers lived on credit.<br /><br />To meet this situation, the Texas Alliance formed a statewide cooperative, a great Texas Exchange, which handled the selling of the farmers' cotton in one great transaction. But the Exchange itself needed loans to advance credit to its members; the banks refused. A call was issued to farmers to scrape together the needed capital for the Exchange to operate. Thousands came on June 9, 1888, to two hundred Texas courthouses and made their contributions, pledging $200,000. Ultimately, $80,000 was actually collected. It was not enough. The farmers' poverty prevented them from helping themselves. The banks won, and this persuaded the Alliances that monetary reform was crucial.<br /><br />There was one victory along the way. Farmers were being charged too much for jute bags (to put cotton in), which were controlled by a trust. The Alliance farmers organized a boycott of jute, made their own bags out of cotton, and forced the jute manufacturers to start selling their bags at 5 cents a yard instead of 14 cents.<br /><br />The complexity of Populist belief was shown in one of its important leaders in Texas, Charles Macune. He was a radical in economics (antitrust, and capitalist), a conservative in politics (against a new party independent of the Democrats), and a racist. Macune came forward with a plan that was to become central to the Populist platform-the sub-Treasury plan. The government would have its own warehouses where farmers would store produce and get certificates from this sub-Treasury. These would be greenbacks, and thus much more currency would be made available, not dependent on gold or silver, but based on the amount of farm produce.<br /><br />There were more Alliance experiments. In the Dakotas, a great cooperative insurance plan for farmers insured them against loss of their crops. Where the big insurance companies had asked 50 cents an acre, the cooperative asked 25 cents or less. It issued thirty thousand policies, covering 2 million acres.<br /><br />Macune's sub-Treasury plan depended on the government. And since it would not be taken up by the two major parties, it meant (against Macune's own beliefs) organizing a third party. The Alliances went to work. In 1890 thirty-eight Alliance people were elected to Congress. In the South, the Alliance elected governors in Georgia and Texas. It took over the Democratic party in Georgia and won three-fourths of the seats in the Georgia legislature, six of Georgia's ten congressmen.<br /><br />This was, however, Goodwyn says, "an elusive revolution, because the party machinery remained in the hands of the old crowd, and the crucial chairmanships of important committees, in Congress, in the state legislatures, remained in the hands of the conservatives, and corporate power, in the states, in the nation, could use its money to still get what it wanted."<br /><br />The Alliances were not getting real power, but they were spreading new ideas and a new spirit. Now, as a political party, they became the People's party (or Populist party), and met in convention in 1890 in Topeka, Kansas. The great Populist orator from that state, Mary Ellen Lease, told an enthusiastic crowd:<br /><br />Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street.... Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. . .. the politicians said we suffered from overproduction. Overproduction, when 10,000 little children . .. starve to death every year in the U.S. and over 100,000 shop girls in New York are forced to sell their virtue for bread. ,..<br />There are thirty men in the United States whose aggregate wealth is over one and one-half billion dollars. There are half a million looking for work.. .. We want money, land and transportation. We want the abolition of the National Banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the accursed foreclosure system wiped out. . . . We will stand by our homes and stay by our firesides by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the Government pays its debts to us.<br /><br />The people are at bay, let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us thus far beware.<br /><br />At the People's party national convention in 1892 in St. Louis, a platform was drawn up. The preamble was written by, and read to the assemblage by, another of the great orators of the movement, Ignatius Donnelly:<br /><br />We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot box, the legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. These people are demoralized. . .. The newspapers are subsidized or muzzled; public opinion silenced; business prostrate, our homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists.<br />The urban workmen are denied the right of organization for self-protection; imported pauperized labor beats down their wages; a hireling standing army . .. established to shoot them down... . The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes. . .. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed two classes-paupers and millionaires... .<br /><br />A People's party nominating convention in Omaha in July of 1892 nominated James Weaver, an Iowa Populist and former general in the Union army, for President. The Populist movement was now tied to the voting system. Their spokesman Polk had said they could "link their hands and hearts together and march to the ballot box and take possession of the government, restore it to the principles of our fathers, and run it in the interest of the people." Weaver got over a million votes, but lost.<br /><br />A new political party had the job of uniting diverse groups-northern Republicans and southern Democrats, urban workers and country farmers, black and white. A Colored Farmers National Alliance grew in the South and had perhaps a million members, but it was organized and led by whites. There were also black organizers, but it was not easy for them to persuade black farmers that, even if economic reforms were won, blacks would have equal access to them. Blacks had tied themselves to the Republican party, the party of Lincoln and civil rights laws. The Democrats were the party of slavery and segregation. As Goodwyn puts it, "in an era of transcendent white prejudice, the curbing of 'vicious corporate monopoly' did not carry for black farmers the ring of salvation it had for white agrarians."<br /><br />There were whites who saw the need for racial unity. One Alabama newspaper wrote:<br /><br />The white and colored Alliance are united in their war against trusts, and in the promotion of the doctrine that farmers should establish cooperative stores, and manufactures, and publish their own newspapers, conduct their own schools, and have a hand in everything else that concerns them as citizens or affects them personally or collectively.<br />The official newspaper of the Alabama Knights of Labor, the Alabama Sentinel, wrote: "The Bourbon Democracy are trying to down the Alliance with the old cry 'nigger'. It won't work though."<br /><br />Some Alliance blacks made similar calls for unity. A leader of the Florida Colored Alliance said: "We are aware of the fact that the laboring colored man's interests and the laboring white man's interest are one and the same."<br /><br />When the Texas People's party was founded in Dallas in the summer of 1891, it was interracial, and radical. There was blunt and vigorous debate among whites and blacks. A black delegate, active in the Knights of Labor, dissatisfied with vague statements about "equality," said:<br /><br />If we are equal, why does not the sheriff summon Negroes on juries? And why hang up the sign "Negro", in passenger cars. I want to tell my people what the People's Party is going to do. I want to tell them if it is going to work a black and white horse in the same field.<br />A white leader responded by urging there be a black delegate from every district in the state. "They are in the ditch just like we are." When someone suggested there be separate white and black Populist clubs which would "confer together," R. M. Humphrey, the white leader of the Colored Alliance, objected: "This will not do. The colored people are part of the people and they must be recognized as such." Two blacks were then elected to the state executive committee of the party.<br /><br />Blacks and whites were in different situations. The blacks were mostly field hands, hired laborers; most white Alliance people were farm owners. When the Colored Alliance declared a strike in the cotton fields in 1891 for a dollar a day wages for cotton pickers, Leonidas Polk, head of the white Alliance, denounced it as hurting the Alliance farmer who would have to pay that wage. In Arkansas, a thirty-year-old black cotton picker named Ben Patterson led the strike, traveling from plantation to plantation to get support, his band growing, engaging in gun battles with a white posse. A plantation manager was killed, a cotton gin burned. Patterson and his band were caught, and fifteen of them were shot to death.<br /><br />There was some black-white unity at the ballot box in the South- resulting in a few blacks elected in North Carolina local elections. An Alabama white farmer wrote to a newspaper in 1892: "I wish to God that Uncle Sam could put bayonets around the ballot box in the black belt on the first Monday in August so that the Negro could get a fair vote." There were black delegates to third- party conventions in Georgia: two in 1892, twenty-four in 1894, The Arkansas People's party platform spoke for the "downtrodden, regardless of race."<br /><br />There were moments of racial unity. Lawrence Goodwyn found in east Texas an unusual coalition of black and white public officials: it had begun during Reconstruction and continued into the Populist period. The state government was in the control of white Democrats, but in Grimes County, blacks won local offices and sent legislators to the state capital. The district clerk was a black man; there were black deputy sheriffs and a black school principal. A night-riding White Man's Union used intimidation and murder to split the coalition, but Goodwyn points to "the long years of interracial cooperation in Grimes County" and wonders about missed opportunities.<br /><br />Racism was strong, and the Democratic party played on this, winning many farmers from the Populist party. When white tenants, failing in the crop-lien system, were evicted from their land and replaced by blacks, race hatred intensified. Southern states were drawing up new constitutions, starting with Mississippi in 1890, to prevent blacks from voting by various devices, and to maintain ironclad segregation in every aspect of life.<br /><br />The laws that took the vote away from blacks-poll taxes, literacy tests, property qualifications-also often ensured that poor whites would not vote. And the political leaders of the South knew this. At the constitutional convention in Alabama, one of the leaders said he wanted to take away the vote from "all those who are unfit and unqualified, and if the rule strikes a white man as well as a negro let him go." In North Carolina, the Charlotte Observer saw disfranchisement as "the struggle of the white people of North Carolina to rid themselves of the dangers of the rule of negroes and the lower class of whites."<br /><br />Tom Watson, the Populist leader of Georgia, pleaded for racial unity:<br /><br />You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.<br />According to the black scholar Robert Alien, taking a look at Populism (Reluctant Reformers), Watson wanted black support for a white man's party. No doubt, when Watson found this support embarrassing and no longer useful, he became as eloquent in affirming racism as he had been in opposing it.<br /><br />Still, Watson must have addressed some genuine feelings in poor whites whose class oppression gave them some common interest with blacks. When H. S. Doyle, a young black preacher who supported Watson for Congress, was threatened by a lynch mob, he came to Watson for protection, and two thousand white farmers helped Doyle escape.<br /><br />It was a time that illustrated the complexities of class and race conflict. Fifteen blacks were lynched during Watson's election campaign. And in Georgia after 1891 the Alliance-controlled legislature, Alien points out, "passed the largest number of anti-black bills ever enacted in a single year in Georgia history." And yet, in 1896, the Georgia state platform of the People's party denounced lynch law and terrorism, and asked the abolition of the convict lease system.<br /><br />C. Vann Woodward points to the unique quality of the Populist experience in the South: "Never before or since have the two races in the South come so close together as they did during the Populist struggles."<br /><br />The Populist movement also made a remarkable attempt to create a new and independent culture for the country's farmers. The Alliance Lecture Bureau reached all over the country; it had 35,000 lecturers. The Populists poured out books and pamphlets from their printing presses. Woodward says:<br /><br />One gathers from yellowed pamphlets that the agrarian ideologists undertook to re-educate their countrymen from the ground up. Dismissing "history as taught in our schools" as "practically valueless", they undertook to write it over-formidable columns of it, from the Greek down. With no more compunction they turned all hands to the revision of economics, political theory, law, and government.<br />The National Economist, a Populist magazine, had 100,000 readers. Goodwyn counts over a thousand Populist journals in the 1890s. There were newspapers like the Comrade, published in the cotton country of Louisiana, and the Toiler's Friend, in rural Georgia. Also, Revolution was published in Georgia. In North Carolina, the Populist printing plant was burned. In Alabama, there was the Living Truth. It was broken into in 1892, its type scattered, and the next year the shop was set afire, but the press survived and the editor never missed an issue.<br /><br />Hundreds of poems and songs came out of the Populist movement, like "The Farmer Is the Man": . . . the farmer is the man<br />The Farmer is the man<br />Lives on credit till the fall<br />With the interest rates so high<br />It's a wonder he don't die <br />And the mortgage man's the one<br />that gets it all.<br /><br />The farmer is the man <br />The farmer is the man <br />Lives on credit till the fall <br />And his pants are wearing thin <br />His condition it's a sin <br />He's forgot that he's the man<br />that feeds them all.<br /><br />Books written by Populist leaders, such as Henry Demarest Lloyd's Wealth Against Commonwealth, and William Harvey Coin's Financial School, were widely read. An Alabama historian of that time, William Garrott Brown, said about the Populist movement that "no other political movement-not that of 1776, nor that of 1860-1861-ever altered Southern life so profoundly."<br /><br />According to Lawrence Goodwyn, if the labor movement had been able to do in the cities what the Populists did in the rural areas, "to create among urban workers a culture of cooperation, self- respect, and economic analysis," there might have been a great movement for change in the United States. There were only fitful, occasional connections between the farmer and labor movements. Neither spoke eloquently enough to the other's needs. And yet, there were signs of a common consciousness that might, under different circumstances, lead to a unified, ongoing movement.<br /><br />Norman Pollack says, on the basis of a close study of midwestern Populist newspapers, that "Populism regarded itself as a class movement, reasoning that farmers and workers were assuming the same material position in society." An editorial in the Farmers' Alliance spoke of a man working fourteen to sixteen hours a day: "He is brutalized both morally and physically. He has no ideas, only propensities, he has no beliefs, only instincts." Pollack sees that as a homespun version of Marx's idea of workers' alienation from his human self under capitalism, and finds many other parallels between Populist and Marxist ideas.<br /><br />Undoubtedly, Populists, along with most white Americans, had racism and nativism in their thinking. But part of it was that they simply did not think race as important as the economic system. Thus, the Farmers' Alliance said: "The people's party has sprung into existence not to make the black man free, but to emancipate all men ... to gain for all industrial freedom, without which there can be no political freedom. . . ."<br /><br />More important than theoretical connections were the Populist expressions of support for workers in actual struggles. The Alliance-Independent of Nebraska, during the great strike at the Carnegie steel plant, wrote: "All who look beneath the surface will see that the bloody battle fought at Homestead was a mere incident in the great conflict between capital and labor." Coxey's march of the unemployed drew sympathy in the farm areas; in Osceola, Nebraska, perhaps five thousand people attended a picnic in Coxey's honor. During the Pullman strike, a farmer wrote to the governor of Kansas: "Unquestionably, nearly, if not quite all Alliance people are in fullest sympathy with these striking men."<br /><br />On top of the serious failures to unite blacks and whites, city workers and country farmers, there was the lure of electoral politics-all of that combining to destroy the Populist movement. Once allied with the Democratic party in supporting William Jennings Bryan for President in 1896, Populism would drown in a sea of Democratic politics. The pressure for electoral victory led Populism to make deals with the major parties in city after city. If the Democrats won, it would be absorbed. If the Democrats lost, it would disintegrate. Electoral polities brought into the top leadership the political brokers instead of the agrarian radicals.<br /><br />There were those radical Populists who saw this. They said fusion with the Democrats to try to "win" would lose what they needed, an independent political movement. They said the much- ballyhooed free silver would not change anything fundamental in the capitalist system. One Texas radical said silver coinage would "leave undisturbed all the conditions which give rise to the undue concentration of wealth."<br /><br />Henry Demarest Lloyd noted that the Bryan nomination was subsidized in part by Marcus Daly (of Anaconda Copper) and William Randolph Hearst (of the silver interests in the West). He saw through the rhetoric of Bryan that stirred the crowd of twenty thousand at the Democratic Convention ("we have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more, we petition no more. We defy them!"). Lloyd wrote bitterly:<br /><br />The poor people are throwing up their hats in the air for those who promise to lead them out of the wilderness by way of the currency route. . .. The people are to be kept wandering forty years in the currency labyrinth, as they have for the last forty years been led up and down the tariff bill.<br />In the election of 1896, with the Populist movement enticed into the Democratic party, Bryan, the Democratic candidate, was defeated by William McKinley, for whom the corporations and the press mobilized, in the first massive use of money in an election campaign. Even the hint of Populism in the Democratic party, it seemed, could not be tolerated, and the big guns of the Establishment pulled out all their ammunition, to make sure.<br /><br />It was a time, as election times have often been in the United States, to consolidate the system after years of protest and rebellion. The black was being kept under control in the South. The Indian was being driven off the western plains for good; on a cold winter day in 1890, U.S. army soldiers attacked Indians camped at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, and killed three hundred men, women, and children. It was the climax to four hundred years of violence that began with Columbus, establishing that this continent belonged to white men. But only to certain white men, because it was clear by 1896 that the state stood ready to crush labor strikes, by the law if possible, by force if necessary. And where a threatening mass movement developed, the two-party system stood ready to send out one of its columns to surround that movement and drain it of vitality.<br /><br />And always, as a way of drowning class resentment in a flood of slogans for national unity, there was patriotism. McKinley had said, in a rare rhetorical connection between money and flag:<br /><br />... this year is going to be a year of patriotism and devotion to country. I am glad to know that the people in every part of the country mean to be devoted to one flag, the glorious Stars and Stripes; that the people of this country mean to maintain the financial honor of the country as sacredly as they maintain the honor of the flag.<br />The supreme act of patriotism was war. Two years after McKinley became President, the United States declared war on Spain.(Courtesy: Historyisaweapon)Justin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-44308473787964070602010-11-30T07:20:00.000-08:002010-11-30T07:24:55.435-08:00The Development of Civilization: Bronze Age Mesopotamia<span style="font-weight:bold;">Model Questions</span><br />1) Examine the process of urbanization and state formation in Mesopotamia with special reference to the role that metal played in it.<br />2) Explain the process involved in the transformation of simple cultures to complex civilizations, paying special attention to Bronze Age Mesopotamia<br />3) Describe the elements of social and economic complexity in Ancient Mesopotamia <br />4) Describe the stages of urban development in the Sumerian Civilization<br />5) Account for the emergence of complex civilization in Mesopotamia in the Bronze Age<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Essential Readings:</span> <br />Brian Fagan, People of the Earth: An Introduction to World Prehistory, Illinois. Delhi: Pearson, 2004 (first pub:1989). <br />Chapters: 14 and 15. <br />V. Gorden Childe, What Happened in History. Harmondsworth; Penguin, 1942. Chapter 5<br />UNESCO, History of Humanity, Vol. II: From Third Millennium to Seventh Century BC, London: 1996. <br />George Roax, Ancient Iraq, Harmondsworth, 1992. <br />Susan Pollock, Ancient Mesopotamia, the Eden that never was. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999. <br />J N Postgate, Early Mesopotamia, London: 1992. <br />V. Gordon Childe, 'The Bronze Age', Past and Present , No. 12 (Nov. 1957), pp. 2-15 <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Additional References for project work:</span> <br />James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, New Delhi, Orient Blackswan, pp. ix-xiv, pp.1-39<br />Karen Rhea Nemat-Nejat, Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, Peabody, Massachusetts, Hendricks Publishers, 2008<br />Patricia Wattenmaker, The Household and the State in Upper Mesopotamia, Washington, Smithsonian Institute, 1998.<br />Henry T. Wright, The Administration of Rural Production in an Early Mesopotamian Town, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, 1969.<br />Mario Liverani (ed), Akkad: The First World Empire: Structure, Ideology, Traditions. Padova, Sargon Srl, 1993. <br />Mc Guire Gibson and Robert D. Biggs, The Organization of Power: Aspects of Bureaucracy in the Ancient Near East, Chicago, Oriental Institute, 1991. <br />Jean Bottero, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning and the Gods. (tr by Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van de Mieroop), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992. <br />Robert Mc C Adams, The Heartland of Cities, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981. <br />Greda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy. New York, 1986.Justin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-84913554161372708442010-11-30T03:04:00.000-08:002010-11-30T03:08:10.919-08:00Ancient Mesopotamia<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9WQTcIADdtI34ALKq1raetvVXxVuLwa333Rhiv25wLIE6yjlkT-ogcScs1dbGNHb7be00x7BZxwZHVabAOrLpzROHlesFkFSXyG_iI40yYtpPQpIGfAgly-oBr_B783jIVE61T0Iksg8/s1600/ancient_mesopotamia1.gif"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 314px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9WQTcIADdtI34ALKq1raetvVXxVuLwa333Rhiv25wLIE6yjlkT-ogcScs1dbGNHb7be00x7BZxwZHVabAOrLpzROHlesFkFSXyG_iI40yYtpPQpIGfAgly-oBr_B783jIVE61T0Iksg8/s320/ancient_mesopotamia1.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545297258429715634" /></a><br />(courtesy: Bible history.com)Justin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-11142416414843710152010-11-25T08:06:00.000-08:002010-11-25T08:09:24.212-08:00Reconstruction-ReadingsReconstruction 1<br />JM<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Reconstruction: Conservative and Radical Phases 1863-1877</span><br /><br />Reconstruction has been subjected to varying interpretations has historiographical debates. Under this rubric we will outline, briefly, the broader interpretative framework of the Reconstruction Era. <br /> <br />Model questions <br />1) Discuss the various interpretations of the aims, programmes and results of the Presidential and Radical Reconstruction<br />2) Critically analyse the Radical Reconstruction Programme of the south after the Civil War. <br />3) “The Period of reconstruction was an age of Hate”. Comment. <br />4) Examine the historiographical debate on the Presidential and Radical Reconstruction Programmes. <br />5) Is it correct to describe the Radical Reconstruction period as a “Tragic Era”?<br />6) Evaluate Congressional reconstruction and its impact on the South. <br />7) What were the reasons for the conflict between Presidential and Congressional reconstruction programmes? <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Recommended Readings</span> <br /><br />Grob, B N and Billias. Interpretations in American History: Patters and Perspectives. Chapter: 11: The Reconstruction Era: Constructive or Destructive?. 431-482<br />Tindall, George Brown and David Shi. 1992. America: A Narrative History, vol. 2. London: W.W. Norton and Company. Chapter 18: Reconstruction: North and South. 693-731. <br />Randall, James and Donald David. 1961. The Civil War and Reconstruction (second edition). Boston: D C Heath and Company. Chapter 31-39. <br /><br />Kaushik, R P. 1983. Significant Themes in American History. Delhi: Ajanta Books International. Chapter 7, 122-141. <br /><br />Du Bois, W. E. B., and David L. Lewis. 1992. Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Atheneum. <br />Foner, Eric. 1988. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. 1st ed. New York: Harper & Row. <br />Stampp, Kenneth M. 1965. The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877. 1st ed. New York: Knopf. <br />Woodward, C. Vann. 1991. Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. <br />Wright, Gavin. 1996. Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War. Louisiana pbk. ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. <br />Du Bois, W. E. B. 1910. “Reconstruction and its Benefits”, Amercian Historical Review, XV, 781-799. <br />William B Hesseltine. 1935. 'Economic Factors in the Abandonment of Reconstruction'. The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXII, 191-210. <br /><br /><br /><br />With Malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.<br /> <br /> --President LincolnJustin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-33898578820140423922010-11-21T11:21:00.000-08:002010-11-21T11:29:18.662-08:00Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln<span style="font-weight:bold;">By the President of the United States of America:<br />A PROCLAMATION<br /></span>Whereas on the 22nd day of September, A.D. 1862, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:<br />"That on the 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.<br />"That the executive will on the 1st day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State or the people thereof shall on that day be in good faith represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such States shall have participated shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State and the people thereof are not then in rebellion against the United States."<br />Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-In-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for supressing said rebellion, do, on this 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, and in accordance with my purpose so to do, publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days from the first day above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof, respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States the following, to wit:<br />Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the parishes of St. Bernard, Palquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrebone, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the city of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkeley, Accomac, Morthhampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Anne, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth), and which excepted parts are for the present left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.<br />And by virtue of the power and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States are, and henceforward shall be, free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.<br />And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and I recommend to them that, in all case when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.<br />And I further declare and make known that such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.<br />And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God.Justin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-38007324108210316292010-11-21T04:04:00.001-08:002010-11-21T04:07:04.545-08:00Early farming sites in Southwest Asia<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy9bR1HFh9HlgRNrhyoAQyMEUaBDEDRonc2-NByShUMS1A6ASaWSCJplRF_jgihE9t400slGQW_nva4ve2Ux9BynOZvEtsemGC_Dcfm9v1Jy3zQkpOHqB0tP7VA01P9dd-R24d1a5GWlk/s1600/Slide04.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 316px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy9bR1HFh9HlgRNrhyoAQyMEUaBDEDRonc2-NByShUMS1A6ASaWSCJplRF_jgihE9t400slGQW_nva4ve2Ux9BynOZvEtsemGC_Dcfm9v1Jy3zQkpOHqB0tP7VA01P9dd-R24d1a5GWlk/s320/Slide04.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5541972891091852018" /></a><br />(courtesy: archAtlas)Justin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-68208384598708820322010-11-18T02:44:00.001-08:002010-11-18T02:49:53.711-08:00Prehistoric TimesI Tenen, The Ancient World. Chapter One - Prehistoric Times<br /><br />A. The Old Stone Age<br /><br />History really begins when men were civilised enough to set down a record of their actions by cutting marks in clay and stone, or by writing on paper and parchment. They first began to do this about six thousand years ago, and we find them in these records already living in great cities, masters of arts and crafts, and divided into humbly- and nobly-born, poor and rich, all subjects of powerful kings. But perhaps you will be curious enough to ask whether we know anything about men's lives before written History begins. Yes, we know something about that too, and our knowledge is the result of much clever and patient study of the remains left by those very, very distant ancestors of ours, such as their own bones, the bones of the animals they hunted or tended, bits of their pottery or clothing, and, perhaps the most interesting of all, the wonderful drawings which they scratched on bones or painted on cave walls. The study of pre-historic man is by no means complete yet, but we can at least take a few glimpses at the long, long ago.<br /><br />The first glimpse shows us the earth as it was from thirty to twenty thousand years ago, and you will hardly want to go further back than that! The oceans and continents had not yet taken the shapes that we know to-day. The land masses were less broken up by seas. The climate of Europe in those far-off days varied in a mysterious way. <br /><br /><br />For centuries it would be much hotter than it is to-day, then a long period of cold weather would set in, there would be endless snow-storms, till a thick sheet of ice covered the "top" half of our hemisphere, and even seas froze. Men would slowly retreat south before the advancing, pale-blue ice-wall, till a milder age returned. Under such conditions Man made little progress for thousands of years. You can think of the people of the early Old Stone Age, as it is called, as squat and hairy, with long, powerful arms and short, thick legs. They have low foreheads with a ridge over the eyes, chins that slope backwards, flat, broad noses and long, thick lips that barely cover their enormous teeth.<br /><br />If they wear anything at all, it will be some animal's hide. While the women perhaps look for roots and berries, eggs or shell-fish worth eating, the men spend a good deal of their time hunting—for that is the main source of their food—various types of hairy elephant and rhinoceros, hippopotamus, the huge saber-toothed tiger, the boar, reindeer, bison and elk. At first their weapons were stone or wooden clubs and stakes. <br /><br />Then they learned how to knock sharp-edged flakes off flints and fasten them with sinews and vegetable fibers into the split top of a branch so as to form a spear. The core of the flint lashed to a stout stick would form a rough hammer or axe. You may not think such weapons would be of much help, say, against a monster tiger or a fifteen-foot-high elephant, but often the quarry was first lured into some trap or pit. The meat was roasted, for there were no pots of any kind for boiling or even storing water. But men had already made the tremendous, all-important discovery of Fire. Thanks to that, they could survive the bitterly cold weather that often prevailed for long periods, they could lighten the darkness with torches, make their food more enjoyable, harden the points of stakes and wooden spears, and scare away the tiger that prowled round the camp at night.<br /><br />How the Old Stone Age people produced fire we can guess from the methods used to-day by primitive tribes, who in many respects have not risen above the level of the earliest men. By studying the habits of such tribes, we get much clearer ideas of how the first men lived. The usual method of making fire among such people is to twirl a stick very quickly, either between the hands or by means of a thong, in a hole in a block of wood. The friction heats the tiny splinters that break off, till they burst into flame. It is also possible that quite early on some genius discovered that a shower of sparks could be produced by striking a flint against certain metallic stones, and that dried moss could be set alight in this way. This method, much later improved into the flint, steel and tinder outfit, became the usual way of producing fire right down to modern times.<br /><br />There seems to have been little difference of race at this period; men looked pretty much the same everywhere. And we do not see signs of fighting on any large scale. Settlements were usually made on the banks of rivers (for remember that there was nothing to carry water in), particularly if there was a good supply of flints near by.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Man, in this age, lived an entirely open-air life. In wet, stormy weather a rough sort of shelter might have been built by sticking a few boughs into the ground at an angle, and weaving twigs between them, but this would be more of a windscreen to protect the fire than a hut to live in. People at this period were sometimes buried underneath their hearths, and so we find their bones along with those of the animals they had eaten.<br /><br />After this glimpse of the earliest men, we must leap in Time over something like ten thousand years. Even after this jump, we are still in the Old Stone Age, but great progress has been made, perhaps because of the more temperate climate which Europe now enjoyed, though occasionally there were still short spells of bitterly cold weather. <br /><br /><br />The people of this period are less hairy and ape-like than the early folk, and their bodies are more upright, smooth and slender. Their chins and foreheads are fairly straight and they have longer noses. They still wear skins, but there is some attempt to shape them to the figure with rough sewing, done with bone needles and thongs. For though flint tools are now well-shaped, this is chiefly an age of bone-tipped weapons and tools, of a high standard. The reindeer is the most important animal of this period, and there is a good deal of fishing with harpoons. Men and women were now vain enough about their appearance to decorate themselves with necklaces and bangles of shells or animals' teeth, and with tufts of feathers. Sometimes they lived in tent-shaped huts, sometimes, when it was cold, in caves from which, often, they would first have to dislodge monster bears or lions.<br /><br />What makes us realise most vividly that already Man had made wonderful progress in some ways, are the marvellous wall-paintings, chiefly of animals, that have been found in such cave-dwellings. The finest of these are in southern France and northern Spain. <br /><br />In the Altamira caves, near Santander on the north coast of Spain, the roof of a cave is closely covered with drawings of many bison, together with a few wild horses, boar and deer. The figures are about five feet long, coloured mainly in black and red, varied here and there with browns and yellows. The main lines of the drawings are actually carved out of the rock. The animals are shown strong, alert, vigorous, in all the poses which the hunter knew so well. And this gives us the clue to their meaning. They are not there for decoration. In many cases they are in a part of the cave which is hard to get at and which could never have been used to live in. Now in some cases the position of the animal's heart or a weak spot in its spine is specially marked. As we have reason to think that there were witch-doctors in those days, it seems very likely that these drawings were used in some magic rites before a great hunt. Near some of the paintings have been found tools for carving the outlines, animals' shoulder-blades which had been used as palettes, materials for making paint, and hollowed stones to contain the grease which must have been the fuel of the earliest lamps. For without a clear, steady light these drawings could never have been made.<br /><br /><br />Apart from such paintings as these, figures of animals have been found so deeply carved on cave walls that they are almost statues. There are also quite a number of small but excellently cut statuettes of animals, especially of boar. Late in this period we find quaint paintings of hunters who seem to be using bows and arrows, and there are also little carved figures of women.<br /><br />It is rather early yet to start the history of Britain, which, for most of the Old Stone Age, was not yet even an island. But you may like to know that the skull of one of the very earliest men in the world was found at Piltdown by the river Ouse, in Sussex; while relics of the later Old Stone Age were dug up in Kent's Cavern at Torquay, south Devon, at Cresswell Caves, near Derby, and at Paviland Cave, in south Wales, near Swansea.<br /><br />Exercises<br /><br />1. With the help of your Geography books, etc., compare early Old Stone Age men with Australian "blackfellows" and late Old Stone Age men with Eskimos and Red Indians.<br /><br />2. What use would the reindeer be to early Man apart from food?<br /><br />3. Draw the bison on p. 1 and colour it in red and black.<br /><br />4. Find out about the cave-paintings in Rhodesia.<br /><br /><br />--------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><br />B. The New Stone Age<br /><br />Again we must make a Time-jump, and when we look at mankind once more, again, what great changes we see! We have reached a period some eight thousand years ago. By this time the land and sea masses of the globe have, roughly, their present outlines, and the British Isles are separating from the Continent. The climate of Europe is now temperate, there is a good deal of rain, and this produces long belts of forest, and many lakes and marshes. Men begin to show the main divisions of race. One type, the Mongolian, with straight black hair, yellow skin and slanting eyes, occupies most of Asia and America. The Negro type, with black skin, flat nose and thick lips, inhabits Africa south of the Equator, and similar people are in south India and Australia; while Europe, the Near East and north Africa are inhabited by races whom we may call "white" for convenience. These latter can be further divided up into fair northern people and dark southerners, as long as we remember not to separate them too sharply, as they frequently overlap.<br /><br />As for the great change in people's lives, we can sum that up by saying that Man has become a Farmer! He keeps cows, sheep, pigs and goats, and he uses their milk. He has given up hunting horses for food, yet he has not begun to use them as he did later. But the dog has obviously been his friend for a long time, and goes with him into the gloomy depths of the forest when he hunts the red deer, the bison, the giant ox, the wild boar and the fox. We can only guess how animals were first tamed. Perhaps young ones were caught and kept as pets.<br /><br />People usually lived on bare hills like the Downs of south England. There was too much forest and swamp on the flat ground for people who had to graze cattle. Up there they made settlements in huts which consisted of circular pits or low stone walls covered by a thatched roof shaped like a bell-tent. These settlements were surrounded by stockades into which the cattle were driven at night to prevent them from straying, and to protect them against bears and wolves. (Much later, when the ugly habit of organised warfare was developed, there were elaborate trenches and high banks as well as ramparts of wood. You will find as good examples of these huge earth-works in Dorset and Wiltshire as anywhere in Europe.) You will not see much water on the Downs, and where it was not easy to get it from lower levels, they made artificial dew-ponds, lining a shallow pit with clay to form a moisture condenser.<br /><br /><br /><br />A New Stone Age Settlement<br /><br />(Near these earthworks terraces are sometimes found, down the hill-side. These, like the earthworks, belong to the Iron Age (p. 22).) But we know definitely that men already grew corn in the New Stone Age, another great advance on the Old Stone Age, and one which led directly to improved civilisation, as we shall see later. Now there are in various parts of the world wild plants corresponding to all our grain crops. People must have discovered that the seeds of these were a satisfying food. It must also have been observed that a seed planted in the ground produced a plant next year which yielded many seeds. Some thrifty soul thought it worth while to save a few seeds and bury them in a cleared patch of ground, and after carefully tending the green shoots next spring, he (or was it she?) was rewarded in autumn with a little crop of corn.<br /><br /><br /><br />New Stone Age Implements, Including Forms Also In Use - In The Following Early Bronze Age<br /><br />a, stone celt or hatchet; <br />b, flint spear-head; <br />c, scraper; <br />d, arrow-heads; <br />e, flint flake-knives; <br />f, core from which flint flakes are taken off; <br />g, flint awl; <br />h, flint saw; <br />i, stone hammer head. <br />For all this digging, shovels made from the shoulder-blades of deer, and picks made from their antlers, were used. Apart from polished, ground, and sharp-edged spear - and arrow-heads, very serviceable axes and hammers of this period have been found, the stone heads carefully shaped and finished, and drilled with smooth holes (a great advance, this) for the handles. The latter too have the right sort of curve, and are made of "elastic" woods. Strips of wood have been found with small triangles of flint fixed in a line, and this suggests saws. With tools like these, very profitable days could be spent down in the forest. You will find good specimens of these in the London museums.<br /><br />You have probably asked already, "How did they carry and keep their water and their milk?" And the answer is, in earthenware bowls, for the use of pottery (and with it the practice of cooking) is another improvement on the Old Stone Age. Earlier on, leather bottles were used, and these were sometimes lined with clay, if they were leaky. <br /><br /><br />We can imagine the clay lining one day going quite hard, because of some form of heat, and this is perhaps how the first jars were made. The study of primitive pottery, of the shapes and decorations, and traces of the contents, has constantly provided important clues for those who seek to solve the mysteries of early civilisation.<br /><br />Late in this period spinning and weaving were practised, both with wool, and linen made from the flax plant. It is not easy to guess how these arts were invented. But we know that baskets were made, and plaiting is a simple form of weaving. However, it is a long step from that to the loom.<br /><br />It is also late on in the New Stone Age that we first come across Lake-Dwellings. Instead of settlements on low hills, we find large groups of people living on lakes and big rivers. Stakes were driven into the lake or river bed and large wooden platforms built on these, connected with the shore by a gangway. On the platforms they built their huts. The lake-dwellers are hardly likely to have been merely farmers. They must have lived more by hunting and fishing, gathering nuts, fruits and herbs in the great forests of that age.<br /><br />We can trace a long chain of lake-dwellings through the Swiss and Italian lakes, south-eastwards down the Danube and north-westwards along the Rhine, through northern France and Belgium, to England, Scotland and Ireland. There was a lake-village at Glastonbury, east Somerset, as remains clearly show, and the English soldiers who hunted the rebels in Ireland in 1603 found many such settlements. They are common to-day in the East Indies.<br /><br />These features of the New Stone Age, improved tools, crops and cattle, cooking, weaving and pottery, bring it nearer to life as we know it. And there is no big, mysterious gap between the end of the New Stone Age and the present day. We know from drawings of circles and crescents that people were already observing the sun and the moon, as we should expect farmers to do. And we have reason to think that they were already beginning to study numbers and to consider some lucky, like twelve, because it split up so conveniently, and others unlucky, like thirteen, because it was so very awkward. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br />But we still have to deal with the most impressive relics of this age, namely, circles of large stones, surrounded by earthworks and approached by stone-edged avenues. It so happens that by far the largest and most magnificent of all these monuments known to us was set up at Avebury, a few miles west of Marlborough, in east Wiltshire. But it was almost entirely destroyed not so very long ago by two farmers, who wanted the stone! There are other famous circles at Carnac, in Brittany. But the one you are most likely to see for yourselves is Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain, in Wiltshire. It is partly in ruins now, so it will be simpler to describe it as it was over three thousand years ago. Inside an earthen rampart a hundred yards across, which was approached by a perfectly straight avenue five hundred yards long, stood thirty tall blocks of stone arranged in a circle. The tops of these were linked by a circle of flat blocks, and these lintel stones were joined to each other and to the uprights by tongues and slots carved on the stones. <br /><br />Within this massive outer ring was arranged a second circle of small, separate blocks. Further in still stood, in horse-shoe formation, five pairs of tall blocks, each with its lintel stone, the central trio being taller and larger than all the rest. Within this horse-shoe lay another, composed of small separate blocks again. And finally, within this small horse-shoe lay a large flat slab of sandstone.<br /><br />The large blocks are made of local stone, but the smaller blocks and the flat stone came from Pembroke in south Wales. There are three other stones which must be mentioned. One is some little distance down the avenue, the other two are inside the earthwork, but away from the big stone circle. A person who stood and looked down the avenue over the first stone at dawn on June 21st (or the longest day) would see the sun rise. Facing the other two stones, he would, in one case, see the sun set on June 21st, in the other he would see it rise on Dec. 21st (or the shortest day). We can assume that Stonehenge was a temple, and that it was connected with Sun-worship. Those who built it must have taken their religion very seriously.<br /><br />Clustered thickly round Stonehenge are the burial mounds which are a special feature of the New Stone Age and of the first metal-using age (the Bronze Age), which immediately followed it. The New Stone Age mounds are in the form of a long oval, sometimes as much as a hundred yards long, surrounded by a low stone parapet, and some have a stone corridor leading to a stone cell inside the mound, where the actual burial took place. The round barrows, which belong to the Bronze Age, are much smaller and are shaped like a bowl turned over. <br /><br /><br />They often contain the ashes of a cremated body. Only important people, of course, were buried with so much trouble.<br /><br />You will no doubt wonder how the people of the New Stone Age, with their simple civilisation, could have cut, transported and set up the huge blocks of which Stonehenge is composed. For the uprights of the outer ring are twelve and a half feet high, and the cross-section of the lintel stones is, roughly, a three-foot square, while the uprights at the centre of the "horseshoe" are no less than twenty-two feet high. <br /><br /><br /><br />Late New Stone Age And Bronze Age Hut - The remains of a number of such huts may be seen in south-west Cornwall<br /><br />Marks on the blocks show that stone and not metal tools were used. By means of poles, used as rollers and as levers, the blocks could slowly have been hauled along by teams of men pulling their hardest at long ropes. Embankments would be built up to the hole in which the stone was to rest. The end of the stone would be levered and rolled till it dropped over the side of the embankment into the hole. Then, by ropes fastened to the top of the stone, it would be pulled upright. A similar method could be used to place the lintel stones.<br /><br />All the same, it was a tremendous engineering and building feat, which would present difficulties even to modern builders. When we remember that even larger and more numerous blocks were used at Avebury, we need not wonder that many learned men believe that these earliest temples of ours were built under the direction of settlers who brought with them the higher civilisation of the Bronze Age, passed on from Egypt, perhaps, or Crete, about which we are next to read. Lately marks have been noticed on the Avebury stones which may be carvings. At any rate, it is a curious thing that near Stonehenge there are three hundred round burial mounds, and only two long ones. As Pepys, the famous diarist, wrote in the report which he drew up for Charles II after they had visited Avebury and Stonehenge, "Hard to tell, but may yet be told."<br /><br />Exercises<br /><br />1. Look up in your dictionary:—palaeo-lithic, neo-lithic, mega-lithic, dolmen, menhir, barrow.<br /><br />2. Find out from maps and guide-books about the pre-historic remains nearest to where you live or where you are going for your next holiday. Make your own drawings of them.<br /><br />C. The Bronze Age And The Early Iron Age<br /><br />We still have to move one stage further towards civilisation before we can begin real History with the stories of separate countries, based on written records. A special feature of this period is the invention of implements with metal heads or blades. The first metal used for practical purposes was copper, which is often found in a state sufficiently pure to enable it to be used at once. It is also soft enough to be hammered or bent into shape when cold. We can imagine that one day some pieces of copper ore were accidentally put into a fire and so melted. The flat and shiny piece of metal which resulted would be curiously examined and perhaps twisted into a shape. And so Man discovered a new and very important art. Now a form of tin is often found near copper ore. Some of this tin must have been combined once with copper by some coppersmith, who noticed that the alloy made a much stronger metal. And so the Bronze Age began. Gold had been discovered earlier, but it was long used only for ornament. Iron came into general use later, and being a much more serviceable metal for hard use, it gradually ousted bronze.<br /><br />By this time the ass, the horse and the camel had been tamed to bear man and his burdens, and cattle were used for ploughing. The use of rollers, for moving heavy weights, gave some clever mechanic the idea of the Wheel, one of the most important of human inventions. So carts came into use, and chariots too, for this was a great age for warfare; and one of the first uses to which metal was put was the manufacture of swords and daggers, apart from spear- and arrow-heads and shields. Trading too grew more extensive owing to the development of the sailing-ship. As in the case of all the early inventions, we can only guess what happened. <br /><br /><br /><br />One day, when there was a strong breeze, a man, in the hollowed tree trunk which was the earliest type of boat, may have thrown a skin over some spear or harpoon which was sticking up out of the boat. And he found, to his surprise, that he was moving without any effort. <br /><br />He might have noticed that the skin was flapping merrily in the breeze, and being an intelligent fellow, he put two and two together. He fixed his spear more carefully and stretched the skin out. And so, perhaps, began the art of sailing, which reached its height in the "tea-clippers" of seventy years ago, with their acre of spread sail.<br /><br /><br /><br />While most of Europe was still in an early stage of civilisation, covered with dense forests, with no good roads, seas and rivers were the most important highways. There was a brisk traffic along the Mediterranean and up the coasts of France and Spain to Britain and the North Sea, while good use was made of the larger French and German rivers. As we shall read in the next chapter, civilisation first began to make rapid progress in the countries adjoining the east end of the Mediterranean. <br /><br /><br />Slowly, in the course of centuries, the greatest centres of civilisation moved further and further to the west. During the period we have now reached, after 1000 B.C., the wares of the Near East, particularly vessels, weapons and tools of bronze were exported to western Europe in return for metal ores. And with these oriental cargoes came new arts and new ideas.<br /><br />What did people in Western Europe look like in the early metal ages? In the Bronze Age men wrapped a square piece of cloth round their bodies from under their arms down to the knees, and kept it in place with a belt tied round the waist. In cold weather they wore cloaks, pinning the top ends round the neck. The women wore a short-sleeved bodice and a long skirt, tied round the waist. All wore moccasins, and the men had leather stockings too. Both sexes used long pins to keep their hair up. In the Iron Age, men wore a short-sleeved vest and a kilt or trousers with bright tartan designs, and sometimes a cloak. Women wore a long frock with short sleeves. Both sexes wore their hair in long plaits, and were fond of metal bracelets and collars decorated with bright enamel. In both the Bronze and Iron Ages men wore long moustaches, but shaved the rest of the face.<br /><br />And now, for a time, we must leave western Europe, still half-hidden in the mists before the dawn of History, and travel to lands in the East where great cities and temples already stood, shining clearly in the morning sun.<br /><br />Exercises<br /><br />1. Look up in your dictionary:—celt, torque, domesticate, starboard.<br /><br />2. Describe the prehistoric implements in your local museum and how they are arranged. Why are there so many of stone, so few of copper and practically none of iron?<br /><br />3. Compare Robinson Crusoe's life on the island with that of a Bronze Age man. What advantages had Crusoe?<br /><br /><br /><br />Time Diagram For Prehistoric Ages In Europe. - Each step represents 1,000 years. The dates given above are to be taken only as rough guides.<br /><br /><br /><br /> TOCJustin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-155281920516209672010-11-17T10:02:00.000-08:002010-11-17T10:06:13.816-08:00History of the USA c.1776-1945): General ReadingsB.A. History (Hons): Course 5 (A): History of The United States of America (C. 1776-1945) for Second Year<br /><br />S. No. Author Book Title Publication Priority Level Remarks<br />5.1. Harold Faulkner American Economic History 1976, Harper & Row A <br />5.2. G.N Grob Interpretation of American History: Patterns and Perspectives, vol. I 1967, Free Press<br /> A <br />5.3. Woodward, Vann C. (ed.), A Comparative Approach to American History 1968, Basic books B <br />5.4. Allen Davis & Harold Woodman (ed.) Conflict and Consensus in American History 1972 D.C Heath A <br />5.5. Richard Hofstadter The American Republic, vols. I &II 1959, Prentice-Hall A <br />5.6. Paul Boyer, Harvard Sitkoff The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People, vols. I & II 1996, Houghton Mifflin Company<br /> B <br />5.7. Hicks, John The Federal Union A History of USA to 1865 1964, Houghton Mifflin, B <br />5.8. David Kennedy, Thomas Bailey & Mel Piehl The Brief American Pageant 1993, D.C. Heath<br /> B <br />5.9. Peter Carroll & <br />David Noble, Free and Unfree: A New History of United States 1988, Penguin Books A <br />5.10. Sheehan, Donald, The Making of American History: The Emergence of a Nation, vol. I, 1963, Holt, Rinehart and Winston <br /> A <br />5.11. Charles Beard ‘The Constitution As An Economic Document’ from An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of U.S 1972, Macmillan<br /> B <br />5.12. Schlesinger, Arthur, The Age of Jackson 1953, Little, Brown A <br />5.13. Remini, Robert, Andrew Jackson 1969, Harper & Row B <br />5.14. Randall & Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction 1969, Little, Brown<br /> A <br />5.15. R. P. Kaushik, Significant Themes in American History 1983, Ajanta Publications A <br />5.16. Franklin, John Hope, From Slavery to Freedom 1968, Knopf A <br />5.17. Stampp, Kenneth, The Imperilled Union (Reference) 1981, Oxford University Press, B <br />5.18. Hacker United States since 1865 1962, Appleton-Century-Crofts A <br />5.19. Hicks, John, The Populist Revolt 1961, University of Nebraska Press B <br />5.20. Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR 1989, Knof AJustin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-22517129708383924052010-11-17T10:00:00.000-08:002010-11-17T10:01:31.092-08:00Ancient and Medieval : Reading ListB.A. History (Hons): Course 2: ‘Social Formations and Cultural Patterns of the Ancient and Medieval World’ for First Year<br /><br />S. No. Author Book Title Publication Priority Level Remarks<br />2.1. Perry Anderson <br /> Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. Verso, 1996 A <br />2.2. J. D.Bernal. Science in History, Vol I. Penguin, 1969 B <br />2.3. Marc Bloch Feudal Society, 2 Vols. Taylor & Francis, 2004 A <br />2.4. Burns and Ralph. World Civilisations. W.W Norton, 1984 B <br />2.5. V Gordon Childe. What Happened in History. Harmondsworth, 1942; Penguin, 1964 A Also available in Hindi<br />2.6. V. Gordon Childe. Social Evolution. Meridian Books, 1963 B <br />2.7. Georges Duby. The Early Growth of the European Economy. Cornell University Press, 1978 B <br />2.8. Glyn Daniel. First Civilizations Penguin, 1978 B <br />2.9. B. Fagan. People of the Earth: An Introduction World Pre-History Little Brown, Boston, 1986 A <br />2.10. Amar Farouqi Early Social Formations Manak Publications Pvt. Ltd, 2001 A Also Available in Hindi as Prachin aur Madhyakalin Samajik Sanrachnaen aur Sanskritiyan, Granthashilpi, New Delhi, 2003<br /><br />2.11. M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy. Penguin, 1992 A <br />2.12. Carlo M. Cipolla Fontana Economic History of Europe. Vol. I: The Middle Ages Barnes & Noble 1977 B <br />2.13. A. Hauser.<br /> A Social History of Art. Vol. I Routledge & kegan Paul, 1968 B <br />2.14. Jacquetta Hawkes. First Great Civilisations. Hutchinson, 1973 B <br />2.15. P. K. Hitti History of the Arabs Macmillian, 1970 B <br />2.16. George Roux,.<br /> Ancient Iraq Penguin, 1980 B <br />2.17. Bai Shouyi. An Outline History of China. Foreign Languages Press, 1993 B <br />2.18. B.Trigger. D. O’Corner, AB loyd (Ed.)<br /> Ancient Egypt: A Social History Cambridge University Press, 1983 B <br />2.19. UNESCO UNESCO Series: History of Mankind. J P Mohen et al (eds.) Vols. 1 - III. / New ed. History of Humanity, UNESCO Publication, London Routledge1994-1996 Routledge A <br />2.20. R. J. Wenke. Patterns in Prehistory: Mankind First Three Million Years Oxford University Press, 1984 A <br />2.21. Ameer Ali, <br /> The Spirit of Islam. Taj Publishers, 1999 B <br />2.22. G. Barraclough<br /> The Medieval Papacy. Thames and Hudson Ltd. 1968 B <br />2.23. K. C. Chang,. The Archaeology of Ancient China Yale University Press, 1977 B <br />2.24. V. Gordon Childe Man Makes Himself Moonraker Press, 1981 B Also available in Hindi<br />2.25. M. I. Finley. The Ancient Greeks Penguin, 1971 B <br />2.26. M. I. Finley Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology Penguin, 1983 A <br />2.27. J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages. / Revised ed. The Autumn of<br />The Middle Ages. Penguin, 1965 B <br />2.28. M. G. S. Hodgson. The Venture of Islam. University of Chicago Press, 1977 B <br />2.29. Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free. Routledge, 1990 B <br />2.30. Rodney Hilton, Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism Verso, 1976 and Aakar Books for South Asia, 2006 A <br />2.31. A. H. M. Jones Decline of the Ancient World Longmens, 1966 B <br />2.32. Joseph Needham. Science and Civilisation in China. Vol. 1 Cambridge University Press, 1962 A <br />2.33. A. L. Oppenheim. Ancient Mesopotamia University of Chicago Press, 1977 B <br />2.34. J. N. Postgate Early Mesopotamia. Routledge, 1992 A <br />2.35. John Boardman et al. (eds) Oxford History of the Classical World OUP, 1986 A <br />2.36. Antony Andrews Greek Society Harmondsworth, 1992 A <br />2.37. E M Wood Peasant-Citizens and Slave: The Foundation of Athenian Democracy London: Verso, 1988 B <br />2.38. P. A. Brunt Social Conflicts in the Roman Republic London: Chatto and Windus, 1971 A <br />2.39. Richard Leaky The Making of Mankind Penguin, 1981 B <br />2.40. J. N. Postgate Early Mesopotamia. Routledge, 1992 A <br />2.41. George Duby The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined Chicago: The University Press, 1980 A <br />2.42. M I Finley Economy and Society in Ancient Grece Penguin, 1980 B <br />2.43. T H Aston and CHE Philipin (eds.) Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre Industrial Europe Cambridge, 1987 B <br />2.44. J N Postgate Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History London: Routledge, 1992 A <br />2.45. Graham Clark World Prehistory in New Perspective Cambridge: CUP, 1977 B <br />2.46. P. M. Holt et al (eds) The Cambridge History of Islam, Vol. I: The Central Islamic Lands Cambridge, 1970. A <br />2.47. Patricia Crone The Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988 AJustin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-15770727082431685782010-11-17T04:45:00.000-08:002010-11-17T04:49:50.456-08:00Chronology of the 1850's Sectional StruggleCHRONOLOGY<br />1846 Wilmot Proviso fuses question of slavery's expansion with consequences of Mexican War. Walker tariff, adopted for revenue only, eliminates principle of protection.<br />1848 Gold discovered on American River in California. Van Buren, running for president on Free-Soil ticket, receives 10 percent of popular vote. Zachary Taylor elected president.<br />1850 In Congress, violent sectional debate culminates in Compromise of 1850. Fugitive Slave Law requires federal agents to recover escaped slaves from sanctuaries in the North. Taylor's death makes Millard Fillmore president.<br />1851 Herman Melville's Moby Dick.<br />1852 Franklin Pierce elected president. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.<br />1853 Upsurge of political nativism, the Know-Nothings.<br />1854 Spectacular Know-Nothing election victories. Collapse of Whigs.<br />1854 New Republican party emerges. Commodore Perry opens Japan to American trade. Kansas-Nebraska Act rekindles sectional controversy over slavery.<br />1856 John Brown's murderous raid at Pottawatomie Creek. James Buchanan elected president.<br />1857 Dred Scott decision. In Kansas, proslavery Lecompton constitution ratified as free-state men refuse to vote.<br />1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.<br />1859 John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry.<br />1860 Democratic party deadlocked at Charleston convention finally divides along sectional lines at Baltimore. Abraham Lincoln elected president. South Carolina secedes from the Union.<br />1861 Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas secede.<br />(Bernard Bailyn, The Great Republic Page 461)Justin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-49558042315039341602010-11-17T04:04:00.001-08:002010-11-17T04:09:23.086-08:00Ancient and Medieval Societies: Course OutlineDelhi University <br />BA (Hon) History Course No II<br /><br />SOCIAL FORMATIONS AND CULTURAL PATTERNS OF THE ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL WORLD<br />NOTE : Students shall be expected to answer four questions, selecting AT LEAST ONE FROM EACH UNIT<br /> <br />UNIT : I<br />I. Evolution of humankind; Palaeolithic and Mesolithic cultures. E Food production : beginnings of agriculture and animal husbandry, in. Bronze Age Civilizations:<br />[a] Economy. [b] social stratification. [c] religion and [d] state structure.<br />{Either (i) EGYPT (Old Kingdom) OR MESOPOTAMIA (up to the Akkadian Empire)<br />AND (ii) either CHINA (Shang) OR EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN (Minoan)}<br />IV Nomadic groups in Central and West Asia <br />UNIT: II<br />V The advent of iron and its implications<br />VI. Slave societies in ancient Greece and Rome: agrarian economy,<br />urbanisation and trade.<br />VII. Political apparatus: Athenian democracy and Roman Republic; Roman<br />Empire; Greek and Roman cultures.<br />VEL Crises of Roman Empire.<br />UNIT: III<br />IX. Subsistence economy to feudal dynamism in Europe from (the 7th to<br />the 15th centuries : organisation of production, towns and trade,<br />technological developments. Crisis of feudalism.<br />X. Religion and culture in medieval Europe :<br />[a] Rise of Papacy, [b] monastic revival and [c] arts and patronage.<br />XI. Societies in Central Islamic Lands:<br />[a] The tribal background, ummah. Caliphal state; rise of Sultanates<br />[b] Religious developments: the origins of Shariah, Milma, Sufism,<br />[cj Urbanisation and trade [d] architecture.<br />XII. Scientific and technological developments either in Islamic societies<br />or Medieval China.Justin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-458890110332009032010-11-17T03:18:00.000-08:002010-11-17T03:53:26.000-08:00History of the USA c.1776-1945) Course OutlineDelhi University <br />BA (Hon) History Course No V(a) <br />HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (c.1776-1945)<br />NOTE : Students shall be expected to answer four questions, Selecting<br />AT LEAST ONE QUESTION FROM EACH UNIT.<br />UNIT: I<br />L The Background:<br />The land and indigenous people; settlement and colonisation by Europeans; early colonial society and politics: indentured labour — White and Black.<br />II. Making of the Republic:<br />[a] Revolution Sources of conflict: Revolutionary groups. Ideology: The War of<br />Independence and its historical interpretations. [b\ Processes, and Features of Constitution making : Debates : Historical<br />interpretations.<br />III. Evolution of American Democracy:<br />[a] Federalists : Jeffersonianisin : Jaeksonianism. Rise of political parties 1840 to 1860 ; Judiciary — role of the Supreme Court.<br />17<br /> <br />|b| Expansion of Frontier; Turner's Thesis: Marginalization.Displacement and decimation of native Americans: Case histories of: Tecumseh : Shawnee Prophet.<br />Id Limits of democracy . Blacks and women .<br />IV. Early Capitalism:<br />|a| Beginnings of industrialisation .<br />|b] Immigrants and changing composition of Labour: Early Labour Movements.<br />UNIT : II<br />V. The Agrarian South:<br />[a] Plantation economy, [b] Slave Society and Culture: Slave resistance.<br />VL Ante Bellum Foreign Policy:<br />War of 1812: Monroe Doctrine: Manifest Destiny.<br />VII. Civil War:<br />[a] Abolitionism and Sectionalism, [b] Issues and interpretations, and [c] Rise of Republicanism. Emancipation and Lincoln.<br />VIII. Reconstructions: Political changes and agrarian transformation :<br />[a] Conservative and Radical phases.<br />[b] The New South: Participants and Reactions - Carpet Baggers:<br />Scalawags. Blacks. Ku KIux Klan.<br />UNIT : III<br />IX. Industrial America:<br />[a] Growth of Capitalism and Big Business, [bj Business cycles; Depression.<br />X. Resistance and Reform:<br />|aj Labour movements and Unionization.<br />[b| Agrarian crises and populism. Urban corruption and progressivism.<br />[c] New Deal.<br />XI. U. S. Imperialism:<br />(a) Spanish-American War; (b) Expansion in the Far East and Latin America; (c) World War I and Fourteen Points: (d) Isolationism; (e) Americans in World War II. Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.<br />18<br /> <br />XII. Afro-American Movements: Black Movements: Booker T. Washington,W.E.B. Dubois; NAACP and Marcus Gnrvey.<br />XIII. Women's Movements:<br />[a| Rise of [he Lowell Factor) System |b| Abolitionists and Women' s rights movement [c| Suffrage |d| Afro-American women.<br />XIV. Religious, Cultural and Intellectual Trends.<br />la] Religious movements; Early Revivalism; Puritans; Quakers; Mormons; Temperance.<br />[b] Mass culture (circa 1900 - 1945).<br />[c] Major literary trends (circa 1900-1945).Justin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-21757832039581243392010-11-17T02:33:00.000-08:002010-11-17T10:07:05.453-08:00Political Map of the US Free Vs. Slave States 1850s<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-WRs117_Ps6-OLYaPI23OooLDBePxH8fYPBV-eI0KMnD7DLOvDQxaboof56KZ0Lvrr2DUwwa2EnlPC0kTkIxJnnwu4tqKEvDu6QvKFbjL8iBHWchEqa43MHP1fM7sw0hhyphenhyphenUa_i6Pp7UA/s1600/e2a443d8d4.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 278px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-WRs117_Ps6-OLYaPI23OooLDBePxH8fYPBV-eI0KMnD7DLOvDQxaboof56KZ0Lvrr2DUwwa2EnlPC0kTkIxJnnwu4tqKEvDu6QvKFbjL8iBHWchEqa43MHP1fM7sw0hhyphenhyphenUa_i6Pp7UA/s320/e2a443d8d4.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5540465284057797330" /></a>Justin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-30945541228259673712010-11-16T23:20:00.001-08:002010-11-16T23:20:59.649-08:00Uncle Tom's Cabin Chapter XXXUncle Tom's Cabin <br />Harriet Beecher Stowe<br />Boston: John P. Jewett, 1852<br /><br />CHAPTER XXX.<br /><br />THE SLAVE WAREHOUSE.<br /><br /> A SLAVE warehouse! Perhaps some of my readers conjure up horrible visions of such a place. They fancy some foul, obscure den, some horrible Tartarus "informis, ingens, cui lumen ademptum." But no, innocent friend; in these days men have learned the art of sinning expertly and genteelly, so as not to shock the eyes and senses of respectable society. Human property is high in the market; and is, therefore, well fed, well cleaned, tended, and looked after, that it may come to sale sleek, and strong, and shining. A slave-warehouse in New Orleans is a house externally not much unlike many others, kept with neatness; and where every day you may see arranged, under a sort of shed along the outside, rows of men and women, who stand there as a sign of the property sold within.<br /><br /> Then you shall be courteously entreated to call and examine, and shall find an abundance of husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, and young children, to be "sold separately, or in lots to suit the convenience of the purchaser;" and that soul immortal, once bought with blood and anguish by the Son of God, when the earth shook, and the rocks rent, and the graves were opened, can be sold, leased, mortgaged, exchanged for groceries or dry goods, to suit the phases of trade, or the fancy of the purchaser.<br /><br /> It was a day or two after the conversation between Marie and Miss Ophelia, that Tom, Adolph, and about half a dozen others of the St. Clare estate, were turned over to the loving <br /><br /><br />155<br /><br />kindness of Mr. Skeggs, the keeper of a depot on —— street, to await the auction, next day.<br /> Tom had with him quite a sizable trunk full of clothing, as had most others of them. They were ushered, for the night, into a long room, where many other men, of all ages, sizes, and shades of complexion, were assembled, and from which roars of laughter and unthinking merriment were proceeding.<br /><br /> "Ah, ha! that's right. Go it, boys,—go it!" said Mr. Skeggs, the keeper. "My people are always so merry! Sambo, I see!" he said, speaking approvingly to a burly negro who was performing tricks of low buffoonery, which occasioned the shouts which Tom had heard.<br /><br /> As might be imagined, Tom was in no humor to join these proceedings; and, therefore, setting his trunk as far as possible from the noisy group, he sat down on it, and leaned his face against the wall.<br /><br /> The dealers in the human article make scrupulous and systematic efforts to promote noisy mirth among them, as a means of drowning reflection, and rendering them insensible to their condition. The whole object of the training to which the negro is put, from the time he is sold in the northern market till he arrives south, is systematically directed towards making him callous, unthinking, and brutal. The slave-dealer collects his gang in Virginia or Kentucky, and drives them to some convenient, healthy place,—often a watering place,—to be fattened. Here they are fed full daily; and, because some incline to pine, a fiddle is kept commonly going among them, and they are made to dance daily; and he who refuses to be merry—in whose soul thoughts of wife, or child, or home, are too strong for him to be gay—is marked as sullen and dangerous, and subjected to all the evils which the ill will of an utterly irresponsible and hardened man can <br /><br /><br />156<br /><br />inflict upon him. Briskness, alertness, and cheerfulness of appearance, especially before observers, are constantly enforced upon them, both by the hope of thereby getting a good master, and the fear of all that the driver may bring upon them if they prove unsalable.<br /> "What dat ar nigger doin here?" said Sambo, coming up to Tom, after Mr. Skeggs had left the room. Sambo was a full black, of great size, very lively, voluble, and full of trick and grimace.<br /><br /> "What you doin here?" said Sambo, coming up to Tom, and poking him facetiously in the side. "Meditatin', eh?"<br /><br /> "I am to be sold at the auction, to-morrow!" said Tom, quietly.<br /><br /> "Sold at auction,—haw! haw! boys, an't this yer fun? I wish't I was gwine that ar way!—tell ye, wouldn't I make em laugh? But how is it,—dis yer whole lot gwine to-morrow?" said Sambo, laying his hand freely on Adolph's shoulder.<br /><br /> "Please to let me alone!" said Adolph, fiercely, straightening himself up, with extreme disgust.<br /><br /> "Law, now, boys! dis yer's one o' yer white niggers,—kind o' cream color, ye know, scented!" said he, coming up to Adolph and snuffing. "O Lor! he'd do for a tobaccer-shop; they could keep him to scent snuff! Lor, he'd keep a whole shop agwine,—he would!"<br /><br /> "I say, keep off, can't you?" said Adolph, enraged.<br /><br /> "Lor, now, how touchy we is,—we white niggers! Look at us now!" and Sambo gave a ludicrous imitation of Adolph's manner; "here's de airs and graces. We's been in a good family, I specs."<br /><br /> "Yes," said Adolph; "I had a master that could have bought you all for old truck!"<br /><br />157<br /><br /> "Laws, now, only think," said Sambo, "the gentlemens that we is!"<br /><br /> "I belonged to the St. Clare family," said Adolph, proudly.<br /><br /> "Lor, you did! Be hanged if they ar'n't lucky to get shet of ye. Spects they's gwine to trade ye off with a lot o' cracked tea-pots and sich like!" said Sambo, with a provoking grin.<br /><br /> Adolph, enraged at this taunt, flew furiously at his adversary, swearing and striking on every side of him. The rest laughed and shouted, and the uproar brought the keeper to the door.<br /><br /> "What now, boys? Order,—order!" he said, coming in and flourishing a large whip.<br /><br /> All fled in different directions, except Sambo, who, presuming on the favor which the keeper had to him as a licensed wag, stood his ground, ducking his head with a facetious grin, whenever the master made a dive at him.<br /><br /> "Lor, Mas'r, 'tan't us,—we 's reglar stiddy,—it's these yer new hands; they 's real aggravatin',—kinder pickin' at us, all time!"<br /><br /> The keeper, at this, turned upon Tom and Adolph, and distributing a few kicks and cuffs without much inquiry, and leaving general orders for all to be good boys and go to sleep, left the apartment.<br /><br /> While this scene was going on in the men's sleeping-room, the reader may be curious to take a peep at the corresponding apartment allotted to the women. Stretched out in various attitudes over the floor, he may see numberless sleeping forms of every shade of complexion, from the purest ebony to white, and of all years, from childhood to old age, lying now asleep. Here is a fine bright girl, of ten years, whose mother was sold <br /><br /><br />158<br /><br />out yesterday, and who to-night cried herself to sleep when nobody was looking at her. Here, a worn old negress, whose thin arms and callous fingers tell of hard toil, waiting to be sold to-morrow, as a cast-off article, for what can be got for her; and some forty or fifty others, with heads variously enveloped in blankets or articles of clothing, lie stretched around them. But, in a corner, sitting apart from the rest, are two females of a more interesting appearance than common. One of these is a respectably-dressed mulatto woman between forty and fifty, with soft eyes and a gentle and pleasing physiognomy. She has on her head a high-raised turban, made of a gay red Madras handkerchief, of the first quality, and her dress is neatly fitted, and of good material, showing that she has been provided for with a careful hand. By her side, and nestling closely to her, is a young girl of fifteen,—her daughter. She is a quadroon, as may be seen from her fairer complexion, though her likeness to her mother is quite discernible. She has the same soft, dark eye, with longer lashes, and her curling hair is of a luxuriant brown. She also is dressed with great neatness, and her white, delicate hands betray very little acquaintance with servile toil. These two are to be sold to-morrow, in the same lot with the St. Clare servants; and the gentleman to whom they belong, and to whom the money for their sale is to be transmitted, is a member of a Christian church in New York, who will receive the money, and go thereafter to the sacrament of his Lord and theirs, and think no more of it.<br /> These two, whom we shall call Susan and Emmeline, had been the personal attendants of an amiable and pious lady of New Orleans, by whom they had been carefully and piously instructed and trained. They had been taught to read and write, diligently instructed in the truths of religion, and their <br /><br /><br />159<br /><br />lot had been as happy an one as in their condition it was possible to be. But the only son of their protectress had the management of her property; and, by carelessness and extravagance involved it to a large amount, and at last failed. One of the largest creditors was the respectable firm of B. & Co., in New York. B. & Co. wrote to their lawyer in New Orleans, who attached the real estate (these two articles and a lot of plantation hands formed the most valuable part of it), and wrote word to that effect to New York. Brother B., being, as we have said, a Christian man, and a resident in a free State, felt some uneasiness on the subject. He didn't like trading in slaves and souls of men,—of course, he didn't; but, then, there were thirty thousand dollars in the case, and that was rather too much money to be lost for a principle; and so, after much considering, and asking advice from those that he knew would advise to suit him, Brother B. wrote to his lawyer to dispose of the business in the way that seemed to him the most suitable, and remit the proceeds.<br /> The day after the letter arrived in New Orleans, Susan and Emmeline were attached, and sent to the depot to await a general auction on the following morning; and as they glimmer faintly upon us in the moonlight which steals through the grated window, we may listen to their conversation. Both are weeping, but each quietly, that the other may not hear.<br /><br /> "Mother, just lay your head on my lap, and see if you can't sleep a little," says the girl, trying to appear calm.<br /><br /> "I haven't any heart to sleep, Em; I can't; it's the last night we may be together!"<br /><br /> "O, mother, don't say so! perhaps we shall get sold together,—who knows?"<br /><br /> "If 't was anybody's else case, I should say so, too, Em," <br /><br /><br />160<br /><br />said the woman; "but I'm so feard of losin' you that I don't see anything but the danger."<br /> "Why, mother, the man said we were both likely, and would sell well."<br /><br /> Susan remembered the man's looks and words. With a deadly sickness at her heart, she remembered how he had looked at Emmeline's hands, and lifted up her curly hair, and pronounced her a first-rate article. Susan had been trained as a Christian, brought up in the daily reading of the Bible, and had the same horror of her child's being sold to a life of shame that any other Christian mother might have; but she had no hope,—no protection.<br /><br /> "Mother, I think we might do first rate, if you could get a place as cook, and I as chamber-maid or seamstress, in some family. I dare say we shall. Let's both look as bright and lively as we can, and tell all we can do, and perhaps we shall," said Emmeline.<br /><br /> "I want you to brush your hair all back straight, to-morrow," said Susan.<br /><br /> "What for, mother? I don't look near so well, that way."<br /><br /> "Yes, but you'll sell better so."<br /><br /> "I don't see why!" said the child.<br /><br /> "Respectable families would be more apt to buy you, if they saw you looked plain and decent, as if you wasn't trying to look handsome. I know their ways better 'n you do," said Susan.<br /><br /> "Well, mother, then I will."<br /><br /> "And, Emmeline, if we shouldn't ever see each other again, after to-morrow,—if I'm sold way up on a plantation somewhere, and you somewhere else,—always remember how you've been brought up, and all Missis has told you; take <br /><br /><br />161<br /><br />your Bible with you, and your hymn-book; and if you're faithful to the Lord, he'll be faithful to you."<br /> So speaks the poor soul, in sore discouragement; for she knows that to-morrow any man, however vile and brutal, however godless and merciless, if he only has money to pay for her, may become owner of her daughter, body and soul; and then, how is the child to be faithful? She thinks of all this, as she holds her daughter in her arms, and wishes that she were not handsome and attractive. It seems almost an aggravation to her to remember how purely and piously, how much above the ordinary lot, she has been brought up. But she has no resort but to pray; and many such prayers to God have gone up from those same trim, neatly-arranged, respectable slave-prisons,—prayers which God has not forgotten, as a coming day shall show; for it is written, "Who causeth one of these little ones to offend, it were better for him that a mill-stone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea."<br /><br /> The soft, earnest, quiet moonbeam looks in fixedly, marking the bars of the grated windows on the prostrate, sleeping forms. The mother and daughter are singing together a wild and melancholy dirge, common as a funeral hymn among the slaves:<br /><br />"O, where is weeping Mary?<br />O, where is weeping Mary?<br />'Rived in the goodly land.<br />She is dead and gone to Heaven;<br />She is dead and gone to Heaven;<br />'Rived in the goodly land."<br /> These words, sung by voices of a peculiar and melancholy sweetness, in an air which seemed like the sighing of earthly despair after heavenly hope, floated through the dark prison <br /><br /><br />162<br /><br />rooms with a pathetic cadence, as verse after verse was breathed out:<br />"O, where are Paul and Silas?<br />O, where are Paul and Silas?<br />Gone to the goodly land.<br />They are dead and gone to Heaven;<br />They are dead and gone to Heaven;<br />'Rived in the goodly land."<br /> Sing on, poor souls! The night is short, and the morning will part you forever!<br /><br /> But now it is morning, and everybody is astir; and the worthy Mr. Skeggs is busy and bright, for a lot of goods is to be fitted out for auction. There is a brisk look-out on the toilet; injunctions passed around to every one to put on their best face and be spry; and now all are arranged in a circle for a last review, before they are marched up to the Bourse.<br /><br /> Mr. Skeggs, with his palmetto on and his cigar in his mouth, walks around to put farewell touches on his wares.<br /><br /> "How's this?" he said, stepping in front of Susan and Emmeline. "Where's your curls, gal?"<br /><br /> The girl looked timidly at her mother, who, with the smooth adroitness common among her class, answers,<br /><br /> "I was telling her, last night, to put up her hair smooth and neat, and not havin' it flying about in curls; looks more respectable so."<br /><br /> "Bother!" said the man, peremptorily, turning to the girl; "you go right along, and curl yourself real smart!" He added, giving a crack to a rattan he held in his hand, "And be back in quick time, too!"<br /><br /> "You go and help her," he added, to the mother. "Them curls may make a hundred dollars difference in the sale of her."<br /><br />* * * * * * *<br /><br />163<br /><br /> Beneath a splendid dome were men of all nations, moving to and fro, over the marble pave. On every side of the circular area were little tribunes, or stations, for the use of speakers and auctioneers. Two of these, on opposite sides of the area, were now occupied by brilliant and talented gentlemen, enthusiastically forcing up, in English and French commingled, the bids of connoisseurs in their various wares. A third one, on the other side, still unoccupied, was surrounded by a group, waiting the moment of sale to begin. And here we may recognize the St. Clare servants,—Tom, Adolph, and others; and there, too, Susan and Emmeline, awaiting their turn with anxious and dejected faces. Various spectators, intending to purchase, or not intending, as the case might be, gathered around the group, handling, examining, and commenting on their various points and faces with the same freedom that a set of jockeys discuss the merits of a horse.<br /><br /> "Hulloa, Alf! what brings you here?" said a young exquisite, slapping the shoulder of a sprucely-dressed young man, who was examining Adolph through an eye-glass.<br /><br /> "Well! I was wanting a valet, and I heard that St. Clare's lot was going. I thought I'd just look at his—"<br /><br /> "Catch me ever buying any of St. Clare's people! Spoilt niggers, every one. Impudent as the devil!" said the other.<br /><br /> "Never fear that!" said the first. "If I get 'em, I'll soon have their airs out of them; they'll soon find that they've another kind of master to deal with than Monsieur St. Clare. 'Pon my word, I'll buy that fellow. I like the shape of him."<br /><br /> "You'll find it'll take all you've got to keep him. He's deucedly extravagant!"<br /><br />164<br /><br /> "Yes, but my lord will find that he can't be extravagant with me. Just let him be sent to the calaboose a few times, and thoroughly dressed down! I'll tell you if it don't bring him to a sense of his ways! O, I'll reform him, up hill and down,—you'll see. I buy him, that's flat!"<br /><br /> Tom had been standing wistfully examining the multitude of faces thronging around him, for one whom he would wish to call master. And if you should ever be under the necessity, sir, of selecting, out of two hundred men, one who was to become your absolute owner and disposer, you would, perhaps, realize, just as Tom did, how few there were that you would feel at all comfortable in being made over to. Tom saw abundance of men,—great, burly, gruff men; little, chirping, dried men; long-favored, lank, hard men; and every variety of stubbed-looking, commonplace men, who pick up their fellow-men as one picks up chips, putting them into the fire or a basket with equal unconcern, according to their convenience; but he saw no St. Clare.<br /><br /> A little before the sale commenced, a short, broad, muscular man, in a checked shirt considerably open at the bosom, and pantaloons much the worse for dirt and wear, elbowed his way through the crowd, like one who is going actively into a business; and, coming up to the group, began to examine them systematically. From the moment that Tom saw him approaching, he felt an immediate and revolting horror at him, that increased as he came near. He was evidently, though short, of gigantic strength. His round, bullet head, large, light-gray eyes, with their shaggy, sandy eye-brows, and stiff, wiry, sun-burned hair, were rather unprepossessing items, it is to be confessed; his large, coarse mouth was distended with tobacco, the juice of which, from time to time, he ejected from him with great decision and <br /><br /><br />165<br /><br />explosive force; his hands were immensely large, hairy, sun-burned, freckled, and very dirty, and garnished with long nails, in a very foul condition. This man proceeded to a very free personal examination of the lot. He seized Tom by the jaw, and pulled open his mouth to inspect his teeth; made him strip up his sleeve, to show his muscle; turned him round, made him jump and spring, to show his paces.<br /> "Where was you raised?" he added, briefly, to these investigations.<br /><br /> "In Kintuck, Mas'r," said Tom, looking about, as if for deliverance.<br /><br /> "What have you done?"<br /><br /> "Had care of Mas'r's farm," said Tom.<br /><br /> "Likely story!" said the other, shortly, as he passed on. He paused a moment before Dolph; then spitting a discharge of tobacco-juice on his well-blacked boots, and giving a contemptuous umph, he walked on. Again he stopped before Susan and Emmeline. He put out his heavy, dirty hand, and drew the girl towards him; passed it over her neck and bust, felt her arms, looked at her teeth, and then pushed her back against her mother, whose patient face showed the suffering she had been going through at every motion of the hideous stranger.<br /><br /> The girl was frightened, and began to cry.<br /><br /> "Stop that, you minx!" said the salesman; "no whimpering here,—the sale is going to begin." And accordingly the sale begun.<br /><br /> Adolph was knocked off, at a good sum, to the young gentlemen who had previously stated his intention of buying him; and the other servants of the St. Clare lot went to various bidders.<br /><br />166<br /><br /> "Now, up with you, boy! d'ye hear?" said the auctioneer to Tom.<br /><br /> Tom stepped upon the block, gave a few anxious looks round; all seemed mingled in a common, indistinct noise,—the clatter of the salesman crying off his qualifications in French and English, the quick fire of French and English bids; and almost in a moment came the final thump of the hammer, and the clear ring on the last syllable of the word "dollars," as the auctioneer announced his price, and Tom was made over.—He had a master!<br /><br /> He was pushed from the block;—the short, bullet-headed man seizing him roughly by the shoulder, pushed him to one side, saying, in a harsh voice, "Stand there, you!"<br /><br /> Tom hardly realized anything; but still the bidding went on,—rattling, clattering, now French, now English. Down goes the hammer again,—Susan is sold! She goes down from the block, stops, looks wistfully back,—her daughter stretches her hands towards her. She looks with agony in the face of the man who has bought her,—a respectable middle-aged man, of benevolent countenance.<br /><br /> "O, Mas'r, please do buy my daughter!"<br /><br /> "I'd like to, but I'm afraid I can't afford it!" said the gentleman, looking, with painful interest, as the young girl mounted the block, and looked around her with a frightened and timid glance.<br /><br /> The blood flushes painfully in her otherwise colorless cheek, her eye has a feverish fire, and her mother groans to see that she looks more beautiful than she ever saw her before. The auctioneer sees his advantage, and expatiates volubly in mingled French and English, and bids rise in rapid succession.<br /><br /> "I'll do anything in reason," said the benevolent-looking <br /><br /><br />167<br /><br />gentleman, pressing in and joining with the bids. In a few moments they have run beyond his purse. He is silent; the auctioneer grows warmer; but bids gradually drop off. It lies now between an aristocratic old citizen and our bullet-headed acquaintance. The citizen bids for a few turns, contemptuously measuring his opponent; but the bullet-head has the advantage over him, both in obstinacy and concealed length of purse, and the controversy lasts but a moment; the hammer falls,—he has got the girl, body and soul, unless God help her!<br /> Her master is Mr. Legree, who owns a cotton plantation on the Red river. She is pushed along into the same lot with Tom and two other men, and goes off, weeping as she goes.<br /><br /> The benevolent gentleman is sorry; but, then, the thing happens every day! One sees girls and mothers crying, at these sales, always! it can't be helped, &c.; and he walks off, with his acquisition, in another direction.<br /><br /> Two days after, the lawyer of the Christian firm of B. & Co., New York, sent on their money to them. On the reverse of that draft, so obtained, let them write these words of the great Paymaster, to whom they shall make up their account in a future day: "When he maketh inquisition for blood, he forgetteth not the cry of the humble!"Justin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-37201459251794788612010-11-16T23:17:00.000-08:002010-11-17T03:57:32.897-08:00Uncle Tom's Cabin Chapter XUncle Tom's Cabin <br />Harriet Beecher Stowe<br />Boston: John P. Jewett, 1852<br /><br />CHAPTER X. <br /><br />THE PROPERTY IS CARRIED OFF.<br /><br /> THE February morning looked gray and drizzling through the window of Uncle Tom's cabin. It looked on downcast faces, the images of mournful hearts. The little table stood out before the fire, covered with an ironing-cloth; a coarse but clean shirt or two, fresh from the iron, hung on the back of a chair by the fire, and Aunt Chloe had another spread out before her on the table. Carefully she rubbed and ironed every fold and every hem, with the most scrupulous exactness, every now and then raising her hand to her face to wipe off the tears that were coursing down her cheeks.<br /><br /> Tom sat by, with his Testament open on his knee, and his head leaning upon his hand;—but neither spoke. It was yet early, and the children lay all asleep together in their little rude trundle-bed.<br /><br /> Tom, who had, to the full, the gentle, domestic heart, which, woe for them! has been a peculiar characteristic of his unhappy race, got up and walked silently to look at his children.<br /><br /> "It's the last time," he said.<br /><br /> Aunt Chloe did not answer, only rubbed away over and <br /><br /><br />141<br /><br />over on the coarse shirt, already as smooth as hands could make it; and finally setting her iron suddenly down with a despairing plunge, she sat down to the table, and "lifted up her voice and wept."<br /> "S'pose we must be resigned; but oh Lord! how ken I? If I know'd anything whar you 's goin', or how they'd sarve you! Missis says she'll try and 'deem ye, in a year or two; but Lor! nobody never comes up that goes down thar! They kills 'em! I've hearn 'em tell how dey works 'em up on dem ar plantations."<br /><br /> "There'll be the same God there, Chloe, that there is here."<br /><br /> "Well," said Aunt Chloe, "s'pose dere will; but de Lord lets drefful things happen, sometimes. I don't seem to get no comfort dat way."<br /><br /> "I'm in the Lord's hands," said Tom; "nothin' can go no furder than he lets it;—and thar's one thing I can thank him for. It's me that's sold and going down, and not you nur the chil'en. Here you're safe;—what comes will come only on me; and the Lord, he'll help me,—I know he will."<br /><br /> Ah, brave, manly heart,—smothering thine own sorrow, to comfort thy beloved ones! Tom spoke with a thick utterance, and with a bitter choking in his throat,—but he spoke brave and strong.<br /><br /> "Let's think on our marcies!" he added, tremulously, as if he was quite sure he needed to think on them very hard indeed.<br /><br /> "Marcies!" said Aunt Chloe; "don't see no marcy in 't! 'tan't right! tan't right it should be so! Mas'r never ought ter left it so that ye could be took for his debts. Ye've arnt him all he gets for ye, twice over. He owed ye yer freedom, <br /><br /><br />142<br /><br />and ought ter gin 't to yer years ago. Mebbe he can't help himself now, but I feel it's wrong. Nothing can't beat that ar out o' me. Sich a faithful crittur as ye've been,—and allers sot his business 'fore yer own every way,—and reckoned on him more than yer own wife and chil'en! Them as sells heart's love and heart's blood, to get out thar scrapes, de Lord'll be up to 'em!"<br /> "Chloe! now, if ye love me, ye won't talk so, when perhaps jest the last time we'll ever have together! And I'll tell ye, Chloe, it goes agin me to hear one word agin Mas'r. Wan't he put in my arms a baby?—it's natur I should think a heap of him. And he couldn't be spected to think so much of poor Tom. Mas'rs is used to havin' all these yer things done for 'em, and nat'lly they don't think so much on 't. They can't be spected to, no way. Set him 'longside of other Mas'rs—who's had the treatment and livin' I've had? And he never would have let this yer come on me, if he could have seed it aforehand. I know he wouldn't."<br /><br /> "Wal, any way, thar's wrong about it somewhar," said Aunt Chloe, in whom a stubborn sense of justice was a predominant trait; "I can't jest make out whar 't is, but thar's wrong somewhar, I'm clar o' that."<br /><br /> "Yer ought ter look up to the Lord above—he's above all—thar don't a sparrow fall without him."<br /><br /> "It don't seem to comfort me, but I spect it orter," said Aunt Chloe. "But dar's no use talkin'; I'll jes wet up de corn-cake, and get ye one good breakfast, 'cause nobody knows when you'll get another."<br /><br /> In order to appreciate the sufferings of the negroes sold south, it must be remembered that all the instinctive affections of that race are peculiarly strong. Their local attach- <br /><br /><br />143<br /><br />ments are very abiding. They are not naturally daring and enterprising, but home-loving and affectionate. Add to this all the terrors with which ignorance invests the unknown, and add to this, again, that selling to the south is set before the negro from childhood as the last severity of punishment. The threat that terrifies more than whipping or torture of any kind is the threat of being sent down river. We have ourselves heard this feeling expressed by them, and seen the unaffected horror with which they will sit in their gossipping hours, and tell frightful stories of that "down river," which to them is<br />“That undiscovered country, from whose bourn<br />No traveller returns.”<br /> A missionary among the fugitives in Canada told us that many of the fugitives confessed themselves to have escaped from comparatively kind masters, and that they were induced to brave the perils of escape, in almost every case, by the desperate horror with which they regarded being sold south,—a doom which was hanging either over themselves or their husbands, their wives or children. This nerves the African, naturally patient, timid and unenterprising, with heroic courage, and leads him to suffer hunger, cold, pain, the perils of the wilderness, and the more dread penalties of recapture.<br /><br /> The simple morning meal now smoked on the table, for Mrs. Shelby had excused Aunt Chloe's attendance at the great house that morning. The poor soul had expended all her little energies on this farewell feast,—had killed and dressed her choicest chicken, and prepared her corn-cake with scrupulous exactness, just to her husband's taste, and brought out certain mysterious jars on the mantel-piece, <br /><br /><br />143<br /><br />some preserves that were never produced except on extreme occasions.<br /> "Lor, Pete," said Mose, triumphantly, "han't we got a buster of a breakfast!" at the same time catching at a fragment of the chicken.<br /><br /> Aunt Chloe gave him a sudden box on the ear. "Thar now! crowing over the last breakfast yer poor daddy's gwine to have to home!"<br /><br /> "O, Chloe!" said Tom, gently.<br /><br /> "Wal, I can't help it," said Aunt Chloe, hiding her face in her apron; "I 's so tossed about, it makes me act ugly."<br /><br /> The boys stood quite still, looking first at their father and then at their mother, while the baby, climbing up her clothes, began an imperious, commanding cry.<br /><br /> "Thar!" said Aunt Chloe, wiping her eyes and taking up the baby; "now I's done, I hope,—now do eat something. This yer's my nicest chicken. Thar, boys, ye shall have some, poor critturs! Yer mammy's been cross to yer."<br /><br /> The boys needed no second invitation, and went in with great zeal for the eatables; and it was well they did so, as otherwise there would have been very little performed to any purpose by the party.<br /><br /> "Now," said Aunt Chloe, bustling about after breakfast, "I must put up yer clothes. Jest like as not, he'll take 'em all away. I know thar ways—mean as dirt, they is! Wal, now, yer flannels for rhumatis is in this corner; so be careful, 'cause there won't nobody make ye no more. Then here's yer old shirts, and these yer is new ones. I toed off these yer stockings last night, and put de ball in 'em to mend with. But Lor! who'll ever mend for ye?" and Aunt Chloe, again overcome, laid her head on the box side, and <br /><br /><br />145<br /><br />sobbed. "To think on 't! no crittur to do for ye, sick or well! I don't railly think I ought ter be good now!"<br /> The boys, having eaten everything there was on the breakfast-table, began now to take some thought of the case; and, seeing their mother crying, and their father looking very sad, began to whimper and put their hands to their eyes. Uncle Tom had the baby on his knee, and was letting her enjoy herself to the utmost extent, scratching his face and pulling his hair, and occasionally breaking out into clamorous explosions of delight, evidently arising out of her own internal reflections.<br /><br /> "Ay, crow away, poor crittur!" said Aunt Chloe; "ye'll have to come to it, too! ye'll live to see yer husband sold, or mebbe be sold yerself; and these yer boys, they's to be sold, I s'pose, too, jest like as not, when dey gets good for somethin'; an't no use in niggers havin' nothin'!"<br /><br /> Here one of the boys called out, "Thar's Missis acomin' in!"<br /><br /> "She can't do no good; what's she coming for?" said Aunt Chloe.<br /><br /> Mrs. Shelby entered. Aunt Chloe set a chair for her in a manner decidedly gruff and crusty. She did not seem to notice either the action or the manner. She looked pale and anxious.<br /><br /> "Tom," she said, "I come to—" and stopping suddenly, and regarding the silent group, she sat down in the chair, and, covering her face with her handkerchief, began to sob.<br /><br /> "Lor, now, Missis, don't—don't!" said Aunt Chloe, bursting out in her turn; and for a few moments they all wept in company. And in those tears they all shed together, the high and the lowly, melted away all the heart-burnings and anger of the oppressed. O, ye who visit the distressed, <br /><br /><br />146<br /><br />do ye know that everything your money can buy, given with a cold, averted face, is not worth one honest tear shed in real sympathy?<br /> "My good fellow," said Mrs. Shelby, "I can't give you anything to do you any good. If I give you money, it will only be taken from you. But I tell you solemnly, and before God, that I will keep trace of you, and bring you back as soon as I can command the money;—and, till then, trust in God!"<br /><br /> Here the boys called out that Mas'r Haley was coming, and then an unceremonious kick pushed open the door. Haley stood there in very ill humor, having ridden hard the night before, and being not at all pacified by his ill success in recapturing his prey.<br /><br /> "Come," said he, "ye nigger, ye'r ready? Servant, ma'am!" said he, taking off his hat, as he saw Mrs. Shelby.<br /><br /> Aunt Chloe shut and corded the box, and, getting up, looked gruffly on the trader, her tears seeming suddenly turned to sparks of fire.<br /><br /> Tom rose up meekly, to follow his new master, and raised up his heavy box on his shoulder. His wife took the baby in her arms to go with him to the wagon, and the children, still crying, trailed on behind.<br /><br /> Mrs. Shelby, walking up to the trader, detained him for a few moments, talking with him in an earnest manner; and while she was thus talking, the whole family party proceeded to a wagon, that stood ready harnessed at the door. A crowd of all the old and young hands on the place stood gathered around it, to bid farewell to their old associate. Tom had been looked up to, both as a head servant and a Christian teacher, by all the place, and there was much honest sympathy and grief about him, particularly among the women.<br /><br />147<br /><br /> "Why, Chloe, you bar it better 'n we do!" said one of the women, who had been weeping freely, noticing the gloomy calmness with which Aunt Chloe stood by the wagon.<br /><br /> "I's done my tears!" she said, looking grimly at the trader, who was coming up. "I does not feel to cry 'fore dat ar old limb, no how!"<br /><br /> "Get in!" said Haley to Tom, as he strode through the crowd of servants, who looked at him with lowering brows.<br /><br /> Tom got in, and Haley, drawing out from under the wagon seat a heavy pair of shackles, made them fast around each ankle.<br /><br /> A smothered groan of indignation ran through the whole circle, and Mrs. Shelby spoke from the verandah,—<br /><br /> "Mr. Haley, I assure you that precaution is entirely unnecessary."<br /><br /> "Don' know, ma'am; I've lost one five hundred dollars from this yer place, and I can't afford to run no more risks."<br /><br /> "What else could she spect on him?" said Aunt Chloe, indignantly, while the two boys, who now seemed to comprehend at once their father's destiny, clung to her gown, sobbing and groaning vehemently.<br /><br /> "I'm sorry," said Tom, "that Mas'r George happened to be away."<br /><br /> George had gone to spend two or three days with a companion on a neighboring estate, and having departed early in the morning, before Tom's misfortune had been made public, had left without hearing of it.<br /><br /> "Give my love to Mas'r George," he said, earnestly.<br /><br /> Haley whipped up the horse, and, with a steady, mournful look, fixed to the last on the old place, Tom was whirled away.<br /><br /> Mr. Shelby at this time was not at home. He had sold <br /><br /><br />148<br /><br />Tom under the spur of a driving necessity, to get out of the power of a man whom he dreaded,—and his first feeling, after the consummation of the bargain, had been that of relief. But his wife's expostulations awoke his half-slumbering regrets; and Tom's manly disinterestedness increased the unpleasantness of his feelings. It was in vain that he said to himself that he had a right to do it,—that everybody did it,—and that some did it without even the excuse of necessity;—he could not satisfy his own feelings; and that he might not witness the unpleasant scenes of the consummation, he had gone on a short business tour up the country, hoping that all would be over before he returned.<br /> Tom and Haley rattled on along the dusty road, whirling past every old familiar spot, until the bounds of the estate were fairly passed, and they found themselves out on the open pike. After they had ridden about a mile, Haley suddenly drew up at the door of a blacksmith's shop, when, taking out with him a pair of handcuffs, he stepped into the shop, to have a little alteration in them.<br /><br /> "These yer 's a little too small for his build," said Haley, showing the fetters, and pointing out to Tom.<br /><br /> "Lor! now, if thar an't Shelby's Tom. He han't sold him, now?" said the smith.<br /><br /> "Yes, he has," said Haley.<br /><br /> "Now, ye don't! well, reely," said the smith, "who'd a thought it! Why, ye needn't go to fetterin' him up this yer way. He's the faithfullest, best crittur—"<br /><br /> "Yes, yes," said Haley; "but your good fellers are just the critturs to want ter run off. Them stupid ones, as doesn't care whar they go, and shifless, drunken ones, as don't care for nothin', they'll stick by, and like as not be rather pleased to be toted round; but these yer prime fellers, they hates it <br /><br /><br />149<br /><br />like sin. No way but to fetter 'em; got legs,—they'll use 'em,—no mistake."<br /> "Well," said the smith, feeling among his tools, "them plantations down thar, stranger, an't jest the place a Kentuck nigger wants to go to; they dies thar tol'able fast, don't they?"<br /><br /> "Wal, yes, tol'able fast, ther dying is; what with the 'climating and one thing and another, they dies so as to keep the market up pretty brisk," said Haley.<br /><br /> "Wal, now, a feller can't help thinkin' it's a mighty pity to have a nice, quiet, likely feller, as good un as Tom is, go down to be fairly ground up on one of them ar sugar plantations."<br /><br /> "Wal, he's got a fa'r chance. I promised to do well by him. I'll get him in house-servant in some good old family, and then, if he stands the fever and 'climating, he'll have a berth good as any nigger ought ter ask for."<br /><br /> "He leaves his wife and chil'en up here, s'pose?"<br /><br /> "Yes; but he'll get another thar. Lord, thar's women enough everywhar," said Haley.<br /><br /> Tom was sitting very mournfully on the outside of the shop while this conversation was going on. Suddenly he heard the quick, short click of a horse's hoof behind him; and, before he could fairly awake from his surprise, young Master George sprang into the wagon, threw his arms tumultuously round his neck, and was sobbing and scolding with energy.<br /><br /> "I declare, it's real mean! I don't care what they say, any of 'em! It's a nasty, mean shame! If I was a man, they shouldn't do it,—they should not, so!" said George, with a kind of subdued howl.<br /><br /> "O! Mas'r George! this does me good!" said Tom. "I <br /><br /><br />150<br /><br />couldn't bar to go off without seein' ye! It does me real good, ye can't tell!" Here Tom made some movement of his feet, and George's eye fell on the fetters.<br /> "What a shame!" he exclaimed, lifting his hands. "I'll knock that old fellow down—I will!"<br /><br /> "No you won't, Mas'r George; and you must not talk so loud. It won't help me any, to anger him."<br /><br /> "Well, I won't, then, for your sake; but only to think of it—isn't it a shame? They never sent for me, nor sent me any word, and, if it hadn't been for Tom Lincon, I shouldn't have heard it. I tell you, I blew 'em up well, all of 'em, at home!"<br /><br /> "That ar wasn't right, I'm 'feard, Mas'r George."<br /><br /> "Can't help it! I say it's a shame! Look here, Uncle Tom," said he, turning his back to the shop, and speaking in a mysterious tone, "I've brought you my dollar!"<br /><br /> "O! I couldn't think o' takin' on 't, Mas'r George, no ways in the world!" said Tom, quite moved.<br /><br /> "But you shall take it!" said George; "look here—I told Aunt Chloe I'd do it, and she advised me just to make a hole in it, and put a string through, so you could hang it round your neck, and keep it out of sight; else this mean scamp would take it away. I tell ye, Tom, I want to blow him up! it would do me good!"<br /><br /> "No, don't Mas'r George, for it won't do me any good."<br /><br /> "Well, I won't, for your sake," said George, busily tying his dollar round Tom's neck; "but there, now, button your coat tight over it, and keep it, and remember, every time you see it, that I'll come down after you, and bring you back. Aunt Chloe and I have been talking about it. I told her not to fear; I'll see to it, and I'll tease father's life out, if he don't do it."<br /><br />151<br /><br /> "O! Mas'r George, ye mustn't talk so 'bout yer father!"<br /><br /> "Lor, Uncle Tom, I don't mean anything bad."<br /><br /> "And now, Mas'r George," said Tom, "ye must be a good boy; 'member how many hearts is sot on ye. Al'ays keep close to yer mother. Don't be gettin' into any of them foolish ways boys has of gettin' too big to mind their mothers. Tell ye what, Mas'r George, the Lord gives good many things twice over; but he don't give ye a mother but once. Ye'll never see sich another woman, Mas'r George, if ye live to be a hundred years old. So, now, you hold on to her, and grow up, and be a comfort to her, thar's my own good boy,—you will now, won't ye?"<br /><br /> "Yes, I will, Uncle Tom," said George, seriously.<br /><br /> "And be careful of yer speaking, Mas'r George. Young boys, when they comes to your age, is wilful, sometimes—it's natur they should be. But real gentlemen, such as I hopes you'll be, never lets fall no words that isn't 'spectful to thar parents. Ye an't 'fended, Mas'r George?"<br /><br /> "No, indeed, Uncle Tom; you always did give me good advice."<br /><br /> "I's older, ye know," said Tom, stroking the boy's fine, curly head with his large, strong hand, but speaking in a voice as tender as a woman's, "and I sees all that's bound up in you. O, Mas'r George, you has everything,—l'arnin', privileges, readin', writin',—and you'll grow up to be a great, learned, good man and all the people on the place and your mother and father'll be so proud on ye! Be a good Mas'r, like yer father; and be a Christian, like yer mother. 'Member yer Creator in the days o' yer youth, Mas'r George."<br /><br /> "I'll be real good, Uncle Tom, I tell you," said George. "I'm going to be a first-rater; and don't you be discouraged. I'll have you back to the place, yet. As I told Aunt <br /><br /><br />152<br /><br />Chloe this morning, I'll build your house all over, and you shall have a room for a parlor with a carpet on it, when I'm a man. O, you'll have good times yet!"<br /> Haley now came to the door, with the handcuffs in his hands.<br /><br /> "Look here, now, Mister," said George, with an air of great superiority, as he got out, "I shall let father and mother know how you treat Uncle Tom!"<br /><br /> "You're welcome," said the trader.<br /><br /> "I should think you'd be ashamed to spend all your life buying men and women, and chaining them, like cattle! I should think you'd feel mean!" said George.<br /><br /> "So long as your grand folks wants to buy men and women, I'm as good as they is," said Haley; "'tan't any meaner sellin' on 'em, than 't is buyin'!"<br /><br /> "I'll never do either, when I'm a man," said George; "I'm ashamed, this day, that I'm a Kentuckian. I always was proud of it before;" and George sat very straight on his horse, and looked round with an air, as if he expected the state would be impressed with his opinion.<br /><br /> "Well, good-by, Uncle Tom; keep a stiff upper lip," said George.<br /><br /> "Good-by, Mas'r George," said Tom, looking fondly and admiringly at him. "God Almighty bless you! Ah! Kentucky han't got many like you!" he said, in the fulness of his heart, as the frank, boyish face was lost to his view. Away he went, and Tom looked, till the clatter of his horse's heels died away, the last sound or sight of his home. But over his heart there seemed to be a warm spot, where those young hands had placed that precious dollar. Tom put up his hand, and held it close to his heart.<br /><br /> "Now, I tell ye what, Tom," said Haley, as he came up <br /><br /><br />153<br /><br />to the wagon, and threw in the hand-cuffs, "I mean to start fa'r with ye, as I gen'ally do with my niggers; and I'll tell ye now, to begin with, you treat me fa'r, and I'll treat you fa'r; I an't never hard on my niggers. Calculates to do the best for 'em I can. Now, ye see, you'd better jest settle down comfortable, and not be tryin' no tricks; because nigger's tricks of all sorts I'm up to, and it's no use. If niggers is quiet, and don't try to get off, they has good times with me; and if they don't, why, it's thar fault, and not mine."<br /> Tom assured Haley that he had no present intentions of running off. In fact, the exhortation seemed rather a superfluous one to a man with a great pair of iron fetters on his feet. But Mr. Haley had got in the habit of commencing his relations with his stock with little exhortations of this nature, calculated, as he deemed, to inspire cheerfulness and confidence, and prevent the necessity of any unpleasant scenes.<br /><br /> And here, for the present, we take our leave of Tom, to pursue the fortunes of other characters in our story.Justin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-83400741646045633882010-11-16T23:16:00.001-08:002010-11-17T03:57:04.509-08:00Uncle Tom's Cabin Chapter VUncle Tom's Cabin <br />Harriet Beecher Stowe<br />Boston: John P. Jewett, 1852<br /><br />CHAPTER V.<br /><br />SHOWING THE FEELINGS OF LIVING PROPERTY ON CHANGING OWNERS.<br /><br /> MR. and Mrs. Shelby had retired to their apartment for the night. He was lounging in a large easy-chair, looking over some letters that had come in the afternoon mail, and she was standing before her mirror, brushing out the complicated braids and curls in which Eliza had arranged her hair; for, noticing her pale cheeks and haggard eyes, she had excused her attendance that night, and ordered her to bed. The employment, naturally enough, suggested her conversation with the girl in the morning; and turning to her husband, she said, carelessly,<br /><br /> "By the by, Arthur, who was that low-bred fellow that you lugged in to our dinner-table to-day?"<br /><br /> "Haley is his name," said Shelby, turning himself rather uneasily in his chair, and continuing with his eyes fixed on a letter.<br /><br /> "Haley! Who is he, and what may be his business here, pray?"<br /><br /> "Well, he's a man that I transacted some business with, last time I was at Natchez," said Mr. Shelby.<br /><br /> "And he presumed on it to make himself quite at home, and call and dine here, ay?"<br /><br />55<br /><br /> "Why, I invited him; I had some accounts with him," said Shelby.<br /><br /> "Is he a negro-trader?" said Mrs. Shelby, noticing a certain embarrassment in her husband's manner.<br /><br /> "Why, my dear, what put that into your head?" said Shelby, looking up.<br /><br /> "Nothing,—only Eliza came in here, after dinner, in a great worry, crying and taking on, and said you were talking with a trader, and that she heard him make an offer for her boy—the ridiculous little goose!"<br /><br /> "She did, hey?" said Mr. Shelby, returning to his paper, which he seemed for a few moments quite intent upon, not perceiving that he was holding it bottom upwards.<br /><br /> "It will have to come out," said he, mentally; "as well now as ever."<br /><br /> "I told Eliza," said Mrs. Shelby, as she continued brushing her hair, "that she was a little fool for her pains, and that you never had anything to do with that sort of persons. Of course, I knew you never meant to sell any of our people,—least of all, to such a fellow."<br /><br /> "Well, Emily," said her husband, "so I have always felt and said; but the fact is that my business lies so that I cannot get on without. I shall have to sell some of my hands."<br /><br /> "To that creature? Impossible! Mr. Shelby, you cannot be serious."<br /><br /> "I'm sorry to say that I am," said Mr. Shelby. "I've agreed to sell Tom."<br /><br /> "What! our Tom?—that good, faithful creature!—been your faithful servant from a boy! O, Mr. Shelby!—and you have promised him his freedom, too,—you and I have spoken to him a hundred times of it. Well, I can believe anything now,—I can believe now that you could <br /><br /><br />56<br /><br />sell little Harry, poor Eliza's only child!" said Mrs. Shelby, in a tone between grief and indignation.<br /> "Well, since you must know all, it is so. I have agreed to sell Tom and Harry both; and I don't know why I am to be rated, as if I were a monster, for doing what every one does every day."<br /><br /> "But why, of all others, choose these?" said Mrs. Shelby. "Why sell them, of all on the place, if you must sell at all?"<br /><br /> "Because they will bring the highest sum of any,—that's why. I could choose another, if you say so. The fellow made me a high bid on Eliza, if that would suit you any better," said Mr. Shelby.<br /><br /> "The wretch!" said Mrs. Shelby, vehemently.<br /><br /> "Well, I didn't listen to it, a moment,—out of regard to your feelings, I wouldn't;—so give me some credit."<br /><br /> "My dear," said Mrs. Shelby, recollecting herself, "forgive me. I have been hasty. I was surprised, and entirely unprepared for this;—but surely you will allow me to intercede for these poor creatures. Tom is a noble-hearted, faithful fellow, if he is black. I do believe, Mr. Shelby, that if he were put to it, he would lay down his life for you."<br /><br /> "I know it,—I dare say;—but what's the use of all this?—I can't help myself."<br /><br /> "Why not make a pecuniary sacrifice? I'm willing to bear my part of the inconvenience. O, Mr. Shelby, I have tried—tried most faithfully, as a Christian woman should—to do my duty to these poor, simple, dependent creatures. I have cared for them, instructed them, watched over them, and known all their little cares and joys, for years; and how can I ever hold up my head again among them, if, for the sake of a little paltry gain, we sell such a faithful, excellent, confiding creature as poor Tom, and tear from him in a moment <br /><br /><br />57<br /><br />all we have taught him to love and value? I have taught them the duties of the family, of parent and child, and husband and wife; and how can I bear to have this open acknowledgment that we care for no tie, no duty, no relation, however sacred, compared with money? I have talked with Eliza about her boy—her duty to him as a Christian mother, to watch over him, pray for him, and bring him up in a Christian way; and now what can I say, if you tear him away, and sell him, soul and body, to a profane, unprincipled man, just to save a little money? I have told her that one soul is worth more than all the money in the world; and how will she believe me when she sees us turn round and sell her child?—sell him, perhaps, to certain ruin of body and soul!"<br /> "I'm sorry you feel so about it, Emily,—indeed I am," said Mr. Shelby; "and I respect your feelings, too, though I don't pretend to share them to their full extent; but I tell you now, solemnly, it's of no use—I can't help myself. I didn't mean to tell you this Emily; but, in plain words, there is no choice between selling these two and selling everything. Either they must go, or all must. Haley has come into possession of a mortgage, which, if I don't clear off with him directly, will take everything before it. I've raked, and scraped, and borrowed, and all but begged,—and the price of these two was needed to make up the balance, and I had to give them up. Haley fancied the child; he agreed to settle the matter that way, and no other. I was in his power, and had to do it. If you feel so to have them sold, would it be any better to have all sold?"<br /><br /> Mrs. Shelby stood like one stricken. Finally, turning to her toilet, she rested her face in her hands, and gave a sort of groan.<br /><br />58<br /><br /> "This is God's curse on slavery!—a bitter, bitter, most accursed thing!—a curse to the master and a curse to the slave! I was a fool to think I could make anything good out of such a deadly evil. It is a sin to hold a slave under laws like ours,—I always felt it was,—I always thought so when I was a girl,—I thought so still more after I joined the church; but I thought I could gild it over,—I thought, by kindness, and care, and instruction, I could make the condition of mine better than freedom—fool that I was!"<br /><br /> "Why, wife, you are getting to be an abolitionist, quite."<br /><br /> "Abolitionist! if they knew all I know about slavery, they might talk! We don't need them to tell us; you know I never thought that slavery was right—never felt willing to own slaves."<br /><br /> "Well, therein you differ from many wise and pious men," said Mr. Shelby. "You remember Mr. B.'s sermon, the other Sunday?"<br /><br /> "I don't want to hear such sermons; I never wish to hear Mr. B. in our church again. Ministers can't help the evil, perhaps,—can't cure it, any more than we can,—but defend it!—it always went against my common sense. And I think you didn't think much of that sermon, either."<br /><br /> "Well," said Shelby, "I must say these ministers sometimes carry matters further than we poor sinners would exactly dare to do. We men of the world must wink pretty hard at various things, and get used to a deal that isn't the exact thing. But we don't quite fancy, when women and ministers come out broad and square, and go beyond us in matters of either modesty or morals, that's a fact. But now, my dear, I trust you see the necessity of the thing, and you see that I have done the very best that circumstances would allow."<br /><br />59<br /><br /> "O yes, yes!" said Mrs. Shelby, hurriedly and abstractedly fingering her gold watch,—"I haven't any jewelry of any amount," she added, thoughtfully; "but would not this watch do something?—it was an expensive one, when it was bought. If I could only at least save Eliza's child, I would sacrifice anything I have."<br /><br /> "I'm sorry, very sorry, Emily," said Mr. Shelby, "I'm sorry this takes hold of you so; but it will do no good. The fact is, Emily, the thing's done; the bills of sale are already signed, and in Haley's hands; and you must be thankful it is no worse. That man has had it in his power to ruin us all,—and now he is fairly off. If you knew the man as I do, you'd think that we had had a narrow escape."<br /><br /> "Is he so hard, then?"<br /><br /> "Why, not a cruel man, exactly, but a man of leather,—a man alive to nothing but trade and profit,—cool, and unhesitating, and unrelenting, as death and the grave. He'd sell his own mother at a good per centage—not wishing the old woman any harm, either."<br /><br /> "And this wretch owns that good, faithful Tom, and Eliza's child!"<br /><br /> "Well, my dear, the fact is that this goes rather hard with me; it's a thing I hate to think of. Haley wants to drive matters, and take possession to-morrow. I'm going to get out my horse bright and early, and be off. I can't see Tom, that's a fact; and you had better arrange a drive somewhere, and carry Eliza off. Let the thing be done when she is out of sight."<br /><br /> "No, no," said Mrs. Shelby; "I'll be in no sense accomplice or help in this cruel business. I'll go and see poor old Tom, God help him, in his distress! They shall see, at any rate, that their mistress can feel for and with them. As to <br /><br /><br />60<br /><br />Eliza, I dare not think about it. The Lord forgive us! What have we done, that this cruel necessity should come on us?"<br /> There was one listener to this conversation whom Mr. and Mrs. Shelby little suspected.<br /><br /> Communicating with their apartment was a large closet, opening by a door into the outer passage. When Mrs. Shelby had dismissed Eliza for the night, her feverish and excited mind had suggested the idea of this closet; and she had hidden herself there, and, with her ear pressed close against the crack of the door, had lost not a word of the conversation.<br /><br /> When the voices died into silence, she rose and crept stealthily away. Pale, shivering, with rigid features and compressed lips, she looked an entirely altered being from the soft and timid creature she had been hitherto. She moved cautiously along the entry, paused one moment at her mistress' door, and raised her hands in mute appeal to Heaven, and then turned and glided into her own room. It was a quiet, neat apartment, on the same floor with her mistress. There was a pleasant sunny window, where she had often sat singing at her sewing; there a little case of books, and various little fancy articles, ranged by them, the gifts of Christmas holidays; there was her simple wardrobe in the closet and in the drawers:—here was, in short, her home; and, on the whole, a happy one it had been to her. But there, on the bed, lay her slumbering boy, his long curls falling negligently around his unconscious face, his rosy mouth half open, his little fat hands thrown out over the bedclothes, and a smile spread like a sunbeam over his whole face.<br /><br /> "Poor boy! poor fellow!" said Eliza; "they have sold you! but your mother will save you yet!"<br /><br />61<br /><br /> No tear dropped over that pillow; in such straits as these, the heart has no tears to give,—it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence. She took a piece of paper and a pencil, and wrote, hastily,<br /><br /> "O, Missis! dear Missis! don't think me ungrateful,—don't think hard of me, any way,—I heard all you and master said to-night. I am going to try to save my boy—you will not blame me! God bless and reward you for all your kindness!"<br /><br /> Hastily folding and directing this, she went to a drawer and made up a little package of clothing for her boy, which she tied with a handkerchief firmly round her waist; and, so fond is a mother's remembrance, that, even in the terrors of that hour, she did not forget to put in the little package one or two of his favorite toys, reserving a gayly painted parrot to amuse him, when she should be called on to awaken him. It was some trouble to arouse the little sleeper; but, after some effort, he sat up, and was playing with his bird, while his mother was putting on her bonnet and shawl.<br /><br /> "Where are you going, mother?" said he, as she drew near the bed, with his little coat and cap.<br /><br /> His mother drew near, and looked so earnestly into his eyes, that he at once divined that something unusual was the matter.<br /><br /> "Hush, Harry," she said; "mustn't speak loud, or they will hear us. A wicked man was coming to take little Harry away from his mother, and carry him 'way off in the dark; but mother won't let him—she's going to put on her little boy's cap and coat, and run off with him, so the ugly man can't catch him."<br /><br /> Saying these words, she had tied and buttoned on the child's simple outfit, and, taking him in her arms, she whispered to <br /><br /><br />62<br /><br />him to be very still; and, opening a door in her room which led into the outer verandah, she glided noiselessly out.<br /> It was a sparkling, frosty, star-light night, and the mother wrapped the shawl close round her child, as, perfectly quiet with vague terror, he clung round her neck.<br /><br /> Old Bruno, a great Newfoundland, who slept at the end of the porch, rose, with a low growl, as she came near. She gently spoke his name, and the animal, an old pet and playmate of hers, instantly, wagging his tail, prepared to follow her, though apparently revolving much, in his simple dog's head, what such an indiscreet midnight promenade might mean. Some dim ideas of imprudence or impropriety in the measure seemed to embarrass him considerably; for he often stopped, as Eliza glided forward, and looked wistfully, first at her and then at the house, and then, as if reassured by reflection, he pattered along after her again. A few minutes brought them to the window of Uncle Tom's cottage, and Eliza, stopping, tapped lightly on the window-pane.<br /><br /> The prayer-meeting at Uncle Tom's had, in the order of hymn-singing, been protracted to a very late hour; and, as Uncle Tom had indulged himself in a few lengthy solos afterwards, the consequence was, that, although it was now between twelve and one o'clock, he and his worthy helpmeet were not yet asleep.<br /><br /> "Good Lord! what's that?" said Aunt Chloe, starting up and hastily drawing the curtain. "My sakes alive, if it an't Lizy! Get on your clothes, old man, quick!—there's old Bruno, too, a pawin' round; what on airth! I'm gwine to open the door."<br /><br /> And suiting the action to the word, the door flew open, and the light of the tallow candle, which Tom had hastily <br /><br /><br />63<br /><br />lighted, fell on the haggard face and dark, wild eyes of the fugitive.<br /> "Lord bless you!—I'm skeered to look at ye, Lizy! Are ye tuck sick, or what's come over ye?"<br /><br /> "I'm running away—Uncle Tom and Aunt Chloe—carrying off my child—Master sold him!"<br /><br /> "Sold him?" echoed both, lifting up their hands in dismay.<br /><br /> "Yes, sold him!" said Eliza, firmly; "I crept into the closet by Mistress' door to-night, and I heard Master tell Missis that he had sold my Harry, and you, Uncle Tom, both, to a trader; and that he was going off this morning on his horse, and that the man was to take possession to-day."<br /><br /> Tom had stood, during this speech, with his hands raised, and his eyes dilated, like a man in a dream. Slowly and gradually, as its meaning came over him, he collapsed, rather than seated himself, on his old chair, and sunk his head down upon his knees.<br /><br /> "The good Lord have pity on us!" said Aunt Chloe. "O! it don't seem as if it was true! What has he done, that Mas'r should sell him?"<br /><br /> "He hasn't done anything,—it isn't for that. Master don't want to sell, and Missis she's always good. I heard her plead and beg for us; but he told her 't was no use; that he was in this man's debt, and that this man had got the power over him; and that if he didn't pay him off clear, it would end in his having to sell the place and all the people, and move off. Yes, I heard him say there was no choice between selling these two and selling all, the man was driving him so hard. Master said he was sorry; but oh, Missis—you ought to have heard her talk! If she an't a Christian and an angel, there never was one. I'm a wicked girl to leave her so; but, then, I can't help it. She said, herself, <br /><br /><br />64<br /><br />one soul was worth more than the world; and this boy has a soul, and if I let him be carried off, who knows what'll become of it? It must be right: but, if it an't right, the Lord forgive me, for I can't help doing it!"<br /> "Well, old man!" said Aunt Chloe, "why don't you go, too? Will you wait to be toted down river, where they kill niggers with hard work and starving? I'd a heap rather die than go there, any day! There's time for ye,—be off with Lizy,—you've got a pass to come and go any time. Come, bustle up, and I'll get your things together."<br /><br /> Tom slowly raised his head, and looked sorrowfully but quietly around, and said,<br /><br /> "No, no—I an't going. Let Eliza go—it's her right! I wouldn't be the one to say no—'tan't in natur for her to stay; but you heard what she said! If I must be sold, or all the people on the place, and everything go to rack, why, let me be sold. I s'pose I can b'ar it as well as any on 'em," he added, while something like a sob and a sigh shook his broad, rough chest convulsively. "Mas'r always found me on the spot—he always will. I never have broke trust, nor used my pass no ways contrary to my word, and I never will. It's better for me alone to go, than to break up the place and sell all. Mas'r an't to blame, Chloe, and he'll take care of you and the poor—"<br /><br /> Here he turned to the rough trundle bed full of little woolly heads, and broke fairly down. He leaned over the back of the chair, and covered his face with his large hands. Sobs, heavy, hoarse and loud, shook the chair, and great tears fell through his fingers on the floor; just such tears, sir, as you dropped into the coffin where lay your first-born son; such tears, woman, as you shed when you heard the cries of your dying babe. For, sir, he was a man,—and you are but another <br /><br /><br />65<br /><br />man. And, woman, though dressed in silk and jewels, you are but a woman, and, in life's great straits and mighty griefs, ye feel but one sorrow!<br /> "And now," said Eliza, as she stood in the door, "I saw my husband only this afternoon, and I little knew then what was to come. They have pushed him to the very last standing place, and he told me, to-day, that he was going to run away. Do try, if you can, to get word to him. Tell him how I went, and why I went; and tell him I'm going to try and find Canada. You must give my love to him, and tell him, if I never see him again," she turned away, and stood with her back to them for a moment, and then added, in a husky voice, "tell him to be as good as he can, and try and meet me in the kingdom of heaven."<br /><br /> "Call Bruno in there," she added. "Shut the door on him, poor beast! He mustn't go with me!"<br /><br /> A few last words and tears, a few simple adieus and blessings, and, clasping her wondering and affrighted child in her arms, she glided noiselessly away.Justin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-53460789928318659012010-11-16T23:13:00.000-08:002010-11-17T03:56:33.309-08:00Uncle Tom's Cabin Chapter 1Uncle Tom's Cabin <br />Harriet Beecher Stowe<br />Boston: John P. Jewett, 1852<br /><br />CHAPTER I. <br /><br />IN WHICH THE READER IS INTRODUCED TO A MAN OF HUMANITY.<br /><br /> LATE in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining parlor, in the town of P——, in Kentucky. There were no servants present, and the gentlemen, with chairs closely approaching, seemed to be discussing some subject with great earnestness.<br /><br /> For convenience sake, we have said, hitherto, two gentlemen. One of the parties, however, when critically examined, did not seem, strictly speaking, to come under the species. He was a short, thick-set man, with coarse, commonplace features, and that swaggering air of pretension which marks a low man who is trying to elbow his way upward in the world. He was much over-dressed, in a gaudy vest of many colors, a blue neckerchief, bedropped gayly with yellow spots, and arranged with a flaunting tie, quite in keeping with the general air of the man. His hands, large and coarse, were plentifully bedecked with rings; and he wore a heavy gold watch-chain, with a bundle of seals of portentous size, and a great <br /><br /><br />14<br /><br />variety of colors, attached to it,—which, in the ardor of conversation, he was in the habit of flourishing and jingling with evident satisfaction. His conversation was in free and easy defiance of Murray's Grammar, and was garnished at convenient intervals with various profane expressions, which not even the desire to be graphic in our account shall induce us to transcribe.<br /> His companion, Mr. Shelby, had the appearance of a gentleman; and the arrangements of the house, and the general air of the housekeeping, indicated easy, and even opulent circumstances. As we before stated, the two were in the midst of an earnest conversation.<br /><br /> "That is the way I should arrange the matter," said Mr. Shelby.<br /><br /> "I can't make trade that way—I positively can't, Mr. Shelby," said the other, holding up a glass of wine between his eye and the light.<br /><br /> "Why, the fact is, Haley, Tom is an uncommon fellow; he is certainly worth that sum anywhere,—steady, honest, capable, manages my whole farm like a clock."<br /><br /> "You mean honest, as niggers go," said Haley, helping himself to a glass of brandy.<br /><br /> "No; I mean, really, Tom is a good, steady, sensible, pious fellow. He got religion at a camp-meeting, four years ago; and I believe he really did get it. I've trusted him, since then, with everything I have,—money, house, horses,—and let him come and go round the country; and I always found him true and square in everything."<br /><br /> "Some folks don't believe there is pious niggers, Shelby," said Haley, with a candid flourish of his hand, "but I do. I had a fellow, now, in this yer last lot I took to Orleans—'twas as good as a meetin, now, really, to hear that critter <br /><br /><br />15<br /><br />pray; and he was quite gentle and quiet like. He fetched me a good sum, too, for I bought him cheap of a man that was 'bliged to sell out; so I realized six hundred on him. Yes, I consider religion a valeyable thing in a nigger, when it's the genuine article, and no mistake."<br /> "Well, Tom's got the real article, if ever a fellow had," rejoined the other. "Why, last fall, I let him go to Cincinnati alone, to do business for me, and bring home five hundred dollars. 'Tom,' says I to him, 'I trust you, because I think you're a Christian—I know you wouldn't cheat.' Tom comes back, sure enough; I knew he would. Some low fellows, they say, said to him—'Tom, why don't you make tracks for Canada?' 'Ah, master trusted me, and I couldn't,'—they told me about it. I am sorry to part with Tom, I must say. You ought to let him cover the whole balance of the debt; and you would, Haley, if you had any conscience."<br /><br /> "Well, I've got just as much conscience as any man in business can afford to keep,—just a little, you know, to swear by, as 'twere," said the trader, jocularly; "and, then, I'm ready to do anything in reason to 'blige friends; but this yer, you see, is a leetle too hard on a fellow—a leetle too hard." The trader sighed contemplatively, and poured out some more brandy.<br /><br /> "Well, then, Haley, how will you trade?" said Mr. Shelby, after an uneasy interval of silence.<br /><br /> "Well, haven't you a boy or gal that you could throw in with Tom?"<br /><br /> "Hum!—none that I could well spare; to tell the truth, it's only hard necessity makes me willing to sell at all. I don't like parting with any of my hands, that's a fact."<br /><br /> Here the door opened, and a small quadroon boy, between four and five years of age, entered the room. There was <br /><br /><br />16<br /><br />something in his appearance remarkably beautiful and engaging. His black hair, fine as floss silk, hung in glossy curls about his round, dimpled face, while a pair of large dark eyes, full of fire and softness, looked out from beneath the rich, long lashes, as he peered curiously into the apartment. A gay robe of scarlet and yellow plaid, carefully made and neatly fitted, set off to advantage the dark and rich style of his beauty; and a certain comic air of assurance, blended with bashfulness, showed that he had been not unused to being petted and noticed by his master.<br /> "Hulloa, Jim Crow!" said Mr. Shelby, whistling, and snapping a bunch of raisins towards him, "pick that up, now!"<br /><br /> The child scampered, with all his little strength, after the prize, while his master laughed.<br /><br /> "Come here, Jim Crow," said he. The child came up, and the master patted the curly head, and chucked him under the chin.<br /><br /> "Now, Jim, show this gentleman how you can dance and sing." The boy commenced one of those wild, grotesque songs common among the negroes, in a rich, clear voice, accompanying his singing with many comic evolutions of the hands, feet, and whole body, all in perfect time to the music.<br /><br /> "Bravo!" said Haley, throwing him a quarter of an orange.<br /><br /> "Now, Jim, walk like old Uncle Cudjoe, when he has the rheumatism," said his master.<br /><br /> Instantly the flexible limbs of the child assumed the appearance of deformity and distortion, as, with his back humped up, and his master's stick in his hand, he hobbled about the room, his childish face drawn into a doleful pucker, and spitting from right to left, in imitation of an old man.<br /><br />17<br /><br /> Both gentlemen laughed uproariously.<br /><br /> "Now, Jim," said his master, "show us how old Elder Robbins leads the psalm." The boy drew his chubby face down to a formidable length, and commenced toning a psalm tune through his nose, with imperturbable gravity.<br /><br /> "Hurrah! bravo! what a young 'un!" said Haley; "that chap's a case, I'll promise. Tell you what," said he, suddenly clapping his hand on Mr. Shelby's shoulder, "fling in that chap, and I'll settle the business—I will. Come, now, if that ain't doing the thing up about the rightest!"<br /><br /> At this moment, the door was pushed gently open, and a young quadroon woman, apparently about twenty-five, entered the room.<br /><br /> There needed only a glance from the child to her, to identify her as its mother. There was the same rich, full, dark eye, with its long lashes; the same ripples of silky black hair. The brown of her complexion gave way on the cheek to a perceptible flush, which deepened as she saw the gaze of the strange man fixed upon her in bold and undisguised admiration. Her dress was of the neatest possible fit, and set off to advantage her finely moulded shape;—a delicately formed hand and a trim foot and ankle were items of appearance that did not escape the quick eye of the trader, well used to run up at a glance the points of a fine female article.<br /><br /> "Well, Eliza?" said her master, as she stopped and looked hesitatingly at him.<br /><br /> "I was looking for Harry, please, sir;" and the boy bounded toward her, showing his spoils, which he had gathered in the skirt of his robe.<br /><br /> "Well, take him away then," said Mr. Shelby; and hastily she withdrew, carrying the child on her arm.<br /><br />18<br /><br /> "By Jupiter," said the trader, turning to him in admiration, "there's an article, now! You might make your fortune on that ar gal in Orleans, any day. I've seen over a thousand, in my day, paid down for gals not a bit handsomer."<br /><br /> "I don't want to make my fortune on her," said Mr. Shelby, dryly; and, seeking to turn the conversation, he uncorked a bottle of fresh wine, and asked his companion's opinion of it.<br /><br /> "Capital, sir,—first chop!" said the trader; then turning, and slapping his hand familiarly on Shelby's shoulder, he added—<br /><br /> "Come, how will you trade about the gal?—what shall I say for her—what'll you take?"<br /><br /> "Mr. Haley, she is not to be sold," said Shelby. "My wife would not part with her for her weight in gold."<br /><br /> "Ay, ay! women always say such things, cause they ha'nt no sort of calculation. Just show 'em how many watches, feathers, and trinkets, one's weight in gold would buy, and that alters the case, I reckon."<br /><br /> "I tell you, Haley, this must not be spoken of; I say no, and I mean no," said Shelby, decidedly.<br /><br /> "Well, you'll let me have the boy, though," said the trader; "you must own I've come down pretty handsomely for him."<br /><br /> "What on earth can you want with the child?" said Shelby.<br /><br /> "Why, I've got a friend that's going into this yer branch of the business—wants to buy up handsome boys to raise for the market. Fancy articles entirely—sell for waiters, and so on, to rich 'uns, that can pay for handsome 'uns. It sets off one of yer great places—a real handsome boy to open door, wait, and tend. They fetch a good sum; and this lit- <br /><br /><br />19<br /><br />tle devil is such a comical, musical concern, he's just the article."<br /> "I would rather not sell him," said Mr. Shelby, thoughtfully; "the fact is, sir, I'm a humane man, and I hate to take the boy from his mother, sir."<br /><br /> "O, you do?—La! yes—something of that ar natur. I understand, perfectly. It is mighty onpleasant getting on with women, sometimes, I al'ays hates these yer screechin,' screamin' times. They are mighty onpleasant; but, as I manages business, I generally avoids 'em, sir. Now, what if you get the girl off for a day, or a week, or so; then the thing's done quietly,—all over before she comes home. Your wife might get her some ear-rings, or a new gown, or some such truck, to make up with her."<br /><br /> "I'm afraid not."<br /><br /> "Lor bless ye, yes! These critters ain't like white folks, you know; they gets over things, only manage right. Now, they say," said Haley, assuming a candid and confidential air, "that this kind o' trade is hardening to the feelings; but I never found it so. Fact is, I never could do things up the way some fellers manage the business. I've seen 'em as would pull a woman's child out of her arms, and set him up to sell, and she screechin' like mad all the time;—very bad policy—damages the article—makes 'em quite unfit for service sometimes. I knew a real handsome gal once, in Orleans, as was entirely ruined by this sort o' handling. The fellow that was trading for her didn't want her baby; and she was one of your real high sort, when her blood was up. I tell you, she squeezed up her child in her arms, and talked, and went on real awful. It kinder makes my blood run cold to think on't; and when they carried off the child, and locked her up, she jest went ravin' mad, and died in a week. Clear <br /><br /><br />20<br /><br />waste, sir, of a thousand dollars, just for want of management,—there's where 't is. It's always best to do the humane thing, sir; that's been my experience." And the trader leaned back in his chair, and folded his arm, with an air of virtuous decision, apparently considering himself a second Wilberforce.<br /> The subject appeared to interest the gentleman deeply; for while Mr. Shelby was thoughtfully peeling an orange, Haley broke out afresh, with becoming diffidence, but as if actually driven by the force of truth to say a few words more.<br /><br /> "It don't look well, now, for a feller to be praisin' himself; but I say it jest because it's the truth. I believe I'm reckoned to bring in about the finest droves of niggers that is brought in,—at least, I've been told so; if I have once, I reckon I have a hundred times,—all in good case,—fat and likely, and I lose as few as any man in the business. And I lays it all to my management, sir; and humanity, sir, I may say, is the great pillar of my management."<br /><br /> Mr. Shelby did not know what to say, and so he said, "Indeed!"<br /><br /> "Now, I've been laughed at for my notions, sir, and I've been talked to. They an't pop'lar, and they an't common; but I stuck to 'em, sir; I've stuck to 'em, and realized well on 'em; yes, sir, they have paid their passage, I may say," and the trader laughed at his joke.<br /><br /> There was something so piquant and original in these elucidations of humanity, that Mr. Shelby could not help laughing in company. Perhaps you laugh too, dear reader; but you know humanity comes out in a variety of strange forms now-a-days, and there is no end to the odd things that humane people will say and do.<br /><br /> Mr. Shelby's laugh encouraged the trader to proceed.<br /><br />21<br /><br /> "It's strange, now, but I never could beat this into people's heads. Now, there was Tom Loker, my old partner, down in Natchez; he was a clever fellow, Tom was, only the very devil with niggers,—on principle 't was, you see, for a better hearted feller never broke bread; 't was his system, sir. I used to talk to Tom. 'Why, Tom,' I used to say, 'when your gals takes on and cry, what's the use o' crackin on' em over the head, and knockin' on 'em round? It's ridiculous,' says I, 'and don't do no sort o' good. Why, I don't see no harm in their cryin',' says I; 'it's natur,' says I, 'and if natur can't blow off one way, it will another. Besides, Tom,' says I, 'it jest spiles your gals; they get sickly, and down in the mouth; and sometimes they gets ugly,—particular yallow gals do,—and it's the devil and all gettin' on 'em broke in. Now,' says I, 'why can't you kinder coax 'em up, and speak 'em fair? Depend on it, Tom, a little humanity, thrown in along, goes a heap further than all your jawin' and crackin'; and it pays better,' says I, 'depend on 't.' But Tom couldn't get the hang on 't; and he spiled so many for me, that I had to break off with him, though he was a good-hearted fellow, and as fair a business hand as is goin'."<br /><br /> "And do you find your ways of managing do the business better than Tom's?" said Mr. Shelby.<br /><br /> "Why, yes, sir, I may say so. You see, when I any ways can, I takes a leetle care about the onpleasant parts, like selling young uns and that,—get the gals out of the way—out of sight, out of mind, you know,—and when it's clean done, and can't be helped, they naturally gets used to it. 'Tan't, you know, as if it was white folks, that's brought up in the way of 'spectin' to keep their children and wives, and all that. Niggers, you know, that's fetched up properly, <br /><br /><br />22<br /><br />ha'n't no kind of 'spectations of no kind; so all these things comes easier."<br /> "I'm afraid mine are not properly brought up, then," said Mr. Shelby.<br /><br /> "S'pose not; you Kentucky folks spile your niggers. You mean well by 'em, but 'tan't no real kindness, arter all. Now, a nigger, you see, what's got to be hacked and tumbled round the world, and sold to Tom, and Dick, and the Lord knows who, 'tan't no kindness to be givin' on him notions and expectations, and bringin' on him up too well, for the rough and tumble comes all the harder on him arter. Now, I venture to say, your niggers would be quite chop-fallen in a place where some of your plantation niggers would be singing and whooping like all possessed. Every man, you know, Mr. Shelby, naturally thinks well of his own ways; and I think I treat niggers just about as well as it's ever worth while to treat 'em."<br /><br /> "It's a happy thing to be satisfied," said Mr. Shelby, with a slight shrug, and some perceptible feelings of a disagreeable nature.<br /><br /> "Well," said Haley, after they had both silently picked their nuts for a season, "what do you say?"<br /><br /> "I'll think the matter over, and talk with my wife," said Mr. Shelby. "Meantime, Haley, if you want the matter carried on in the quiet way you speak of, you'd best not let your business in this neighborhood be known. It will get out among my boys, and it will not be a particularly quiet business getting away any of my fellows, if they know it, I'll promise you."<br /><br /> "O! certainly, by all means, mum! of course. But I'll tell you, I'm in a devil of a hurry, and shall want to <br /><br /><br />23<br /><br />know, as soon as possible, what I may depend on," said he, rising and putting on his overcoat.<br /> "Well, call up this evening, between six and seven, and you shall have my answer," said Mr. Shelby, and the trader bowed himself out of the apartment.<br /><br /> "I'd like to have been able to kick the fellow down the steps," said he to himself, as he saw the door fairly closed, "with his impudent assurance; but he knows how much he has me at advantage. If anybody had ever said to me that I should sell Tom down south to one of those rascally traders, I should have said, 'Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?' And now it must come, for aught I see. And Eliza's child, too! I know that I shall have some fuss with wife about that; and, for that matter, about Tom, too. So much for being in debt,—heigho! The fellow sees his advantage, and means to push it."<br /><br /> Perhaps the mildest form of the system of slavery is to be seen in the State of Kentucky. The general prevalence of agricultural pursuits of a quiet and gradual nature, not requiring those periodic seasons of hurry and pressure that are called for in the business of more southern districts, makes the task of the negro a more healthful and reasonable one; while the master, content with a more gradual style of acquisition, has not those temptations to hardheartedness which always overcome frail human nature when the prospect of sudden and rapid gain is weighed in the balance, with no heavier counterpoise than the interests of the helpless and unprotected.<br /><br /> Whoever visits some estates there, and witnesses the good-humored indulgence of some masters and mistresses, and the affectionate loyalty of some slaves, might be tempted to dream the oft-fabled poetic legend of a patriarchal institution, and all <br /><br /><br />24<br /><br />that; but over and above the scene there broods a portentous shadow—the shadow of law. So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to a master,—so long as the failure, or misfortune, or imprudence, or death of the kindest owner, may cause them any day to exchange a life of kind protection and indulgence for one of hopeless misery and toil,—so long it is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best regulated administration of slavery.<br /> Mr. Shelby was a fair average kind of man, good-natured and kindly, and disposed to easy indulgence of those around him, and there had never been a lack of anything which might contribute to the physical comfort of the negroes on his estate. He had, however, speculated largely and quite loosely; had involved himself deeply, and his notes to a large amount had come into the hands of Haley; and this small piece of information is the key to the preceding conversation.<br /><br /> Now, it had so happened that, in approaching the door, Eliza had caught enough of the conversation to know that a trader was making offers to her master for somebody.<br /><br /> She would gladly have stopped at the door to listen, as she came out; but her mistress just then calling, she was obliged to hasten away.<br /><br /> Still she thought she heard the trader make an offer for her boy;—could she be mistaken? Her heart swelled and throbbed, and she involuntarily strained him so tight that the little fellow looked up into her face in astonishment.<br /><br /> "Eliza, girl, what ails you to-day?" said her mistress, when Eliza had upset the wash-pitcher, knocked down the workstand, and finally was abstractedly offering her mistress <br /><br /><br />25<br /><br />a long nightgown in place of the silk dress she had ordered her to bring from the wardrobe.<br /> Eliza started. "O, missis!" she said, raising her eyes; then, bursting into tears, she sat down in a chair, and began sobbing.<br /><br /> "Why, Eliza child, what ails you?" said her mistress.<br /><br /> "O! missis, missis," said Eliza, "there's been a trader talking with master in the parlor! I heard him."<br /><br /> "Well, silly child, suppose there has."<br /><br /> "O, missis, do you suppose mas'r would sell my Harry?" And the poor creature threw herself into a chair, and sobbed convulsively.<br /><br /> "Sell him! No, you foolish girl! You know your master never deals with those southern traders, and never means to sell any of his servants, as long as they behave well. Why, you silly child, who do you think would want to buy your Harry? Do you think all the world are set on him as you are, you goosie? Come, cheer up, and hook my dress. There now, put my back hair up in that pretty braid you learnt the other day, and don't go listening at doors any more."<br /><br /> "Well, but, missis, you never would give your consent—to—to—"<br /><br /> "Nonsense, child! to be sure, I shouldn't. What do you talk so for? I would as soon have one of my own children sold. But really, Eliza, you are getting altogether too proud of that little fellow. A man can't put his nose into the door, but you think he must be coming to buy him."<br /><br /> Reassured by her mistress' confident tone, Eliza proceeded nimbly and adroitly with her toilet, laughing at her own fears, as she proceeded.<br /><br /> Mrs. Shelby was a woman of a high class, both intellect- <br /><br /><br />26<br /><br />ually and morally. To that natural magnanimity and generosity of mind which one often marks as characteristic of the women of Kentucky, she added high moral and religious sensibility and principle, carried out with great energy and ability into practical results. Her husband, who made no professions to any particular religious character, nevertheless reverenced and respected the consistency of hers, and stood, perhaps, a little in awe of her opinion. Certain it was that he gave her unlimited scope in all her benevolent efforts for the comfort, instruction, and improvement of her servants, though he never took any decided part in them himself. In fact, if not exactly a believer in the doctrine of the efficiency of the extra good works of saints, he really seemed somehow or other to fancy that his wife had piety and benevolence enough for two—to indulge a shadowy expectation of getting into heaven through her superabundance of qualities to which he made no particular pretension.<br /> The heaviest load on his mind, after his conversation with the trader, lay in the foreseen necessity of breaking to his wife the arrangement contemplated,—meeting the importunities and opposition which he knew he should have reason to encounter.<br /><br /> Mrs. Shelby, being entirely ignorant of her husband's embarrassments, and knowing only the general kindliness of his temper, had been quite sincere in the entire incredulity with which she had met Eliza's suspicions. In fact, she dismissed the matter from her mind, without a second thought; and being occupied in preparations for an evening visit, it passed out of her thoughts entirely.Justin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-66522750575330976012010-11-16T22:41:00.000-08:002010-11-17T03:56:04.769-08:00Civil War HistoriographyThe Story of American Revisionism<br /><br />I. The Birth of American Revisionism and the Rise of Harry Elmer Barnes<br /><br /> <br /><br />II. Charles A. Beard and William Appleman Williams: From Progressivism to the New Left<br /><br />Beard was a fearsome talent to be deployed on behalf of the revisionist cause. A native of Indiana, Beard had studied at DePauw University, Oxford University, and Columbia. He had taught at Columbia for thirteen years, then resigned to become "an independent scholar and commentator on events of the day."<br /><br />Over the course of his career, Beard published forty-two volumes of history and political science and coauthored another thirty-five. His masterful overview of U.S. history, The Rise of American Civilization, written with his wife, Mary R. Beard, became a bestseller and Book-of-the-Month Club selection. His histories alone sold 11.3 million copies during his lifetime. Beard's articles and reviews — numbering in the hundreds — appeared in virtually all the leading scholarly and general-circulation journals of his day.<br /><br />Altogether, "[t]hrough the first half of the twentieth century, Charles A. Beard … was by common agreement the most influential historian in America."[24]<br /><br />With such intellectual firepower as Beard could muster, combined with that of his precocious and fabulously productive former student Barnes, anyone would expect that their case for World War I revisionism would have resoundingly carried the day. And, indeed, according to some accounts, it did. James J. Martin writes, for example, that the revisionist campaign "during the two decades prior to the outbreak of the Second World War" was "a success by almost any standard." For "in the main, the field was carried by Revisionism, its position being adopted generally throughout the country by the majority of the nation's most influential journalists and publicists. A very large part of the academic world as well accepted its general conclusions of divided war responsibility." Moreover, "the stubborn unwillingness shown by an immense majority of Americans to become totally immersed in the [following] war until the Japanese attack on Hawaii on December 7, 1941, was due in large part to popularized revisionist lessons, disseminated between 1924 and 1937."[25] Similarly, Cohen refers to the revisionists' battle for the minds and hearts of the American people during the interwar years as "[t]he battle won in the 1920's and 1930's by men like Harry Elmer Barnes, Charles Beard, C. Hartley Grattan, Walter Millis, and Charles Tansill."[26]<br /><br />Barnes himself was never so certain that the battle had been won. "At the outset," he wrote,<br /><br />American revisionist writing was somewhat precarious. Professor Fay was not in peril, personally, for he wrote in a scholarly journal which the public missed or ignored. But when I began to deal with the subject in media read by at least the upper intellectual level of the "men on the street," it was a different matter. I recall giving a lecture in Trenton, New Jersey, in the early days of revisionism and being threatened bodily by fanatics who were present.<br /><br />"Gradually," Barnes acknowledged, "the temper of the country changed, but at first it was caused more by resentment against our former allies than by the impact of revisionist writings."[27]<br /><br />Like Beard, Barnes put much energy during the 1930s into an attempt to persuade the American public of the dangerous folly (as he saw it) of becoming involved in yet another world war. When, late in the '20s, Barnes was given an opportunity to place this message before a much larger audience than he could ever command from the front of a college classroom or the pages of an intellectual weekly, he jumped at it. As Marguerite Fisher tells the story, "In 1929, during a sabbatical leave of absence" from his job at Smith, "Barnes went to New York to experiment for a year as an editorial writer, columnist, and book reviewer with the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain … then a powerful and liberal newspaper chain." The experiment was deemed a success, by both Barnes and his new employer, and was continued for another four years. In 1934, "he left the general organization of Scripps-Howard" and "was then taken on as a columnist, editorial writer and book reviewer for the World-Telegram, the New York City Scripps-Howard newspaper and the most important one in the chain. … Barnes finally left the World Telegram in May, 1940," determined to do as Beard had done and carve out a career for himself as a freelance intellectual — writing books, contributing to magazines and newspapers, and taking the occasional appointment as a visiting lecturer at such colleges or universities as might be interested in his services.[28]<br /><br />"His departure" from the World-Telegram, according to Fisher, "was hastened by the controversy aroused by his anti-interventionist editorials, columns, and book reviews."[29] It was perhaps inevitable, then, that he would next turn his revisionist attention to the very Second World War that he had tried so valiantly but failed so miserably to keep the United States out of. After all, that was what his old professor, Charles Beard, had done. As Bacevich puts it, Beard<br /><br />closed out his career by denouncing as fraudulent the text most crucial to sustaining the myth of the reluctant superpower: the orthodox account of U.S. entry into World War II. In two scathing volumes — American Foreign Policy in the Making (1946) and President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (1948) — Beard accused Franklin Roosevelt of outright deception in his conduct of foreign affairs.<br /><br />For, according to Beard, "even as he was promising to keep the country out of the war, Roosevelt was conniving to maneuver the United States into it."[30]<br /><br />Barnes agreed entirely with Beard's analysis. And "[j]ust as in March, 1922, Barnes had demanded that the current interpretations of the causes of World War I be revised, so now, at the end of 1947, he made a similar demand with regard to World War II, only to find that the difficulties in the way of getting any truth published about the responsibility for World War II were all but insuperable." Still, by 1953 Barnes was able to find a publisher for his most ambitious revisionist project on the second great war. This was a nearly seven-hundred-page collection of essays by diverse hands, "dedicated to the late Charles Austin Beard who had suggested its title, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. The specific content of the book was then illuminated by its subtitle, A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Its Aftermath."[31]<br /><br />Barnes continued to work out the details of his revisionist account of World War II for the rest of his life. But he knew by 1953, even in the hour of his greatest triumph (successfully getting Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace into print), that his cause was a lost one. He wrote, from that time on, in the interest of recording the truth, as he saw it, as an end in itself. He held out no hope for the sort of victory in the court of public opinion that his earlier World War I revisionism had enjoyed. "However much we may recoil from the prospect," he wrote in 1953 in the opening chapter of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace,<br /><br />there seems a strong probability that we are now entering the twilight of historical science. … History has been an intellectual casualty in both World Wars, and there is much doubt that it can be rehabilitated during the second half of the century. Indeed, there is every prospect that it will become more and more an instrument and adjunct of official propaganda — a supine instrument of our "Ministry of Truth."[32]<br /><br />Little did Barnes realize — little could he have realized — that all was not lost. For only a year before, the seed of an entirely new revisionist movement had been planted by a much younger but comparably prolific and polemical historian named William Appleman Williams, a movement that would shortly enjoy the kind of currency and influence which Barnes's own early works had enjoyed back in the 1920s and '30s. Williams (1921–1990) grew up in a small town in Iowa, won an appointment to the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, and served aboard a US Navy ship during the last year of the great war that was to bring Harry Elmer Barnes so much sorrow. "In 1947," Andrew J. Bacevich notes, "Williams left the Navy to study history at the University of Wisconsin, an institution famous, among other things, for its 'notorious loyalty' to the teachings of Charles Beard."[33] Paul Buhle and Edward Rice-Maximin, from whom Bacevich drew the phrase "notorious loyalty" in the passage just quoted, go even farther in their 1995 biography of Williams, paraphrasing an unnamed "graduate alumnus" as saying that in those days "[a]ll a Wisconsin history student had to do for preliminary examinations … was to read Beard carefully."[34] Peter Novick writes of the University of Wisconsin history department that it "was dedicated to the defense of Beard's reputation, and, with some qualifications, of his teachings."[35] At Madison "Williams earned a doctorate in US diplomatic history. His first book, American-Russian Relations, 1781–1947, published in 1952, implicitly questioned orthodox views of the Cold War's origins, much as Beard had questioned the conventional wisdom about American entry into World War II."[36]<br /><br />But Williams's questioning of the conventional wisdom would not remain implicit for long. By 1959, when the first edition of his most influential book, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, appeared, he was clearly articulating, with considerable polemical vigor, the views that would characterize the rest of his long career. American foreign policy in the 20th century, according to Williams, had been based on the Open Door Policy first enunciated by John Hay, secretary to President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State to Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. The problem, Williams argued, was that the Open Door Policy had evolved "from a utopian idea into an ideology," and the gist of that ideology was "the firm conviction, even dogmatic belief, that America's domestic well-being depends upon … sustained, ever-increasing overseas economic expansion."[37] This expansion could only be assured if the United States could be assured that the doors of all nations would be open to her goods, her culture, her social and political ideals, even her military. In Williams's view, "[o]f all the twentieth-century American presidents, only Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the dangers inherent in such an approach."[38] But Roosevelt's successor in the White House, Harry S. Truman, "was … an enthusiastic and militant advocate of America's supremacy in the world. He seemed, indeed, to react, think, and act as an almost classic personification of the entire Open Door Policy."[39] Unsurprisingly, Truman "and his advisors pursued ends that made the Cold War inevitable."[40]<br /><br />"After a series of short teaching appointments elsewhere," Bacevich writes, "Williams returned to Wisconsin in 1957 and quickly established himself in the front rank of American historians." Over the next eleven years he also "became the founding father and abiding inspiration of the 'Wisconsin School' of revisionist history that examined the underside of US foreign policy and found there an American variant of imperialism."[41] This Wisconsin School of revisionist history also came to be known by another name, because so many of its leading figures were perceived as members of the New Left. As Novick puts it,<br /><br />The new, left-oriented historians who became visible within the profession during the 1960s came to be capitalized, reified, and often tacitly homogenized as "New Left historians." This was a largely empty and misleading designation, lumping together individuals of the most diverse orientation, and often, innocently or maliciously, associating them with the most extreme wing of the student movement. … In fact, although there were some dissident historians who had ties to the student and youth insurgency which was labeled "New Left," at least as many either had no connection with the movement, or viewed it with a jaundiced eye.[42]<br /><br />One of those who might well be counted as viewing the New Left movement "with a jaundiced eye," in fact, was Williams himself. As Joseph R. Stromberg writes, "Even in the turbulent 'sixties,'" Williams "was critical of New Left excesses. He would have hated the present university climate of political correctness."[43] This assertion is echoed by Henry W. Berger in his "Introduction" to A William Appleman Williams Reader. Berger writes:<br /><br />Late in the 1960s, in the midst of frustrated opposition to the Vietnam War and increased domestic upheavals, Williams became disenchanted with many in the New Left, protesting a number of their actions which he believed contradicted and damaged efforts to change American society and the nature of United States relations with the world. He especially deplored "random nonsocial violence" as self-defeating and was disturbed when members of the New Left "tried to impose [their] consciousness on the rest of society through what [they] considered "vanguard" actions in a crisis situation.[44]<br /><br />According to Bacevich, Williams's disenchantment with the New Left began even earlier. "Though an avowed man of the left," Bacevich writes, "by the mid-1960s Williams found himself increasingly out of sympathy with the political views of the Vietnam-era student radicals, among whom he had achieved the status of icon. He considered the antics of the counterculture to be childish and self-indulgent. He found the sexual revolution to be repugnant."[45]<br /><br />onetheless, for better or for worse, the revisionist historians of the 1960s and '70s who were followers of William Appleman Williams have come to be called the New Left Historians. And there can be no doubt that it was Williams to whom they looked as the creator and leader of their movement. Several of the most prominent among them — Walter LaFeber, Gabriel Kolko, Ronald Radosh — did their graduate work in history under Williams at Wisconsin. Others, like Gar Alperovitz, earned their undergraduate degrees in history at Wisconsin during Williams's time there. As Robert James Maddox has written,<br /><br />[b]y far the most influential American revisionist interpreter of the origins of the Cold War has been William Appleman Williams. … It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that much of the existing revisionist, or "New Left," literature on the subject amounts to little more than extended footnotes on interpretations Williams first put forward.[46]<br /><br />This story, excerpted from "Why American History Is Not What They Say" by Jeff Riggenbach, appears courtesy of the Mises Institute's Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States license.<br /><br />(courtesy: Classic-liberal com)Justin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-41037645958788061152010-11-12T03:11:00.000-08:002010-11-17T03:55:35.417-08:00Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States Chapter 9A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Howard Zinn<br /><br />Chapter 9: SLAVERY WITHOUT SUBMISSION, EMANCIPATION WITHOUT FREEDOM<br />The United States government's support of slavery was based on an overpowering practicality. In 1790, a thousand tons of cotton were being produced every year in the South. By 1860, it was a million tons. In the same period, 500,000 slaves grew to 4 million. A system harried by slave rebellions and conspiracies (Gabriel Prosser, 1800; Denmark Vesey, 1822; Nat Turner, 1831) developed a network of controls in the southern states, hacked by the laws, courts, armed forces, and race prejudice of the nation's political leaders.<br /><br />It would take either a full-scale slave rebellion or a full-scale war to end such a deeply entrenched system. If a rebellion, it might get out of hand, and turn its ferocity beyond slavery to the most successful system of capitalist enrichment in the world. If a war, those who made the war would organize its consequences. Hence, it was Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves, not John Brown. In 1859, John Brown was hanged, with federal complicity, for attempting to do by small-scale violence what Lincoln would do by large-scale violence several years later-end slavery.<br /><br />With slavery abolished by order of the government-true, a government pushed hard to do so, by blacks, free and slave, and by white abolitionists-its end could be orchestrated so as to set limits to emancipation. Liberation from the top would go only so far as the interests of the dominant groups permitted. If carried further by the momentum of war, the rhetoric of a crusade, it could be pulled back to a safer position. Thus, while the ending of slavery led to a reconstruction of national politics and economics, it was not a radical reconstruction, but a safe one- in fact, a profitable one.<br /><br />The plantation system, based on tobacco growing in Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, and rice in South Carolina, expanded into lush new cotton lands in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi-and needed more slaves. But slave importation became illegal in 1808. Therefore, "from the beginning, the law went unenforced," says John Hope Franklin (From Slavery to Freedom). "The long, unprotected coast, the certain markets, and the prospects of huge profits were too much for the American merchants and they yielded to the temptation.. .." He estimates that perhaps 250,000 slaves were imported illegally before the Civil War.<br /><br />How can slavery be described? Perhaps not at all by those who have not experienced it. The 1932 edition of a best-selling textbook by two northern liberal historians saw slavery as perhaps the Negro's "necessary transition to civilization." Economists or cliometricians (statistical historians) have tried to assess slavery by estimating how much money was spent on slaves for food and medical care. But can this describe the reality of slavery as it was to a human being who lived inside it? Are the conditions of slavery as important as the existence of slavery?<br /><br />John Little, a former slave, wrote:<br /><br />They say slaves are happy, because they laugh, and are merry. I myself and three or four others, have received two hundred lashes in the day, and had our feet in fetters; yet, at night, we would sing and dance, and make others laugh at the rattling of our chains. Happy men we must have been! We did it to keep down trouble, and to keep our hearts from being completely broken: that is as true as the gospel! Just look at it,-must not we have been very happy? Yet I have done it myself-I have cut capers in chains.<br />A record of deaths kept in a plantation journal (now in the University of North Carolina Archives) lists the ages and cause of death of all those who died on the plantation between 1850 and 1855. Of the thirty-two who died in that period, only four reached the age of sixty, four reached the age of fifty, seven died in their forties, seven died in their twenties or thirties, and nine died before they were five years old.<br /><br />But can statistics record what it meant for families to be torn apart, when a master, for profit, sold a husband or a wife, a son or a daughter? In 1858, a slave named Abream Scriven was sold by his master, and wrote to his wife: "Give my love to my father and mother and tell them good Bye for me, and if we Shall not meet in this world I hope to meet in heaven."<br /><br />One recent book on slavery (Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross) looks at whippings in 1840-1842 on the Barrow plantation in Louisiana with two hundred slaves: "The records show that over the course of two years a total of 160 whippings were administered, an average of 0.7 whippings per hand per year. About half the hands were not whipped at all during the period." One could also say: "Half of all slaves were whipped." That has a different ring. That figure (0.7 per hand per year) shows whipping was infrequent for any individual. But looked at another way, once every four or five days, some slave was whipped.<br /><br />Barrow as a plantation owner, according to his biographer, was no worse than the average. He spent money on clothing for his slaves, gave them holiday celebrations, built a dance hall for them. He also built a jail and "was constantly devising ingenious punishments, for he realized that uncertainty was an important aid in keeping his gangs well in hand."<br /><br />The whippings, the punishments, were work disciplines. Still, Herbert Gutman (Slavery and the Numbers Game) finds, dissecting Fogel and Engerman's statistics, "Over all, four in five cotton pickers engaged in one or more disorderly acts in 1840-41.... As a group, a slightly higher percentage of women than men committed seven or more disorderly acts." Thus, Gutman disputes the argument of Fogel and Engerman that the Barrow plantation slaves became "devoted, hardworking responsible slaves who identified their fortunes with the fortunes of their masters."<br /><br />Slave revolts in the United States were not as frequent or as large-scale as those in the Caribbean islands or in South America. Probably the largest slave revolt in the United States took place near New Orleans in 1811. Four to five hundred slaves gathered after a rising at the plantation of a Major Andry. Armed with cane knives, axes, and clubs, they wounded Andry, killed his son, and began marching from plantation to plantation, their numbers growing. They were attacked by U.S. army and militia forces; sixty-six were killed on the spot, and sixteen were tried and shot by a firing squad.<br /><br />The conspiracy of Denmark Vesey, himself a free Negro, was thwarted before it could be carried out in 1822. The plan was to burn Charleston, South Carolina, then the sixth-largest city in the nation, and to initiate a general revolt of slaves in the area. Several witnesses said thousands of blacks were implicated in one way or another. Blacks had made about 250 pike heads and bayonets and over three hundred daggers, according to Herbert Aptheker's account. But the plan was betrayed, and thirty-five blacks, including Vesey, were hanged. The trial record itself, published in Charleston, was ordered destroyed soon after publication, as too dangerous for slaves to see.<br /><br />Nat Turner's rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in the summer of 1831, threw the slaveholding South into a panic, and then into a determined effort to bolster the security of the slave system. Turner, claiming religious visions, gathered about seventy slaves, who went on a rampage from plantation to plantation, murdering at least fifty-five men, women, and children. They gathered supporters, but were captured as their ammunition ran out. Turner and perhaps eighteen others were hanged.<br /><br />Did such rebellions set back the cause of emancipation, as some moderate abolitionists claimed at the time? An answer was given in 1845 by James Hammond, a supporter of slavery:<br /><br />But if your course was wholly different-If you distilled nectar from your lips and discoursed sweetest music.... do you imagine you could prevail on us to give up a thousand millions of dollars in the value of our slaves, and a thousand millions of dollars more in the depreciation of our lands ... ?<br />The slaveowner understood this, and prepared. Henry Tragic (The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831), says:<br /><br />In 1831, Virginia was an armed and garrisoned state... . With a total population of 1,211,405, the State of Virginia was able to field a militia force of 101,488 men, including cavalry, artillery, grenadiers, riflemen, and light infantry! It is true that this was a "paper army" in some ways, in that the county regiments were not fully armed and equipped, but it is still an astonishing commentary on the state of the public mind of the time. During a period when neither the State nor the nation faced any sort of exterior threat, we find that Virginia felt the need to maintain a security force roughly ten percent of the total number of its inhabitants: black and white, male and female, slave and free!<br />Rebellion, though rare, was a constant fear among slaveowners. Ulrich Phillips, a southerner whose American Negro Slavery is a classic study, wrote:<br /><br />A great number of southerners at all times held the firm belief that the negro population was so docile, so little cohesive, and in the main so friendly toward the whites and so contented that a disastrous insurrection by them would be impossible. But on the whole, there was much greater anxiety abroad in the land than historians have told of....<br />Eugene Genovese, in his comprehensive study of slavery, Roll, Jordan, Roll, sees a record of "simultaneous accommodation and resistance to slavery." The resistance included stealing property, sabotage and slowness, killing overseers and masters, burning down plantation buildings, running away. Even the accommodation "breathed a critical spirit and disguised subversive actions." Most of this resistance, Genovese stresses, fell short of organized insurrection, but its significance for masters and slaves was enormous.<br /><br />Running away was much more realistic than armed insurrection. During the 1850s about a thousand slaves a year escaped into the North, Canada, and Mexico. Thousands ran away for short periods. And this despite the terror facing the runaway. The dogs used in tracking fugitives "bit, tore, mutilated, and if not pulled off in time, killed their prey," Genovese says.<br /><br />Harriet Tubman, born into slavery, her head injured by an overseer when she was fifteen, made her way to freedom alone as a young woman, then became the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad. She made nineteen dangerous trips back and forth, often disguised, escorting more than three hundred slaves to freedom, always carrying a pistol, telling the fugitives, "You'll be free or die." She expressed her philosophy: "There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive...."<br /><br />One overseer told a visitor to his plantation that "some negroes are determined never to let a white man whip them and will resist you, when you attempt it; of course you must kill them in that case."<br /><br />One form of resistance was not to work so hard. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, in The Gift of Black Folk:<br /><br />As a tropical product with a sensuous receptivity to the beauty of the world, he was not as easily reduced to be the mechanical draft-horse which the northern European laborer became. He ... tended to work as the results pleased him and refused to work or sought to refuse when he did not find the spiritual returns adequate; thus he was easily accused of laziness and driven as a slave when in truth he brought to modern manual labor a renewed valuation of life.<br />Ulrich Phillips described "truancy," "absconding," "vacations without leave," and "resolute efforts to escape from bondage altogether." He also described collective actions:<br /><br />Occasionally, however, a squad would strike in a body as a protest against severities. An episode of this sort was recounted in a letter of a Georgia overseer to his absent employer: "Sir, I write you a few lines in order to let you know that six of your hands bas left the plantation-every man but Jack. They displeased me with their work and I give some of them a few lashes, Tom with the rest. On Wednesday morning, they were missing."<br />The instances where poor whites helped slaves were not frequent, but sufficient to show the need for setting one group against the other. Genovese says:<br /><br />The slaveholders ... suspected that non-slaveholders would encourage slave disobedience and even rebellion, not so much out of sympathy for the blacks as out of hatred for the rich planters and resentment of their own poverty. White men sometimes were linked to slave insurrectionary plots, and each such incident rekindled fears.<br />This helps explain the stern police measures against whites who fraternized with blacks.<br /><br />Herbert Aptheker quotes a report to the governor of Virginia on a slave conspiracy in 1802: "I have just received information that three white persons are concerned in the plot; and they have arms and ammunition concealed under their houses, and were to give aid when the negroes should begin." One of the conspiring slaves said that it was "the common run of poor white people" who were involved.<br /><br />In return, blacks helped whites in need. One black runaway told of a slave woman who had received fifty lashes of the whip for giving food to a white neighbor who was poor and sick.<br /><br />When the Brunswick canal was built in Georgia, the black slaves and white Irish workers were segregated, the excuse being that they would do violence against one another. That may well have been true, but Fanny Kemble, the famous actress and wife of a planter, wrote in her journal:<br /><br />But the Irish are not only quarrelers, and rioters, and fighters, and drinkers, and despisers of niggers-they are a passionate, impulsive, warm-hearted, generous people, much given to powerful indignations, which break out suddenly when not compelled to smoulder sullenly-pestilent sympathizers too, and with a sufficient dose of American atmospheric air in their lungs, properly mixed with a right proportion of ardent spirits, there is no saying but what they might actually take to sympathy with the slaves, and I leave you to judge of the possible consequences. You perceive, I am sure, that they can by no means be allowed to work together on the Brunswick Canal.<br />The need for slave control led to an ingenious device, paying poor whites-themselves so troublesome for two hundred years of southern history-to be overseers of black labor and therefore buffers for black hatred.<br /><br />Religion was used for control. A book consulted by many planters was the Cotton Plantation Record and Account Book, which gave these instructions to overseers: "You will find that an hour devoted every Sabbath morning to their moral and religious instruction would prove a great aid to you in bringing about a better state of things amongst the Negroes."<br /><br />As for black preachers, as Genovese puts it, "they had to speak a language defiant enough to hold the high-spirited among their flock but neither so inflammatory as to rouse them to battles they could not win nor so ominous as to arouse the ire of ruling powers." Practicality decided: "The slave communities, embedded as they were among numerically preponderant and militarily powerful whites, counseled a strategy of patience, of acceptance of what could not be helped, of a dogged effort to keep the black community alive and healthy-a strategy of survival that, like its African prototype, above all said yes to life in this world."<br /><br />It was once thought that slavery had destroyed the black family. And so the black condition was blamed on family frailty, rather than on poverty and prejudice. Blacks without families, helpless, lacking kinship and identity, would have no will to resist. But interviews with ex-slaves, done in the 1930s by the Federal Writers Project of the New Deal for the Library of Congress, showed a different story, which George Rawick summarizes (From Sundown to Sunup):<br /><br />The slave community acted like a generalized extended kinship system in which all adults looked after all children and there was little division between "my children for whom I'm responsible" and "your children for whom you're responsible." ... A kind of family relationship in which older children have great responsibility for caring for younger siblings is obviously more functionally integrative and useful for slaves than the pattern of sibling rivalry and often dislike that frequently comes out of contemporary middle-class nuclear families composed of highly individuated persons. ... Indeed, the activity of the slaves in creating patterns of family life that were functionally integrative did more than merely prevent the destruction of personality. ... It was part and parcel, as we shall see, of the social process out of which came black pride, black identity, black culture, the black community, and black rebellion in America.<br />Old letters and records dug out by historian Herbert Gutman (The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom) show the stubborn resistance of the slave family to pressures of disintegration, A woman wrote to her son from whom she had been separated for twenty years: "I long to see you in my old age.. .. Now my dear son I pray you to come and see your dear old Mother. ... I love you Cato you love your Mother-You are my only son. ..."<br /><br />And a man wrote to his wife, sold away from him with their children: "Send me some of the children's hair in a separate paper with their names on the paper. ... I had rather anything to had happened to me most than ever to have been parted from you and the children. . . . Laura I do love you the same...."<br /><br />Going through records of slave marriages, Gutman found how high was the incidence of marriage among slave men and women, and how stable these marriages were. He studied the remarkably complete records kept on one South Carolina plantation. He found a birth register of two hundred slaves extending from the eighteenth century to just before the Civil War; it showed stable kin networks, steadfast marriages, unusual fidelity, and resistance to forced marriages.<br /><br />Slaves hung on determinedly to their selves, to their love of family, their wholeness. A shoemaker on the South Carolina Sea Islands expressed this in his own way: "I'se lost an arm but it hasn't gone out of my brains."<br /><br />This family solidarity carried into the twentieth century. The remarkable southern black farmer Nate Shaw recalled that when his sister died, leaving three children, his father proposed sharing their care, and he responded:<br /><br />That suits me. Papa. . .. Let's handle em like this; don't get the two little boys, the youngest ones, off at your house and the oldest one be at my house and we bold these little boys apart and won't bring em to see one another. I'll bring the little boy that I keep, the oldest one, around to your home amongst the other two. And you forward the others to my house and let em grow up knowin that they are brothers. Don't keep em separated in a way that they'll forget about one another. Don't do that, Papa.<br />Also insisting on the strength of blacks even under slavery, Lawrence Levine (Black Culture and Black Consciousness) gives a picture of a rich culture among slaves, a complex mixture of adaptation and rebellion, through the creativity of stories and songs:<br /><br />We raise de wheat,<br />Dey gib us de corn;<br />We bake de bread,<br />Dey gib us de crust,<br />We sif de meal,<br />Dey gib us de huss;<br />We peel de meat,<br />Dey gib us de skin;<br />And dat's de way<br />Dey take us in;<br />We skim de pot,<br />Dey gib us de liquor,<br />An say dat's good enough for nigger.<br />There was mockery. The poet William Cullen Bryant, after attending a corn shucking in 1843 in South Carolina, told of slave dances turned into a pretended military parade, "a sort of burlesque of our militia trainings. . . ."<br /><br />Spirituals often had double meanings. The song "O Canaan, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of Canaan" often meant that slaves meant to get to the North, their Canaan. During the Civil War, slaves began to make up new spirituals with bolder messages: "Before I'd be a slave, I'd be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be saved." And the spiritual "Many Thousand Go":<br /><br />No more peck o ' corn for me, no more, no more,<br />No more driver's lash far me, no more, no more. . . .<br />Levine refers to slave resistance as "pre-political," expressed in countless ways in daily life and culture. Music, magic, art, religion, were all ways, he says, for slaves to hold on to their humanity.<br /><br />While southern slaves held on, free blacks in the North (there were about 130,000 in 1830, about 200,000 in 1850) agitated for the abolition of slavery. In 1829, David Walker, son of a slave, but born free in North Carolina, moved to Boston, where he sold old clothes. The pamphlet he wrote and printed, Walker's Appeal, became widely known. It infuriated southern slaveholders; Georgia offered a reward of $10,000 to anyone who would deliver Walker alive, and $1,000 to anyone who would kill him. It is not hard to understand why when you read his Appeal.<br /><br />There was no slavery in history, even that of the Israelites in Egypt, worse than the slavery of the black man in America, Walker said. "... show me a page of history, either sacred or profane, on which a verse can he found, which maintains, that the Egyptians heaped the insupportable insult upon the children of Israel, by telling them that they were not of the human family."<br /><br />Walker was scathing to his fellow blacks who would assimilate: "I would wish, candidly ... to be understood, that I would not give a pinch of snuff to be married to any white person I ever saw in all the days of my life."<br /><br />Blacks must fight for their freedom, he said:<br /><br />Let our enemies go on with their butcheries, and at once fill up their cup. Never make an attempt to gain our freedom or natural right from under our cruel oppressors and murderers, until you see your way clear-when that hour arrives and you move, be not afraid or dismayed. . .. God has been pleased to give us two eyes, two hands, two feet, and some sense in our heads as well as they. They have no more right to hold us in slavery than we have to hold them... . Our sufferings will come to an end, in spite of all the Americans this side of eternity. Then we will want all the learning and talents among ourselves, and perhaps more, to govern ourselves.-"Every dog must have its day," the American's is coming to an end.<br />One summer day in 1830, David Walker was found dead near the doorway of his shop in Boston.<br /><br />Some born in slavery acted out the unfulfilled desire of millions. Frederick Douglass, a slave, sent to Baltimore to work as a servant and as a laborer in the shipyard, somehow learned to read and write, and at twenty-one, in the year 1838, escaped to the North, where he became the most famous black man of his time, as lecturer, newspaper editor, writer. In his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, he recalled his first childhood thoughts about his condition:<br /><br />Why am I a slave? Why are some people slaves, and others masters? Was there ever a time when this was not so? How did the relation commence?<br />Once, however, engaged in the inquiry, I was not very long in finding out the true solution of the matter. It was not color, but crime, not God, but man, that afforded the true explanation of the existence of slavery; nor was I long in finding out another important truth, viz: what man can make, man can unmake. .. .<br /><br />I distinctly remember being, even then, most strongly impressed with the idea of being a free man some day. This cheering assurance was an inborn dream of my human nature-a constant menace to slavery-and one which all the powers of slavery were unable to silence or extinguish.<br /><br />The Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1850 was a concession to the southern states in return for the admission of the Mexican war territories (California, especially) into the Union as nonslave states. The Act made it easy for slaveowners to recapture ex-slaves or simply to pick up blacks they claimed had run away. Northern blacks organized resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, denouncing President Fillmore, who signed it, and Senator Daniel Webster, who supported it. One of these was J. W. Loguen, son of a slave mother and her white owner. He had escaped to freedom on his master's horse, gone to college, and was now a minister in Syracuse, New York. He spoke to a meeting in that city in 1850:<br /><br />The time has come to change the tones of submission into tones of defiance-and to tell Mr. Fillmore and Mr. Webster, if they propose to execute this measure upon us, to send on their blood-hounds. ... I received my freedom from Heaven, and with it came the command to defend my title to it. ... I don't respect this law-I don't fear it-I won't obey it! It outlaws me, and I outlaw it.... I will not live a slave, and if force is employed to re-enslave me, I shall make preparations to meet the crisis as becomes a man. ... Your decision tonight in favor of resistance will give vent to the spirit of liberty, and it will break the bands of party, and shout for joy all over the North. ... Heaven knows that this act of noble daring will break out somewhere-and may God grant that Syracuse be the honored spot, whence it shall send an earthquake voice through the land!<br />The following year, Syracuse had its chance. A runaway slave named Jerry was captured and put on trial. A crowd used crowbars and a battering ram to break into the courthouse, defying marshals with drawn guns, and set Jerry free.<br /><br />Loguen made his home in Syracuse a major station on the Underground Railroad. It was said that he helped 1,500 slaves on their way to Canada. His memoir of slavery came to the attention of his former mistress, and she wrote to him, asking him either to return or to send her $1,000 in compensation. Loguen's reply to her was printed in the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator:<br /><br />Mrs. Sarah Logue. .. . You say you have offers to buy me, and that you shall sell me if I do not send you $1000, and in the same breath and almost in the same sentence, you say, "You know we raised you as we did our own children." Woman, did you raise your own children for the market? Did you raise them for the whipping post? Did you raise them to be driven off, bound to a coffle in chains? . .. Shame on you!<br />But you say I am a thief, because I took the old mare along with me. Have you got to learn that I had a better right to the old mare, as you call her, than Manasseth Logue had to me? Is it a greater sin for me to steal his horse, than it was for him to rob my mother's cradle, and steal me? . .. Have you got to learn that human rights are mutual and reciprocal, and if you take my liberty and life, you forfeit your own liberty and life? Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man?<br /><br />If you or any other speculator on my body and rights, wish to know how I regard my rights, they need but come here, and lay their hands on me to enslave me.. . .<br /><br />Yours, etc. J. W. Loguen<br />Frederick Douglass knew that the shame of slavery was not just the South's, that the whole nation was complicit in it. On the Fourth of July, 1852, he gave an Independence Day address:<br /><br />Fellow Citizens: Pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I or those I represent to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits, and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?.. .<br />What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. 'In him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass- fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.<br /><br />Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival... .<br /><br />Ten years after Nat Turner's rebellion, there was no sign of black insurrection in the South. But that year, 1841, one incident took place which kept alive the idea of rebellion. Slaves being transported on a ship, the Creole, overpowered the crew, killed one of them, and sailed into the British West Indies (where slavery had been abolished in 1833). England refused to return the slaves (there was much agitation in England against American slavery), and this led to angry talk in Congress of war with England, encouraged by Secretary of State Daniel Webster. The Colored Peoples Press denounced Webster's "bullying position," and, recalling the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, wrote:<br /><br />If war be declared . .. Will we fight in defense of a government which denies us the most precious right of citizenship? .. . The States in which we dwell have twice availed themselves of our voluntary services, and have repaid us with chains and slavery. Shall we a third time kiss the foot that crushes us? If so, we deserve our chains.<br />As the tension grew, North and South, blacks became more militant. Frederick Douglass spoke in 1857:<br /><br />Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle. ... If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will... .<br />There were tactical differences between Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, white abolitionist and editor of The Liberator-differences between black and white abolitionists in general. Blacks were more willing to engage in armed insurrection, but also more ready to use existing political devices-the ballot box, the Constitution-anything to further their cause. They were not as morally absolute in their tactics as the Garrisonians. Moral pressure would not do it alone, the blacks knew; it would take all sorts of tactics, from elections to rebellion.<br /><br />How ever-present in the minds of northern Negroes was the question of slavery is shown by black children in a Cincinnati school, a private school financed by Negroes. The children were responding to the question "What do you think most about?" Only five answers remain in the records, and all refer to slavery. A seven-year-old child wrote:<br /><br />Dear schoolmates, we are going next summer to buy a farm and to work part of the day and to study the other part if we live to see it and come home part of the day to see our mothers and sisters and cousins if we are got any and see our kind folks and to be good boys and when we get a man to get the poor slaves from bondage. And I am sorrow to hear that the boat... went down with 200 poor slaves from up the river. Oh how sorrow I am to hear that, it grieves my heart so drat I could faint in one minute.<br />White abolitionists did courageous and pioneering work, on the lecture platform, in newspapers, in the Underground Railroad. Black abolitionists, less publicized, were the backbone of the antislavery movement. Before Garrison published his famous Liberator in Boston in 1831, the first national convention of Negroes had been held, David Walker had already written his "Appeal," and a black abolitionist magazine named Freedom's Journal had appeared. Of The Liberator's first twenty-five subscribers, most were black.<br /><br />Blacks had to struggle constantly with the unconscious racism of white abolitionists. They also had to insist on their own independent voice. Douglass wrote for The Liberator, but in 1847 started his own newspaper in Rochester, North Star, which led to a break with Garrison. In 1854, a conference of Negroes declared: ". . . it is emphatically our battle; no one else can fight it for us. . . . Our relations to the Anti-Slavery movement must be and are changed. Instead of depending upon it we must lead it."<br /><br />Certain black women faced the triple hurdle-of being abolitionists in a slave society, of being black among white reformers, and of being women in a reform movement dominated by men. When Sojourner Truth rose to speak in 1853 in New York City at the Fourth National Woman's Rights Convention, it all came together. There was a hostile mob in the hall shouting, jeering, threatening. She said:<br /><br />I know that it feels a kind o' hissin' and ticklin' like to see a colored woman get up and tell you about things, and Woman's Rights. We have all been thrown down so low that nobody thought we'd ever get up again; but ... we will come up again, and now I'm here. . . . we'll have our rights; see if we don't; and you can't stop us from them; see if you can. You may hiss as much as yon like, but it is comin'. ... I am sittin' among you to watch; and every once and awhile I will come out and tell you what time of night it is. ...<br />After Nat Turner's violent uprising and Virginia's bloody repression, the security system inside the South became tighter. Perhaps only an outsider could hope to launch a rebellion. It was such a person, a white man of ferocious courage and determination, John Brown, whose wild scheme it was to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and then set off a revolt of slaves through the South.<br /><br />Harriet Tubman, 5 feet tall, some of her teeth missing, a veteran of countless secret missions piloting blacks out of slavery, was involved with John Brown and his plans. But sickness prevented her from joining him. Frederick Douglass too had met with Brown. He argued against the plan from the standpoint of its chances of success, but he admired the ailing man of sixty, tall, gaunt, white- haired.<br /><br />Douglass was right; the plan would not work. The local militia, joined by a hundred marines under the command of Robert E. Lee, surrounded the insurgents. Although his men were dead or captured, John Brown refused to surrender: he barricaded himself in a small brick building near the gate of the armory. The troops battered down a door; a marine lieutenant moved in and struck Brown with his sword. Wounded, sick, he was interrogated. W. E. B. Du Bois, in his book John Brown, writes:<br /><br />Picture the situation: An old and blood-bespattered man, half-dead from the wounds inflicted but a few hours before; a man lying in the cold and dirt, without sleep for fifty-five nerve-wrecking hours, without food for nearly as long, with the dead bodies of his two sons almost before his eyes, the piled corpses of his seven slain comrades near and afar, a wife and a bereaved family listening in vain, and a Lost Cause, the dream of a lifetime, lying dead in his heart. . . .<br />Lying there, interrogated by the governor of Virginia, Brown said: "You had better-all you people at the South-prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question.. . . You may dispose of me very easily-I am nearly disposed of now, but this question is still to be settled,-this Negro question, I mean; the end of that is not yet."<br /><br />Du Bois appraises Brown's action:<br /><br />If his foray was the work of a handful of fanatics, led by a lunatic and repudiated by the slaves to a man, then the proper procedure would have been to ignore the incident, quietly punish the worst offenders and either pardon the misguided leader or send him to an asylum... . While insisting that the raid was too hopelessly and ridiculously small to accomplish anything .. . the state nevertheless spent $250,000 to punish the invaders, stationed from one to three thousand soldiers in the vicinity and threw the nation into turmoil.<br />In John Brown's last written statement, in prison, before he was hanged, he said: "I, John Brown, am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood." Ralph Waldo Emerson, not an activist himself, said of the execution of John Brown: "He will make the gallows holy as the cross."<br /><br />Of the twenty-two men in John Brown's striking force, five were black. Two of these were killed on the spot, one escaped, and two were hanged by the authorities. Before his execution, John Copeland wrote to his parents:<br /><br />Remember that if I must die I die in trying to liberate a few of my poor and oppressed people from my condition of servitude which Cod in his Holy Writ has hurled his most bitter denunciations against ...<br />I am not terrified by the gallows....<br /><br />I imagine that I hear you, and all of you, mother, father, sisters, and brothers, say-"No, there is not a cause for which we, with less sorrow, could see you die." Believe me when I tell you, that though shut up in prison and under sentence of death, I have spent more happy hours here, and .. . I would almost as lief the now as at any time, for I feel that I am prepared to meet my Maker. .. .<br /><br />John Brown was executed by the state of Virginia with the approval of the national government. It was the national government which, while weakly enforcing the law ending the slave trade, sternly enforced the laws providing for the return of fugitives to slavery. It was the national government that, in Andrew Jackson's administration, collaborated with the South to keep abolitionist literature out of the mails in the southern states. It was the Supreme Court of the United States that declared in 1857 that the slave Dred Scott could not sue for his freedom because he was not a person, but property.<br /><br />Such a national government would never accept an end to slavery by rebellion. It would end slavery only under conditions controlled by whites, and only when required by the political and economic needs of the business elite of the North. It was Abraham Lincoln who combined perfectly the needs of business, the political ambition of the new Republican party, and the rhetoric of humanitarianism. He would keep the abolition of slavery not at the top of his list of priorities, but close enough to the top so it could be pushed there temporarily by abolitionist pressures and by practical political advantage.<br /><br />Lincoln could skillfully blend the interests of the very rich and the interests of the black at a moment in history when these interests met. And he could link these two with a growing section of Americans, the white, up-and-coming, economically ambitious, politically active middle class. As Richard Hofstadter puts it:<br /><br />Thoroughly middle class in his ideas, he spoke for those millions of Americans who had begun their lives as hired workers-as farm hands, clerks, teachers, mechanics, flatboat men, and rail- splitters-and had passed into the ranks of landed farmers, prosperous grocers, lawyers, merchants, physicians and politicians.<br />Lincoln could argue with lucidity and passion against slavery on moral grounds, while acting cautiously in practical politics. He believed "that the institution of slavery is founded on injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends to increase rather than abate its evils." (Put against this Frederick Douglass's statement on struggle, or Garrison's "Sir, slavery will not be overthrown without excitement, a most tremendous excitement") Lincoln read the Constitution strictly, to mean that Congress, because of the Tenth Amendment (reserving to the states powers not specifically given to the national government), could not constitutionally bar slavery in the states.<br /><br />When it was proposed to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, which did not have the rights of a state that was directly under the jurisdiction of Congress, Lincoln said this would be Constitutional, but it should not be done unless the people in the District wanted it. Since most there were white, this killed the idea. As Hofstadter said of Lincoln's statement, it "breathes the fire of an uncompromising insistence on moderation."<br /><br />Lincoln refused to denounce the Fugitive Slave Law publicly. He wrote to a friend: "I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down . .. but I bite my lips and keep quiet." And when he did propose, in 1849, as a Congressman, a resolution to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, he accompanied this with a section requiring local authorities to arrest and return fugitive slaves coming into Washington. (This led Wendell Phillips, the Boston abolitionist, to refer to him years later as "that slavehound from Illinois.") He opposed slavery, but could not see blacks as equals, so a constant theme in his approach was to free the slaves and to send them back to Africa.<br /><br />In his 1858 campaign in Illinois for the Senate against Stephen Douglas, Lincoln spoke differently depending on the views of his listeners (and also perhaps depending on how close it was to the election). Speaking in northern Illinois in July (in Chicago), he said:<br /><br />Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.<br />Two months later in Charleston, in southern Illinois, Lincoln told his audience:<br /><br />I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races (applause); that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.. . .<br />And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.<br /><br />Behind the secession of the South from the Union, after Lincoln was elected President in the fall of 1860 as candidate of the new Republican party, was a long series of policy clashes between South and North. The clash was not over slavery as a moral institution-most northerners did not care enough about slavery to make sacrifices for it, certainly not the sacrifice of war. It was not a clash of peoples (most northern whites were not economically favored, not politically powerful; most southern whites were poor farmers, not decisionmakers) but of elites. The northern elite wanted economic expansion-free land, free labor, a free market, a high protective tariff for manufacturers, a bank of the United States. The slave interests opposed all that; they saw Lincoln and the Republicans as making continuation of their pleasant and prosperous way of life impossible in the future.<br /><br />So, when Lincoln was elected, seven southern states seceded from the Union. Lincoln initiated hostilities by trying to repossess the federal base at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and four more states seceded. The Confederacy was formed; the Civil War was on.<br /><br />Lincoln's first Inaugural Address, in March 1861, was conciliatory toward the South and the seceded states: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." And with the war four months on, when General John C. Fremont in Missouri declared martial law and said slaves of owners resisting the United States were to be free, Lincoln countermanded this order. He was anxious to hold in the Union the slave states of Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware.<br /><br />It was only as the war grew more bitter, the casualties mounted, desperation to win heightened, and the criticism of the abolitionists threatened to unravel the tattered coalition behind Lincoln that he began to act against slavery. Hofstadter puts it this way: "Like a delicate barometer, he recorded the trend of pressures, and as the Radical pressure increased he moved toward the left." Wendell Phillips said that if Lincoln was able to grow "it is because we have watered him."<br /><br />Racism in the North was as entrenched as slavery in the South, and it would take the war to shake both. New York blacks could not vote unless they owned $250 in property (a qualification not applied to whites). A proposal to abolish this, put on the ballot in 1860, was defeated two to one (although Lincoln carried New York by 50,000 votes). Frederick Douglass commented: "The black baby of Negro suffrage was thought too ugly to exhibit on so grand an occasion. The Negro was stowed away like some people put out of sight their deformed children when company comes."<br /><br />Wendell Phillips, with all his criticism of Lincoln, recognized the possibilities in his election. Speaking at the Tremont Temple in Boston the day after the election, Phillips said:<br /><br />If the telegraph speaks truth, for the first time in our history the slave has chosen a President of the United States. . . . Not an Abolitionist, hardly an antislavery man, Mr. Lincoln consents to represent an antislavery idea. A pawn on the political chessboard, his value is in his position; with fair effort, we may soon change him for knight, bishop or queen, and sweep the board. (Applause)<br />Conservatives in the Boston upper classes wanted reconciliation with the South. At one point they stormed an abolitionist meeting at that same Tremont Temple, shortly after Lincoln's election, and asked that concessions be made to the South "in the interests of commerce, manufactures, agriculture."<br /><br />The spirit of Congress, even after the war began, was shown in a resolution it passed in the summer of 1861, with only a few dissenting votes: "... this war is not waged . . . for any purpose of... overthrowing or interfering with the rights of established institutions of those states, but... to preserve the Union."<br /><br />The abolitionists stepped up their campaign. Emancipation petitions poured into Congress in 1861 and 1862. In May of that year, Wendell Phillips said: "Abraham Lincoln may not wish it; he cannot prevent it; the nation may not will it, but the nation cannot prevent it. I do not care what men want or wish; the negro is the pebble in the cog-wheel, and the machine cannot go on until you get him out."<br /><br />In July Congress passed a Confiscation Act, which enabled the freeing of slaves of those fighting the Union. But this was not enforced by the Union generals, and Lincoln ignored the nonenforcement. Garrison called Lincoln's policy "stumbling, halting, prevaricating, irresolute, weak, besotted," and Phillips said Lincoln was "a first-rate second-rate man."<br /><br />An exchange of letters between Lincoln and Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, in August of 1862, gave Lincoln a chance to express his views. Greeley wrote:<br /><br />Dear Sir. I do not intrude to tell you-for you must know already-that a great proportion of those who triumphed in your election ... are sorely disappointed and deeply pained by the policy you seem to be pursuing with regard to the slaves of rebels,... We require of you, as the first servant of the Republic, charged especially and preeminently with this duty, that you EXECUTE THE LAWS. ... We think you are strangely and disastrously remiss . .. with regard to the emancipating provisions of the new Confiscation Act....<br />We think you are unduly influenced by the councils ... of certain politicians hailing from the Border Slave States.<br /><br />Greeley appealed to the practical need of winning the war. "We must have scouts, guides, spies, cooks, teamsters, diggers and choppers from the blacks of the South, whether we allow them to fight for us or not.... I entreat you to render a hearty and unequivocal obedience to the law of the land."<br /><br />Lincoln had already shown his attitude by his failure to countermand an order of one of his commanders, General Henry Halleck, who forbade fugitive Negroes to enter his army's lines. Now he replied to Greeley:<br /><br />Dear Sir: ... I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. .. . My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about Slavery and the colored race, I do because it helps to save this Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. . .. I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men, everywhere, could be free. Yours. A. Lincoln.<br />So Lincoln distinguished between his "personal wish" and his "official duty."<br /><br />When in September 1862, Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, it was a military move, giving the South four months to stop rebelling, threatening to emancipate their slaves if they continued to fight, promising to leave slavery untouched in states that came over to the North:<br /><br />That on the 1st day of January, AD 1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward and forever free. . . .<br />Thus, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued January 1, 1863, it declared slaves free in those areas still fighting against the Union (which it listed very carefully), and said nothing about slaves behind Union lines. As Hofstadter put it, the Emancipation Proclamation "had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading." The London Spectator wrote concisely: "The principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States."<br /><br />Limited as it was, the Emancipation Proclamation spurred antislavery forces. By the summer of 1864, 400,000 signatures asking legislation to end slavery had been gathered and sent to Congress, something unprecedented in the history of the country. That April, the Senate had adopted the Thirteenth Amendment, declaring an end to slavery, and in January 1865, the House of Representatives followed.<br /><br />With the Proclamation, the Union army was open to blacks. And the more blacks entered the war, the more it appeared a war for their liberation. The more whites had to sacrifice, the more resentment there was, particularly among poor whites in the North, who were drafted by a law that allowed the rich to buy their way out of the draft for $300. And so the draft riots of 1863 took place, uprisings of angry whites in northern cities, their targets not the rich, far away, but the blacks, near at hand. It was an orgy of death and violence. A black man in Detroit described what he saw: a mob, with kegs of beer on wagons, armed with clubs and bricks, marching through the city, attacking black men, women, children. He heard one man say: "If we are got to be killed up for Negroes then we will kill every one in this town."<br /><br />The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in human history up to that time: 600,000 dead on both sides, in a population of 30 million-the equivalent, in the United States of 1978, with a population of 250 million, of 5 million dead. As the battles became more intense, as the bodies piled up, as war fatigue grew, the existence of blacks in the South, 4 million of them, became more and more a hindrance to the South, and more and more an opportunity for the North. Du Bois, in Black Reconstruction, pointed this out:<br /><br />.. . these slaves had enormous power in their hands. Simply by stopping work, they could threaten the Confederacy with starvation. By walking into the Federal camps, they showed to doubting Northerners the easy possibility of using them thus, but by the same gesture, depriving their enemies of their use in just these fields....<br />It was this plain alternative that brought Lee's sudden surrender. Either the South must make terms with its slaves, free them, use them to fight the North, and thereafter no longer treat them as bondsmen; or they could surrender to the North with the assumption that the North after the war must help them to defend slavery, as it had before.<br /><br />George Rawick, a sociologist and anthropologist, describes the development of blacks up to and into the Civil War:<br /><br />The slaves went from being frightened human beings, thrown among strange men, including fellow slaves who were not their kinsmen and who did not speak their language or understand their customs and habits, to what W. E. B. DuBois once described as the general strike whereby hundreds of thousands of slaves deserted the plantations, destroying the Smith's ability to supply its army.<br />Black women played an important part in the war, especially toward the end. Sojourner Truth, the legendary ex-slave who had been active in the women's rights movement, became recruiter of black troops for the Union army, as did Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin of Boston. Harriet Tubman raided plantations, leading black and white troops, and in one expedition freed 750 slaves. Women moved with the colored regiments that grew as the Union army marched through the South, helping their husbands, enduring terrible hardships on the long military treks, in which many children died. They suffered the fate of soldiers, as in April 1864, when Confederate troops at Fort Pillow, Kentucky, massacred Union soldiers who had surrendered-black and white, along with women and children in an adjoining camp.<br /><br />It has been said that black acceptance of slavery is proved by the fact that during the Civil War, when there were opportunities for escape, most slaves stayed on the plantation. In fact, half a million ran away- about one in five, a high proportion when one considers that there was great difficulty in knowing where to go and how to live.<br /><br />The owner of a large plantation in South Carolina and Georgia wrote in 1862: "This war has taught us the perfect impossibility of placing the least confidence in the negro. In too numerous instances those we esteemed the most have been the first to desert us." That same year, a lieutenant in the Confederate army and once mayor of Savannah, Georgia, wrote: "I deeply regret to learn that the Negroes still continue to desert to the enemy."<br /><br />A minister in Mississippi wrote in the fall of 1862: "On my arrival was surprised to hear that our negroes stampeded to the Yankees last night or rather a portion of them.... I think every one, but with one or two exceptions will go to the Yankees. Eliza and her family are certain to go. She does not conceal her thoughts but plainly manifests her opinions by her conduct-insolent and insulting." And a woman's plantation journal of January 1865:<br /><br />The people are all idle on the plantations, most of them seeking their own pleasure. Many servants have proven faithful, others false and rebellious against all authority and restraint. .. . Their condition is one of perfect anarchy and rebellion. They have placed themselves in perfect antagonism to their owners and to all government and control.. . . Nearly all the house servants have left their homes; and from most of the plantations they have gone in a body.<br />Also in 1865, a South Carolina planter wrote to the New York Tribune that<br /><br />the conduct of the Negro in the late crisis of our affairs has convinced me that we were all laboring under a delusion.... I believed that these people were content, happy, and attached to their masters. But events and reflection have caused me to change these positions.. .. If they were content, happy and attached to their masters, why did they desert him in the moment of his need and flock to an enemy, whom they did not know; and thus left their perhaps really good masters whom they did know from infancy?<br />Genovese notes that the war produced no general rising of slaves, but: "In Lafayette County, Mississippi, slaves responded to the Emancipation Proclamation by driving off their overseers and dividing the land and implements among themselves." Aptheker reports a conspiracy of Negroes in Arkansas in 1861 to kill their enslavers. In Kentucky that year, houses and barns were burned by Negroes, and in the city of New Castle slaves paraded through the city "singing political songs, and shouting for Lincoln," according to newspaper accounts. After the Emancipation Proclamation, a Negro waiter in Richmond, Virginia, was arrested for leading "a servile plot," while in Yazoo City, Mississippi, slaves burned the courthouse and fourteen homes.<br /><br />There were special moments: Robert Smalls (later a South Carolina Congressman) and other blacks took over a steamship, The Planter, and sailed it past the Confederate guns to deliver it to the Union navy.<br /><br />Most slaves neither submitted nor rebelled. They continued to work, waiting to see what happened. When opportunity came, they left, often joining the Union army. Two hundred thousand blacks were in the army and navy, and 38,000 were killed. Historian James McPherson says: "Without their help, the North could not have won the war as soon as it did, and perhaps it could not have won at all."<br /><br />What happened to blacks in the Union army and in the northern cities during the war gave some hint of how limited the emancipation would be, even with full victory over the Confederacy. Off- duty black soldiers were attacked in northern cities, as in Zanesville, Ohio, in February 1864, where cries were heard to "kill the nigger." Black soldiers were used for the heaviest and dirtiest work, digging trenches, hauling logs and camion, loading ammunition, digging wells for white regiments. White privates received $13 a month; Negro privates received $10 a month.<br /><br />Late in the war, a black sergeant of the Third South Carolina Volunteers, William Walker, marched his company to his captain's tent and ordered them to stack arms and resign from the army as a protest against what he considered a breach of contract, because of unequal pay. He was court-martialed and shot for mutiny. Finally, in June 1864, Congress passed a law granting equal pay to Negro soldiers.<br /><br />The Confederacy was desperate in the latter part of the war, and some of its leaders suggested the slaves, more and more an obstacle to their cause, be enlisted, used, and freed. After a number of military defeats, the Confederate secretary of war, Judah Benjamin, wrote in late 1864 to a newspaper editor in Charleston: ". . . It is well known that General Lee, who commands so largely the confidence of the people, is strongly in favor of our using the negroes for defense, and emancipating them, if necessary, for that purpose. . . ." One general, indignant, wrote: "If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong."<br /><br />By early 1865, the pressure had mounted, and in March President Davis of the Confederacy signed a "Negro Soldier Law" authorizing the enlistment of slaves as soldiers, to be freed by consent of their owners and their state governments. But before it had any significant effect, the war was over.<br /><br />Former slaves, interviewed by the Federal Writers' Project in the thirties, recalled the war's end. Susie Melton:<br /><br />I was a young gal, about ten years old, and we done heard that Lincoln gonna turn the niggers free. Ol' missus say there wasn't nothin' to it. Then a Yankee soldier told someone in Williamsburg that Lincoln done signed the 'mancipation. Was wintertime and mighty cold that night, but everybody commenced getting ready to leave. Didn't care nothin' about missus - was going to the Union lines. And all that night the niggers danced and sang right out in the cold. Next morning at day break we all started out with blankets and clothes and pots and pans and chickens piled on our backs, 'cause missus said we couldn't take no horses or carts. And as the sun come up over the trees, the niggers started to singing: Sun, you be here and I'll be gone<br />Sun, you be here and I'll be gone<br />Sun, you be here and I'll be gone<br />Bye, bye, don't grieve after me<br />Won't give you my place, not for yours<br />Bye, bye, don't grieve after me<br />Cause you be here and I'll be gone.<br />Anna Woods:<br /><br />We wasn't there in Texas long when the soldiers marched in to tell us that we were free. ... I remembers one woman. She jumped on a barrel and she shouted. She jumped off and she shouted. She jumped hack on again and shouted some more. She kept that up for a long time, just jumping on a barrel and back off again.<br />Annie Mae Weathers said:<br /><br />I remember hearing my pa say that when somebody came and hollered, "You niggers is free at last," say he just dropped his hoc and said in a queer voice, "Thank God for that."<br />The Federal Writers' Project recorded an ex-slave named Fannie Berry:<br /><br />Niggers shoutin' and clappin' hands and singin'! Chillun runnin' all over the place beatin' time and yellin'! Everybody happy. Sho' did some celebratin'. Run to the kitchen and shout in the window:<br />"Mammy, don't you cook no more.<br /><br />You's free! You's free!"<br /><br />Many Negroes understood that their status after the war, whatever their situation legally, would depend on whether they owned the land they worked on or would be forced to be semislaves for others. In 1863, a North Carolina Negro wrote that "if the strict law of right and justice is to be observed, the country around me is the entailed inheritance of the Americans of African descent, purchased by the invaluable labor of our ancestors, through a life of tears and groans, under the lash and yoke of tyranny."<br /><br />Abandoned plantations, however, were leased to former planters, and to white men of the North. As one colored newspaper said: "The slaves were made serfs and chained to the soil. . . . Such was the boasted freedom acquired by the colored man at the hands of the Yankee."<br /><br />Under congressional policy approved by Lincoln, the property confiscated during the war under the Confiscation Act of July 1862 would revert to the heirs of the Confederate owners. Dr. John Rock, a black physician in Boston, spoke at a meeting: "Why talk about compensating masters? Compensate them for what? What do you owe them? What does the slave owe them? What does society owe them? Compensate the master? . . . It is the slave who ought to be compensated. The property of the South is by right the property of the slave. . . ."<br /><br />Some land was expropriated on grounds the taxes were delinquent, and sold at auction. But only a few blacks could afford to buy this. In the South Carolina Sea Islands, out of 16,000 acres up for sale in March of 1863, freedmen who pooled their money were able to buy 2,000 acres, the rest being bought by northern investors and speculators. A freedman on the Islands dictated a letter to a former teacher now in Philadelphia:<br /><br />My Dear Young Missus: Do, my missus, tell Linkum dat we wants land - dis bery land dat is rich wid de sweat ob de face and de blood ob we back. . . . We could a bin buy all we want, but dey make de lots too big, and cut we out.<br />De word cum from Mass Linkum's self, dat we take out claims and hold on ter um, an' plant um, and he will see dat we get um, every man ten or twenty acre. We too glad. We stake out an' list, but fore de time for plant, dese commissionaries sells to white folks all de best land. Where Linkum?<br /><br />In early 1865, General William T. Sherman held a conference in Savannah, Georgia, with twenty Negro ministers and church officials, mostly former slaves, at which one of them expressed their need: "The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and till it by our labor. . . ." Four days later Sherman issued "Special Field Order No. 15," designating the entire southern coastline 30 miles inland for exclusive Negro settlement. Freedmen could settle there, taking no more than 40 acres per family. By June 1865, forty thousand freedmen had moved onto new farms in this area. But President Andrew Johnson, in August of 1865, restored this land to the Confederate owners, and the freedmen were forced off, some at bayonet point.<br /><br />Ex-slave Thomas Hall told the Federal Writers' Project:<br /><br />Lincoln got the praise for freeing us, but did he do it? He gave us freedom without giving us any chance to live to ourselves and we still had to depend on the southern white man for work, food, and clothing, and he held us out of necessity and want in a state of servitude but little better than slavery.<br />The American government had set out to fight the slave states in 1861, not to end slavery, but to retain the enormous national territory and market and resources. Yet, victory required a crusade, and the momentum of that crusade brought new forces into national politics: more blacks determined to make their freedom mean something; more whites-whether Freedman's Bureau officials, or teachers in the Sea Islands, or "carpetbaggers" with various mixtures of humanitarianism and personal ambition-concerned with racial equality. There was also the powerful interest of the Republican party in maintaining control over the national government, with the prospect of southern black votes to accomplish this. Northern businessmen, seeing Republican policies as beneficial to them, went along for a while.<br /><br />The result was that brief period after the Civil War in which southern Negroes voted, elected blacks to state legislatures and to Congress, introduced free and racially mixed public education to the South. A legal framework was constructed. The Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." The Fourteenth Amendment repudiated the prewar Dred Scott decision by declaring that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States" were citizens. It also seemed to make a powerful statement for racial equality, severely limiting "states' rights":<br /><br />No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.<br />The Fifteenth Amendment said: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."<br /><br />Congress passed a number of laws in the late 1860s and early 1870s in the same spirit-laws making it a crime to deprive Negroes of their rights, requiring federal officials to enforce those rights, giving Negroes the right to enter contracts and buy property without discrimination. And in 1875, a Civil Rights Act outlawed the exclusion of Negroes from hotels, theaters, railroads, and other public accommodations.<br /><br />With these laws, with the Union army in the South as protection, and a civilian army of officials in the Freedman's Bureau to help them, southern Negroes came forward, voted, formed political organizations, and expressed themselves forcefully on issues important to them. They were hampered in this for several years by Andrew Johnson, Vice-President under Lincoln, who became President when Lincoln was assassinated at the close of the war. Johnson vetoed bills to help Negroes; he made it easy for Confederate states to come back into the Union without guaranteeing equal rights to blacks. During his presidency, these returned southern states enacted "black codes," which made the freed slaves like serfs, still working the plantations. For instance, Mississippi in 1865 made it illegal for freedmen to rent or lease farmland, and provided for them to work under labor contracts which they could not break under penalty of prison. It also provided that the courts could assign black children under eighteen who had no parents, or whose parents were poor, to forced labor, called apprenticeships - with punishment for runaways.<br /><br />Andrew Johnson clashed with Senators and Congressmen who, in some cases for reasons of justice, in others out of political calculation, supported equal rights and voting for the freedman. These members of Congress succeeded in impeaching Johnson in 1868, using as an excuse that he had violated some minor statute, but the Senate fell one vote short of the two-thirds required to remove him from office. In the presidential election of that year, Republican Ulysses Grant was elected, winning by 300,000 votes, with 700,000 Negroes voting, and so Johnson was out as an obstacle. Now the southern states could come back into the Union only by approving the new Constitutional amendments.<br /><br />Whatever northern politicians were doing to help their cause, southern blacks were determined to make the most of their freedom, in spite of their lack of land and resources. A study of blacks in Alabama in the first years after the war by historian Peter Kolchin finds that they began immediately asserting their independence of whites, forming their own churches, becoming politically active, strengthening their family ties, trying to educate their children. Kolchin disagrees with the contention of some historians that slavery had created a "Sambo" mentality of submission among blacks. "As soon as they were free, these supposedly dependent, childlike Negroes began acting like independent men and women."<br /><br />Negroes were now elected to southern state legislatures, although in all these they were a minority except in the lower house of the South Carolina legislature. A great propaganda campaign was undertaken North and South (one which lasted well into the twentieth century, in the history textbooks of American schools) to show that blacks were inept, lazy, corrupt, and ruinous to the governments of the South when they were in office. Undoubtedly there was corruption, but one could hardly claim that blacks had invented political conniving, especially in the bizarre climate of financial finagling North and South after the Civil War.<br /><br />It was true that the public debt of South Carolina, $7 million in 1865, went up to $29 million in 1873, but the new legislature introduced free public schools for the first time into the state. Not only were seventy thousand Negro children going to school by 1876 where none had gone before, but fifty thousand white children were going to school where only twenty thousand had attended in 1860.<br /><br />Black voting in the period after 1869 resulted in two Negro members of the U.S. Senate (Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, both from Mississippi), and twenty Congressmen, including eight from South Carolina, four from North Carolina, three from Alabama, and one each from the other former Confederate states. (This list would dwindle rapidly after 1876; the last black left Congress in 1901.)<br /><br />A Columbia University scholar of the twentieth century, John Burgess, referred to Black Reconstruction as follows:<br /><br />In place of government by the most intelligent and virtuous part of the people for the benefit of the governed, here was government by the most ignorant and vicious part of the population.... A black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason; has never, therefore, created civilization of any kind.<br />One has to measure against those words the black leaders in the postwar South. For instance, Henry MacNeal Turner, who had escaped from peonage on a South Carolina plantation at the age of fifteen, taught himself to read and write, read law books while a messenger in a lawyer's office in Baltimore, and medical books while a handyman in a Baltimore medical school, served as chaplain to a Negro regiment, and then was elected to the first postwar legislature of Georgia. In 1868, the Georgia legislature voted to expel all its Negro members-two senators, twenty-five representatives- and Turner spoke to the Georgia House of Representatives (a black woman graduate student at Atlanta University later brought his speech to light):<br /><br />Mr. Speaker.. . . I wish the members of this House to understand the position that I take. I hold that I am a member of this body. Therefore, sir, I shall neither fawn or cringe before any party, nor stoop to beg them for my rights. .. . I am here to demand my rights, and to hurl thunderbolts at the men who would dare to cross the threshold of my manhood. . . .<br />The scene presented in this House, today, is one unparalleled in the history of the world.... Never, in the history of the world, has a man been arraigned before a body clothed with legislative, judicial or executive functions, charged with the offense of being of a darker hue than his fellow-men. ... it has remained for the State of Georgia, in the very heart of the nineteenth century, to call a man before the bar, and there charge him with an act for which he is no more responsible than for the head which he carries upon his shoulders. The Anglo-Saxon race, sir, is a most surprising one.... I was not aware that there was in the character of that race so much cowardice, or so much pusillanimity. ... I tell you, sir, that this is a question which will not the today. This event shall be remembered by posterity for ages yet to come, and while the sun shall continue to climb the hills of heaven....<br /><br />. . . we are told mat if black men want to speak, they must speak through white trumpets; if black men want their sentiments expressed, they must be adulterated and sent through white messengers, who will quibble, and equivocate, and evade, as rapidly as me pendulum of a clock.. . .<br /><br />The great question, sir is this: Am I a man? If I am such, I claim the rights of a man.. . .<br /><br />Why, sir, though we are not white, we have accomplished much. We have pioneered civilization here; we have built up your country; we have worked in your fields, and garnered your harvests, for two hundred and fifty years! And what do we ask of you in return? Do we ask you for compensation for the sweat our fathers bore for you-for the rears you have caused, and the hearts you have broken, and the lives you have curtailed, and the blood you have spilled? Do we ask retaliation? We ask it not. We are willing to let the dead past bury its dead; but we ask you now for our RIGHTS. .. .<br /><br />As black children went to school, they were encouraged by teachers, black and white, to express themselves freely, sometimes in catechism style. The records of a school in Louisville, Kentucky:<br /><br />TEACHER: Now children, you don't think white people are any better than you because they have straight hair and white faces?<br />STUDENTS: No, sir.<br />TEACHER: No, they are no better, but they are different, they possess great power, they formed this great government, they control this vast country. . . . Now what makes them different from you?<br />STUDENTS: Money!<br />TEACHER: Yes, but what enabled them to obtain it? How did they get money?<br />STUDENTS: Got it off us, stole it off we all!<br />Black women helped rebuild the postwar South. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, born free in Baltimore, self-supporting from the age of thirteen, working as a nursemaid, later as an abolitionist lecturer, reader of her own poetry, spoke all through the southern states after the war. She was a feminist, participant in the 1866 Woman's Rights Convention, and founder of the National Association of Colored Women. In the 1890s she wrote the first novel published by a black woman: lola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted. In 1878 she described what she had seen and heard recently in the South:<br /><br />An acquaintance of mine, who lives in South Carolina, and has been engaged in mission work, reports that, in supporting the family, women are the mainstay; that two-thirds of the truck gardening is done by them in South Carolina; that in the city they are more industrious than the men. . ., When the men lose their work through their political affiliations, the women stand by them, and say, "stand by your principles."<br />Through all the struggles to gain equal rights for blacks, certain black women spoke out on their special situation. Sojourner Truth, at a meeting of the American Equal Rights Association, said:<br /><br />There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again... .<br />I am above eighty years old; it is about time for me to be going. I have been forty years a slave and forty years free, and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all. I suppose I am kept here because some-thing remains for me to do; I suppose I am yet to help break the chain. I have done a great deal of work; as much as a man, but did not get so much pay. I used to work in the field and bind grain, keeping with the cradler; but men doing no more, got twice as much pay-... I suppose I am about the only colored woman that goes about to speak for the rights of the colored women. I want to keep the thing stirring, now that the ice is cracked. . . .<br /><br />The Constitutional amendments were passed, the laws for racial equality were passed, and the black man began to vote and to hold office. Cut so long as the Negro remained dependent on privileged whites for work, for the necessities of life, his vote could be bought or taken away by threat of force. Thus, laws calling for equal treatment became meaningless. While Union troops-including colored troops- remained in the South, this process was delayed. But the balance of military powers began to change.<br /><br />The southern white oligarchy used its economic power to organize the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups. Northern politicians began to weigh the advantage of the political support of impoverished blacks-maintained in voting and office only by force-against the more stable situation of a South returned to white supremacy, accepting Republican dominance and business legislation. It was only a matter of time before blacks would be reduced once again to conditions not far from slavery.<br /><br />Violence began almost immediately with the end of the war. In Memphis, Tennessee, in May of 1866, whites on a rampage of murder killed forty-six Negroes, most of them veterans of the Union army, as well as two white sympathizers. Five Negro women were raped. Ninety homes, twelve schools, and four churches were burned. In New Orleans, in the summer of 1866, another riot against blacks killed thirty-five Negroes and three whites.<br /><br />Mrs. Sarah Song testified before a congressional investigating committee:<br /><br />Have you been a slave?<br /><br />I have been a slave.<br /><br />What did you see of the rioting?<br /><br />I saw them kill my husband; it was on Tuesday night, between ten and eleven o'clock; he was shot in the head while he was in bed sick, . .. There were between twenty and thirty men.. . . They came into the room. . . . Then one stepped back and shot him . . . he was not a yard from him; he put the pistol to his head and shot him three times. . .. Then one of them kicked him, and another shot him again when he was down. . .. He never spoke after he fell. They then went running right off and did not come back again. .. .<br />The violence mounted through the late 1860s and early 1870s as the Ku Klux Klan organized raids, lynchings, beatings, burnings. For Kentucky alone, between 1867 and 1871, the National Archives lists 116 acts of violence. A sampling:<br /><br />1. A mob visited Harrodsburg in Mercer County to take from jail a man name Robertson Nov. 14, 1867.. . .<br />5. Sam Davis hung by a mob in Harrodsburg, May 28, 1868.<br />6. Wm. Pierce hung by a mob in Christian July 12, 1868.<br />7. Geo. Roger hung by a mob in Bradsfordville Martin County July 11, 1868. ...<br />10. Silas Woodford age sixty badly beaten by disguised mob. . .. <br />109. Negro killed by Ku Klux Klan in Hay county January 14, 1871.<br />A Negro blacksmith named Charles Caldwell, born a slave, later elected to the Mississippi Senate, and known as "a notorious and turbulent Negro" by whites, was shot at by the son of a white Mississippi judge in 1868. Caldwell fired back and killed the man. Tried by an all-white jury, he argued self-defense and was acquitted, the first Negro to kill a white in Mississippi and go free after a trial. But on Christmas Day 1875, Caldwell was shot to death by a white gang. It was a sign. The old white rulers were taking back political power in Mississippi, and everywhere else in the South.<br /><br />As white violence rose in the 1870s, the national government, even under President Grant, became less enthusiastic about defending blacks, and certainly not prepared to arm them. The Supreme Court played its gyroscopic role of pulling the other branches of government back to more conservative directions when they went too far. It began interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment- passed presumably for racial equality-in a way that made it impotent for this purpose. In 1883, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, outlawing discrimination against Negroes using public facilities, was nullified by the Supreme Court, which said: "Individual invasion of individual rights is not the subject-matter of the amendment." The Fourteenth Amendment, it said, was aimed at state action only. "No state shall ..."<br /><br />A remarkable dissent was written by Supreme Court Justice John Harlan, himself a former slaveowner in Kentucky, who said there was Constitutional justification for banning private discrimination. He noted that the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery, applied to individual plantation owners, not just the state. He then argued that discrimination was a badge of slavery and similarly outlawable. He pointed also to the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, saying that anyone born in the United States was a citizen, and to the clause in Article 4, Section 2, saying "the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States."<br /><br />Harlan was fighting a force greater than logic or justice; the mood of the Court reflected a new coalition of northern industrialists and southern businessmen-planters. The culmination of this mood came in the decision of 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson, when the Court ruled that a railroad could segregate black and white if the segregated facilities were equal:<br /><br />The object of the amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.<br />Harlan again dissented: "Our Constitution is color-blind.. .."<br /><br />It was the year 1877 that spelled out clearly and dramatically what was happeninJustin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7802161651764963928.post-63469474300812196652010-11-12T02:48:00.000-08:002010-11-17T03:54:38.962-08:00Marx on American Civil War (1861)Articles by Karl Marx in Die Presse 1861<br />The North American Civil War<br />________________________________________<br />Written: October 1861;<br />Source: Marx/Engels Collected Works, Volume 19;<br />Publisher: Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964;<br />First Published: Die Presse No. 293, October 25, 1861;<br />Online Version: marxists.org 1999;<br />Transcribed: Bob Schwarz;<br />HTML Markup: Tim Delaney in 1999.<br />________________________________________<br />London, October 20, 1861<br />For months the leading weekly and daily papers of the London press have been reiterating the same litany on the American Civil War. While they insult the free states of the North, they anxiously defend themselves against the suspicion of sympathising with the slave states of the South. In fact, they continually write two articles: one article, in which they attack the North, and another article, in which they excuse their attacks on the North.<br />In essence the extenuating arguments read: The war between the North and South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust for sovereignty. Finally, even if justice is on the side of the North , does it not remain a vain endeavour to want to subjugate eight million Anglo-Saxons by force! Would not separation of the South release the North from all connection with Negro slavery and ensure for it, with its twenty million inhabitants and its vast territory, a higher, hitherto scarcely dreamt-of, development? Accordingly, must not the North welcome secession as a happy event, instead of wanting to overrule it by a bloody and futile civil war?<br />Point by point we will probe the plea of the English press.<br />The war between North and South -- so runs the first excuse -- is a mere tariff war, a war between a protectionist system and a free trade system, and Britain naturally stands on the side of free trade. Shall the slave-owner enjoy the fruits of slave labour in their entirety or shall he be cheated of a portion of these by the protectionists of the North? That is the question which is at issue in this war. It was reserved for The Times to make this brilliant discovery. The Economist, The Examiner, The Saturday Review and tutti quantiexpounded the theme further. It is characteristic of this discovery that it was made, not in Charleston, but in London. Naturally, in America everyone knew that from 1846 to 1861 a free trade system prevailed, and that Representative Morrill carried his protectionist tariff through Congress only in 1861, after the rebellion had already broken out. Secession, therefore, did not take place because the Morrill tariff had gone through Congress, but, at most, the Morrill tariff went through Congress because secession had taken place. When South Carolina had its first attack of secession in 1831, the protectionist tariff of 1828 served it, to be sure, as a pretext, but only as a pretext, as is known from a statement of General Jackson. This time, however, the old pretext has in fact not been repeated. In the Secession Congress at Montgomery all reference to the tariff question was avoided, because the cultivation of sugar in Louisiana, one of the most influential Southern states, depends entirely on protection.<br />But, the London press pleads further, the war of the United States is nothing but a war for the forcible maintenance of the Union. The Yankees cannot make up their minds to strike fifteen stars from their standard. They want to cut a colossal figure on the world stage. Yes, it would be different if the war was waged for the abolition of slavery! The question of slavery, however, as The Saturday Review categorically declares among other things, has absolutely nothing to do with this war.<br />It is above all to be remembered that the war did not originate with the North, but with the South. The North finds itself on the defensive. For months it had quietly looked on while the secessionists appropriated the Union's forts, arsenals, shipyards, customs houses, pay offices, ships and supplies of arms, insulted its flag and took prisoner bodies of its troops. Finally the secessionists resolved to force the Union government out of its passive attitude by a blatant act of war, and solely for this reason proceeded to the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston. On April 11 (1861) their General Beauregard had learnt in a meeting with Major Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter, that the fort was only supplied with provisions for three days more and accordingly must be peacefully surrendered after this period. In order to forestall this peaceful surrender, the secessionists opened the bombardment early on the following morning (April 12), which brought about the fall of the fort in a few hours. News of this had hardly been telegraphed to Montgomery, the seat of the Secession Congress, when War Minister Walker publicly declared in the name of the new Confederacy: No man can say where the war opened today will end. At the same time he prophesied that before the first of May the flag of the Southern Confederacy will wave from the dome of the old Capitol in Washington and within a short time perhaps also from the Faneuil Hall in Boston. Only now ensued the proclamation in which Lincoln called for 75,000 men to defend the Union. The bombardment of Fort Sumter cut off the only possible constitutional way out, namely the convocation of a general convention of the American people, as Lincoln had proposed in his inaugural address. For Lincoln there now remained only the choice of fleeing from Washington, evacuating Maryland and Delaware and surrendering Kentucky, Missouri and Virginia, or of answering war with war.<br />The question of the principle of the American Civil War is answered by the battle slogan with which the South broke the peace. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, declared in the Secession Congress that what essentially distinguished the Constitution newly hatched at Montgomery from the Constitution of Washington and Jefferson was that now for the first time slavery was recognised as an institution good in itself, and as the foundation of the whole state edifice, whereas the revolutionary fathers, men steeped in the prejudices of the eighteenth century, had treated slavery as an evil imported from England and to be eliminated in the course of time. Another matador of the South, Mr. Spratt, cried out: "For us it is a question of founding a great slave republic." If, therefore, it was indeed only in defence of the Union that the North drew the sword, had not the South already declared that the continuance of slavery was no longer compatible with the continuance of the Union?<br />Just as the bombardment of Fort Sumter gave the signal for the opening of the war, the election victory of the Republican Party of the North, the election of Lincoln as President, gave the signal for secession. On November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected. On November 8, 1860, a message telegraphed from South Carolina said: Secession is regarded here as an accomplished fact; on November 10 the legislature of Georgia occupied itself with secession plans, and on November 13 a special session of the legislature of Mississippi was convened to consider secession. But Lincoln's election was itself only the result of a split in the Democratic camp. During the election struggle the Democrats of the North concentrated their votes on Douglas, the Democrats of the South concentrated their votes on Breckinridge, and to this splitting of the Democratic votes the Republican Party owed its victory. Whence came, on the one hand, the preponderance of the Republican Party in the North? Whence, on the other, the disunion within the Democratic Party, whose members, North and South, had operated in conjunction for more than half a century?<br />Under the presidency of Buchanan the sway that the South had gradually usurped over the Union through its alliance with the Northern Democrats attained its zenith. The last Continental Congress of 1787 and the first Constitutional Congress of 1789 -90 had legally excluded slavery from all Territories of the republic north-west of the Ohio. (Territories, as is known, is the name given to the colonies lying within the United States itself which have not yet attained the level of population constitutionally prescribed for the formation of autonomous states.) The so-called Missouri Compromise (1820), in consequence of which Missouri became one of the States of the Union as a slave state, excluded slavery from every remaining Territory north of 36 degrees latitude and west of the Missouri. By this compromise the area of slavery was advanced several degrees of longitude, whilst, on the other hand, a geographical boundary-line to its future spread seemed quite definitely drawn. This geographical barrier, in its turn, was thrown down in 1854 by the so-called Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the initiator of which was St[ephen] A. Douglas, then leader of the Northern Democrats. The Bill, which passed both Houses of Congress, repealed the Missouri Compromise, placed slavery and freedom on the same footing, commanded the Union government to treat them both with equal indifference and left it to the sovereignty of the people, that is, the majority of the settlers, to decide whether or not slavery was to be introduced in a Territory. Thus, for the first time in the history of the United States, every geographical and legal limit to the extension of slavery in the Territories was removed. Under this new legislation the hitherto free Territory of New Mexico, a Territory five times as large as the State of New York, was transformed into a slave Territory, and the area of slavery was extended from the border of the Mexican Republic to 38 degrees north latitude. In 1859 New Mexico received a slave code that vies with the statute-books of Texas and Alabama in barbarity. Nevertheless, as the census of 1860 proves, among some hundred thousand inhabitants New Mexico does not yet count half a hundred slaves. It had therefore sufficed for the South to send some adventurers with a few slaves over the border, and then with the help of the central government in Washington and of its officials and contractors in New Mexico to drum together a sham popular representation to impose slavery and with it the rule of the slaveholders on the Territory.<br />However, this convenient method did not prove applicable in other Territories. The South accordingly went a step further and appealed from Congress to the Supreme Court of the United States. This Court, which numbers nine judges, five of whom belong to the South, had long been the most willing tool of the slaveholders. It decided in 1857, in the notorious Dred Scott case, that every American citizen possesses the right to take with him into any territory any property recognized by the Constitution. The Constitution, it maintained, recognises slaves as property and obliges the Union government to protect this property. Consequently, on the basis of the Constitution, slaves could be forced to labour in the Territories by their owners, and so every individual slaveholder was entitled to introduce slavery into hitherto free Territories against the will of the majority of the settlers. The right to exclude slavery was taken from the Territorial legislatures and the duty to protect pioneers of the slave system was imposed on Congress and the Union government.<br />If the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had extended the geographical boundary-line of slavery in the Territories, if the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 had erased every geographical boundary-line and set up a political barrier instead, the will of the majority of the settlers, now the Supreme Court of the United States, by its decision of 1857, tore down even this political barrier and transformed all the Territories of the republic, present and future, from nurseries of free states into nurseries of slavery.<br />At the same time, under Buchanan's government the severer law on the surrendering of fugitive slaves enacted in 1850 was ruthlessly carried out in the states of the North. To play the part of slave-catchers for the Southern slaveholders appeared to be the constitutional calling of the North. On the other hand, in order to hinder as far as possible the colonisation of the Territories by free settlers, the slaveholders' party frustrated all the so-called free-soil measures, i.e., measures which were to secure for the settlers a definite amount of uncultivated state land free of charge.<br />In the foreign, as in the domestic, policy of the United States, the interest of the slaveholders served as the guiding star. Buchanan had in fact bought the office of President through the issue of the Ostend Manifesto, in which the acquisition of Cuba, whether by purchase or by force of arms, was proclaimed as the great task of national policy. Under his government northern Mexico was already divided among American land speculators, who impatiently awaited the signal to fall on Chihuahua, Coahuila and Sonora. The unceasing piratical expeditions of the filibusters against the states of Central America were directed no less from the White House at Washington. In the closest connection with this foreign policy, whose manifest purpose was conquest of new territory for the spread of slavery and of the slaveholders' rule, stood the reopening of the slave trade, secretly supported by the Union government. St[ephen] A. Douglas himself declared in the American Senate on August 20, 1859: During the last year more Negroes have been imported from Africa than ever before in any single year, even at the time when the slave trade was still legal. The number of slaves imported in the last year totalled fifteen thousand.<br />Armed spreading of slavery abroad was the avowed aim of national policy; the Union had in fact become the slave of the three hundred thousand slaveholders who held sway over the South. A series of compromises, which the South owed to its alliance with the Northern Democrats, had led to this result. On this alliance all the attempts, periodically repeated since 1817, to resist the ever increasing encroachments of the slaveholders had hitherto come to grief. At length there came a turning point.<br />For hardly had the Kansas-Nebraska Bill gone through, which wiped out the geographical boundary-line of slavery and made its introduction into new Territories subject to the will of the majority of the settlers, when armed emissaries of the slaveholders, border rabble from Missouri and Arkansas, with bowie-knife in one hand and revolver in the other, fell upon Kansas and sought by the most unheard-of atrocities to dislodge its settlers from the Territory colonised by them. These raids were supported by the central government in Washington. Hence a tremendous reaction. Throughout the North, but particularly in the North-west, a relief organisation was formed to support Kansas with men, arms and money. Out of this relief organisation arose the Republican Party, which therefore owes its origin to the struggle for Kansas. After the attempt to transform Kansas into a slave Territory by force of arms had failed, the South sought to achieve the same result by political intrigues. Buchanan's government, in particular, exerted its utmost efforts to have Kansas included in the States of the Union as a slave state with a slave constitution imposed on it. Hence renewed struggle, this time mainly conducted in Congress at Washington. Even St[ephen] A. Douglas, the chief of the Northern Democrats, now (1857 - 58) entered the lists against the government and his allies of the South, because imposition of a slave constitution would have been contrary to the principle of sovereignty of the settlers passed in the Nebraska Bill of 1854. Douglas, Senator for Illinois, a North-western state, would naturally have lost all his influence if he had wanted to concede to the South the right to steal by force of arms or through acts of Congress Territories colonised by the North. As the struggle for Kansas, therefore, called the Republican Party into being, it at the same time occasioned the first split within the Democratic Party itself.<br />The Republican Party put forward its first platform for the presidential election in 1856. Although its candidate, John Fremont, was not victorious, the huge number of votes cast for him at any rate proved the rapid growth of the Party, particularly in the North-west. At their second National Convention for the presidential election (May 17, 1860), the Republicans again put forward their platform of 1856, only enriched by some additions. Its principal contents were the following: Not a foot of fresh territory is further conceded to slavery. The filibustering policy abroad must cease. The reopening of the slave trade is stigmatised. Finally, free-soil laws are to be enacted for the furtherance of free colonisation.<br />The vitally important point in this platform was that not a foot of fresh terrain was conceded to slavery; rather it was to remain once and for all confined with the boundaries of the states where it already legally existed. Slavery was thus to be formally interned; but continual expansion of territory and continual spread of slavery beyond its old limits is a law of life for the slave states of the Union.<br />The cultivation of the southern export articles, cotton, tobacco, sugar , etc., carried on by slaves, is only remunerative as long as it is conducted with large gangs of slaves, on a mass scale and on wide expanses of a naturally fertile soil, which requires only simple labour. Intensive cultivation, which depends less on fertility of the soil than on investment of capital, intelligence and energy of labour, is contrary to the nature of slavery. Hence the rapid transformation of states like Maryland and Virginia, which formerly employed slaves on the production of export articles, into states which raise slaves to export them into the deep South. Even in South Carolina, where the slaves form four-sevenths of the population, the cultivation of cotton has been almost completely stationary for years due to the exhaustion of the soil. Indeed, by force of circumstances South Carolina has already been transformed in part into a slave-raising state, since it already sells slaves to the sum of four million dollars yearly to the states of the extreme South and South-west. As soon as this point is reached, the acquisition of new Territories becomes necessary, so that one section of the slaveholders with their slaves may occupy new fertile lands and that a new market for slave-raising, therefore for the sale of slaves, may be created for the remaining section. It is, for example, indubitable that without the acquisition of Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas by the United States, slavery in Virginia and Maryland would have been wiped out long ago. In the Secessionist Congress at Montgomery, Senator Toombs, one of the spokesmen of the South, strikingly formulated the economic law that commands the constant expansion of the territory of slavery. "In fifteen years," said he, "without a great increase in slave territory, either the slaves must be permitted to flee from the whites, or the whites must flee from the slaves."<br />As is known, the representation of the individual states in the Congress House of Representatives depends on the size of their respective populations. As the populations of the free states grow far more quickly than those of the slave states, the number of Northern Representatives was bound to outstrip that of the Southern very rapidly. The real seat of the political power of the South is accordingly transferred more and more to the American Senate, where every state, whether its population is great or small, is represented by two Senators. In order to assert its influence in the Senate and, through the Senate, its hegemony over the United States, the South therefore required a continual formation of new slave states. This, however, was only possible through conquest of foreign lands, as in the case of Texas, or through the transformation of the Territories belonging to the United States first into slave Territories and later into slave states, as in the case of Missouri, Arkansas, etc. John Calhoun, whom the slaveholders admire as their statesman par excellence, stated as early as February 19, 1847, in the Senate, that the Senate alone placed a balance of power in the hands of the South, that extension of the slave territory was necessary to preserve this equilibrium between South and North in the Senate, and that the attempts of the South at the creation of new slave states by force were accordingly justified.<br />Finally, the number of actual slaveholders in the South of the Union does not amount to more than three hundred thousand, a narrow oligarchy that is confronted with many millions of so-called poor whites, whose numbers have been constantly growing through concentration of landed property and whose condition is only to be compared with that of the Roman plebeians in the period of Rome's extreme decline. Only by acquisition and the prospect of acquisition of new Territories, as well as by filibustering expeditions, is it possible to square the interests of these poor whites with those of the slaveholders, to give their restless thirst for action a harmless direction and to tame them with the prospect of one day becoming slaveholders themselves.<br />A strict confinement of slavery within its old terrain, therefore, was bound according to economic law to lead to its gradual effacement, in the political sphere to annihilate the hegemony that the slave states exercised through the Senate, and finally to expose the slaveholding oligarchy within its own states to threatening perils from the poor whites. In accordance with the principle that any further extension of slave Territories was to be prohibited by law, the Republicans therefore attacked the rule of the slaveholders at its root. The Republican election victory was accordingly bound to lead to open struggle between North and South. And this election victory, as already mentioned, was itself conditioned by the split in the Democratic camp.<br />The Kansas struggle had already caused a split between the slaveholders' party and the Democrats of the North allied to it. With the presidential election of 1860, the same strife now broke out again in a more general form. The Democrats of the North, with Douglas as their candidate, made the introduction of slavery into Territories dependent on the will of the majority of the settlers. The slaveholders' party, with Breckinridge as their candidate, maintained that the Constitution of the United States, as the Supreme Court had also declared, brought slavery legally in its train; in and of itself slavery was already legal in all Territories and required no special naturalisation. Whilst, therefore, the Republicans prohibited any extension of slave Territories, the Southern party laid claim to all Territories of the republic as legally warranted domains. What they had attempted by way of example with regard to Kansas, to force slavery on a Territory through the central government against the will of the settlers themselves, they now set up as law for all the Territories of the Union. Such a concession lay beyond the power of the Democratic leaders and would only have occasioned the desertion of their army to the Republican camp. On the other hand, Douglas's settlers' sovereignty could not satisfy the slaveholders' party. What it wanted to effect had to be effected within the next four years under the new President, could only be effected by the resources of the central government and brooked no further delay. It did not escape the slaveholders that a new power had arisen, the North-west, whose population, having almost doubled between 1850 and 1860, was already pretty well equal to the white population of the slave states -- a power that was not inclined either by tradition, temperament or mode of life to let itself be dragged from compromise to compromise in the manner of the old North-eastern states. The Union was still of value to the South only so far as it handed over Federal power to it as a means of carrying out the slave policy. If not, then it was better to make the break now than to look on at the development of the Republican Party and the upsurge of the North-west for another four years and begin the struggle under more unfavourable conditions. The slaveholders' party therefore played va banque. When the Democrats of the North declined to go on playing the part of the poor whites of the South, the South secured Lincoln's victory by splitting the vote, and then took this victory as a pretext for drawing the sword from the scabbard.<br />The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be emancipated outright or not, but whether the twenty million free men of the North should submit any longer to an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders; whether the vast Territories of the republic should be nurseries for free states or for slavery; finally, whether the national policy of the Union should take armed spreading of slavery in Mexico, Central and South America as its device.<br />In another article we will probe the assertion of the London press that the North must sanction secession as the most favourable and only possible solution of the conflict.<br /> <br />Articles on the U.S. Civil War | Marx-Engels ArchiveJustin Mathew ജസ്റ്റിന് മാത്യു http://www.blogger.com/profile/17405627866579098342noreply@blogger.com0