NOTES ON AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY
Part 1
Harriet Tubman's Last Portrait, 1911
Introduction
“I speak of the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition. . .”
Maya Angelou
African Americans have a unique history of survival, creativity, unity and struggle in what became the Americas. Although it is now settled history that in what is known as the New World, Indigenous people, aka, Indians (1), were the first people enslaved by European colonialists, by the late 18th century people captured in internecine warfare and /or kidnapped in Africa comprised the majority of enslaved people in the Americas.
What is particularly unique about African Americans is that we were workers on arrival in the Americas. Unlike most people who came here at the time, fleeing oppression and/or working off debts accrued in the ‘Old World’, Africans were transported here via the transatlantic slave trade to do one thing: work. Thus, from the very beginning black people were laborers caught up in a spiraling web of colonialism and class struggle, as unpaid laborers. Moreover, enslaved Africans constituted two-thirds of the total migration into the Americas - North, South & Central - between 1600 and 1700. Much, perhaps, most of the meaning and significance of our sojourn has to do with where we went in the Americas. (60% to the South American colony called Brazil by Portuguese colonialists)
This paper focuses mainly but not exclusively on African Americans, within what came to be called the USA.
PART 1
"Brought together in the dungeons of the coastal castles - Goree, Elmina, Cape Coast - or the corral-like barracoons of Bonny and Calabar, they were a melange of people. They might seem to have little in common save color. Yet even that sameness, given the shades of blacks and browns, was remarkable only in that they shared in not being white. One who would search out to one of his own would not attend to color. He would rather listen to language, the special inflections that were his and no other's, and look for familiar markings and mannerisms" (Nathan Irvin Huggins, Black Odyssey, Pgs. 4-5
The people who were brought to the New World beginning in the 15th century via the Transatlantic Slave Trade primarily came from over 100 tribes in the Western part of the African continent. Although the great majority were brought to South America - by Portuguese slave traders to Brazil - many would be taken to Central and North America by Dutch, French and British traders.
Slavery, as Karl Marx informed us, was an economic category of prime importance. Moreover, the Transatlantic Slave Trade not only represented the beginnings of real world trade, but also global capitalism. The trade essentially consisted of Europeans exchanging pots, pans, beads, cloth, guns, ammunition and gun powder to African rulers, for men, women and children, who possessed within them the capacity to produce, and reproduce wealth and people..
"African merchants and chiefs who acted as merchants had about them the fantastic aura of the caliph of The Arabian Nights . . Wealth's power mirrored personal pride and could be reflected in the ceremonial reverence of others. To have wealth, to use it, to destroy it, were all symbols of power, and it was either in luxury and dissipation or in gross avarice that wealth and power were enjoyed most. The Europeans with whom they traded, however, had a different calculus of value. Capitalists all, they made a distinction between a simple 'thing', and one that produces other things that create wealth. There was for them a different kind of wealth; spectral and impalpable & founded on credit and investment." (Nathan Irving Huggins, Black Odyssey, Pg. 6)
It is important to note that the life-long hereditary chattel enslavement of Africans - as contrasted with the temporary 'enslavement' of Europeans - did not emerge all at once in the British colonies. Moreover, there were many contradictions, and much confusion, over their status during the early days of slavery. Although chattel slavery initially existed in all thirteen original British colonies, some Africans were initially treated no worse than European indentured servants. There is ample evidence that the African captives brought to America in 1619 were not classified as life-long slaves, but indentures.
“Some Native American people enslaved Africans; they were slave owners and slave catchers. Some treaties, like the 1823 treaty between the Florida Native nations and the U.S. government explicitly mentioned that tribes that capture Africans who escaped their captivity would be compensated. In 1860, enslaved Africans made up 15% of the Cherokee Nation’s total population; in the Chicasaw Nation, that number was 18%; the Choctaw owned 14% and the Creek 10% . These numbers are not small, though a large majority were owned by a few elite families. White people also enslaved Native people.”
Kyle T. Mays, An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States, Pgs.35-36
“During the first three centuries of European residence in North America, enslaved agricultural laborers fueled the growth of early capitalism as a transnational phenomenon. Brought here through the African slave trade specifically for their labor. . .African Americans produced wealth not only through their labor power and toil without pay but also as commodities bought and sold for profit in the capitalist marketplace. They were the most exploited and unequal component of the emerging modern capitalist labor force” (Joe William Trotter, Jr., Workers On Arrival, Pg. xvi.)
A considerable number of enslaved Africans had come to North America via the West Indies, learned English and were occasionally able to transcend enslavement by religious conversion, a fairly common practice in Spanish colonies. There had always been nominally free Blacks in northern colonies, and a small number in the South. There were even black slave owners.
When religious conversion was not available, some enslaved people were freed by masters who had a change of heart, or were willing to sell the enslaved person back to him or herself; a kind of reverse reparations!. The latter was usually not feasible considering the rare opportunities on the part of the enslaved to accumulate enough money to buy themselves back from a slave owner.
Enslaved and free black women shouldered the twin burdens of reproductive and productive labor. As recent scholars note, the colonial and earlier national eras witnessed the gradual emergence of ‘the Atlantic Service economy’, characterized by the increasing commodification of reproductive labor. Middle class and elite families turned to poor and working class women to perform labor that ‘ladies’ of the household increasingly viewed as beneath their station in life. In their detailed analysis of black women’s lives in colonial Boston and other New England towns, historian Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Peck underscore the pursuit and use of enslaved women to perform what they describe as “household drudge’ work. Among the wealthiest households enslaved women and girls polished furniture and the family silver and assisted the ‘lady’ of the house with her clothes and hair, drew her bath and mended her clothes. Some elite men also preferred the servant girl to shave them rather than going to a barber. The vast majority of mistresses nonetheless used enslaved women not as their personal attendant but rather as heavy-laden domestic laborers - black women were put to work sweeping, emptying chamber pots, carrying water, washing the dishes, brewing, looking after children, cooking and baking, spinning, knitting, carding and sewing.” (Ibid. Pg 12)
"Household labor not only entailed long hours and tedious work. . .but also made black women vulnerable to widespread physical and sexual abuse. In Charleston, some slaveowners realized a superordinate level of accumulation by forcing enslaved women household workers to perform sexual acts for money in addition to their washing, cleaning and other domestic tasks. In some cases, slave owners ordered enslaved women to have sex with enslaved men to increase the slave workforce.” Michael Tee, The Rise of a White Nationalist State (online)
During the colonial period many proposals were discussed by leading colonists to send (nominally) free black people to Africa, or elsewhere. On December 16, 1816, delegates from several states convened in Washington, D.C. the American Colonization Society. The ACS sought to win mass support for its program through legislative petitions, public meetings and its own journal, The African Repository.
“. . .Colonizationists argued that theirs was the only humane and just solution. As long as Negroes remained in the United States, public opinion would bar them from the polls, the jury box, the white man’s schools, church pews, workshops and dining tables. Besides, this legal and social proscription, the Negro had to contend with an obviously superior knowledge, wealth and influence. . .a competition to which he is unequal.”
(Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery, the Negro in the Free States 1790 - 1860, Pgs. 20 - 21
“Adorning the Society’s list of officers during the antebellum period were such men as James Madison, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Richard Rush, John Marshall, Roger Taney, Francis Scott Key, General Winfield Scott. . .and many religious leaders and college presidents.”(5)
(Ibid, Pg. 24)
One important, indeed, indispensable source of support for colonizing Africans was conspicuously absent: nominally free black people. One month after the founding of the ASC more than 3,000 people crowded into Philadelphia’s Bethel Church to categorically reject the project. In state and national conventions and newspapers, black people reiterated their opposition to African colonization. “This is our home,”, they repeatedly asserted, “and this is our country. Beneath its sod lie the bones of our fathers; for it some of them fought, bled and died”. No grandiose schemes for alleged Christianization of Africa, they insisted, would deter them from maintaining a steady campaign to gain political recognition and the abolition of slavery in the United States . ..
Ibid, Pgs. 24-25
By 1830, whether by legislative, judicial or constitutional action, enslavement of black people had been mostly abolished in the northern states of the U.S Nevertheless, the great majority - over 3 million - remained in bondage in the southern states. Freedom in the North did not confer full citizenship. No statute or court decision could erase the myth of white supremacy which by the 19th century had permeated the U.S. body politic.
“While there were many laws that spoke of the limits of the rights of the enslaved, perhaps nothing more clearly defined that oppression than the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford. . .“John Emerson purchased Dred Scott after Scott's first master died in 1832. Emerson took Scott to Illinois, which was a ‘free’ state, and later to Wisconsin. There, Scott married his wife, Harriet. In 1837 Emerson moved to Louisiana and married Irene Sanford. Dred Scott joined them, and after a time they moved back to Wisconsin and then back to St.Louis. The Emerson's moved once again to Iowa where John Emerson suddenly died in 1843. Then Irene moved back to St. Louis. In 1846 Dred and Harriet sued their master, Irene, for their freedom. They established their case on the basis of two statutes in Missouri. The first allowed for any person to sue for wrongful enslavement. The second established that a person brought to a free territory was automatically free and could not be re-enslaved. In 1847 the Missouri court ruled against them, but they won their appeal in 1850.
Irene Emerson then appealed the case all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court, which ruled in 1852 in her favor. Emerson's victory assured the Scott’s that they would be enslaved again. Irene transferred the rights of ownership of the Scotts to her brother, John Sanford. In 1853 Scott appealed again to a federal court, which ruled against him, forcing him to once again file an appeal.
Eventually their case would be taken to the Supreme Court. In 1857 the SC ruled against them, 7-2, with Chief Justice Roger Taney opining that enslaved Africans were not citizens. Taney wrote that:”. . they have no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Kyle T. Mays, An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States, Pg. 42
Although the U.S. Civil War officially began with the Confederate (CSA) attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina in 1861, many historians mark the beginning of that conflagration with the raid on the federal arsenal by John Brown, two years earlier. . . .
John Brown was a major figure in the class struggle known as the Abolitionist Movement. He was an entrepreneur who ran, among other enterprises, a tannery and a cattle trading business prior to the economic depression of 1839. He got involved in the antislavery struggle following the murder of Presbyterian minister and abolitionist, Elijah Lovejoy in 1837. Brown is reputed as publicly declaring, "Here before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery."
Brown's first major antislavery action occurred in Kansas, still known as a territorial possession of the U.S. government. Several of his sons, all active in the Abolitionist Movement, had summoned him to the area, fearing attacks from pro-slavery settlers. The latter were in the territory determined to bring it into the Union as a slave state. After they attacked Abolitionist forces in Lawrence, Kansas, Brown's forces counterattacked, killing five pro-slavery people.. This became nationally known as the Pottawatomie Massacre, occurring near the river of the same name.
By early 1859 Brown was leading raids to free enslaved people in various parts of the country. It was during this time that he met leading Abolitionists, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, revealing to them his plan to raid the federal arsenal in West Virginia, arm the enslaved and launch attacks on slave labor camps.
The operation began on October 16, 1859 (without Tubman or Douglass) with a band of 17 people, including fivel black males and several of Brown's sons. First, they captured Colonel Lewis Washington, a prominent local slave owner and distant relative ofPresident George Washington. Then, they seized the arsenal. Unfortunately a local militia was able to capture a bridge crossing the Potomac River, effectively cutting off an important escape route for the insurgents.
In the late afternoon of October 17, President James Buchannan ordered a company of marines, under soon-to-be General Robert E. Lee, to storm the arsenal. Brown and his compatriots, along with several of their hostages were subsequently captured. One man, Osbourne Anderson, escaped.
On December 2, 1859, after a brief trial, Brown and several others were charged with treason against the state of Virginia, and hung..
The U.S. Civil War, which officially began in 1861, can easily be viewed as a replay of the counterrevolutionary war of 1776. . .
Between the two conflicts the white nationalist state of America, built primarily on chattel slavery and seizure of land and genocide of indigenous populations, gradually split into two, hostile polities.
This social fissure had become, by the 1850s, irrepressible, irreconcilable and inextricably related to several key contradictions: 1) enslaved labor and its allies vs slave owners and their allies 2) the further westward expansion of chattel slavery vs the 'Free Soil' movement; not to mention what also lay, literally, buried beneath all of these contradictions: the steady, violent encroachment on indigenous-occupied land.
On the eve of the Civil War the (multicultural) Abolitionist Movement was a relatively minor political movement in the U.S. However, once the war began, and the Confederates won many of the early major battles, abolition rapidly became a central issue.
As much as Lincoln, and the political forces he represented, had tried initially to win the war without emancipating the enslaved, the intransigence of the Confederates forced them to do so as an indispensable war strategy. Lincoln could not "save the Union" without emancipation, and encouraging Blacks, both nominally free and enslaved, to enlist in the Union armies.” Michael Tee, The Rise of a White Nationalist State (online)
"When the Civil War broke out no one with power in this country intended to free any slaves. It was only Abolitionists, who had no power, who wanted to do that. The Union, the government, was NOT, in the beginning, fighting to end slavery. If they had been, or even said they were, most WHITES, in the North AND the South would have fought for the Confederacy. And the Confederacy would have won. The war was, instead, fought TO MAINTAIN SLAVERY. . . with the Union fighting to keep slavery within the United States, by preventing its spread into the western territories, and stopping the Confederacy from separating from the United States, and forming a separate nation of their own, WITH slavery. . ." Frederick Douglass
The Combahee River Raid was a military operation initiated by Union forces on June 1st & 2nd, 1863, in South Carolina. Led by abolitionist Harriet Tubman, the raid freed more than 750 enslaved people.
“In the end, all of the flash and the glory and promise of the new freedom would be denied. The guns, the lash, the fagot, and the hangman’s rope would smother freedom’s hopes, all under the Nation's indifferent eyes. In their lifetimes, most of the freedom men and women would be reduced to a near peonage, denied almost every right of citizenship, whatever the Constitution has been made to say. For too many, what freedom meant in the end was continued oppression and brutality without the meager ‘security’ plantation life had provided. For all black men and women, regardless of where they finally settled, the realization sank in that America, not only in the South, but all of America, would remain for them, a land of tyranny . . .
Nathaniel Irwin Huggins, Black Odyssey, Pg. 243
(To be continued)
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