Professors owned people forced into bondage
I’m reading a long Guardian piece about Harvard and slavery and what to do about that whole massive scar on US history. In doing that I find myself doing what I always do, which is wonder how it worked – how people explained it to themselves, lived with it, understood it, all that. It’s a puzzle. If I’d lived then instead of now I would have done the same thing, so naturally I’m curious how it worked.
Part one is that it’s not all that puzzling that bad working conditions were taken for granted, because that was just a given and had been since forever. It’s the ownership part, the permanent capture part, that sticks out. The enslavement.
As the country’s oldest and wealthiest university, Harvard’s history is inextricable from the history of transatlantic slavery. The enslaved labored in campus buildings, university presidents and professors owned people forced into bondage, and the school’s wealth grew through a circle of donors intimately connected to the plantation system in the Caribbean, the American south and the trafficking of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.
That. University presidents and professors owned people forced into bondage. Not people born to peasants tied to the land, but people forced into bondage. I’m not doing a point and condemn thing; to repeat, I would have done the same had I been in their position; what I’m wondering is what that was like.
There was no long chain of history to lie back on – no “their parents were tied to this estate, as were their parents before them, and so on back to Richard II or William the Conqueror or whatever.” There was only force. Force plus distance. “These people are from Africa, therefore we get to own them.” It’s not a hugely compelling argument.
Maybe it’s the pressure of the normal. “This is normal. It’s been this way for years. Who are we to jump up and change things?”
Samuel Johnson was rude enough to point that out.
Sometimes words don’t mean what you think they mean. The author likes these words:
And it is natural to imagine they can be justly elaborated as:
But look closely:
That was not a person taken from Africa but from Antigua. That person wasn’t born free but was born to parents already enslaved, and who knows how many prior generations enslaved (slave labor began in Antigua a hundred years previously).
It’s a matter of the global CTRL+H for language concerning people held as slaves. This year, these are the words we use to talk about them.
That phrase does not mean that the Vassall family went to Africa and hunted about for Africans to capture and force into bondage. Tony, if he was originally from Jamaica, was also born into slavery, and there’s no telling how many generations previous of his family were also slaves / enslaved, as African slavery spread to Jamaica in the early 1500s. At some point in his family history, members of one African tribe took his ancestors in war as slaves, as had long been their custom for centuries, and then they sold those captured rival tribesmen to Europeans, as had become their new, more profitable custom (the Arabs were broke by then).
The required euphemisms do more to obscure history than reveal it. It’s part of an attempt to portray the slavery of the descendants of Africans by the descendants of Europeans, in America, as the only slavery that we need to talk about. We don’t need to talk about the tens of thousands of Europeans who were held as slaves by Africans at the time that Cuba Vassall was shipped from Antigua to Boston. We don’t need to look past Antigua and see if Cuba Vassall’s descendants were held by Arabs or sold in Algiers.
So it’s probably true that Harvard professors owned people forced into bondage, but only if you’re talking about other people and/or other professors, or if “forced into bondage” means the same thing as “born into slavery.”
This was explained to my third grade class in 1955 in the state of South Carolina. Similar lessons were presented every year, by every teacher:
1. The coloreds were not quite people—they didn’t even feel the same about their children the way white people do.
2. The coloreds were better off in America because they got free housing, food, and medical care.
3. They learned about Jesus, so their souls were saved.
It was never admitted that many colored children had to call their father “Master”.
I don’t understand it, either. I am still angry about the things I was taught by women I admired, and angry that we didn’t learn the real, brutal history, and that so many people today still won’t admit that slavery was unremittingly evil.
Well, once you have an explanation that satisfies for lower grade things, it should also work for slavery. That is, an explanation for how people relate to something like maintaining an underpaid labor class, apartheid, putting women in sacks, foot binding, FGM, or surgically altering children to superficially look like the opposite sex. Finding one that’s really satisfying in the face of the extremes of human evil is the hard part.
Yes but I was asking about not how people relate to but how they do. Not how people thought about slavery but how people could participate in it. At least I think that’s what I was asking about – I probably mixed the two together without intending to. Anyway you’re right. Those chicken processing plants in Iowa – how do we let that go on?
How European people participated in slavery of people of African ancestry (a relatively small subset of the larger category of the history of slavery) does involve an amount of white supremacism, of the sort Barbyra points out. You’ll find some people claim that white supremacism is the theory and slavery is the practice.
However, that doctrine does not explain how the European powers – the French, the British, the Danes – abolished slavery centuries ago in their societies and colonies (followed later by their ex-colonies). The child of the subject of the article, named Dante, grew up a freedman in Boston. Meanwhile, slavery still persists, mostly in Africa, the Middle East, and India, affecting 20-50 million people. White supremacism has nothing to do with that.
If one wants to know how people could do slavery in 1737, perhaps one could watch a documentary interviewing people who hold slaves today.
The poison of slavery in the U.S. is connected to its definition in racial terms. People were BORN into slave status, and that status was extended and justified on the basis of race. See Dredd Scott.
That’s how ‘good’ people lived with the peculiar institution. Harvard professors, and Scarlett O’Hara for that matter, didn’t paddle canoes up the Congo and snatch people off of the banks. The trade depended on obscene states like Dahomey and Ashanti conquering and trafficking their neighbors. The damage to African civilization extended across the continent, with the Arab trade working from Zanzibar and the Nile at the same time, and for centuries longer.
Oddly, the Barbary pirates DID snatch up coastal villagers from as far as Ireland and Iceland.
One might make an argument that the race based slavery was worse than eg: slavery as practiced in the Roman Empire.
In the Roman Empire war captives almost automatically became slaves, so I suppose it was just regarded as a misfortune that could happen to anyone, regardless of skin color or other aspect of physical appearance. If a slave was freed, his/her children could become Roman citizens. I read that in 2nd century CE Rome many senators had freedmen among their ancestors.
Note: I recently read “To Turn the Tide” by S.M. Stirling, a time travel novel in which some 21st century Americans are stranded (with lots of useful equipment) in 2nd century CE Roman Empire near what is now Vienna. Their reactions to slavery as practiced there/then, particularly the dark skinned one, are part of the plot. (The Germanic people just across the Danube sell war captives from neighboring tribes as slaves to the Romans.)
Very much so. The Iliad is packed with highly privileged people who could become slaves at any moment. And, I’ve just remembered, there’s that ridiculously moving moment in the Odyssey when Odysseus’s nanny – of course a slave – recognizes him and he has to clap a hand over her mouth to keep her from expressing her joy. And there’s Eumaeus…
Book 19.
Jim Baerg, that is an argument, and possibly valid, but a lot of the women were sold or given to the victorious to have sex. For some reason, that is always a component of slavery…men get to have sex with the women. (As for my ‘for some reason’, that is sarcasm, so doesn’t need a response.)
American slavery was a particularly horrendous form, but I’m not sure that makes the others better, just different. Being a slave was often used to pay off a debt, which might be okay, I suppose, because in a sense it means you were getting something for your work, but otherwise…owning another human being is often set up to be as humiliating and degrading to the owned human as possible. Oh, I know, not all slaves, and all that, but…
I read somewhere that one of the reasons for the rapid colonization of Africa in the late 19th century was British abolition of and naval enforcement against the slave trade caused the economies of the slave trading states to collapse