A Liberal Dose, November 2, 2023 "Why the True History of Slavery and Race Matters Today"

 

A Liberal Dose

November 2, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“Why the True History of Slavery and Race Matters Today”

 

I have been talking about the origins of slavery in America. In part, I’ve been doing so because there is a lot about that subject that most people don’t know -and our current political climate, especially in red states like ours, suppresses honest discussion and true understanding of the subject. You can’t understand the present without understanding the past, nor can you effectively build the future, and some people would rather you not do any of those things. Their strategy for controlling the present and shaping the future is controlling your ability to know the past.

That said. For roughly the first century of the English colonies, labor in the South was done by three groups: African slaves, white indentured servants, and American Indian slaves. For reasons discussed last week, by about 1720 it had become exclusively the task of African slaves. Southern colonies started passing laws to keep even free blacks separate from poor whites, the better to control them both and avoid a replay of Bacon’s Rebellion.

Those laws became, in fits and spurts, more and more restrictive as the eighteenth century progressed. Every time there was a failed slave revolt, or word was leaked of a planned one, Southern colonial legislatures passed more laws exerting ever more control over the black population, free and slave alike. Free blacks lost most of the rights they had possessed the previous century, and slavery became harsher and harsher. This continued after the Revolution and into the nineteenth century. Race was simultaneously defined by LAW, and shaped by custom. This was a way for the planter class -who controlled the economy and the politics -to tell poor white workers and farmers, “Hey, you may not have any money or access to education or many opportunities in life, but you are white like us and we are all on the same side. You are not like those OTHER people... so stop hanging around with them. They are inferior to US.” This was a way to both delude the white “lower classes” and keep them from turning on the powers that be, and to protect the institution of slavery which was making the elites rich.

I’ll return to the cookie analogy I’ve used often. Picture three guys sitting around a table: a black guy, a poor white guy, and a rich white guy. There are ten cookies at the table. The rich guy has eight and the other two each have one. The rich guy tells the poor white guy, “You’d better watch that black guy, he wants to steal your cookie.” And while the poor white guy and the black guy are watching each other, neither notices that the rich guy now has ALL the cookies. Or, as Lyndon Johnson put it, “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

This was done to maintain the social status quo, and keep the empowered in power. And it worked. Thousands and thousands of poor white Southerners who had never owned a slave and never would fought and died to protect the institution that only benefited the people at the top. And when that war ended slavery in America, the same economic/political class leaned in heavier than ever on reinforcing racism in order to hold on to that control -and that worked, too.

Today many Americans -95% or more of them white, I would guess -want to gloss over all the history I have laid out these last few weeks, because they think it makes America look bad… and because they want people to stop complaining about racial injustice, because doing so is a “divisive concept.” “Let’s forget it and move on.” But “forgetting” it (or never learning it in the first place) only further cements it.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

 

 

A Liberal Dose, Oct. 5, 2023 "How the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Began"

 

A Liberal Dose

October 5, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“How the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Began”

 

Last week I told you about the Arab slave trade, which involved mostly captives from sub-Saharan Africa but also involved some other groups of people, including Europeans captured on or near the Mediterranean (perhaps as many as a million over a couple of centuries), and which lasted around a thousand years. It has been estimated that as many as 17 million people were sold as slaves in that millennium. How does that compare with the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, wherein Europeans transported African slaves to the New World? That has been estimated at around 13 million -but over only 350 years. So, during that 350 years, Europeans were trading two-and-a-half times as many slaves as were their Arab counterparts. So that’s one big difference -sheer scale. Let’s discuss how that happened.

It all started in the “Age of Discovery,” roughly the early-to-mid 1400s. Europeans had been exposed to luxury items from the Far East (like silks and spices -and sugar) during the Crusades in the Middle East. It was impossible to trade directly with East Asian lands like India and China, because the Muslim-controlled Middle East was in-between Europe and those far eastern markets. It’s fair to say that European Christendom and Islamic lands were not on the best terms, post-Crusades. It was therefore either impossible to get at those Far Eastern trade goods, or you could only get them by going through Middle Eastern middlemen who had a considerable markup attached. This is why so many Europeans in the 1400s were wanting to explore oceans, hoping to find a way to bypass the Muslim World and get at those treasured items. There was also a strong desire for access to the gold and gems (and, later, coffee) of southern Africa -and Muslims were blocking them there, too.

Enter Prince Henry of Portugal, alias Henry the Navigator. Henry supervised the construction of a new, lighter and more maneuverable ship, the caravel -and invested money in the training and hiring of cartographers and navigators, convinced they could make their way down the (unknown to Europeans at the time) coast of Africa and find the source of all that gold. The plan was to sail west and swing wide around northwest Africa and the Arabs and Berbers there, looping back east south of the Sahara Desert.

While making that initial swing into the Atlantic, though, the Portuguese stumbled across several uninhabited islands previously unknown to them, namely Madeira and the Azores (still part of Portugal today). These semi-tropical islands, it turns out, were capable of growing sugarcane. It would no longer be necessary to buy it from India or intermediaries. The Portuguese government encouraged Portuguese farmers to move to the islands to work in cane fields -to be transplanted, in other words. Which is why such farms began to be called, in English, plantations. However, it proved hard to convince even poor Portuguese people to move out to the middle of nowhere for very low wages, so another tack was tried -slavery. Initially, the slave labor consisted of the native people of the nearby Canary Islands, which Portugal had already claimed. However, they had low resistance to disease, and quickly died off.

Meanwhile, the Portuguese had, in fact, made contact with the African peoples south of the Sahara -people who had been participating in the Arab slave trade for centuries by selling off the captives they took when warring with one another. The Portuguese began buying African slaves from them, as well, to work on their sugar plantations off the coast of Africa. And so had been planted -on a very small scale -both the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the genocide of indigenous people…  for the sake of trade and profit.

In ensuing decades, both the Portuguese and their Spanish allies/competitors/frenemies would push farther into the Atlantic looking for trade routes. They would find two huge continents ripe for cultivation -but, inconveniently, already inhabited.

To be continued.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE