The Southern Colonies Become States

Episode 5: Southern States in the New Nation

A New History of the American South

Dr Edward Ayers (2018)

Film Review

Ayers begins this lecture by pointing the overall difficulty of persuading settlers (in the 13 American colonies) to fight a war of independence when when they all identified more with Britain than with each other. A chief purpose of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson wrote was to create solidarity between the colonies by promoting a unifying dream of “equality.”

Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration blames the British monarch for the slave trade and slavery (which it calls a “cruel war against human nature,” an “execrable commerce” and an “assemblage of horrors.” The Continental Congress subsequently deleted this language.

During the Revolutionary War, pro-independence forces capitalized on the fact that the British recruited slaves and Native Americans to their side to mobilize racist animosity against both groups. The British used slaves and Native Americans to help forage for food and serve as scouts and spies. In addition slaves also drove teams of oxen, cooked for British troops and piloted British boats.

Some historians believe African and Native Americans would have been better off had America remained British, in part because the Revolutionary War cut the continent off from Europe’s growing abolition movement. Slavery definitely would have ended in Virginia, where Governor Dunsmore had granted freedom to all indentured servants and slaves in 1775.** According to Ayers, US independence greatly facilitated the spread of slavery to new territories.***

Ayers moves on to discuss the framing of the US Constitution. Here the main debate was between the Federalists, led by James Madison, who favored a strong federal government; and the Anti-Federalists, led by Patrick Henry, who wished states to hold the balance of power. There were Southern slaveholders on both sides of this debate, but the richest, most powerful slaveholders favored a strong central government.

To win support from this faction, the original Constitution postpones any legal effort to end slavery for 20 years, as well as granting southern states the right to count each slave as a 3/5 person in assigning congressional representatives.

Although the Constitution prohibits federal initiatives to end slavery in the first 13 states, in 1784, Congressman Thomas Jefferson introduced a bill to ban slavery in all new western states (including Alabama and Mississippi). Although it lost by one vote, in 1787 he successfully incorporated a ban on slavery in the legislation creating the Northwest Territories.

The constitutional ban didn’t stop the legislatures of northern states from ending slavery. Those with the largest number of slaves did so only gradually (with persons born into slavery required to wait until age 25-28 to claim their freedom. By 1810, 3/4 of northern African Americans were free and by 1830, they all were.

Losing much of his anti-slavery fervor as he grew older, Jefferson became a proponent of scientific racism. The latter asserts that black-skinned people are inferior to those with white skin. He had six children by one of his slaves, a biracial woman named Sally Hemings, starting when she was 15. Jefferson granted all his slaves (including his slave children) their freedom at his death. The state of Virginia had legalized the private manumission**** of slaves in 1792.

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*Ayers finds this ironic as it was mainly the institution of slavery that made the American colonies wealthy enough to attempt independence.

**By 1775, tobacco had depleted much of the Virginia colony’s soil, leading many local farmers (including George Washington) to turn to wheat instead. Wheat was not nearly as labor intensive as tobacco which meant Virginian slaves often had nothing to do.

***The British had banned slavery west of the Appalachians.

****Manumission refers to an official act whereby a slaveowner grants a slave their freedom.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/southern-states-new-nation

The Birth of Slavery in North America

Episode 3: Slavery Becomes American

A New History of the American South

Dr Edward Ayers (2018)

Film Review

Jamestown was the first North American to participate in the Atlantic slave trade. According to official accounts, a Dutch ship transported 20 African slaves pirated from a Spanish ship to the Jamestown in 1619. They were traded for “victuals (food).” The settlement would turn away a second slave ship (presumably their slaves were also pirated) to avoid “Spanish animosity.”

With plenty of surplus labor to supply their indentured servant scheme (see Hidden History: How Slavery Fueled Capitalism), England was slow to tap into the African slave trade. Initially they only transported slaves to Bermuda and the Bahamas to work sugar plantations. Prior to 1660, the English transported 200,000 African slaves to the New World. Of these, 120,000 went to Bermuda and the Bahamas, 22,000 went to New England and 50,000 to Virginia. The first slaves worked in glass, pitch, sassafras or iron production, but low demand meant poor return for investors.* It was only when Jamestown settlers began growing tobacco (in high demand in Europe due to its addictiveness**) that slavery became profitable in Virginia.

The 1666 Great Fire of London (and subsequent rebuild) also gave the Virginia slave trade a boost by creating local job opportunities for homeless Londoners that might otherwise have emigrated indentured servants.

Virginia adopted slave laws initially codified in Bermuda and the Bahamas. These  differed significantly from those adopted by Portuguese and Spanish in Central and South America. Under English law, Africans and mulattoes were denied the option of buying their freedom (as under Roman slave law adopted by Catholic slave colonies).

Ayers describes the background behind Bacon’s Rebellion in 1675 in some detail. After 1670, white settlers and freed indentured servants*** had little prospect of accessing new undepleted land in the coastal settlements. At the same time, they experienced increasing conflict with Native Americans as they pushed West sinking fertile land. In 1676 after Governor Berkeley banned freed servants from squatting on indigenous land, aristocrat Nathaniel Bacon (who belonged to Berkeley’s governing council) mobilized disenchanted indentured servants, free Africans and slaves to join an armed expedition against the native Americans and eventually Berkeley himself.

The rebellion collapsed when Bacon died of dysentery. Berkeley was recalled to England in disgrace following the rebellion.

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*Queen Elizabeth and her successors, who “owned” the land the first Virginia settlers claimed on behalf of England, granted charters signing it over to private investors willing to finance ocean voyages to the New World.

**King James I was the first to campaign to outlaw tobacco use, owing to its detrimental effect on human health.

***The standard contract required  an indentured servant to work for a master 7 years, after which Virginia colony investors would grant them 50 acres of their own land.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/slavery-becomes-american

The First North American Civilizations

Episode 25: North American Peoples and Tribes

The Big History of Civilizations (2016)

Dr Craig G Benjamin

Film Review

As Benjamin describes in this lecture, early human civilization developed spontaneously on four isolated continents: the Afro-Eurasian zone, the Americas, Australasia and the Pacific. The American civilizations developed 2,000 years later than those of Afro-Eurasia. According to Benjamin, this delay stemmed from difficult climatic conditions that made it difficult to produce sufficient food for the development of complex cities.

Unlike South America, early North American settlements never produced the rigid hierarchies, tribute taking, powerful coercive rulers or organized warfare that characterized most Afro-Eurasian civilizations. That being said, several complex North American societies arose out of sedentary and semi-sedentary settlements that supplemented food production with hunting and gathering.

Woodland tribes east of the Mississippi River lived in semi-sedentary groups that grew corn and beans via horticulture.* Prior to 60 AD, they practiced woodworking, leather working, shelter building and tool production. From 600-800 AD, they abandoned their semi-nomadic life ways to establish permanent villages of up to 40,000 inhabitants and began using a bow and arrow, rather than spear, to hunt. By 1400 AD, the five Iroquois tribes formed a state-like structure referred to as the Iroquois Nation.**

Tribes in the Ohio River Valley traded with tribes across the continent, obtaining mica from the Appalachian Mountains, conch shells and sharks teeth from the Gulf of Mexico and copper from upper Michigan.

In the Southwest, the Pueblo people employed irrigation from 600 AD and built permanent adobe structure. They abandoned these dwellings around 1300 AD to return to a lifestyle of hunting and gathering. Benjamin claims this was due to drought, but in The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow maintain foraging is even more sensitive to drought than agriculture and residents either overthrew a tyrannical regime or simply opted out. See https://stuartbramhall.wordpress.com/2021/12/14/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-history-of-so-called-civilization/

In the Northwest, Chinook and Yakima tribes established semi-sedentary settlements lasting several thousands of years after bow and arrow technology spread across the Great Plains.

The Nez Perce, Sioux and Cherokee were Great Plains tribes who developed strong tribal leaders and social;y structured hierarchies and experienced a fair amount of inter-tribal warfare.

The Paleo Eskimo tribes became expert fishermen and hunters. They lived in ice houses they heated with fire and crafted fur clothing, canoes and exquisite tool, spears and knives from bone, antler, stone and tusks.

Benjamin notes that all North American tribes developed shamanistic practices and grew corn and tobacco (which were first domesticated in South America).

The Vikings were the first Europeans to make contact with North American tribes in Newfoundland in 1000 AD. They returned to Scandinavia during the Little Ice Age (1400-1600 AD), when it became too cold to produce sufficient food.

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*Horticulture is the cultivation of domesticated plants at a small scale garden level, as opposed to agriculture, which focuses on mass production of food.

**Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca.

The film can be viewed free on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/north-american-peoples-and-tribes

Death by Toxic Chemicals

The Human Experiment

Directed by Don Hardy (2013)

Film Review

Narrated by Sean Penn, this documentary concerns the growing toxics movement and the fight to bring the US in line with the rest of the world in protecting Americans against toxic chemicals. The ultimate goal of this movement is to put the burden of proof on chemical manufacturers to prove their products are safe before introducing them to the environment. At present new chemicals are considered safe until large numbers of consumers get sick and die.

I was aware the EU had much stronger consumer protections than the US. I was appalled to learn that China’s toxic standards exceed those of the US – that China uses the US as dumping ground for formaldehyde containing products banned in their own country.

The film starts with some frightening health problems related to toxic chemical exposure:

• Breast cancer (virtually unknown prior to 1900) has increased 30% since 1975.
• Infertility has increased 49% since 1988.
• Brain cancer in children has increased 38% since 1990.
• Autism has increase over 1000% since 1999.
• Asthma has increased 80% since 1990.
• Leukemia has increased 74% since 1990.

The filmmakers also provide an intriguing snapshot of the cynical techniques employed by the chemical lobby, which spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year fighting federal and state regulation. Unsurprisingly they rely on the same public relations firms and tactics the asbestos and tobacco industry used to stall regulation of their products.

The most inspiring segment of the documentary concerns Teens for Safe Cosmetics, a movement organized by teenage girls to educate other teens about the dangerous chemicals in their cosmetics. So far, the group’s most inspiring tactic involved entering supermarkets and labeling all the Secret deodorant products with homemade warning stickers.

1493 and the Hidden History of Industrial Capitalism

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

By Charles C Mann

Vintage Books (2012)

Book Review

1493 is a fascinating book tracing a totally neglected aspect of the rise of capitalism and industrial civilization – namely the transfer of new crops, livestock, trees, diseases, guano (nitrogen-rich bird poop, silver and diverse ethnic groups to every continent except Antarctica. Based on his detailed investigations, Mann cites numerous examples of major historical events and movements that can be directly traced to this “Columbian Exchange.”

Mann begins by tracing the history of tobacco, which was first transferred from the lower Amazon to Jamestown Virginia, and from there to China. An immensely popular drug of addiction, it provided the cash England needed to support colonization of the South-eastern US.

He next focuses on the potato, which was transferred from the Andes in South America to Northern Europe, where it replaced wheat as the staple crop in Ireland, northern Germany, Belgium and Russia (potatoes flourish in colder climates and on more marginal land than wheat and are four times more productive). Thanks to the introduction of the potato, Europe was finally able to end the famines that occurred every ten years. At a time, when China, India and various African and South American civilizations were far more advanced than Europe, the main factor holding back European development was its inability to feed its population.

Next Mann covers the important of sugar (originally domesticated in New Guinea) to the West Indies and the importation of coffee and bananas (to South America) from Africa.

African Slaves Resistant to Malaria

He devotes a whole section to the transfer of diseases, which played a significant role in wiping out America’s indigenous population, to the New World. I was previously aware that new settlers also brought malaria with them. This often fatal illness was endemic to England in the 1500s – thanks to misguided schemes to reclaim wetlands for agriculture. The high prevalence of malaria meant that 8 out of 10 settlers in Jamestown and other southern colonies could be expected to die in the first 18 months. Mann makes a case that the natural resistance present in slaves from West and Central Africa** was a main factor in England (a historically antislavery nation) turning to slaves in their desperation to establish a labor force to work the tobacco fields.

Silver, Sweet Potatoes and the Downfall of China

The chapter on the role of the Columbian Exchange in the downfall of China as the most prosperous, politically developed and culturally sophisticated country in the world is also extremely enlightening. I was totally unaware that between 1/3 and 1/2 of all the silver mined in 16^th century Peru was transported to China via the Philippines for use in their monetary system. Nor the importance of sweet potatoes and maize (which, like potatoes, thrive on marginal land) in feeding poor farmers displaced by China’s dynastic wars. China is still the number one world producer of sweet potatoes.

Why the US was the Last to Free Their Slaves

For me, the most interesting section was the one on slavery, particularly the chapter on the “maroon”*** revolts and guerilla warfare that forced Central and South America to abolish slavery long before the US did. Except for Florida, escaped slaves in the US tended not to form rebellious maroon enclaves. The reason, according to Mann, was their difficulty surviving on their own in a colder climate and the opportunity for legal freedom if they fled to the North.

In Florida, escaped slaves formed alliances with the Seminole Indians. Their guerilla bands conducted continual attacks (with covert British support) on Georgia – until 1839 when Florida maroons were granted their freedom if they agreed to resettle of the Mississippi.

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*The Columbian Exchange was the widespread transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, technology, and ideas between the Americas and the Old World in the 15th and 16th centuries, related to European colonization and trade after Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage.

**Approximately 97% of people indigenous to West and Central Africa are resistant to malaria owing to the presence of the Duffy Negative Antigen.

***Maroon is a term applied to fugitive black slaves.