I have been reading recently about the experience of slavery in this country. Frederic Law Olmsted (yes, the guy who designed Central Park in New York City), wrote a couple of books about his journeys through the American South prior to the Civil War. I am about half the way through The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 1853-1861.
Olmsted was an abolitionist. He (and I in reading his book) was struck by the amount of energy taken up with the purchase and sale of slaves, and how they should be employed, regarded and sustained in their labor. Everything revolved around how to best use enslaved labor to keep the plantation/farm going and occasionally earn a profit. As growing cotton wore out the land in the eastern part of the South, one way of making money from slavery was in breeding and selling slaves to larger plantations with better land in the western states of the South.
In contrast to the New England of the time, the South displayed few of the institutions and infrastructure of civilization: schools, churches, roads, decent housing, and bustling businesses. Travel through the South was a miserable experience with transport being slow and uncertain and hotels in short supply and of poor quality.
Lest New Englanders feel their chest swelling with some pride by comparison, Jared Ross Hardesty has written Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England, 2019. In that volume he tells the story of native Americans who survived King Philip’s War in the late 1600s. Few Americans today realize that this war, measured by death and destruction per 1000 of population, may have been the bloodiest war on American soil.
Many of the native Americans who survived the war surely wished they had died. Hardesty makes the point that New England already had a slave trade with the Caribbean prior to King Philip’s War, swapping native American slaves for African slaves. After King Philip’s War nearly 1000 native Americans, some who were Christian, were sold into slavery (Hardesty, p. 12).
To say that slavery is appalling in its causes, reality and effects is a ridiculous understatement. And yet, we do ourselves a disservice if we do not educate ourselves on this ugly part of American history, whether by watching the new movie on Harriet Tubman or by reading written accounts of this example of our abuse of one another.
Alan Baughcum
11/25/19