Slavery

Friday

Daniel McCarthy

What would Lincoln do?

If Americans are feeling gloomy as the nation’s 250th birthday approaches, they might look back to what Abraham Lincoln thought about the condition of the country in 1838 to get some perspective on present discontents. That was the year a young Lincoln, then just a state senator, delivered a speech at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, on “the perpetuation of our institutions.” Lincoln perceived trouble ahead, but not exactly of the sort that would lead to the Civil War. He was already concerned about the lawlessness arising from racial strife, and there’s a hint of his future insistence upon the truth of the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal.

lincoln

Wednesday

Julia Friedman

What monuments stand to teach Americans about themselves

Why do we raise monuments? Why do we tear them down? These questions hover over MONUMENTS, now on view at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the Brick. The premise is straightforward enough: gather the remains of America’s shattered sculptural conscience – decommissioned Confederate statues and their graffiti-marred plinths – and display them alongside contemporary works on racial topics. This comparison is supposed to reveal something about America’s nature and history, and it certainly does: it shows us just how attached we are to grievance. Both the raising and the destruction of monuments nourishes convictions on either side, ensuring that the argument can never end.

monuments

Friday

David Sypher Jr.

The Democrats’ trillion-dollar reparations racket

When politicians run out of solutions, they start offering symbolism – and this year, that symbolism comes in the form of a check. Representative Summer Lee’s “Reparations Now” resolution calls for trillions of dollars in payments to black Americans as compensation for slavery and its aftershocks. As a black man in America, this issue cuts close to home. My grandparents came from South Georgia, and their grandparents were born into slavery. That blood runs through me. The pain, the endurance, the quiet strength – it’s part of my inheritance. If reparations were handed out, I’d be one of the people eligible to receive them. But I couldn’t take the check in good conscience.

Reparations

Thursday

Clement Knox

A new and compelling study of the life of the iconic rebel Nat Turner

In 1831, while the slave rebel leader Nat Turner sat in jail awaiting trial in Southampton County, Virginia, he was visited by a local lawyer named Thomas Gray. Turner spoke at length to Gray, who subsequently published his record of their conversations. At one point Turner said he had been visited many years before by the spirit. “What do you mean by the spirit?” Gray asked. “The Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days,” Turner replied. Gray was unmoved by Turner’s claims of divine inspiration and concluded that he was a “gloomy fanatic” moved to mass murder by religious delusions.

Turner

Tuesday

Geoff Hill

Modern-day slavery in Mauritania

In April 1864, the US Senate passed a bill that set in motion what would become the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Slavery was to be abolished. Seven months later, Union forces would burn Atlanta to the ground, a year after Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg marked the battle that began the South’s collapse and the April 1865 surrender of General Robert E. Lee and his Confederate army. The Civil War remains the bloodiest and most divisive conflict in American history with at least a million dead, including soldiers and civilians from both sides. You might think that given American history, if slavery had an in-your-face visibility anywhere on the planet, Congress would call for intervention by the UN, perhaps threaten to send in the Marines. Think again.

Mauritania
reparations
Xander J. Causwell

The moral folly of slavery reparations

Undergraduates at Georgetown University have voted to pay reparations to descendants of slaves the school once owned. Meanwhile, Democratic candidates for the 2020 US presidential nomination unanimously support creating a commission to study slavery’s impact on African Americans, with a reparations program as a possible outcome. These are the latest victories of an international movement for reparations which, despite its flawed and misguided justifications, continues to grow. Reparations means compensation from Western European and American governments for the systems of African chattel slavery once practiced throughout the Americas. Campaigners also cite post-slavery racial injustices against ‘Afro-descendants’, and the colonization and genocide of Amerindian peoples.

Monday

Gene Dattel

Did the fight over slavery cause the Civil War?

Nikki Haley reignited the battle over the cause of the Civil War. Today’s racial protocol requires a reflexive one-word answer: “slavery.” Haley didn’t give that response, but neither did she give one that reflects our best historical knowledge. Instead, she blamed government for not ensuring “that individuals have the liberties so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.” The media pummeled Haley. In fact, the primary cause of the American Civil War was different from the pat answer. It was slave-produced cotton. Cotton and race-based slavery cannot be separated here.

Friday

Philip Womack

Zadie Smith’s latest novel is glittering, grand and powerful

Zadie Smith’s ambitious latest novel, The Fraud, is loosely based on the life of the little-known nineteenth-century novelist William Harrison Ainsworth. He was, at one point, as popular as Charles Dickens, his novel Jack Sheppard even outselling Oliver Twist. But Ainsworth’s fortunes and talents declined, and his forty-odd novels vanished, going out of print soon after his death. Throughout The Fraud, as he sits groaning at his desk, he is an arch reminder not only of the vagaries of literary fame, but the pains of fiction-writing. As his cousin Eliza Touchet observes: “God preserve me from that tragic indulgence, that useless vanity, that blindness!” Ainsworth’s actual writing is redolent of educated middle-class male privilege. (“‘Zounds!

fraud

Tuesday

J. Scott Turner

The National Audubon Society considers canceling itself

How thoroughly has diversity, equity and inclusion penetrated the sciences? “To the core!” at least if the recent travails of the National Audubon Society are any indication. For over two years, a woke storm has roiled the Society over whether it should purge its namesake, John James Audubon, from its title. After a year-long review, the Society’s Board of Directors recently announced its decision: Audubon’s name will stay. The Society’s CEO, Elizabeth Gray, defended the decision on the sensible grounds that, for whatever his faults, Audubon remains a pivotal figure in the history of science in our once young republic. His legacy includes establishing ornithology as the burgeoning field that it is today, which draws both on professional experts and passionate amateurs.

audubon

Thursday

Matt McDonald

Do I get Friday off for Juneteenth?

Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act this afternoon, which designates June 19 as a federal holiday. In recent years, the date has been a cause to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. On June 19, 1865, Union Maj. Gen. George Granger assumed command of 2,000 federal troops on the island of Galveston in Texas and transmitted the news of the Emancipation Proclamation to the state's residents, freeing the slaves at the end of the Civil War. But in 2021, June 19 falls on a Saturday. According to the US Code (specifically 5 U.S. Code § 6103), 'Instead of a holiday that occurs on a Saturday, the Friday immediately before is a legal public holiday for...employees whose basic workweek is Monday through Friday.

june 19 juneteenth friday

Friday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The trouble with America’s ‘systemic racism’

Laramie, Wyoming The refuge of a scoundrel is always the profession — in spades — of whatever a particular society prizes above everything else. In the United States from 1776 until the 1960s, that was patriotism. Since then it has been racial equality, succeeded in recent decades by crude and unapologetic racism of the anti-white variety whose virulence appears to contradict Newton’s Third Law, which states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is why the death of George Floyd in the custody of the Minneapolis Police Department last May was accepted by the left as proof that race relations in America have worsened in recent years to attain critical mass.

systemic racism

Monday

Jonathan Leaf

Should Kamala Harris pay reparations?

What do Stokely Carmichael, Harry Belafonte, Colin Powell, Sidney Poitier and Busta Rhymes have in common? And how are Beyoncé, Ava DuVernay, Barack Obama and Kamala Harris alike? None of the first set is descended from American slaves. All of the second are descended from slave-owners. Much of the media and the political establishment is pushing the idea of reparations for black Americans. But, as these lists show, it isn’t obvious who should get paid and who should pay. Consider the case of Kamala Harris. Should her Indian mother pay reparations to her Jamaican father for his partial ancestry from slaves? Should she foot half the bill?

kamala harris reparations

Wednesday

Elisa Segrave

Horrors of the plantation

I am not American and I am not descended from British slave owners, but I was shocked when I read a letter from the 1860s that my Irish great-grandfather wrote to his brother from Peru, acknowledging receipt of a ‘shipment of Chinese coolies’ in the guano trade. John Cummings III of Louisiana is also of Irish origin, and his ancestors never owned slaves either. But in 2014, Cummings, a retired lawyer, and his wife Donna used $8.6 million of their own money to create the Whitney Plantation Museum at Wallace, just under an hour from the French Quarter of New Orleans. The Whitney museum is America’s first and so far only museum of slavery. My cousin and I drove there from New Orleans on a bitter winter’s day. There is no café.

plantation

Thursday

J. Arthur Bloom

Ralph Northam’s family owned at least 84 slaves

The First Lady of Virginia, Pam Northam, wife of Ralph, got herself in hot water this week for handing out cotton to black students while they were on a tour. But the Northams have form when it comes to messy race relations. There’s the whole blackface or KKK costume school photograph business. Then there’s the blacking up as Michael Jackson thing, which Ralph admitted to. Oh, and Ralph Northam’s family owned at least 84 slaves. Northam maintains that he learned about his family’s slave ownership in 2017. That story is harder to believe once you see that three out of the four grandparental lines of his family owned slaves. Two branches owned at least two dozen. Let’s take a tour of the family genealogy.

ralph northam slaves

Thursday

William Leith

A Shout in the Ruins is a panorama of the Civil War and beyond

We’re in Virginia, in the 1850s. A girl called Emily is tormenting her dog, Champion, and her father’s teenage slave, Rawls. Seeing this, Emily’s father, Bob, beats her with his belt and kicks the dog. Of Rawls, Bob says: ‘Now leave him be so he can get about my business!’ A girl, a dog, a slave, and a slave-owner.The owner addresses the girl with words and violence, and abuses the dog. He helps the slave get down from the fencepost he’s standing on. But he does not talk to the slave. He talks about the slave. Thinking this over, Rawls looks at Emily,‘sprawled out and wailing in the grass’, and envies her. Her pain is temporary; his is permanent.