slavery Archives - Page 6 of 7

Visualizing Emancipation(s): Mapping The End of Slavery in America

THE NEW ARCHIVE (No.2)

Computer and online technologies are enabling historians to do history in a variety of new ways. Archives and libraries all over the world are digitizing their collections, making their documents available to anyone with a computer. Mapping and other kinds of visualization are allowing historians to create new kinds of documents and ask new questions about history. Each week, our Assistant Editors, UT History PhD student, Henry Wiencek and Undergraduate Editorial Intern, Charley Binkow, will introduce our readers to the world’s most interesting new digital documents and projects in THE NEW ARCHIVE.

How did slavery end in America? It’s a deceptively simple question—but it holds a very complicated answer. “Visualizing Emancipation” is a new digital project from the University of Richmond that maps the messy, regionally dispersed and violent process of ending slavery in America.

Using a map of the United States, the site visually charts the precise time and place of “emancipation events” that appeared in newspaper accounts, books, personal papers or official records between 1861 and 1865. Click on any of the red dots scattered across the map and you get a small snapshot of emancipation as a historical process: blacks in Culpeper, Virginia assisting Union troops on July 19, 1862; confederate troops forcibly conscripting blacks in Yazoo City, MS on September 27, 1863; an enslaved man named Wm. P. Rucker escaping in Pittsylvania County, VA on October 27, 1863. And alongside the red dots of “emancipation events,” blue dots illustrate the changing positions of Union troops, a clever overlay of social and military history. Move the time frame backwards or forwards and an entirely new set of “events” appears, coordinated spatially with the movements of troops.

This exciting new project aims to be an online resource to educators looking for a unique means of teaching the end of slavery. The site also hosts an impressive archive of more traditional primary documents users can easily access for lesson plans and further reading.

“Visualizing Emancipation” changes the story of emancipation from one singular turning point—Lincoln’s proclamation—to thousands. Its scattered and chaotic map connects small, often seemingly futile, acts of local resistance into a compelling visual depiction of the multiple and diverse acts that marked the end of slavery in America. Moreover, the defeats for rebelling slaves or Union troops that appear here make another crucial point: emancipation was never inevitable—it had to be earned through the blood and sweat of individual soldiers, slaves, freedmen, and countless others. “Visualizing Emancipation” artfully illustrates that and allows us to see their stories in new ways.

And don’t miss Charley Binkow’s piece on a new digital archive dedicated to Ireland’s Easter Rising

Photo Credits:

Recently freed slave children, possibly photographed by Matthew Brady, circa 1870 (Image courtesy of AP Photo)

Screen shot of “Visualizing Emancipation”

“12 Years a Slave” and the Difficulty of Dramatizing the “Peculiar Institution”

By Jermaine Thibodeaux

Historian Annette Gordon-Reed often describes slavery studies as the “crown jewel of American historiography.” For Gordon-Reed and others, the historical scholarship on slavery that has emerged over the past sixty years has provided a far more nuanced and complex understanding of America’s “peculiar institution” and of American history as a whole. Much of what we now understand about slavery and its central characters has largely resulted from the diligence, resourcefulness, and dedication of historians determined to demystify perhaps the central episode in this nation’s history. Yet, historians have not labored alone.

The challenge of informing an inquisitive American public about the nation’s own two-hundred year old tragedy—slavery—has not fallen squarely on the shoulders of historians and other scholars. Artists, and particularly filmmakers, have played a central role in helping the larger public grapple with the horrors and indeed, aftershocks of human bondage. The Blaxpoitation-tinged slavery films of the early and mid-1970s unquestionably paved the way for the groundbreaking 1977 television mini-series Roots: The Saga of an American Family and a handful of subsequent slavery dramas. Roots author, Alex Haley, treated millions of American television viewers to a seven-day run of an emotionally raw and mostly well-researched dramatization of one family’s experience in slavery and freedom. It was through Roots that many Americans of all races first confronted slavery in a meaningful way. As a testament to its growing power, television, and not books, history classrooms, or even scholarly conferences, then served as the most effective medium for educating Americans about slavery. Undoubtedly, the Roots miniseries and subsequent television spinoffs not only whetted the appetites of curious publics, but these visual, dramatic renderings of slavery also generated much needed conversations about race and inequality in America. Those conversations were central to the embrace of multiculturalism in the 1970s-80s. And at the same time, the public’s response to these slavery dramas compelled many trained historians to ask even bolder and more sophisticated questions about the institution of slavery in their own work. By the 1980s, a flurry of influential and field-defining slavery studies emerged. Jacqueline Jones and Deborah Gray White, for example, exposed slavery’s sweeping impact on black women, their families, and their labor in their respective works Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (1985) and Ar’n’t I a Woman (1985). Explorations of so-called slave culture, questions about slave agency, and even interrogations of slavery’s connections to other age-old American institutions and values soon filled library bookshelves. The rush to know could not be stopped, and again, media was there to assist.

Television and cinematic portrayals of slavery often seem to thrust that sensitive topic to the fore of the public’s consciousness and in so doing, expose contemporary (mis)understandings of the institution and the era not too long past. Within the last two years, Hollywood has risked potential revenue slumps and produced two major films about slavery. Quentin Tarantino’s fictional Django Unchained exploded onto movie screens on Christmas Day 2012 with its characteristic Tarantino stamp. Though not an historical adaptation of slavery, the film garnered praise for its daring vision and originality, and on the other hand, it invited well-deserved criticism for its highly graphic display of wonton violence and its borderline comedic portrayal of the day-to-day brutality endemic to the Slave South. Django managed to get some things right about slavery, and the public devoured the so-called “spaghetti western” slavery film, but its very premise pushed the historical envelope a bit too far for many historians. In what U.S. South would one find an enslaved bounty hunter working alongside a German immigrant to capture fugitive criminals? But despite its historical absurdity, Django seems to have paved the way for what was to follow in slave genre films.

This year’s critically acclaimed Twelve Years a Slave stands in stark contrast to Django Unchained. Shaped primarily by the non-fictional 1853 memoir by Solomon Northup—a freed black man from upstate New York who falls prey to money-hungry kidnappers and is eventually enslaved for twelve years in the Deep South—this film attempts to transport viewers back into the dark and cruel world of American slavery and expose the perilous experience of quasi-freedom for freed blacks. British film director Steve McQueen brilliantly achieves this most fundamental task within minutes of the film’s opening. As Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) peers up and out of his dank holding cell, the viewer is immediately reminded of slavery’s most defining element—its barbarism. Not only is Northup beaten until blood stains his once crisp white shirt, he has his fundamental identity—the one thing that he truly owns, his name—beaten out of him. From this point on in the film, Northup loses his familiar and free self and becomes an enslaved man, renamed Platt. Gone, too, are his respectable black family and all of the trappings of success and respectability that his life in upstate New York afforded him. After a torturous boat ride down river, his previous free life gradually disappears into his past and a new, darker future awaits him. Furthermore, any hope that Northup had of slavery’s abolition seems crushed by his now unfortunate, spirit-crushing predicament. The former “slave without a master,” to invoke Ira Berlin’s characterization of antebellum freedmen, would now experience a similar fate endured by millions of blacks in the Slave South. Branded a slave, Platt must adapt to a brave new world. Ultimately, it is the uniqueness of Northup’s story and his liminal status that makes Twelve Years a Slave a gem of a film. And for historians, the original source material provided in Northup’s memoir remains an amazing historical find, especially for scholars of Louisiana slavery.

Using smart camera work, McQueen again capitalizes on the early minutes of the film to indict slavery as a national institution and not merely as a distinct southern problem. Herein lies the beauty and power of the film. The cinematography and imagery tell the story of American slavery and human suffering in ways that enhance the script. A whipped-slashed back, a blood-stained eye, an inconsolable mother and even Northup’s own defeated hanging body collectively provide viewers with a rudimentary, visceral education about the role of violence—both physical and psychic—in maintaining a system of human bondage and entrenching a hardened racial caste order, particularly in the American South. While screaming for help after his kidnapping, Northup gazes coldly into the gloomy Washington streets. And there, on the immediate horizon, sits an unfinished U.S. Capitol building. The now iconic statue “Freedom” had not yet found its way to the top of the Capitol dome. The irony and the symbolism of that shot, however, are profound. For right under the noses of the nation’s elite and powerful, were black men and women—entire families, or “lots”—ready to be bought, sold, or even stolen, all to fulfill the capitalist dreams of some and to assuage the racist fears of others. It is not until the Compromise of 1850 that embarrassed American politicians prohibit the domestic slave trade within the nation’s capital while simultaneously reinvigorating the system of slavery throughout the rest of the Union with the passage of a stronger Fugitive Slave Law. By this time, being a freed black in the North could have potentially posed problems for men and women like Solomon Northup, as it was not uncommon for unscrupulous slave catchers to circumvent personal liberty laws and round-up freed blacks in the North and attempt to sell them into southern slavery. Thus, the threat of enslavement for blacks knew no regional bounds; being black alone was enough. Social standing, personal connections, or even highly regarded talents were rarely sufficient protections, and certainly none of these factors mattered for Northup.

To its credit, McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave does not shy away from the ugliness of slavery. And unlike Tarantino, he captures the disturbing physical and emotional violence inflicted on blacks by sticking to documented history rather than resorting to fantastical exaggeration. One can hardly describe the violent scenes in Twelve Years a Slave as gratuitous. Most prominently, McQueen foregrounds the very real and pervasive pattern of female sexual exploitation on southern plantations. Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), perhaps the real breakout star of this film, endures years of rape and humiliation at the hands of the drunken Louisiana slaveholder, Mr. Epps (Michael Fassbender) and his diabolically jealous wife. Mrs. Epps (Sarah Paulson) is by far one of least likeable characters in this drama: outspoken, uncaring, self-righteous, and ruthless in her treatment of Patsey and the other slaves. The southern belle stereotype of the plantation mistress seen in so many films is thrown out the window the minute Mrs. Epps reveals her knowledge of her husband’s ongoing sexual relationship with Patsey. Though she faults her husband for this marital transgression, reminding him at one point that he is too filthy to sleep in her “holy bed,” she harbors most of her resentment and venom for the slave woman. She foolishly believes that Patsey, like so many bondwomen, had the authority to resist the illicit and unwelcomed advances of powerful white men. In one of the film’s most poignant scenes, Mrs. Epps strikes the slave woman on the side of her head with a heavy crystal decanter after she is convinced that Patsey has glared at her with contempt while she is being forced to dance in Mrs. Epps’s parlor. And it is Mrs. Epps who ultimately demands that her husband publicly punish Patsey after she wanders off without permission to a neighboring plantation, seeking soap and communion with another black woman, who is also in an equally problematic interracial ‘relationship.’ That woman, Mistress Shaw (Alfre Woodward), reveals to a much younger Patsey that she must resign herself to the unavoidable sexual predations on southern plantations. In fact, Mistress Shaw speaks candidly about her “rise” to common-law-wife status with her white husband. She tells the curious Patsey that her new position has afforded her a life far removed from the fields and the whip. Now, she lives in relative leisure and luxury, though it is clear that she has been emotionally, if not physically scarred by her messy experience with Mr. Shaw. To the filmmaker’s credit, portraying such a wide range of human relationships—across the colorline and of varying degrees of complexity—makes this film a certifiably American story, no matter how troubling.

The film’s emphasis on Patsey’s tumultuous relationship with Mr. Epps indicates McQueen’s dedication to the veracity of Northup’s memoir, and at the same time, it attests to his knowledge of scholarly studies of southern women—enslaved women and to some extent, plantation mistresses. Following the lead of historians Daina Ramey Berry, Thavolia Glymph, and Elizabeth Fox Genovese, misconceptions about southern white women in general and in particular, bondwomen’s abilities to negotiate sexual advances and handle rigorous field labor are put to rest. It is Patsey who emerges as the “queen of the fields” both in Northup’s memoir and in the film. Patsey picks more cotton than any other man or woman on the plantation, despite her rather thin frame and sex. Her skill and expertise set the standard for work on the plantation. When Patsey outpicks Northup and others, they suffer daily lashings for their inability to meet such a lofty picking goal. Thus, Patsey’s performance in the fields challenges conventional notions of skilled and unskilled labor and at the same time, forces viewers to rethink the stale, male-centered iconography of slavery. Not only were women omnipresent in slavery, they also proved to be ferocious workers right alongside some of the men.

With its adherence to Solomon Northup’s words and its obvious attention to slavery scholarship, Twelve Years a Slave succeeds in bringing the ruthlessness of slavery to film. Still, one can always ask if film has the power to present such human trauma in a most authentic and respectful manner. Or, one can ask if film is the appropriate medium for presenting slavery. Many viewers will continue to grapple with this dilemma, just as historians themselves will continue to question if their works most accurately and respectfully get at the hearts of the people, places, and times they study and the questions they ask. Just as no piece of historical scholarship is without fault, no historical film will ever “tell it like it was” or be able to convey completely what it felt like to be Solomon Northrup.

In Twelve Years a Slave, the faults are few but still worth noting. Those viewers unfamiliar with Northup’s story would be surprised to know that Northup was enslaved for twelve years. Save for the film’s name, the movie does not adequately reflect a clear linear progression of time. In fact, Northup’s agonizing twelve years on various Louisiana plantations are compressed into one long, single-note experience. Only graying hairs and a few visible wrinkles indicate the passage of time. The viewer is carried from 1841 to 1853 with very little historical context along the way; the growing abolitionist movement and raucous national political debates over slavery do not make an appearance in the film. Likewise, even the bustling city of New Orleans, with its large free black population, appeared to be an afterthought.

Additionally, the film could have taken more pains to recognize or even highlight the distinctive nature of sugar planting versus cotton cultivation. Historians continue to emphasize that there were many slaveries existing side-by-side throughout the South, but cotton has maintained its hold as the singular, dominant symbol of southern slavery. All southern slaves did not labor exclusively in the cotton fields. Sugar most certainly dominated the world of southern Louisiana slavery. Its unique growing conditions and labor demands unquestionably affected the nature and rhythm of slavery in that region. Men typically outnumbered women on most sugar plantations and, therefore, both labor and leisure looked markedly different from slave life on cotton plantations. The work Northup did on sugar plantations and the people he met along the way deserved more attention in the film. For example, Northup served as driver, or manager of other slaves on a sugar plantation. As a driver, he wielded the whip and capitalized on his intellect and skill to vie for greater privileges and status among the other slaves. It was also here in sugar country that Northup developed many of his closest relationships with other bondsmen and earned his Sunday money. Though he writes at length about numerous interactions and friendships with blacks and whites during his stint in slavery, in the film Northup is strangely isolated from the other slaves except Patsey,. His friendship with Mr. Bass (Brad Pitt), however, stands out, as it proves instrumental to his ultimate freedom. Surprisingly absent, though, are those homosocial bonds (close interactions between men, in this case) Northup formed with an interesting and diverse cast of male characters in sugar country. A sharper focus on this aspect of Northup’s slave experience would have added more depth to his rather flat portrayal. One thing about Northup that was abundantly clear in his memoir was his ability to adapt and make do. If anything, viewers are left wanting to know more about this side of Northup. More attention to his associations during slavery, and certainly, his life as an abolitionist once freed would have certainly rounded out the picture of this exceptional character. That story definitely warrants more attention. Yet, as is typical in some social histories of slavery, a fully developed portrait of the bondsman never truly emerges.

Ultimately, Twelve Years a Slave marks a watershed moment in slavery studies and film history in this country. While the film falls short in developing Northrup’s individual complexity, its boldness and vivid imagery in depicting fundamental experiences of slavery definitely suffice. Making historical films is a tough business and bringing a thoughtful portrayal of American slavery to big screens is especially tough. The stakes are high and the expectations are often beyond standard filmmaking requirements. Still, there is so much to learn about America’s “peculiar institution” from this film. Its warm reception might just encourage other filmmakers to continue tackling slavery and other controversial historical topics—with empathy and accuracy.

Photo Credits:

Promotional poster for Twelve Years a Slave

A scene from the 1977 miniseries, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (Image courtesy of Warner Bros. International TV)

Jamie Foxx in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (Image courtesy of Salon)

Actors Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor in a scene from Twelve Years a Slave (Image courtesy of Slate)

Illustration from the 1855 edition of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Lupita Nyong’o portraying the enslaved Patsey in a still from Twelve Years a Slave (Image courtesy of The Artsy Film Blog)

Enslaved African Americans hoe and plow the earth and cut piles of sweet potatoes on a South Carolina plantation, circa 1862-3 (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

An enslaved family in Beaufort, South Carolina, 1862 (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o in a scene from Twelve Years a Slave (Image courtesy of The Artsy Film Blog)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

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Further Reading:

Historical reviews of the films Lincoln and Django Unchained

UT historians reflect on the many meanings of the Emancipation Proclamation

Solomon Northup’s memoir in its entirety

An 1853 New York Times article on Northup’s remarkable life

The Many Histories of South Austin: The Old Sneed Mansion

By Dennis Fisher

You wouldn’t think much of the limestone walls hanging on for dear life as you walked along Bluff Springs to get to the grocery store or the bus stop. Not least because they are set back about thirty feet from the road and concealed by trees. I first heard something about the walls and the Sneed mansion they once supported while walking along the Onion Creek greenbelt in South Austin. “The mansion on the hill was built by slave labor,” a local told me.

I decided to explore for myself on a recent drizzly Sunday. The entire neighborhood, mostly apartment complexes, a few empty lots, and bus stops, has grown up around this small patch of land, which has been just barely “preserved” (given its dilapidated state) by city officials. Walking past the crumbling walls of the Sneed mansion, marked by graffiti and littered with plastic bottles, evokes not only Austin’s past but also a sense of loneliness.

A black and white 1936 photograph of the Sneed House still intact taken by the Historic American Buildings Survey

A 1936 photograph of the Sneed House still intact taken by the Historic American Buildings Survey (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Sebron Sneed Sr. was born in Kentucky in 1802. He spent his early years bouncing around—first in the Missouri militia in 1823 and later in Arkansas practicing law. He married Marinda Atkins of Tennessee in 1824 and they both ended up in Austin, Texas in 1848 after the conclusion of the War on Mexico, making a new home for themselves. They both joined the Pleasant Hill Baptist Church—which still stands today on William Cannon across IH-35. Sebron started the local Democratic Party chapter in 1857. It’s probably not too hard to discern what the Sneed family thought about Texas in the 1850s. Coming from the Appalachian borderlands into newly conquered territory they probably hoped to prosper in a land that would soon expell its Native inhabitants—Tonkawa, Apache, and Comanche peoples around here—and in a place where black slavery was firmly entrenched and outside of the reach of the troublesome former Mexican government as well as the current Federal one—up until 1861, that is, when Lincoln was elected to the presidency. Sebron Sneed Sr. owned 21 people as property in 1860. One of them, Nancy Jane, was purchased by Sneed as “the highest bidder . . . of a certain mulato girl” in Arkansas in 1848 just before he relocated to Texas. We have no idea what Nancy Jane, almost entirely lost to us in the historical record, must have thought, felt, and dreaded–torn from her relatives and brought to a strange land.

Daguerreotype of Marinda Atkins (1809-1878), wife of Sebron Sneed, ca. 1849-1850 in an ornate gold frame

Daguerreotype of Marinda Atkins (1809-1878), wife of Sebron Sneed, ca. 1849-1850 (Image courtesy of Southern Methodist University, Central University Libraries, DeGolyer Library)

The location chosen for Sneed’s mansion still makes good sense. It stands on a hill that lifts slightly to the west but then drops down to where IH-35 currently sits. The land gently slopes downward on all remaining sides. Close by on the north and east sides of the house wind small streams that gently make their way downhill. Limestone, soft and porous, is readily available in this area. All of south Texas (and extending down into Guatemala and Belize) was covered by a shallow sea some sixty million years ago, which left behind as its primary legacy a thick layer of limestone—great for building houses and pyramids as well as collecting and channeling water into natural wells, creeks, and aquifers.

Sneed made his money in the legal profession. His papers, located at the Briscoe Center for American History at The University of Texas, are full of promissory notes from clients. In 1860, he paid fifty dollars in “occupation taxes” as a lawyer. By looking at his tax receipts we find that he owned enslaved people, horses, cattle, and land in Del Valle (just east on Highway 290)—the numbers vary from year to year suggesting he sold people as well. In 1864, he paid his county taxes in kind with 545 bushels of corn. During the war he made money by selling two enslaved men—Peter and Isaac—to Confederate General Magruder for building fortifications at Galveston. If Sebron saw Texas as a promised land, his vision and future rested firmly on the foundation of white supremacy. Furthering that vision, Sneed opened his mansion in south Austin as a recruiting station at the outset of the Civil War and later as a convalescent home for returning wounded soldiers. Both he and his son fought in the war—he as a provost marshall and his son as a captain. Sebron Sr. would die in 1879, at the time engaged in “agricultural pursuits”—the records shed little light on this post-war aspect of his life. He would be buried in the adjoining family cemetery along with his wife, other family members, and “infant Sneed.” After the war, his son moved downtown to Colorado and 3rd and kept busy as a lawyer, acting Comptroller, and later as superintendent of Travis County schools.

Black and white photograph of the second floor fireplace of the Sneed House, 1936

Second floor fireplace of the Sneed House, 1936 (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Today echoes of that era linger in both small and not so subtle ways. Ranch owners along the Onion Creek greenbelt still regularly take their horses out along the trails and locals flock to McKinney Falls to play along the limestone and creeks that crisscross the area. Confederate flags still find a place at rallies at the capitol as well as on t-shirts and pickup trucks. But today south Austin at William Cannon and IH-35 looks very different. Anglo-Americans, African-Americans, Native-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Mexicans all call this place home. Hispanic Texans constitute the majority of enrolled students in a state that could swing Democratic in a decade or less in a country that has twice elected an African-American to be president. Looking at what remains of the Sneed mansion serves to remind us of the very different histories that have inhabited these places.

If you’d like to learn more about the Sneed family:

A 1982 issue of the Austin Genealogical Society which includes an 1860 letter from Sebron Sneed jr. to his wife

The Sneed House’s city zoning information

A guide to the Briscoe Center’s Sneed family papers

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Could a Muslim – or a Catholic or a Jew – Be President? A 1788 Constitutional Debate

by Denise A. Spellberg

The Constitution’s ban on religious tests prompted the nation’s first debate in 1788 about whether a Muslim – or a Catholic or a Jew – might one day become president of the United States. William Lancaster, a delegate to the North Carolina convention to ratify the Constitution, worried: “But let us remember that we form a government for millions not yet in existence. I have not the art of divination. In the course of four or five hundred years, I do not know how it will work. This is most certain, that Papists may occupy that chair, and Mahometans may take it.”

Lancaster asserted these future fears of a “certain” Catholic or Muslim president on July 30, 1788 as part of a day-long debate on the Constitution’s Article VI, section 3: “… no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” His views are preserved as the final utterance in the most detailed attack on – and defense of – a uniquely American ideal of religious pluralism, one that included Muslims at the founding.

Thomas Jefferson’s 1764 copy of The Koran (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

The Constitution’s no religious test clause, intended to end strife among Protestants of varied denominations, also theoretically ended exclusive Protestant control over federal appointed and elected offices. An Anti-Federalist, Lancaster and the majority of delegates to the North Carolina convention, opposed not just all non-Protestant participation in the federal government but the Constitution itself. (Anti-Federalists would eventually defeat ratification by a landslide 184 to 84 vote.) Henry Abbot, an Anti-Federalist, worried at the beginning of the day’s debate that Protestant rights of conscience were not sufficiently protected: “They suppose that if there be no religious test required, pagans, deists, and Mahometans might obtain offices among us…”

For Federalists in North Carolina, support for the Constitution thus also included an inadvertent defense of the political equality of Muslims, Catholics, and Jews. James Iredell, later appointed to the Supreme Court by President George Washington in 1790, countered Abbot’s anxieties in the 1788 debate. He included Muslims in his country’s new blueprint: “But it is to be objected that the people of America may, perhaps, choose representatives who have no religion at all, and that pagans and Mahometans may be admitted into offices. But how is it possible to exclude any set of men, without taking away that principle of religious freedom which we ourselves so warmly contend for?”

James Iredell, a prominent Federalist and Supreme Court Justice who expressed support for the incorporation of Muslims into American society (Image courtesy of the U.S. Government)

Iredell’s universally inclusive stance shocked his listeners. At the time, there were 2,000 Jews in the United States and 25,000 Catholics; both were despised minorities. Catholics were perceived as dangerous because of their past persecution of Protestants in Europe and their allegiance to the Pope. All the delegates to the North Carolina ratification convention were, by law, Protestant, but seemingly none were aware of the thousands of enslaved West African adherents of Islam then in the United States.

The Muslim slave Omar ibn Said, for example, lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina from 1811 until his death in 1863, two years before the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution would have granted him his freedom. Omar is famous for writing his autobiography in Arabic, which is preserved still. A mosque in Fayetteville now bears his name. James Iredell, a slave owner, might argue for the rights of future Muslim citizens in theory, but even he assumed these “Mahometans” remained an exclusively foreign population. The majority of Americans associated Muslims with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman Turkish military incursions in Europe. North African pirates remained a more immediate problem for Americans. In 1784, they began seizing American commercial shipping in the Mediterranean, left defenseless without British naval protection it the wake of Independence.

Omar ibn Said, a Muslim slave from Fayetteville, North Carolina (Image courtesy of UNC University Libraries)

At home, the fate of all non-Protestants, Muslims, Catholics, and Jews remained linked together in debate on the Constitution. The idea of Muslims and Jews as citizens with rights was not invented in the United States. John Locke, the English political theorist, first asserted the possibility in his 1689 tract on toleration. In 1776, Thomas Jefferson, who considered Locke his hero, copied this precedent: ““he sais ‘neither Pagan nor Mahomedan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion.’” What Jefferson noted in Locke as theory, James Iredell first asserted in actual political debate in support of a Constitution that legally protected the equality of male Muslim, Catholic, and Jewish believers.

If you’d like to learn more:

The complete transcript of the North Carolina debate may be found online in Elliot’s Debates, The Debate in the Several States Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, volume 4, pp. 191-215, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwed.html. This brief discussion is based on the author’s article “Could a Muslim Be President? An Eighteenth-Century Constitutional Debate,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 39, no. 4 (2006), pp. 485-506 and her forthcoming book, Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders, which will be published by Knopf in October 2013.

Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia by João José Reis (1993)

by Michael Hatch

Shortly after 1:00am on January 25, 1835, a contingent of African-born slaves and former slaves emerged from a house at number 2 Ladeira da Praça and overpowered the justice of the peace and a police lieutenant. Throughout the night approximately six hundred rebels ran through the streets fighting and vandalizing a number of municipal buildings. Because the leaders of the revolt were African-born Muslims, some historians have characterized the revolt as a jihad. Others downplay the religious elements engrained in the rebellion, emphasizing instead ethnic differences among Africans. Joao Jose Reis effectively establishes a middle ground between these two arguments by describing networks existing across African ethnic and religious lines. Africans from a myriad of ethnic groups and religious affiliations counted themselves among the ranks of the revolt. For Reis, classifying the rebellion as either a religious or an ethnic phenomenon misrepresents the various forces of social solidarity in the Bahian slave society.

Reis begins his investigation by carefully crafting the social and economic setting of early-nineteenth-century Bahia. That society was fraught with social inequity and an atmosphere often fractured by revolts. Both free and enslaved peoples throughout the opening decades of the 19th century took to the streets as a means to voice displeasure with some aspect of society. He goes on to show the roles played by the African Muslim population in that setting. and the daily lives of the accused rebels. He ends with an examination of the depth and breadth of the Brazilian response to the revolt and subsequent repressive measures meted out against the free and enslaved Afro-descended community.

Reis utilizes documentary evidence including eyewitness accounts from Brazilian, French, and English sources in order to craft as complete an account of the events of that night as possible. The author then moves from the revolt itself to the various affiliations (religious, ethnic, social) that tied together and drove apart Afro-descended peoples in and around Salvador. Despite the majority of the primary conspirators being Muslims, religious difference did not prove an insurmountable obstacle to coordination or affiliation with the revolt.

Afro-Brazilian slaves performing “Capoeira,” a Brazilian martial art, 1825 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The Muslim rebels (Malês) “never posed a threat” to ethnic and religious plurality in Bahia, and Reis emphasizes that there is no evidence to support the claim that religious conquest was the rebels’ goal as state officials at the time and some scholars would argue. However, Reis the documentary evidence of the revolt does show that “ethnic identity continued to be an organizing and sociopolitical cornerstone of African life in Bahia.” According to one document translated from Arabic by a Hausa slave, “They were to have come… taking the land and killing everyone in the white man’s land.” Other documents from African-born slaves describe a desire to kill all whites, mulattoes, and native-born blacks, while testimony from the trials indicate a desire to enslave mulattoes.

Public flagellation of a slave, Rio de Janeiro, 1834-1839 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Reis also uncovers the tensions within the Afro-descended communities of Bahia, most notably, the friction between African-born and Brazilian-born people of color. Brazilian-born (crioulo) free people of color made up a large fraction of the city police, regular army, and slave hunters. In a way, Reis characterizes the face of oppression as Afro-Brazilian because many crioulos were viewed by African-born slaves as the most apparent beneficiaries of the slave society and economy. The author takes pains to emphasize the role that ethnicity played in the revolt, while tempering it with religious undertones. The relationship between religion and ethnic plurality played a key role in the revolt, and although “Islam is not an ethnic religion… it may have been ethnic in the 1835 scenario.” Although the religious motivations for the revolt were secondary to ethnic ones, religion was an important element in the development of a specific ethnic and cultural affiliation, which manifested itself, in this case, as confrontation. Reis utilizes the trial documentation as a window through which to view everyday life under the auspices of urban slavery. The revolt then becomes the vehicle to understanding a wider social and cultural history; a reversal of the introductory chapters which supply a portrait of the society which nurtured a rebellious tradition.

Receipt of a Rio de Janeiro slave sale, 1851 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The concluding chapters of Slave Rebellion in Brazil describe the response from governmental and political authorities and repression of the Afro-descended population of Bahia. In the immediate aftermath floggings, deportations, and death sentences characterized a swift and violent response to the revolt. After appeal and deliberation, however, the courts commuted many executions. Tomás, a Nagô slave and one of the leaders of the rebellion initially sentenced to death on March 10, had his execution commuted to 800 lashes on June 20. Reis argues that 1835 was a watershed moment because the response to the rebellion represented a systematic and far-reaching effort “exorcize [sic] anything African” from Bahian society. Additionally, the author hints that the post-1835 repression symbolized an effort on the part of Brazilian officials to develop slavery as a firm foundation for the newly independent nation. Of all assertions in this work, this is the least substantiated by evidence, and appears more a conjecture regarding official efforts to “whiten” society.

Slave Rebellion in Brazil is a magnificent example of interpretative historical analysis based on rigorous archival research. Slave Rebellion represents a dramatic shift in the historiography of Latin American and Brazilian slavery, emphasizing both slave agency and the importance of a plurality of African ethnic identities in the development of Afro-Latino cultures rooted in the Atlantic slave trade.

Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012)

by Daina Ramey Berry

I was ’bout fourteen years old when President Lincoln set us all free in 1863. The war was still goin’ on and I’m tellin’ you right when I say that my folks and friends round me did not regard freedom as a unmixed blessin’.
–Daniel Waring, enslaved in South Carolina, interviewed in South Carolina, ca. 1937.

Today marks the 150-year anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. While I’m delighted that a national discussion on slavery is taking place, it appears that Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Django Unchained, is overshadowing church “watch night” services all over the United States and events hosted by the National Archives, including a rare public viewing of the original Proclamation. To many, the connection between a contemporary spaghetti-western film and the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation is offensive, inappropriate, oxymoronic, and just down right wrong. Perhaps understanding the significance of this legislation in context can elevate the public dialogue and aid in our national healing.

We all know that films on historical subjects distort events for the sake of entertainment. The goal of this review is to examine this latest rendition of slavery in popular culture from a historian’s point of view to see how those distortions are used and what affect they may have on popular ideas about slavery. I am not a historian “having a hissy fit” to quote Tarantino, but I believe that using one dimensional, anachronistic characters and the preposterous plot line of an ex-slave bounty hunter, while satisfying Hollywood entertainment formulas, detract from any understanding of the actual, lived experience of bondage in US history. Whatever satisfactions may be had from Tarantino’s depiction of revenge and the reunification of loved-ones, and however violent the depiction of master-slave relations in the film, its absurdities trivialize the real violence of the slave system and everyday lives of the enslaved. And turning away from the actual history of oppression obliterates the significance of those who sacrificed their lives for African American freedom. What does this say about our sensibilities? How does one reconcile a deliberately over-simplistic impulse to satirize the nearly 300-year history of slavery, for the sake of entertainment? American slavery was full of complexity, hypocrisy, and diversity. Emancipation itself was not a straightforward process, but followed all sorts of contours, twists, and turns evident in the creative ways American slaves sought to secure their freedom.

The past few months have been interesting for historians of the nineteenth century because the subjects we study are part of a contemporary dialogue. Rather than playing “script doctor” to Hollywood (to borrow from Jim Downs’ blog on Lincoln,) this is an important moment for scholars who wish to comment and participate in discussions about films based on historical topics. Yet I regard this as a mixed blessing given the thought of students entering the classroom with images of enslaved men as nineteenth-century gun slinging gangstas and black women as voiceless damsels in distress.

On September 22, 1862 President Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation which declared that “on the first day of January [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.” For the next 100 days northern and southerners alike anticipated the changes our nation would undergo after the pending deadline. Frederick Douglass recalls anxiously awaiting the news with a large crowd at Tremont Temple in Boston, MA:

Every moment of waiting chilled our hopes, and strengthened our fears. . . We were waiting and listening as for a bolt from the sky, which should rend the fetters of four millions of slaves; we were watching, as it were, by the dim light of the stars, for the dawn of a new day; we were longing for the answer to the agonizing prayers of centuries. Remembering those in bonds as bound with them, we wanted to join in the shout for freedom, and in the anthem of the redeemed.

In 1862 news did not travel as fast as a 140-character tweet nor could it instantly appear in the blogosphere. Instead, Douglass and his constituents waited at the church from 8 pm until after midnight and they were elated to learn from the flicker of the wires in the form of a telegraph that “. . . on this day of January 1st, 1863, the formal and solemn announcement was made that thereafter the government would be found on the side of emancipation.”

This fall, similar to the days leading to the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the buzz about Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained filled the media anticipating its Christmas release. Spike Lee went on record noting that he did not want to disrespect his ancestors by supporting the film, perhaps thinking about Tarantino’s sensationalist treatment of the Holocaust in his previous film, Inglorious Basterds, and anticipating the same treatment of “the peculiar institution.” In fact, the press has spent more time discussing Lee’s brief remarks than they have Tarantino’s habitual and pornographic use of the N-word (even though it was used in 1858 Mississippi—we all get that!). Oprah Winfrey, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Michael Eric Dyson, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Howard Stern, and others interviewed members of the cast and the director, to promote and perhaps understand the film. They wanted to know from Jamie Foxx what it felt like to play a newly freed slave. His answer was disheartening to say the least. Rather than draw upon the eloquent statements or heroic acts of historical figures who radically tried to uproot slavery like David Walker, Gabriel Prosser, Charles Deslondes, Nat Turner, or Denmark Vesey, Foxx “wanted this s—t to be fly” so he channeled the fictitious, gun-slinging, crack dealer, Nino Brown from New Jack City (1991). The actor shared these thoughts in an interview with Brett Johnson on The Root, openly admitting that “I want to be Nino Brown” and that “we got to take some responsibility now that the movie is out, to spark education; we gotta know our history.”

Can we learn the history of slavery from a Tarantino film? The director readily admitted that he used his artistic license to create a movie that Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. labeled “a postmodern slave narrative Western.” To this Tarantino responded, “I’ll buy that,” but he added that the film contains “more of an entertainment value” and it is also “a thrilling adventure” in which he is committed to showing some of the brutalities of slavery.

Described by critics and supporters as a Western romance set against the backdrop of slavery, the director claims that Hollywood has virtually left the antebellum south and films about slavery untouched with the exception this not so short list including: Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone With the Wind (1933), The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972), Mandingo (1975) and more recent films such as Glory (1989), Amistad (1997), Beloved (1998), and Lincoln (2012). Beyond these Hollywood canons are independent and television films such as Roots (1977), Ganga Zumba (1963), Burn! (1969), Quilumbo (1986) and Sankofa (1993). Tarantino enters this body of work casting familiar faces such as Academy Award Winners Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz, as well as Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel Jackson, and Kerry Washington. Thus, it is no surprise that Django Unchained would draw a large viewership and without these specific actors, Tarantino himself has a large following.

As a result of Tarantino’s popularity, the discussions of slavery at this historic moment are not about the impact of the Emancipation Proclamation or the meaning of freedom. Instead, the current buzz centers on Tarantino’s fanatical love story of a black superhero who channels a crack dealer to get his girl . . . “It’s me baby,” says Django upon his “heroic” rescue. This romanticized framing of gender roles flies in the face of scholarship by historians such as Deborah Gray White. From White and others, we learn that slavery created a different set of gender roles where strength is evident in both men and women. One might even argue that a more accurate portrayal of this western slave romance would involve an enslaved woman going to great lengths to help her man out of slavery. One such historical woman had a Biblical male nickname (Moses), carried a gun, and her “husband” refused to join her. The true story of Celia, another enslaved woman who took matters into her own hands, clubbed her enslaver after years of sexual abuse, burned his corpse, and then buried his remains on the plantation. Do not mistake these examples as endorsement for emasculating black men; instead, consider them as incentives for moviegoers to travel beyond the one-dimensional characters reflected in this film. Enslaved women were not props on a stage, swinging on swings, idly watching another sister being whipped, nor were they damsels in distress waiting for men to save them.

Ironically, the film opens in Texas in 1858 “two years before the Civil War,” (the war began in 1861), with Dr. King Shultz (Waltz), a “bounty hunter,” interrupting a slave coffle to “purchase” Django (Foxx). Given the history of Texas emancipation, this is indeed an interesting starting point. Texas bond people did not know they were free until June 1865 nearly two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, a date still commemorated in Texas in annual Juneteenth celebrations. Schultz needed Django to help him find a family of slave traders for his next job. Since Django knew the notorious men and wanted to locate his “wife,” (in bondage, enslaved people’s marital relationships were not legally sanctioned,) he agreed to partner with Schultz in exchange for freedom and a portion of the bounty. The majority of the film documents the duo’s killing spree throughout Texas and into Mississippi leading them to Candyland, a plantation owned by Calvin Candie (DiCaprio). This is where we meet Broomhilda, Django’s “wife” (Washington), because up to this point viewers only know her through a series of Django’s flashbacks. We also meet Stephen (Jackson) at Candyland, who resurrects the most despised “Uncle Tom” character on screen or stage today. Stephen is the quintessential snitch who unravels Django’s and Shultz’s plan. Some reviewers embrace Django’s “justice” reveling that, in the end, the guy gets the girl and that “bad” men and women are blown to pieces. Yes, enslaved men and women tried to reunite upon separation, but the killing sprees depicted in this film would have been met with physical, legal, and psychological sanctions. One only has to turn to the enslaved experiences of Celia, Margaret Garner, Nat Turner, and Dred Scott to illustrate this point.

Former slaves such as Daniel Waring experienced freedom as a mixed blessing. People like Douglass, Waring, Elizabeth Keckley, Harriet Jacobs and countless and nameless others witnessed horrific scenes: nursing babes being torn from mothers’ breast; fathers burned alive; mothers gang raped or having their pregnant bellies placed in shallow trenches to protect their fetus during beatings. Yes, these scenes are difficult to imagine and even more difficult to convey using the historian’s pen or the filmmaker’s lens, but they occurred in our history. The horrors of slavery do appear in Django Unchained — whippings, auctions, and family separation — yet most are depicted in the form of “flashbacks” from a freed slave. In many ways, this creates an even greater space between the audience and the reality serving as a way for the director to regain his viewers after difficult imagery.

In addition to the visual representations, Tarantino’s selection of music undermines the realities of nineteenth-century culture, which at that time would have included spirituals–a genre that attempted to capture the sorrow, sadness, and pain of the antebellum era. Instead, Tarantino creates an anachronistic moment with the soundtrack by allowing the audience to escape the past and experience the film through the eyes of the present. This tactic lightens the mood to the entertaining flair he falls back upon and blurs the line between past and present. The music also facilitated Foxx’s character as a gangsta while at the same time highlighted his modern verbal swagger in an effort to appeal to members of the Hip Hop, X and Y generations.

Like the Emancipation Proclamation, the appearance of this film at this time is also a mixed blessing. On the one hand, we have a major motion picture that touches on slavery, but by prioritizing entertainment over education it trivializes the suffering of four million slaves who became legally free in 1865 with the passage of the 13^th Amendment. One hundred and fifty years ago today, enslaved people in Confederate occupied regions were supposed to receive their freedom. But we know that this did not happen. Frederick Douglass described the period following the Emancipation Proclamation as “one marked by discriminations and reservations” against blacks. He believed that this five-page document was “moderate, cautious, and guarded” even if, “it created a howl of indignation and wrath amongst the rebels and their allies.” Looking at those affected by the Emancipation Proclamation, we have few stories if any, of lone enslaved men teaming up with white “bounty hunters” to reunite with their enslaved wives. The public interest in a wildly popular director’s well-known penchant for depicting violence and revenge, and applying his formulas to the historical subject of slavery, inevitably effects the popular memory of slavery and begs the question: Should Tarantino’s exercise in counterfactual history make us feel good? Who wouldn’t want to see victims of enslavement embrace their power? Yet how do we rectify the “Mandingo” fighting and dog-mauling scenes with the blessing(s) of freedom? Tarantino’s uses fiction, humor, and exaggeration to rectify this contrast.

Tarantino clearly acknowledges that a film on slavery will not generate a comfortable dialogue—it’s not supposed to. But in an effort to redirect our conversation and reflect on the current historic moment, I encourage filmgoers to shift their gaze back to the history of slavery and the Emancipation Proclamation, a document written as a decree to force the Confederate States to return to the Union. Take a moment to learn about Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator,” whose primary goal was to preserve the Union. Imagine the antebellum south and the diversity of slavery from the recollections of former slaves, fugitive slave narratives, and plantation records. Although it’s not a “fun history” full of triumphs like Django Unchained depicts, hearing the words of actual slaves may help a twenty-first-century audience imagine the experiences of life in bondage.

More on the Emancipation Proclamation on Not Even Past:
George Forgie, “Work Left Undone: Emancipation was not Abolition”
Jacqueline Jones, “The Emancipation Proclamation reaches Savannah”
Laurie Green, “1863 in 1963”
Nicholas Roland on Spielberg’s Lincoln
Daina Ramey Berry “Let the Enslaved Testify“

Further Reading:

John Blassingame, Slave Testimony: Two Century of Letters, Speeches, Interviews and Autobiographies (1977).

William L. Andrews, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Slave Narratives (2000).

Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1999, 1985).

Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (2012).

Heather Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (2012).

James Downs, “Our Lincoln Our Selves: Rethinking Slavery and Abolition” Huffington Post Blog (12/12/12)

Selected Links:

Celia a Slave, The Trial (1855)

David Walker’s Appeal

Digital Library of American Slavery

Documenting the American South

Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
Born in Slavery: Library of Congress

Voices from the Days of Slavery: Library of Congress

Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses

Work Left Undone: Emancipation was not Abolition

by George Forgie

There are two great legal milestones in the destruction of slavery in the United States—the Emancipation Proclamation, issued by President Lincoln on January 1, 1863, and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed by Congress and ratified by the states in 1865.

F. B. Carpenter, First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln

The difference between the two documents is not always well understood. Here, for instance, is how an encyclopedic website, the Internet Movie Database, summarizes the plotline of Steven Spielberg’s film, Lincoln: “As the Civil War continues to rage, America’s president . . . fights with many inside his own cabinet on the decision to emancipate the slaves.” In fact, President Lincoln had made and proclaimed his decision to free the slaves two full years before the beginning of the “fight” over the Thirteenth Amendment that is depicted in the movie. But the confusion is understandable. If Lincoln freed the slaves in 1863, why were he and his cabinet—and others—fighting about the future of slavery in 1865? The short answer is that, momentous as the Emancipation Proclamation was, its reach was limited. It promised to liberate the approximately three million slaves held in those parts of the country controlled by the Confederate rebels, but it left in bondage nearly one million slaves held in those parts of the country loyal to the Union. More crucially, the Emancipation Proclamation did not abolish the institution of slavery. Indeed, on that subject, it had not a word to say.

When it was framed in 1787, the Constitution contained provisions designed and understood to protect slavery in the United States. This was why the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison condemned and burned the document in 1854 as a “covenant with death” and “an agreement with hell.” This was why President Lincoln in his inaugural address in 1861 had no problem endorsing a proposed amendment to the Constitution explicitly barring the federal government from ever interfering with slavery in the states where the institution was legal.

Less than two years later, Lincoln interfered with slavery more than any American ever had before, by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. His rationale was straightforward: our objective is to suppress the rebellion. We all agree that we must do everything we reasonably can to destroy the rebels’ capacity to make war. Thus we blockade their ports, we seize their military resources, and we kill their soldiers. How is taking away their labor force any different? And how better to accomplish that than to welcome the slaves to freedom?

This rationale appealed to Northerners who might have been indifferent or even hostile to freeing the slaves, but who at the same time were willing to support whatever measures were necessary to win the war. Placed on this basis, however, the Emancipation Proclamation carried with it an obvious and ominous implication: what would happen if the war reached a point where such measures were deemed no longer necessary to win it?

The imaginations of antislavery activists quickly conjured up a variety of bleak scenarios, which laid bare the greatest vulnerability of an executive proclamation: it could be easily undone. What might Lincoln do if the Confederates offered reunion in return for new guarantees for slavery? Had he not famously told Horace Greeley in 1862 that saving the Union was more important than freeing the slaves? If Lincoln should be defeated by a Democrat in the 1864 presidential election (which for a time during the campaign seemed more likely than not), might his successor revoke the Emancipation Proclamation? What complications might arise if the Supreme Court ruled the Emancipation Proclamation unconstitutional? What would ensue if the war should end with a Union victory and with hundreds of thousands of slaves not yet actually liberated? At that point, obviously, securing their freedom would no longer be necessary for Union victory.

As the war slogged on, month after dreary month, the enemies of slavery pounded home a simple message: slavery caused the war; if emancipating slaves was necessary to win it, destroying slavery was necessary to prevent its recurrence. And the only way to put the institution beyond the chance of resuscitation was to amend the Constitution, “the supreme law of the land,” to prohibit forever the ownership of one human being by another in the United States. Millions of Americans had reached this conclusion by the beginning of 1865. Whether that number would be enough is the question that sets the stage for the constitutional drama depicted in Spielberg’s film. Spoiler alert: on January 31, 1865 the Congress passed and sent to the states for ratification an amendment to the Constitution stating that “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 next evening, speaking to a jubilant crowd gathered outside the White House, President Lincoln congratulated “the country and the whole world upon this great moral victory.” He implicitly acknowledged that no presidential proclamation could ever be what he said the amendment now was: “a King’s cure for all the evils. It winds the whole thing up.”

More on the Emancipation Proclamation on Not Even Past:
Jacqueline Jones, “The Emancipation Proclamation reaches Savannah”
Laurie Green, “1863 in 1963”
Daina Ramey Berry, “Unmixed Blessin'”? A Historian’s Thoughts on Django Unchained“
Nicholas Roland on Spielberg’s Lincoln

The Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863

On the afternoon of January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed The Emancipation Proclamation, freeing approximately three million people held in bondage in the rebel states of the Confederacy. The Emancipation Proclamation was a huge step towards rectifying the atrocity of institutionalized slavery in the United States, but it was only one step and it had a mixed legacy, as the four essays by UT Austin historians in this month’s feature remind us.

George Forgie discusses the political wrangling that accompanied the Emancipation Proclamation, the work it left undone, and the need – that seems so obvious today, but was so deeply contested at the time – for a law abolishing slavery altogether.

Jacqueline Jones takes us right into Savannah’s African American community on New Year’s Eve, to see and hear how Black Americans there anticipated the momentous news.

Laurie Green brings us up to 1963 to show us how civil rights activists in the 1960s saw the work of the Emancipation Proclamation as still unfinished. One hundred years after it was signed, they viewed the civil rights movement as an effort to fulfill its original intent to bring not only legal freedom, but economic justice and individual dignity to the descendants of US slaves.

Daina Ramey Berry looks at Quentin Tarantino’s sensationalist and willfully inaccurate treatment of slavery in Django Unchained and she offers us alternative sources for learning about the historical violent abuses of slave life.

Juliet E. K. Walker examines the contrast between the legal and economic consequences of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Henry Wiencek Sr on Thomas Jefferson, Slave owner

Laura Miller begins her review of Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, with this:

“No founding father wrote more eloquently on behalf of liberty and human rights than Thomas Jefferson, and none has a more troubling record when it comes to the “peculiar institution” of slavery. At present, the popular understanding of Jefferson’s shilly-shallying on this issue doesn’t extend much deeper than knowing smirks about Sally Hemings and the (unacknowledged) children Jefferson fathered with her. We tend to assume that the dirtiest secrets of the past have to do with sex. But, as Henry Wiencek explains in his new book, “Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves,” the real filth is in the ledger books.”

On Friday, October 26, 2012, Mr Wiencek visited us at the UT History department to discuss the new book with Professors Jacqueline Jones and Robert Olwell and answer questions from the audience. Listen to the discussion here or click the link above.

Henry Wiencek, “The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson,” Smithsonian, October 2012

Laura Miller, Master of the Mountain reviewed, Salon, October 14, 2012.

Posted Monday, November 5, 2012

“Captive Fates: Displaced American Indians in the Southwest Borderlands, Mexico, and Cuba, 1500-1800.”

by Paul Conrad

This past May, the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin awarded the Lathrop Prize for Best Dissertation to Paul Conrad, a PhD graduate in early American history. His dissertation, titled “Captive Fates: Displaced American Indians in the Southwest Borderlands, Mexico, and Cuba, 1500-1800,” chronicles the history of Native American capture by Euroamerican settlers in the Greater Rio Grande River Basin.

Abstract:

Between 1500 and 1800, Spaniards and their Native allies captured hundreds of Apache Indians and members of neighboring groups from the Rio Grande River Basin and subjected them to a variety of fates. They bought and sold some captives as slaves, exiled others as prisoners of war to central Mexico and Cuba, and forcibly moved others to mines, towns, and haciendas as paid or unpaid laborers. Though warfare and captive exchange predated the arrival of Europeans to North America, the three centuries following contact witnessed the development of new practices of violence and captivity in the North American West fueled by Euroamericans’ interest in Native territory and labor, on the one hand, and the dispersal of new technologies like horses and guns to American Indian groups, on the other. While at times subject to an enslavement and property status resembling chattel slavery, Native peoples of the Greater Rio Grande often experienced captivities and forced migrations fueled more by the interests of empires and nation-states in their territory and sovereignty than by markets in human labor. Uncovering these dynamics of captivity and their effects on Apachean groups and their neighbors serves to better integrate American Indian and Borderlands histories into central narratives of colonial North American scholarship.

Contemporary view of the Rio Grande, New Mexico.

Map of the Rio Grande River in 1718.

Castle of San Juan de Ulua (Veracruz, Mexico) where Native captives were housed en route to Cuba.

About Paul Conrad:

Paul Conrad is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Colorado State University-Pueblo. He will spend the 2012-2013 academic year at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University, where he has received a research fellowship to work on revising his dissertation into a book manuscript.

Visit Paul Conrad’s homepage.

Photo credits:

All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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