Thank you for sharing the experiences of your visits to Whitney and Africatown and for the clarity with which you express yourself (I didn’t expect less!).
As I was reading your description of the economic rather than moral reasons for the abolition of slavery in 19c America, what occurred to me most of all is the fact that there is, and always has been, a philosophy of history, as there is indeed a philosophy of science, of medicine, and of every discipline of study. There is a culture of what will be prioritised in research, what will be chosen for dissemination and what left aside, how each discipline will be practiced, how its findings will be presented. And the culture pertaining to each discipline will not be constant — that of Whitney Plantation had changed in the time between your first and second visits. I believe you can be fairly certain that if you went back to Whitney in forty years’ time, you would find that it had shifted once more, and its basis would be as near as damn-it unrecognisable to you. We historians pride ourselves on the rigour of our neutrality, when it comes to studying and analysing the past; but in fact there is no such thing as a culturally or ideologically neutral stance to study — we’re obliged to try our best of course, but I think our striving must be accompanied by a wry and self-deprecating grin. What’s more, it’s inevitable that today’s way of looking at things will always seem old hat to the next generation. Yes, in forty years’ time the philosophy of history — in general and in the locality of Whitney — will have changed, even as the historical periods under research slip further behind us and immediate witness escapes our grasp. We comfort ourselves with the notion of meliorism, but in reality we slide from conceit to conceit!
When I read of your Lithuanian family I thought of my own Scottish heritage. We Scots like to play up our victim status as having been conquered by the English. Gallant losers, maybe, but the fact of eventual defeat is taken to absolve us from blame for anything. Wallace may have won the Battle of Stirling Bridge, but he was still hanged, drawn, and quartered at Smithfield in London; Bruce may have won the Battle of Bannockburn, but the Parliament of Scotland ceased to be, with a fart and a whimper, just under four hundred years later. At the same time we like to play up our status as the innovators and thinkers of Britain, as the inventors of the pneumatic tyre and of television, as denizens of ‘The Athens of the North’. Yet the cotton cloth used to make our ‘national dress’ initially came from the mills of Northern England, which got the bulk of their raw material from the Southern states of the USA. The American Civil War interrupted that supply, which was bad news for England, but good news for the city of Dundee, where the textile industry based on jute flourished. Jute, of course, was the product of Britain’s empire in India, and the dynamism of Scotland’s workers, thinkers, and inventors provided many of the nuts, bolts, and cogs that drove the British Empire. The point I am trying to make of course is, for all that, your Lithuanian immigrant family and my Scottish ancestors could not have known the complexity of all the connections, the warp and weft of society/ies and economies, of cultures and philosophies, of decisions made and decisions avoided, of accidents and escapes, that make up what seems like a stable state and a process of cause and effect to us, but which is really a continuous and chaotic tumble! Don’t put on a hair shirt on behalf of your ancestors — neither you nor they deserve it.
I would like to take you up on one point. You say, in bold, “Humans as currency.” Yet further down your article you express the situation with more accuracy: “it was much cheaper to buy humans on the Gold Coast than it was on the Auction Block in New Orleans.” The slaves themselves were never currency. Rather their worth was reckoned IN currency and in nothing else. Over and above that financial reckoning — what they could be bought for, what they could be sold for, what they could produce whilst in your possession — they had no intrinsic value as human beings. The only currency then, as today, was pieces of paper and discs of metal (okay today these things largely exist in virtuality, but they use the same symbols as were found on the dollars and cents, the pounds and shillings), inert things that only signaled what a bale of cotton, a horse, a wagon, or a slave was ‘worth’. The same principle pertains today. To businesses and institutions, we folk who work are expressed only in terms of our cost and our productivity. We exist only in monetary value. The same principle, the same inhumanity, that drove slavery drives ‘free’ labour. Precedent wealth(s) established slavery, and slavery created its own wealth. That wealth is perpetuated by ‘free’ labour, and the owners still reap the profit they never earned. Meanwhile those inert pieces of paper, metal discs, and £/$ signs in virtuality still mutely express the inhumanity.
I have now read your article through three times. Please keep writing. We need your eyes, your mind, your heart.
MM.
P.S. I’m well aware of the main reasons why ‘Barracoon’ remained unpublished for so long, and how one of them remains dangerous to this day — just ask those good ol’ boys strutting around your statues!
P.P.S. May I recommend ‘A Narrative of the Most remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, As related by himself.’ It is from 1772 and rather stilted and pious, but it is the first first-hand slave narrative in the English language. It gives some insight into a previous generation. Also it’s quite a tale!
