Slavery Ignored
PHILADELPHIA — Scholars are objecting to a National Park Service text that does not mention that the house in Philadelphia used by President George Washington had a slaves’ quarters attached to it.
Instead, the Independence National Historical Park’s Web site refers to a “large servants’ hall” that Washington had attached to the back of the house.
“No more lying, just tell the truth,” said Charles L. Blockson, curator of the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University.
Some historians and blacks began protesting last spring when it was revealed that the park service’s new pavilion for the Liberty Bell, scheduled to open in 2003, would be located near where Washington’s slaves lived.
The park service promised to include exhibits on slavery at the new Liberty Bell Center. A U.S. House committee also required the park service to commemorate the nation’s first presidential mansion, including an acknowledgment that slaves lived and worked there.
The house, torn down in the 1830s, was home to Washington and John Adams before the nation’s capital moved from Philadelphia.
Park service spokesman Phil Sheridan said the Web site does not refer to a slaves’ quarters because nobody knows whether the slaves had separate quarters, or shared space with white indentured servants and free white servants.
“Can we say it was for the exclusive housing and feeding of slaves? We have no historical evidence to say that it was,” Sheridan said.
Historian Randall Miller of St. Joseph’s University, who wanted to halt construction of the Liberty Bell pavilion so an extensive archaeological evaluation could be done, said the flap over the Web site portends a major battle over how the president’s house will be represented.
“A lot of groups are interested in ‘owning’ that space, and the first thing they want to do is get control of the language,” he said.
November 9th, 2002 at 2:13 pm
“white indentured servants”? I’d suggest you soft-peddle that. Otherwise, reparations might have to include partial payments from some whites to other whites, and that would just complicate matters unnecessarily.
November 10th, 2002 at 12:00 am
“white indentured servants”? I’d suggest you soft-peddle that.
Oh, blah blah blah, like you care. Your other comments made recently make it clear that you’re not at all interested in these issues.
Otherwise, reparations might have to include partial payments from some whites to other whites, and that would just complicate matters unnecessarily.
Yeah, that’s it, indentured servanthood (which wasn’t typcially life-long, which wasn’t inherited by children born into captivity, which lacked the range of dignitary harms and offenses associated with slavery, which lacked the entire 100+ year history of formal racial apartheid, and so on) is just like African chattel slavery. Yeah, right.
November 12th, 2002 at 2:20 pm
There were no doubt white slaves in early U.S. history. Whether they were as badly treated or whether they could buy themselves off is immaterial. Are you saying that being a slave for ten years is a minor matter? Shouldn’t someone who was a slave for ten years get, say, 1/4 of the amount that a life-long slave would get?
I want my share, goldarnit!
Further, “African chattel slavery” sounds vaguely like serfdom. Perhaps I could pay my reparations to blacks by getting reparations against the Normans, English, Romans, Carthaginians, and, maybe just maybe, the Assyrians. Compound interest is great!
November 12th, 2002 at 2:57 pm
There were no doubt white slaves in early U.S. history. Whether they were as badly treated or whether they could buy themselves off is immaterial.
Indentured servitude is not the same as chattel slavery, as I made clear, as every historical work on the subject makes clear. Differential initial or constitutive conditions, levels of treatment, and real avenues for escape absolutely matter.
While indentured servitude was a nasty business, it ended up benefiting the people who endured it quite often, most of whom left Europe — which was land-starved — to endure indenture to pay off the debt they incurred in the passage to North America (and were taken advantage of at every turn, to be sure), and then often ended up either owning land — and thus rapidly moving into the burgeoning, new middle classes — or becoming part of the artisanal, urban bourgeoisie.
All of which was a vastly better range of outcomes as a group than was faced by African slaves and their descendants. Black freedmen and free born did at times enjoy land ownership and become artisanal “small business” owners, but in dramatically lower percentages. If those differences don’t matter to the lasting political and social impact of the two different forms of involuntary or forced labor, I’m not sure what does.
Are you saying that being a slave for ten years is a minor matter?
Of course I’m not, primarily because indentured servants were not slaves. I suggested a range of differences to warrant this claim already, which you neatly ignored. Now I’ll suggest some more, you’ll ignore them, and we’ll make no progress: indentured servants could not, as a matter of law, be killed or raped willy-nilly; they entered into the condition voluntarily, unlike African slaves who were taken by force; indentured servants were not legally prohibited from learning to read and write, unlike African slaves; indentured servants were not policed by the shared resources of entire communities, unlike African slaves; indentured servants were not seen by the rest of society as a group separated by race, castigated as inferior or subhuman, and then subjected to 100 years of formal and substantive racial apartheid after nominal emancipation.
If you can’t see the difference these differences make, we should just drop this line of discussion as a waste of time.
Shouldn’t someone who was a slave for ten years get, say, 1/4 of the amount that a life-long slave would get?
No; indentured servants were not slaves.
I want my share, goldarnit!
Further, “African chattel slavery” sounds vaguely like serfdom.
No, it doesn’t; and, regardless of what it sounds like, it wasn’t like serfdom. And, even if it was, so what?
Perhaps I could pay my reparations to blacks by getting reparations against the Normans, English, Romans, Carthaginians, and, maybe just maybe, the Assyrians. Compound interest is great!
Few, if any pro-reparations arguments suggests that living individuals owe reparations for slavery; they suggest that institutions owe reparations. In general you do not quibble with institutional debt assumed by the federal government for which you had no personal responsibility. I’m unclear why people raise such a fuss about this debt.
Further, the strongest reparations arguments are based not on slavery’s effects directly but on the subsequent 100 year history of racial apartheid. Many, many, many individual victims of that apartheid are still alive to press their claims, often against the still living perpetrators, both individually and institutionally.
To say nothing of the argument that the ongoing apartheid substantively and formally prevented redress of the initial pattern of grievances. How were ex-slaves and their descendants supposed to press for legitimate reparations when they couldn’t be assured of legal right to vote till 1965? When political participation very often, from about the end of Reconstruction till at least the 1930s, resulted in a lynching? The “it’s been too long” objection to reparations for slavery is a loser.
That’s a far different situation than with your Carthiginians example, which is, frankly, stupid.
November 12th, 2002 at 4:30 pm
While slavery was bad for the people who had to endure it, it’s a great deal for the slaves’ descendants, who get to live in America, a civilized country created by white people, instead of having to live in Africa. Does anyone really think that blacks in Africa are better off than blacks in America? If not, then what in the heck are the reparations for?
November 12th, 2002 at 4:32 pm
I also wonder if the proponents of “reparations” for slavery are aware of the constitutional prohibition on ex post facto laws. But then again, we’ve already seen how the “anti-racist” crowd doesn’t care much for the constitution - just look at the dim view they take on the freedom of association.
November 12th, 2002 at 10:49 pm
You, Rurik, and David Horowitz all make the point that some group of people were better off because of some form of slavery, whether “African chattel slavery” or what I and many others would refer to as a form of slavery, indentured servitude. You don’t mention whether blacks are better off, just indenture servants. Would you consider black Americans (oops, U.S. citizens) better off than, say, blacks in the Sudan?
Regarding institutions, not people, being the target of reparations: there are many institutions that have been around for hundreds of years. Such as the “English” monarchy.
I’ll let you know when I sue QE II, or when I reductio ad absurdum this on my blog, whichever comes first.
November 12th, 2002 at 11:20 pm
You, Rurik, and David Horowitz all make the point that some group of people were better off because of some form of slavery, whether “African chattel slavery” or what I and many others would refer to as a form of slavery, indentured servitude.
This is chock full of distortions and errors. I’m not making the same point as Horowitz. The point I made was not about a racially identified group of people but about individuals who were indentured. Many indentured servants, after finishing their term of service, (which was often abusive and exploitative, as I’ve said) ended up owning land or becoming artisanal urban producers, neither of which they were likely to accomplish in Europe. (And, fine, so you want to assimilate indenture to chattel slavery, which is nuts, but what does it get you? That assimilating move is in no way a defeater of reparations arguments. Not even close.)
In that sense some indentured servants enjoyed an improved material condition, comparative to their economic and social peers who stayed behind in Europe, as a result *of their choice* to come to North America at the cost of entering a term of indenture. That is a vastly different case than the one *imposed* on African slaves.
Your assimilationist move is like a person who says that since murder and suicide both result in someone’s death there’s no point in distinguishing them.
The difference between indenture and chattel slavery is precisely the difference, for example, between a daredevil who decides to jump from a high cliff into water, hoping to land safely beyond the rocks, but who jumps short and lands on the rocks; and a person who is thrown from the same cliff, against her will, landing on the rocks. In each case someone dies, but to suggest the cases are the same is simply wrongheaded.
Further, as I now tire of explaining, the differences between indenture and chattel slavery were constituted not only by the very important difference in initiating conditions (roughly, consent versus violent coercion), but different in what constituted their respective daily lives, different in their social and legal status, and very different in the lasting effects of the condition. There simply is no indentured analogue to the 100 year apartheid which African slaves, their descendents, and many (if not most) free born blacks suffered. There simply is no indentured analogue to the ongoing racial stigma suffered by African Americans.
You don’t mention whether blacks are better off, just indenture servants.
Because the point was to explain why collapsing indenture to chattel slavery is wrongheaded.
Would you consider black Americans (oops, U.S. citizens) better off than, say, blacks in the Sudan?
That’s not remotely a relevant (or even coherent, for that matter) question. Were the African people who were taken by slavers through the Middle Passage (during which *millions died*) and sold into lifelong and inheritable slavery in North America better off than Africans who were not so captured and enslaved?
Funny that no one who opposes reparations ever asks or answers *that* question.
Regarding institutions, not people, being the target of reparations: there are many institutions that have been around for hundreds of years. Such as the “English” monarchy.
I would ask you “so what?” but I’d be afraid you might tell me, and I’d have to read more of your boring, unimpressive arguments.
This is my last post in this thread.