******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
LRB, March 22, 2018
I just get my pistol and shoot him right down
by Eric Foner
The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American
History by Anne C. Bailey
Cambridge, 197 pp, £19.99, November 2017, ISBN 978 1 316 64348 8
In pre-Civil War fugitive slave narratives – memoirs written by men and,
occasionally, women who had escaped to freedom and hoped to convert
readers to the cause of abolition – the most heart-rending passages
described slave auctions and the separation of families that usually
ensued. When the abolitionist journalist and underground railroad
activist Sydney Howard Gay interviewed fugitives who passed through his
office in New York City in the 1850s he found that the threat of sale
was a major reason for the decision to run away.
Although most Americans today acknowledge the centrality of slavery to
antebellum Southern life, the ubiquity of the buying and selling of
slaves is less widely recognised. In 2016, many were shocked to learn
that the Jesuit university Georgetown sold nearly three hundred slaves
in the 1830s to remain afloat financially. A venerable myth survives
that slave trading was of marginal economic importance and that slave
traders were outcasts who operated on the fringes of Southern society.
In fact, after the importation of slaves from Africa was outlawed by
Congress in 1807, a massive commerce in slaves developed within the
United States. This ‘internal middle passage’, as the historian Ira
Berlin has called it, involved the sale of more than two million slaves
in the decades before the Civil War, a large number of whom were sent
from older states such as Virginia to the burgeoning Cotton Kingdom of
the Lower South. Every Southern newspaper carried advertisements for the
sale of slaves and every major town had slave dealers who drew attention
to their business with signs proclaiming ‘Negro Sales’ or ‘Negroes
Bought Here’. In Charleston and New Orleans, there were large public
slave markets. Slave trading was essential to the survival and
profitability of the system, as well as to the financial success of
individual owners.
The largest slave auction in American history, the sale of more than
four hundred men, women and children owned by Pierce M. Butler, took
place in Savannah, Georgia in 1859. Butler was the grandson and namesake
of the signer of the US constitution who proposed its notorious fugitive
slave clause, which ensured that slaves who fled to another state were
returned to their owners. He spent nearly all his time in a luxurious
townhouse in Philadelphia and rarely visited his Georgia estates – a
rice plantation near Darien and a plantation growing Sea Island cotton
(the most sought after and profitable strain of the crop) on St Simon’s
Island, just off the coast – leaving them to be run by overseers.
Butler is best known to historians for his tempestuous marriage to the
British actress Fanny Kemble, whom he courted after seeing her perform
in Philadelphia. They married in 1834; two years later, he inherited
half of his grandfather’s estate. In 1838, Butler and Kemble embarked on
a five-month visit to his plantations; she later published an account of
their stay in Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation, an
eye-opening account of how slavery operated. Kemble held anti-slavery
views, which grew stronger after witnessing the institution at first
hand. Arguments, separations and reunions followed the couple’s return
to Philadelphia. In 1849 they divorced, an event much chronicled in the
society pages. In keeping with the laws of the time, Butler was given
custody of their two young children. To Kemble’s dismay, their daughter
inherited her father’s outlook on slavery and strongly supported the
Confederate cause during the Civil War.
Before then, however, Butler’s gambling losses and financial reverses
triggered by the Panic of 1857, the first worldwide economic crisis, led
him to agree to a massive sale of slaves to satisfy his creditors. Some
remarkable documents survive from the sale, held over two days in March
1859, beginning with the auction catalogue, which lists slaves by name,
age and skill. The first entries read: ‘George, age 27, prime cotton
planter; Sue, age 26, prime rice planter; George Jr, age 4, boy child;
Harry, age 2, boy child.’ Listings for 432 other slaves follow. Another
indispensable source is a 28-page pamphlet published soon after the
auction took place. Its author was Mortimer Thomson, a reporter for the
New York Tribune, the country’s leading anti-slavery newspaper, who
posed as a potential buyer and wrote a detailed account of the
proceedings, down to some of the conversations among the buyers. Thomson
overheard one of them say that he could ‘manage ordinary niggers’ with
the whip, but when he encountered a really recalcitrant slave, ‘I just
get my pistol and shoot him right down.’ Others eagerly looked forward
to the reopening of the Atlantic slave trade, which some Southern
political leaders were advocating. Thomson mostly let the events speak
for themselves but occasionally offered a sardonic comment. Some of
Butler’s slaves, he reported, had been known to ‘inquire into the
definition of the word liberty, and the meaning of the starry flag which
waves, as you may have heard, o’er the land of the free’.
Half the slaves on the Butler plantations were included in the sale.
Most were field hands, but there were also domestic servants and skilled
craftsmen, among them coopers, carpenters and blacksmiths. The catalogue
did not list prices, but Thomson recorded what many of the slaves sold
for. The auctioneer announced the terms: buyers would pay one-third down
in cash, with the remainder in interest-bearing instalments. The highest
sum paid was $1750 for William, a carpenter – an immense amount at a
time when the average working-class white person earned around $300 per
year. George, Sue and their two young sons together went for $2480.
The sale was managed by Joseph Bryan, a prominent slave dealer whose
occupation does not seem to have impeded his acceptance by Savannah’s
white residents – he was also the city’s chief of police. For several
days, local hotels were filled with potential buyers, who made the
three-mile trip to the Savannah racetrack, where the auction took place.
There they closely examined the slaves (a procedure that involved the
most intimate examination of their bodies), who were housed in stalls
that usually accommodated horses.
The sale destroyed long established slave communities. Most of the
slaves, and their parents before them, had lived their entire lives on
Butler’s plantations. They were part of what is now known as the Gullah
Geechee culture of coastal South Carolina and Georgia, where African
traditions survived more fully than in other parts of the South, partly
because most of the owners, like Butler, were absentees and the slaves
had little contact with whites. Slaves in this region spoke a dialect
that mixed African and English words, which blacks further inland often
could not understand. They told stories about slaves who learned to fly
and made their way back to Africa. Butler’s slaves were required to
attend religious services conducted by white ministers, who instructed
them to serve their masters faithfully, but also had their own religious
leaders. One day one of them, Sinda, prophesied that the end of the
world was nigh, and with it emancipation. Butler’s slaves, the overseer
reported, stopped working and refused to resume until the appointed day
had come and gone.
Unusually, the auctioneer was instructed not to separate families,
although as Thomson noted, this admonition was limited to not separating
husbands from wives and parents from young children. Siblings, cousins,
grandparents and grandchildren were wrenched apart, as were couples who
had not been formally married. The night before the auction began, the
slaves Dembo and Frances somehow located a minister who agreed to marry
them so that they could be sold together; they were bought for $1320
each by a cotton planter from Alabama. Jeffrey, age 23, begged his buyer
also to purchase Dorcas, proclaiming: ‘I loves her well and true.’ But
they weren’t married so his plea was to no avail. With his business
agent, Butler made the trip from Philadelphia to watch the auction,
which netted more than $300,000, enough to wipe out his debts. He stayed
until the final lot was spoken for and then, Thomson reported, handed
out ‘one whole dollar, in specie’, to each of the slaves who had been sold.
The Savannah auction is the starting point of The Weeping Time by Anne
C. Bailey, who teaches African-American and African history at
Binghamton University in New York State. Her opening chapter recounting
the sale of the Butler slaves is riveting but somewhat brief: one wishes
that she had devoted more space to this harrowing story. But she seems
anxious to move on to larger questions, to use the auction as a window
into slavery itself. She discusses issues ranging from black culture in
the Georgia low country to the way agricultural skills brought from
Africa – especially complex methods of cultivating rice – enriched the
slaves’ owners. She probes the way subsequent generations remembered (or
forgot) the institution’s brutality and its centrality to American
development. These are all weighty subjects, perhaps too weighty for a
book of fewer than two hundred pages. Some of those pages cover subjects
of dubious relevance, such as Britain’s involvement in the Atlantic
slave trade, and the presence of Islam in West Africa, where the
ancestors of these slaves originated (although evidence for its presence
on the Butler plantations is meagre). Bailey also spends too much time
establishing points already widely accepted among historians. ‘This book
affirms the view that the black family is a resilient institution,’ she
writes, a finding demonstrated more than forty years ago by Herbert
Gutman in The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom. Other aspects of the
story cry out for further analysis. The book devotes considerable
attention to establishing ‘links to the slaves’ African pasts’ in their
work routines, religious practices and folkways such as ring dances.
There is less on how Africans became African-Americans, or the extent to
which they were influenced by the values of the society around them.
When emancipation finally arrived, Bailey notes, the former slaves saw
the right to vote ‘as the heart and soul of their freedom’. This outlook
is more likely to have originated in 19th-century America than ancestral
Africa.
During the Civil War, the slaves who had not been put on sale were moved
inland, as Butler, like other local planters, acted to prevent them from
running off to join the Union army, which occupied the Sea Islands early
in the war. Once peace and emancipation arrived, former slaves
throughout the South, including some from the Butler sale, set out to
locate those from whom they had been separated. Only a few succeeded.
Many of Butler’s former slaves returned to his estates, the only place
they knew as home. They hoped to claim some of the land for themselves,
an aspiration that seemed plausible in January 1865, when General
Sherman set aside a large swathe of land on the Sea Islands and along
the Georgia and South Carolina coasts for the settlement of black
families and barred whites entirely from the islands. Later that year,
however, President Andrew Johnson, who took office after Lincoln’s
assassination, ordered that the confiscated territory be returned to its
owners. Butler and his daughter travelled to Georgia, hoping to put the
former slaves back to work, but soon complained about their ‘laziness’ –
in other words, they were unwilling to work as if they were slaves. The
frustrated Butlers eventually hired immigrants from China and Ireland to
get their plantations running again.
Bailey’s book is as much about memory as history. In black communities
the memory of lost children, husbands, wives and other family members
was seared into the culture of post-emancipation generations. How did
the Butler slaves and their descendants, and African-Americans more
generally, confront and try to overcome the trauma of slavery and to
reconstitute families that had been torn apart? Bailey pays tribute to
‘the noble efforts of modern-day descendants … to restore the pieces of
their fragmented past’, despite not only a paucity of documentation but
also the silence of former slaves and their immediate descendants about
their experiences. Remarkably, however, ten families have managed to map
out their ancestry, representing 15 per cent of those sold at the
Savannah auction. Over the course of generations, some of these families
thrived. They learned to read and write, and became property owners.
Several served in the armed forces, following in the footsteps of two
Butler slaves who enrolled in the Union military during the Civil War.
Some families suffered the kinds of loss all too familiar in the Jim
Crow South. One 18-year-old was killed with an ice pick in Texas in 1940
by a white man who had been overheard earlier in the day saying he was
‘going to get him a nigger’.
*
As Bailey notes, the heroic attempts of these families to reconstruct
their lineages form part of a much broader effort among
African-Americans, many of whom have turned to companies that analyse
DNA samples to identify their ethnic and geographic ancestry. Bailey
tells us that she has had samples of her own DNA examined in order to
locate her forebears’ origins in West Africa. Although no direct
evidence exists, she believes she ‘may have an ancestral link to the
people of this study’. She rightly insists that such genealogical
explorations can lead to increased historical knowledge. She does not,
however, take into account some of the problems raised by genetic
testing, which has become big business, even spawning genome-themed
tours of ancestral African homelands. The sociologist Alondra Nelson’s
recent book The Social Life of DNA explores these themes in depth and
raises questions about both the scientific credibility of DNA findings
and whether science can really be the vehicle for healing old wounds and
answering questions about personal identity and heritage.[*] Nelson
points out that relatively few of the many hundreds of ethnic groups in
West Africa have had their DNA studied, yet companies offer
definitive-sounding findings about an individual’s ethnic ancestry. She
wonders whether the reliance on DNA is reviving the long discredited
biological understanding of race as something inborn and immutable that
determines a person’s capabilities. For her part, Bailey seems to
believe that the impact of traumatic experiences, such as the Holocaust
and slavery, can be transmitted genetically, that descendants can
‘unconsciously’ inherit ‘environmental stresses akin to historical
trauma’. Studies of rats, she reports, reveal the reality of
‘transgenerational stress’.
If Bailey’s account of the transmission of memory borders on the
metaphysical, she occupies solid ground in pointing to the inadequacy of
public understandings of slavery. Of course, the way the Civil War is
commemorated in public statues and monuments has become a highly
controversial matter in the United States. There is nothing uniquely
American about these debates. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and
the fall of communism in Eastern Europe such artefacts have been removed
with increasing frequency. Many Americans who oppose taking down statues
of Confederate leaders applauded when Muscovites upended the statue of
Felix Dzerzhinsky, a founder of the Soviet secret police, when Hungary
shifted its communist-era monuments to a museum outside Budapest, and
when US troops toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad.
Generally, as regimes change so does the public presentation of history.
But this hasn’t really happened in the United States. The problem isn’t
simply the nostalgia for the Confederacy (and its underlying raison
d’être of white supremacy) inscribed in many hundreds of monuments
scattered across the South, but that the public commemoration of the
history of the region, and the US generally, is entirely
one-dimensional. As Bailey notes, the experience of slavery is
conspicuously absent from public representations of history. One might
add that there are few, if any, statues of the black leaders of
Reconstruction – the period of biracial democracy that followed the
Civil War – or of the white Southerners who remained loyal to the Union.
What is needed, she writes, is a ‘democratisation of memory’.
Some progress is being made. Bailey chides the National Park Service for
having ‘obscured’ the significance of slavery at its Civil War sites.
This seems somewhat unfair since at the direction of Congress the
service has in fact included discussions of slavery at many locations,
even at Gettysburg, where until recently visitors could learn intricate
details of the battle but not what the soldiers were fighting about. And
in 2016 the Obama administration designated Beaufort, South Carolina,
just up the coast from the Butler plantations, as the site of a national
monument devoted to the history of Reconstruction. But Bailey’s larger
point is correct. It’s hardly a secret that slavery is deeply embedded
in American history. But too many white Americans continue to view it as
a footnote, an exception to the larger story of the expansion of
freedom. A few years ago, President Sarkozy dedicated a monument in the
Luxembourg Gardens intended to commemorate both the long travail of
French slavery and the slaves’ own contributions, through their
struggles for freedom, to ‘the universality of human rights’ and to
French traditions of liberty. A historical marker now stands in Savannah
showing the site of the ‘Largest Slave Sale in Georgia History’. But to
this day there is no monument anywhere in the United States to the
millions of victims of American slavery or to the ways their labour
helped to produce the world we live in.
[*] The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations and Reconciliation after
the Genome by Alondra Nelson (Beacon, 216 pp., £17.99, September 2016,
978 0 8070 2718 9).
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
