Fascinating series. There’s a period of American history that in my own era was taught pretty much on the level of Washington and the cherry tree, ie, a lot of legend, no substance. This is the rise of the American Aristocracy, so to speak, the building of the castles, how and why…
It started with the Triangular Trade, in which some Scottish merchants (the Tobacco Lords) early on arranged a deal with the shipment of slaves from Africa to the Caribbean sugar plantations, Rum from the Caribbean sugar plantations to the Americas, Tobacco to England…
[Alas, it was one of my own x-great-grandfathers, an Adm Hawkins, who proposed this routing to Queen Elizabeth. He didn’t originate it the traffic, but he proposed at least the route that would enable the rum-colonies-tobacco-England part of it, which is one reason we aren’t all speaking Spanish: it funded the English navy in advance of the Spanish Armada—he was of a ship-building family, and used the funds to revised British ships and make them more efficient.]
Then the Tobacco Barons of the Post-civil-war South, Reynolds, Phillips, etc, who found a way to get rich from the farms down there, and who formed the political connection with the tobacco farmers-US Congress that would make the southern voting bloc and tobacco linked.
Add in the beginnings of the railroad, oil, and electricity, we have the subjects of this documentary—Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie…and the upstart Ford. Fascinating how they interlocked, and what they were up to. The Edison-Tesla business is in there. We’re headed for the motorcar. But there’s also the Homestead Riot, which stained Carnegie’s career, and may have driven him to philanthropy in remorse; and the Jamestown Flood, the characters of Frick, Teddy Roosevelt and others who had a hand in it….plus some footnotes that explain why we now have laws against private militias and watering down stock. It’s on the H2 channel, and if you missed it the first time around, catch it.
I loved that series! They are set to do more. I’d be thrilled if they kept it up all the way to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
It’s still very much just an overview, but way more than school usually got into it and it gives you a direction to go should you want to read a book on Carnegie for example.
I just finished Martin Dugard’s book on Columbus and his final voyage and now I am very interesting in reading about Isabella just from the tease I got from that. It’s all very much gateway drug type material.
Speaking of Columbus, I just finished reading O.S. Card’s “Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus”. It’s one of his better books to my taste, and a very cute premise etc. Dunno if it’s heresy to mention other authors here (apologies?). For some reason, history and fictionalized treatments of history are very much a gateway drug for me too. Some titles I’ve really enjoyed: ‘The Killer Angels’ ‘Little Big Man’ ‘Augusta Tabor’ ‘The City and The Saloon’ ”Wild Swans’ a whole bunch of Wallace Stegner’s stuff. A friend of Mine J.C. Pratt just wrote one about Portugal in the 70’s ‘American Affairs’ good stuff!
The railroads you mention bring up another fortuitous three-way conjunction in time. The Irish Potato Famine bringing labor to our shores. Discovery of the Minnesota/Michigan iron ore lodes to use the Appalachian coal and new labor. And the opening of the west, needing efficient transportation over large distances.
You can certainly watch the towns spring up as the railroads advance.
Right before the US Civil War, a lot of people were thinking of opportunity in yet one more big deal—the Louisiana Purchase. The Cherry ancestor, who had lost his shirt in tobacco, took his pregnant wife to newly-purchased Louisiana, et al, and as war with Britain looked likely, kept right on going into Texas, which was Mexican territory at the time. That’s where my great-grandfather was born…they went without a railroad, by horseback, likely, or nursed a carriage or wagon over the non-existent roads.
The other side of the family was more citified,and went probably by horseback into Ohio as that opened up for the same reasons, traveling likely from Baltimore or Philadephia. And they were involved in the Ohio regiment in the War of 1812—one died. But then the railroad came into Ohio, and so did a lot more immigrants. Pretty well my mother’s side of the family followed the railroad, after that. Where it went, they followed, farming, generally doing their best to stay out of trouble spots and the Civil War.
Eventually, after bloody Kansas settled down (scene of terrible Civil War terrorism, and aftermath, such as the career of the Daltons, Youngers, and Jesse James), my mother’s family moved from Nebraska into Kansas, and then into Oklahoma.
Ironic that one of ‘the Younger boys,’ nephew of the outlaw Cole Younger, introduced my mother and father. Bill Younger was working on my grandfather’s farm, and his uncle Cole, who was not that bad a bad guy, was in prison in Oklahoma.
The Irish Potato famine sent the Scanlans to America, and the railroads got them west: my paternal grandmother.
And the Youngers weren’t the only outlaw connection for my family: one of the married-in’s mother helped shelter Bonnie and Clyde by hiding them and their car in the family garage, while the sheriff was looking for them.
If you have Daltons in your family tree, we may be obliquely related. My dad’s granddaddy was married to a Dalton. He advised her not to be talking about her family tree since so many of her relatives were hanging from it! We are related to Mollie Bailey who had a traveling circus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mollie_Arline_Kirkland_Bailey (not the Bailey of Barnum &, though), which might account for some of the eccentricities loose in the family. I really need to join Ancestry.com and see what I can turn up. I’d like to see if I can trace the Neuthard connection in Germany and see what turns up. Ditto the Bauers and Melchoirs. I know practically nothing about my dad’s family past his parents. His momma was a Lee and her momma was a Windom, who they referred to as “Grandmither.” I’m hazy on where the Bailey’s come in. There were two Bailey brothers, James and George, who played in a band during the Civil War. James (cornet) married Mollie, and we’re descended from the younger brother George (don’t know what instrument he played). I think his girl (Also named “Mollie”) married the Dalton.
No, no Daltons, nor even Youngers within the tree, just passing acquaintances. My mum’s lot were New York Dutch who went to Tennessee, and English from Baltimore who went to Ohio.
I’m surprised sometimes I don’t see more crosses between your lines and mine, CJ. I have a multi-G grandfather in the tobacco trade during the 1600’s. I have another who was in Ohio in 1812 (and there’s a family legend about him having a statue done of him, on account of him passing messages and horses across the battle lines.) But that wasn’t homesteading; Joseph Gordon was a mailman.
My father’s mother’s grandfather marched with the Stonewall Brigade in the Civil War. After, the Harrises went from Virginia to Kansas, where my grandmother was born; her grandparents and various relations had already moved on to Oklahoma.
You get a sense of the when and where of history, looking at these people and where they spent their lives. It makes me wonder what people 100 years or so up from us will make of the traces *we* leave behind.
I’ve got Harrises in the Carolinas…
I don’t know where the Harrises were before Virginia, but a branch may have gone south; the peregrinations of my branch is Virginia (up to the 1840’s), Tennessee (1840’s?), Nebraska (by the late 1860’s, and where a lot of them stayed), Kansas (1880), Oklahoma (1890), everywhere else.
It’s such a common surname, it’s been difficult to trace individual lines.
My mother’s bff was Irene Harris, in 1920’s Oklahoma, Caddo Co. And there are many Harrises in the Carolinas.
Mom had folk settle in Clay County, Mo. Its most famous residents were the James boys. Also had folk next door in Ray County, a lawyer/judge named Lavelock, where Robert Ford came from.
Cole Younger was radicalized by an incident which his sister was raped, his mother’s house burned, his father killed—rebelling against a disarmament rule, he rode with Quantrill’s raiders, and was in prison in Oklahoma until 1902. He died with 14 bullets still in his body, most from the Northfield Raid. His nephew worked for my grandfather. Kansas was a terrible place because of the personal level of the Civil War as fought there. It was not regiments. It was militias with grudges.
Agreed, it’s very good. Watched 4 or 5 in a row yesterday, recorded the last 2 for later.
Thankfully such options exist! A co-worker in Phoenix several years ago was complaining about his son’s US History textbook which literally only mentioned Washington twice. One short paragraph which basically in passing mentioned that he was the first president and the other was a large side-bar insert raging about what an evil person old George was because he owned slaves. Dammed scary.
The Texas School Board creationist demands make it perfectly obvious that education is a political exercise, intellectual truth be damned.
Same with Jefferson. Definitely worth reading a biography to understand him and his times, and his household.
I have to say that I’ve never understood how the same men who could sign a declaration saying that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” could be… slave owners.
To many non-Americans at the time, and perhaps to many non-Americans now, it seems like the most blatant hypocrisy.
As Samuel Johnson wrote in 1775, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
Benjamin Franklin then furiously denounced Johnson for inciting slaves to rise up against their masters.
If liberty is an unalienable and God-given right, then how can anyone possibly justify owing slaves?
If they solemnly declare that all men have the right to liberty, but continue to own slaves, then they are deliberately being unjust. They are knowingly denying others their rights, and exploiting them – for their own financial benefit.
Either they are disregarding their own declared principles… or else they don’t really believe those principles, they just think they are a good way to stir up the emotions of the rabble. Either way it’s plain hypocrisy.
I think that they regarded them and other peoples as not real humans, just as women and children were regarded as not quite humans… My personal radical opinion is that even infants have a right to opinions and any choices which will do them no lasting harm…
I know something about the situation in Rome, where abolition also became an issue—a situation our founding fathers knew well.
There were several issues: several big estates did free slaves, and it was a disaster for the slaves, who ended up homeless, with no employment; the Senate then passed a law against deathbed manumissions. Traditionally, the house that manumitted had responsibility for support, but the huge estates and deathbed manumissions got around that and solved an economic issue—for the heirs. But the slavery system was killing their economy, and they generally wanted rid of it.
Slavery in the Americas was far more brutal than it ever was in Rome, except in Rome’s punitive slavery, such as the mines and quarries, which were truly horrid. We would call them penal colonies. American slavery was better at first, when it was indentured servitude for a specific term of labor, which was the way at least two of my ancestors got to the New World.
Recapture and enslavement was the potential fate of a manumitted slave in much of the United States, because there was no system set up to protect that status. And if you weren’t in a ‘free’ state, proving you were manumitted relied on a fragile piece of paper, and it was always possible you could be snagged back into slavery by some lowlife simply wanting to make some quick money: it wasn’t as if you could pretend not to be black.
Getting an agricultural job in areas where slaves did all the work was nearly impossible. Getting another sort of job, say, as a clerk, was not easy in the South.
There were American plantations which ran more like villas, where slaves had well-built houses, married, and maintained stable families as if they were hired workers. There were other places that were unmitigated hellholes, where work was hard, punishment was brutal, and where children were sold off as assets.
Jefferson’s mistress Sally Hemmings was a slave. His relationship with her was apparently monogamous, lasted for years, and was his way of staying loyal to his wife, who was invalid, and then died still quite young. He ended up, I believe, having to do a deathbed manumission for his own son, probably with a good deal of worry about his fate. Why didn’t he manumit Sally? Only he knew what his reasons were, but if he had, he would have had to break off the relationship. His society would tolerate a man of means having relations with a slave, but not with a free black woman. Some who were enlightened—were not that enlightened.
And a world in which black people who’d been transported away from their culture and homeland were going to blend into the system was a long ways off. Things weren’t going to be made all right with a slip of paper, or the sudden manumission of slaves who had no job training but agriculture and farms that weren’t prepared to pay them. The founding fathers tried to get rid of slavery, but they weren’t politically able to do it while fighting off the King—the situation portrayed in ‘1776’ is not so far from the truth. There was the strong opposition of the agricultural states. There was the reality of, by then, a large, culturally and racially distinct population who would have to be taken care of, educated, housed, employed, and otherwise assimilated—at a time when a lot of justification for the practice was that the slaves’ souls were being saved by Christianizing them, and the belief that they had no culture. The fact that the slaveholders never penetrated the African languages or saw African customs as anything that mattered was the mindset of the time: there they were in a ‘first contact’ situation and their conclusion was that people who didn’t worship, speak, or dress as they did were just in need of being Christianized and educated.
The fact that the need of the colonial push for plantation workers who could tolerate southern and island climate very unhappily corresponded with what was going on in Africa, where the animism-believers were being rounded up and dispossessed by the advance of Muslims, who also believed *they* were superior to these folk who believed there was a spirit in everything… The destruction of these cultures and their being shipped out as slaves was an ongoing tragedy.
The United States, after the Revolutionary War, slammed down an embargo on the importation of more slaves, for various reasons: the anti-slavery people got that far. But there began to be an even more heinous trade, taking young slaves from their families on the East Coast, and transporting them by ship to New Orleans…I’ve transcribed no few of those ship manifests for Ancestry, and the ones being shipped out are the old and the young. ‘Nice’ people didn’t see what was going on. They tried to make it better and did save Africans from being kidnapped to the US; but it meant a new and uglier domestic trade.
The fact that the slaveholders never penetrated the African languages or saw African customs as anything that mattered was the mindset of the time
Of this time as well, as the Islamist reactionaries burn libraries in Timbuktu.
…But not all of those libraries, nor even most of them. There are people in Timbuktu who have been getting the manuscripts out, since they were expecting the Islamists to get busy with torches. It’s happened before, after all.
They’ve been hiding the manuscripts. One gentleman, in possession of several centuries-old pieces, told a reporter that his family had found more, bricked up into a wall around their compound. He has moved both sets to a new hiding place, and has no intention of bringing them out while there is a breath of danger to them. A pity for any scholars wanting access, perhaps, but something for the future to hope for.
That is happening in many locations in North Africa, where the librarians and other MS keepers are vehemently opposed to seeing history repeat itself (‘Anything not contained in the Koran is heresy, and anything that is contained in the Koran is redundant’). Something much like this might have led to the caching of the original Dead Sea Scrolls. Blessings on anyone opposed to seeing information lost, just because it gets someone’s feathers in an uproar!
It wasn’t until the late 17th century that they decided that slavery should be hereditary. Before that, you could be freed, and have the same rights as others (whatever those might have been – they used property ownership to decide that).
I don’t know why that changed, but it wasn’t a change for the better.
Sally Hemmings was the daughter of John Wayles, father of Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, by his slave “concubine” Betty Hemmings (who was half white), and was thus Martha Jefferson’s half sister. That may have had something to do with her relationship with Jefferson. Betty Hemmings was the property of Martha Eppes, Martha Jefferson’s mother. In the marriage settlement of Martha Eppes to John Wayles, Betty Hemmings and her children were to remain the property of the descendants of Martha Eppes and could not be sold. That was how Jefferson ended up with them, as they were his wife’s inheritance from her mother. If Jefferson had not freed his children by Sally, they would have gone to Patsy, Jefferson’s daughter, on Jefferson’s death, as Sally did, or reverted to the Eppes family if Patsy predeceased him. Patsy withheld Sally from the auction of Jefferson’s property to pay his debts, and freed her. Sally’s son Beverly (it started out as a man’s name) “ran away” at age 24 but “was not pursued.” Jefferson’s overseer reported that he put Sally’s daughter Harriet on a stage coach and gave her $50 to go to live with her brother Beverly. Both children could and did “pass for white” and married into the white community in Washington DC. The rest of the children were manumitted by Jefferson upon their majority, or in his will.
My great-great grandmother Nancy Skelton was out of the same family as Martha Wayles was married to before marrying Jefferson, and we’re also descended from Thomas Jefferson’s grandfather. It’s all very crazy. Explaining that nest of matruska dolls is not easy.
So how about Vetruvian Tux for April, eh?
Leo would be proud! 😀
Hmm…. I’d read that the issue did bother some of the Founding Fathers enough that they freed their slaves and became abolitionists, while others of them did so only later in life or at their deaths, and most…went right on ignoring the blatant disparity.
Was it Jefferson or Franklin or some other, who said that if they didn’t settle it then, and abolish slavery, that it would come back later to haunt the American people?
A hundred years later, almost, and a Civil War, though that was over many issues besides.
Another hundred years before the Civli Rights Act, only after terrible trouble, and that was only shortly before I was born, a few years.
We still live with the after effects. I won’t claim we’re showing too many signs it’s getting better. There’s still too much that is *not* better. But perhaps it won’t take another hundred years before we’re finally free, and skin color or accent or customs don’t make any more difference than eye color.
Something that I think often gets overlooked in science fiction is how much (or how little) human cultures are likely to change in however long it takes us to get out into the Solar System and then out to the stars. In another two hundred or more years, will any of us think nearly as strongly about the differences between this side of the planet and the other? When we’ve had global instant communications for a couple of hundred years and rapid travel, with people moving back and forth for work and leisure, falling in love, trading goods and services, developing ties, getting to know one another, able to see and hear each other daily, will people in other countries still seem as “foreign” and “strangers” to us? — I grant, there will still be different beliefs, opinions, ideas, in religion and politics and everything else. But… are we likely to see a higher degree of merger, blending, whether it’s a tossed salad or a soup or stew? And what about throughout the Solar System, as early spacers, miners, colonists turn to each other out of necessity for survival in space? Is it too much to expect some degree of commonality to form? I’d hope we can learn to get along. If we can’t…. Well, perhaps all that empty space between us and the rest of the galaxy is a necessary buffer, at least until we outgrow our racial (and other) childish tantrums.
Just a flight of folly for April Fool’s? I hope not merely that.
I have a theory that what bothers us as a species is one of our most precious gifts: the ability to see and seek patterns. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing intrinsic in meeting a different human type (technically they’re not even properly races) that should make us react emotionally at all—except for that ‘pattern’ business. And it is something we’re going to have to deal with in ourselves, and possibly in others, when we do meet an intelligent ‘other’ species. We’re getting better: communication and image transmission is helping. But there’s still this gut-reaction to differences between us and those-like-us that is at the back of scary stories, horror, and unfortunately, some less artistic responses of our culture. History has to be understood in context of the times. People make the best decisions they can at the time. Often a good idea turns back on itself and becomes awful—the people who thought ‘we can gain a bit for abolition by banning the import of foreign slaves’ saw that it would stop the terrible losses and cut off that trade. But it turned out to mean people shipping slaves all over the place, away from their families, which gave us some of the worst horror stories. You try to cut the head off the hydra and worse comes back.
I can’t help but think of the old saw: It’s darkest before the dawn. Yes, worse came of the well-intended embargo of the African trade, but it *was* worse, and I believe it pushed more people into seeing that slavery was inherently bad. Eventually, enough people saw that.
Not that that stops random fools from spouting inanities like ‘slaves should have been grateful for having been given food and shelter’. And that was just last month, at CPAC. Sigh. Hypocrisy isn’t just the purview of the Founding Fathers and friends.
“Being sold down the river” i.e., to New Orleans, was the sword of Damoclese over the head of every slave. It was considered a terrible fate.
There is a fascinating Smithsonian Channel show “Skin Deep” about the genetics for skin pigmentation and what the natural selection pressures are for the different levels of skin pigmentation. Turns out, it’s not about skin cancer, it’s about the mother’s blood folate, which has to do with fetal viability and about vitamin D, which has to do with infant development. Turns out, white people are actually mutants. Here’s the link: http://www.smithsonianchannel.com/site/sn/show.do?show=141379
I’m an H5b in mitochondrial, and like every other human on this planet right now, my ancestors came from an African woman we call mitochondrial Eve, circa 180,000 years ago. I also have mtdna from two related strains, both Neanderthal and Denisovan (Siberian). For all I know, my ancestors got the white skin from the Neanderthal, who were living up where it was cold, and where living was harder. My lot generally must have been dark-skinned until at least the hike through the Mediterranean coast…there’s only two ways we know of our of Africa, and most Europeans went by my route and tend to have Neanderthal in the mix.
I have some Harrises in my family. My batch supposedly came from New Jersey and western Pennysylvania, to Ohio and thence to Iowa. They wound up in Oklahoma about the turn of the century.
The Harrises are a wide-traveling clan. My batch has their roots in Wales, as I recall.