[The Soup Nazi]

(cont'd)

PRESIDENTS AND OTHER LUMINARIES

41 “Thomas Jefferson funded the renovation of Monticello by mortgaging the labor force that did the work.”

49 “When Jefferson’s slaves got too old to work, he routinely cut their rations in half.”

63 “Twenty-two-year-old Ona Judge, who was Martha Washington’s personal servant, escaped from the President and First Lady of the United States in Philadelphia in 1796 after learning she was to be given away as a wedding gift. She married a free black man in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and managed to avoid falling prey to the attempts at recapture that George Washington attempted against her until he died in 1799.”

259 “Patrick Henry’s polemical evocations of liberty and slavery were framed by his concrete, daily experience of denying the most basic freedoms to an entire community of people over whom his word was law and who lived in misery at his grudging expense.”

262 Patrick Henry in a private letter: “I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil.”

277 “With Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson definitively established himself as a founding theorist of white supremacy in America, laying out in condensed form key points of racialized thought that pro-slavery writers would consistently reaffirm and that would echo in the cant of modern-day white supremacists.”

297 “The story of the Constitution’s making in 1787 has been told any number of ways, typically suffused with a cue-the-kettledrums aura of religiosity and an assumption of American triumphalism. Constitutional historians have tended to portray their subject as the most important political document in world history, in the greatest nation in history. In extreme cases this has involved elevating the framers to a sort of secular sainthood.”

282 “The bargain between freedom and slavery contained in the Constitution of the United States is morally and politically vicious”—John Quincy Adams, 1820

342 “Jefferson’s policy toward Toussaint Louverture was markedly different from that of the non-slaveowner John Adams. He refused even to write a personal letter for his new consul to Saint-Domingue to carry to Louverture, as was diplomatic custom.”

397 “Andrew Jackson is the only US president that we know of who personally drove a slave coffle [Webster’s: ‘a train of animals or slaves fastened together’]. But then, Jackson was also the first president to have been a merchant.”

459-60 “John Quincy Adams, whom Jackson defeated in the 1828 presidential election, was elected to Congress in 1830—the only ex-president to take such a step—and began a remarkable second career. His diary, which he began at the age of 12 in 1779 and maintained for 69 years until his death in office in 1849, is the most extensive by any American historical figure. On his first day in Congress he presented 15 petitions praying for the abolition of slavery in Pennsylvania and the slave trade in the District of Columbia.”

495 In 1836 the district attorney of the District of Columbia jailed a young Georgetown doctor whose possession of a trunk full of abolitionist literature the DA adjudged seditious. The doctor was acquitted, but two years later died of tuberculosis he contracted in prison. The name of the DA was Francis Scott Key.

530-31 James Knox Polk hailed from Tennessee but owned a plantation in Mississippi and bought slaves for it while he was president. His “slaves were a miserable, unhealthy lot who couldn’t even sustain ‘natural increase’ over the years: a collection of young people bought like mules and cut off from their familiar lives, with few natural or local connections among them, in an atmosphere of violent, daily repression.”

629 “Thomas Jefferson’s youngest grandson, George Wythe Randolph, was the Confederate Secretary of War for eight months in 1862.”

P.S. George Washington, James Madison, and James Polk all left wills instructing that their slaves be freed upon their deaths. None of their widows complied.

SOUTH CAROLINA

142 “The constitution of South Carolina was largely drafted by John Locke, who was secretary to the lords proprietors and an investor in the Royal Adventurers and the Royal African Company and who tutored one of the lords proprietors’ children.”

143 “The utopian vision of Carolina was the pursuit of individual profit by any means necessary.”

144 “North Carolina had no major seaport, and never developed a colonial aristocracy.”

147 “Carolina traders built a network that extended through the territories later known as Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. It was all South Carolina, at least in the minds of the Carolinians.”

148 “Even before South Carolina was able to establish a major staple crop, it quickly developed a two-way slave trade: first, exporting Native Americans, then plowing the profits into importing Africans.”

366 South Carolina slave imports: 8,592 in 1805, 15,551 in 1806, 23,174 in 1807. Recall if you will that 1808 was when it became unconstitutional to import slaves.

441 “The Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822 provoked a series of retaliatory measures that included the formation of a new repressive organization, the South Carolina Association. The Negro Seamen’s Act provided for imprisoning free black soldiers when their ships were docked in Charleston; in open defiance of federal law, it put South Carolina in the provocative position of detaining black British sailors. All emancipation petitions were to be denied; the entry of free people of color into the state was prohibited, as was all education for free or enslaved blacks.”

564 “‘Give us slavery or give us death!’”—Edward Bryan, South Carolina, 1850.

OPPRESSION AND RESISTANCE

60 “The slave trade routinely destroyed marital relationships, along with all other family ties, by selling one or the other partner away.”

165 “Self-interested rationally acting sugar plantation owners could make the most money by working laborers to death.”

184 “Slave rebellions reveal themselves not to be isolated struggles, as they have been frequently characterized, but rather as eruptions of a widespread, ongoing state of resistance. Between 1730 and 1760, there were 29 slave revolts reported in North America, about one a year.”

213 “Slave ships were death ships, the bottom of the employment ladder for sailors. On 1709 slave voyages out of Liverpool from 1780 forward there were 10,439 deaths, or 17.8 percent, about half of them killed by the captives.”

237 “John Wesley, in what was called the Arminian heresy by its enemies, democratized salvation by insisting that anyone could attain it—a free-will doctrine that would be fundamental to African-American Christianity as well.”

432 “The free black people of Baltimore—and indeed, free black people throughout the North—lived with the knowledge that they could be kidnapped and sold.”

439 “Bona fide abolitionists were relatively few among the white population in the early days of the movement, though their numbers grew in the 1850s. The hard core of abolitionists, of course, were the enslaved themselves, along with free people of color, who constituted most of the first 500 subscribers to The Liberator.”

480 “‘Small fancy girls’ means light-skinned female children, salable as sex slaves. It was a discreet phrase, but not a mysterious one: everyone understood it.”

566 “A clause in the California constitution that would have barred free blacks from entering the territory was voted down.”

575 At a November 1850 convention, 73-year-old secessionist South Carolinian Langdon Cleves “denounced abolitionists as communists, a term recently current from its use during the European-revolutionary year of 1848.”

576 Post-1848, “proslavery writers formulated the first generation of American anti-communist rhetoric. Southern ideology had coalesced into a vision of a worthy elite that governs while the unworthy multitude suffer.”

577 Unsung stanza of Stephen Collins Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home,” the state song since 1928: “The head must bow and the back will have to bend/Wherever the darkey may go/A few more days, and the trouble all will end/In the field where the sugar canes grow/A few more days for to tote the weary load/No matter, ‘twill never be light/A few more days till we totter on the road/Then my old Kentucky home, good night.”

(continues)