[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

You know what is an "anglo/saxon" political tradition? Rape and pillage. Murder, slavery, and horror.

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

guilty.
guilty.
guilty.

some small relief!

"depraved state of mind" indeed.

I've been meaning to post this for almost a month. It's Robert Christgau's take on a book that's five years old now. To the short attention span crowd: please abandon your tl;dr ways for once and read the full text below. ETA: as Xgau says, "most of the details are new to me and feel like they’re worth sharing".

Root of All Evil
Ned and Constance Sublette, "The American Slave Coast" (2016, 754 pp)
Robert Christgau, Mar 24

Ned and Constance Sublette’s The American Slave Coast was published in 2016. It got a fair number of positive, intelligent reviews from people you never heard of in periodicals you never heard of either, enthusiastic writeups at Goodreads and Amazon, and no coverage whatsoever from the establishment press. It’s long, and painful to read despite the grace and verve of the Sublettes’ prose—the excruciating details of a slave’s daily life up front proved so nightmarish that I put it down for years. But in December, at the end of a year that convinced me more vividly than ever that black-white relations were at the root of national politics more bifurcated than I’d ever seen, I finally picked it up again, reading five or 10 pages at a time until I got near enough to page 668 to hike to the end.

I consider this is a great book, worth reading at least as much as Ned Sublette’s 2004 Cuba and Its Music. But while it means something for a music critic to declare that one the best social history of music he’s ever read, my blackface minstrelsy studies don’t give me the standing to make comparable claims for The American Slave Coast. I believe the reasons the USA became the first democracy since an Athens that had slavery too were less pecuniary and more idealistic than this book makes room for. Moreover, I have no idea what the Sublettes, who I’ve known as casual friends for years, may have left out, of what the counterarguments might be or who might make them. So it occurred to me that rather than reviewing this worthy tome I should just cherry-pick it—sequence brief excerpts and let the misprisions fall where they may. Despite scattered moments of hope, this is grim stuff. But most of the details are new to me and feel like they’re worth sharing. Want to read nicer things about George Washington? Try Howard Fast’s Citizen Tom Paine. The Civil War? I’m a fan of Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels. But the Sublettes are every bit as much worth reading.

Having reread the hundreds of passages I’d marked and picked out the most striking, I’ve settled for a rather crude organization. Rather then construct a pseudo-argument, I’ve divided my selections into five categories. The Sublettes’ fundamental thesis is that the Constitution banned the importation of slaves after 1808 so that slave owners—especially in Virginia, then the wealthiest state, and South Carolina, the Capital of Evil in the Sublettes’ view—could turn slavery into an appalling industry in which they’d produce and sell slaves domestically by breeding them like livestock. Insofar as Southerners were wealthy, they counted their riches not in precious metals but in the living bodies of the people they owned. Many of America’s most revered figures—including every president not named Adams or Van Buren through Polk—benefited directly from this system. So my first three sections are headed “Capital/Credit,” “Presidents and Other Luminaries” (watch out, pretentious Francophile Thomas Jefferson), and—such an obsession I had to cordon it off—“South Carolina.” Then follow two more sections, one labeled “Oppression and Resistance,” the other “Civil War.”

Some notes on form. Anything in quotation marks is a direct quote from the text, but not always a verbatim one—I’ve both inserted clarifying words or phrases and elided verbiage without indicating it with the customary ellipsis. Page numbers are provided. The few entries not in quotation marks are observations I’ve gathered from the text and condensed.

CAPITAL/CREDIT

17 “Slaveowners’ wealth was stored in the bodies of their always liquidatable slaves. In the absence of a domestic supply of coin, slaves collateralized the credit that created new money.”

69 “The idea that the South fought the Civil War so that it could be left in peace to have slavery merely within its settled bounds does not fit the facts on the ground, nor did anyone think so at the time. Quite the contrary: the war was fought over the expansion of slavery.”

111 “New England had slavery in the colonial years, but unlike Virginia, it never became a slave society, in which all social and economic relations revolve around slavery.”

183 “As the slave trade created business opportunities in Africa, African despots formed regular armies and battled against each other, the losers being sold into slavery.”

215 “Rhode Island in the eighteenth century became the largest outfitter of slaving voyages in North America, with Newport sometimes referred to as the ‘American Liverpool.’”

250 “The slave-society colonies of the South had their own compelling reason to secede from Britain: only independence could protect slavery from the growing power of British abolitionism.”

257 Some Southern soldiers in the War of Independence were paid in slaves.

357 “The payday for Virginia slaveholders was that slaves could not be brought to Louisiana from Africa or Havana but would have to be imported from the United States—a move that substantially revalued every Chesapeake slaveowner’s holdings upwards and substantially increased Virginia’s share of the nation’s capital stock.”

397 “New England did not want the War of 1812; the Southerners did. They got what they wanted: under cover of war with Britain, a substantial chunk of the Deep South was made safe for plantation slavery when Andrew Jackson vanquished the Creek Nation and took its land.”

414 “As the power looms of Lancashire sucked up all the cotton the South could grow, enslaved wombs were not only sources of local enrichment but were also suppliers in a global system of agricultural input, industrial output, and financial expansion.”

447 “In the eight years it took to build, the Erie Canal employed some nine thousand wage laborers, many of them Irish, but also including free black laborers. This was what a non-slave economy could do, and indeed by 1827 slavery ended in New York.”

464 “Slave mortgaging was essential to the functioning of the Southern credit system, but the practice has not been much discussed by historians and we do not have a good overview of the numbers.”

465 “The price of slaves fluctuated with the price of cotton, but in the long term, those fluctuations were superficial disturbances of steadily increasing prices.”

465 “The stimulus that got the economy pumping again after the Panic of 1837 was the annexation of Texas in 1845, which stimulated the slave trade.”

466 “Slave prices inflated continuously as compared with the price of the cotton the slaves produced.”

552 The slave population grew almost 30 percent between 1840 and 1850.

564 “The discovery of gold in California was a turning point on the way to Southern secession.”

598 “The Compromise of 1850 that admitted California as a free-soil state had not removed the South’s dream of slavery in a separate Southern California. The slave-breeding industry was reaching critical mass for unraveling—unless the expansion of slavery territory could postpone the collapse. From California, it would have to expand outward into Asia, and this was discussed on occasion.”

606 “The coming of railroads ushered in a new era of capitalism on a scale impossible when markets were linked only by water. But Dred Scott threw western expansion plans into chaos, railroad bonds dropped in price, and there was a Panic.”

627 Alabama secession commissioner Stephen F. Hale, December 27, 1860: “African slavery has become not only one of the fixed domestic institutions of the Southern States, but forms an important element of their political power, and constitutes the most valuable species of their property, worth, according to recent estimates, $4,000,000,000” (a figure that converts to 127 billion in today’s dollars).

(continues)