Three weeks after receiving the petition of an interracial couple the Cherokee General Council passed an act outlawing marriage between "negro slaves and Indians, or whites".
Frankly, I can see why they'd outlaw the one against whites, given the oppression they'd face, but slaves was a bit much.
Last edition.
The ship Needham landed in New York from Newry, England, with indentured servants as its cargo. They immediately protested that they'd been kidnapped in Ireland and treated badly on the trip, whereupon they were freed.
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Russian Cossack ataman and rebel Yemelyan Ivanovich Pugachev, impersonating Czar Peter III, purported to free the serfs and extend religious liberty to the Old Believers
We, Peter III, by the Grace of God Emperor and Autocrat of All-Russia, etc. This is given for nationwide information. By this personal decree, with our monarchial and fatherly love, we grant to everyone who formerly was in serfdom or in any other obligation to the nobility; and we transfer these to be faithful personal subjects of our crown; we grant the right to use the ancient sign of the Cross, and to pray, and to wear beards; while to the Cossacks for eternity their freedoms and liberties; we terminate the recruiting system, cancel personal and other monetary taxes, abolish without compensation the ownership of land, forest, pastures, fisheries and salt deposits; and we free everyone from all taxes and obligations which the thievish nobles and extortionist city judges have imposed on the peasantry and the rest of the population. We pray for the salvation of your souls and wish you a happy and peaceful life here where we have suffered and experienced much from the above-mentioned thievish nobles. Now since our name, thanks to the hand of Providence, flourishes throughout Russia, we make hereby known by this personal decree the following: all nobles who have owned either pomesties [estates granted by the state], or votchinas [inherited estates], who have opposed our rule, who have rebelled against the empire, and who have ruined the peasantry should be seized, arrested, and hanged; that is, treated in the same manner as these unchristians have treated you, the peasantry. After the extermination of these opponents and thievish nobles everyone will live in a peace and happiness that shall continue to eternity.
The rebellion against Catherine the Great ended in the expansion of serfdom.
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A new study suggests that Muslims enslaved 1,000,000 or more European Christians in North Africa between 1530 and 1780.
This is a larger number than previously estimated.
Men and boys, it is known, were generally sold into backbreaking work. Young women were sold into sex slavery.
The Mayor and Common Council of Annapolis, Maryland declared a by-law to prevent the firing of firearms and openly carrying them with in the city. Violators were to be fined $5.00 for firing a gun, a hefty fine in those days, and $1.00 for openly carrying one.
However, if an offender was a slave, lashes or ten days imprisonment was ordered. Slaves actually were commonly entrusted with firearms both for hunting purposes, thereby offsetting part of the costs of holding and keeping them or to keep them in good repair.
This item is interesting for numerous reasons. One is, contrary to what people like to believe, the banning of openly carrying firearms was common throughout the 18th and 19th Centuries, and into the 20th. Concealed firearms, however, tended to be a different matter. Secondly, for much of the 18th Century, and into the 19th Century, armed slaves were not uncommon, which sounds odd, but they had little chance for escape, firearms were a common tool, and it demonstrated how cheap slaveholders could be, in that slaves often had to provide part of their own sustenance.
Related threads:
Last prior edition:
It had nothing whatsoever to do with "economic freedom".
I am firmly convinced that the Reformation of the sixteenth century was as near as any mortal thing can come to unmixed evil. Even the parts of it that might appear plausible and enlightened from a purely secular standpoint have turned out rotten and reactionary, also from a purely secular standpoint.
By substituting the Bible for the sacrament, it created a pedantic caste of those who could read, superstitiously identified with those who could think. By destroying the monks, it took social work from the poor philanthropists who chose to deny themselves, and gave it to the rich philanthropists who chose to assert themselves. By preaching individualism while preserving inequality, it produced modern capitalism. It destroyed the only league of nations that ever had a chance. It produced the worst wars of nations that ever existed. It produced the most efficient form of Protestantism, which is Prussia. And it is producing the worst part of paganism, which is slavery.
G. K. Chesterton
I don't know if it was the anniversary of the raid, or what, but my Twitter feed for some reason picked up a link to a story about a large raid by the Barbary Pirates on the coast of Ireland. In 1631 the pirates raided Baltimore, Ireland, in the County of Cork. The town was not large, but between 100 and 300 of its inhabitants were abducted. Only two made it back to Ireland, in part because the English government had just enacted a law which forbid paying ransom, which was often the goal of such raids.
The article that was linked in was scholarly, and noted that what would have occured is that, for the most part, children would have been separated from their parents and everyone sold into slavery when it became obvious that they would not be ransomed. The male slavery would have been of the grueling work variety. Women would have largely been sold as sex slaves, which the articles like to call "concubines".
The reason that I note this here is that the author, again it was a scholarly article, felt compelled to blame the raids on the Spanish expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula. That process has commenced in 1492, and it was completed, effectively, in 1614. The entire period wasn't a peaceful one, and in the Mediterranean various nations raided each other.
The final stages of the story are more complicated, in Spain, than might at first be imagined, as by the 1600s the "Moriscos" weren't actually Muslim, but rather Spanish descendants of Berbers and Arabs who were Catholic, but who retained Berber/Arab ancestry. Some claim they were "crypto Islamic", but more likely they were Catholics who retained some folk connection to their ancestor's prior religion. Indeed, it'd be worth noting that Islam itself has a murky origin connection with Christianity, and this may have been confusing at the street level. Anyhow, the last stages of this seem to be an ethnic spat, but it did have the effect of expelling Moriscos to North Africa, where they were absorbed ultimately into the local population, or to distribute them across Spain where the same thing occured.
Anyhow, blaming the Baltimore, and other Barbary Pirate, raids on this event is stretching it. I suppose you could argue that the general belligerency of the Mediterranean contributed to the raiding atmosphere, and both sides did that, but that traces back to the rise of Islam in the first place, which was spread by the sword. That this process went on, in one fashion or another, for a thousand years, and in some cases to this very day, does not mean that much except that the long arch of history and the fact that events play out over decades or centuries is the rule, and only seems to be odd to us, as we're used to everything occurring rapidly.
Anyhow, the author claimed that the children were treated with "utmost kindness". Really? Separating them from their parents, sending their fathers off to early grueling slave induced deaths and selling their mothers as sex slaves? And then they'd end up slaves themselves, with boys often ending up enslaved soldiers and girls. . . sex slaves.
What BS.
The same author claimed that the women were sold into "concubinage", which is sex slavery in this context, and lived lives of "relative luxury", as if this weird image of the Playboy ethos had the women looking forward to this life of chattel status while they still retained their desirability. The reality of it is that they had value as they were exotic, and bought for their physical attributes alone.
Why this story has to be spun in this fashion is really remarkable. We're supposed to feel some guilt for the story of the kidnappers and slavers, and even look kindly upon some of the grossest examples of slavery that are around.
None of this is to excuse Western conduct, whatever might be sought to be excused. Slavery was common amongst all Mediterranean societies, Christian and Islamic, but what played out with the Barbary pirates was not. They engaged in slave raids, and forced sex slave status of captured women was endorsed by the Koran, although frankly probably not really in the form that was practiced here (it likely applied to women captured as a result of warfare, not that this makes it a lot better). Putting a gloss on any kind of slavery, moreover, is bizarre. When people attempt to do that, as many once did and a few still try to do, in regard to American slavery, we're rightly appalled. This isn't any better.
The West has had a hard time reconciling an imperial past with its democratic values, and one way it tries to cope with it is by making Westerners always be the baddies. The story of empire is a complicated one, but the 100 to 300 inhabitants of Baltimore didn't have much to do with it, and neither, really, did the Barbary pirates. Slavery was always bad and this sort of slavery gross. Kidnapping people is always bad. There are always bad people. The Barbary Pirates don't need to be portrayed as if they're Captain Morocco, or something, in a Marvel movie.
Up until today, I was unaware that there was slavery in Renaissance Italy, Italy of course being a region at the time, not a nation state.
There was.
Somebody has come out with a theory that Leonardo da Vinci's mother, about whom nothing is really know, was a Circassian slave. I don't know about that, and it's probably impossible to prove. The evidence for it is, frankly, in my view extraordinarily weak and completely circumstantial, but that there were slaves held in Italy at that point in time was a surprise to me.
Which probably means that there's more here to be surprised about. Where else in Renaissance Europe was slavery practiced?
We recently had a big item on sewing.
Well, sort of. We had this item:
"Government Housewives". Sewing, sewing and seamstresses.
American soldier in Cuba in 1898 doing a sewing repair.
That entry, concluded with this:
Prior to the early 19th Century, pre manufactured clothing didn't exist at all.
This is something that's difficult for us to really imagine now. We don't think of our daily clothing being homemade, or anything of the type. Indeed, this is so much the case that we pass right over the references to it on the rare instances in which they occur. For instance, in the song House of the Rising Sun, which we discussed here recently. In the classic Eric Burdon version, we hear:
My mother was a tailor
She sewed my new blue jeans
My father was a gamblin' man
Down in New Orleans
And as we know from the lengthy discussion the other day, in the original version we find:
My mother she's a tailor
Sews those new blue jeans
My sweetheart, he's a drunkard, Lord God
He drinks down in New Orleans
What? Sew blue jeans?
Now, in fairness, my mother, who had learned to sew and wasn't bad at it (although she doesn't compare in that category to my mother-in-law, who is a true and very talented seamstress) actually did sew some trousers in the 70s that I can recall, right about the time that women started to wear trousers. As we've also discussed here in the past, women didn't really wear trousers until the 20th Century, or didn't wear them much, and it was the combined impact of the First and Second World Wars that really started to open that up. Contrary to popular myth, the Second World War did really move women into the workplace, but it did certainly help move them into trousers. As part of that my mother sewed some jeans, and they truly had really long wear as I can remember her wearing them into the 90s. They weren't blue jeans, however.
And they were bell-bottoms.
But I digress.
Bell-bottoms are a good place to start this discussion, in fact, as before the American Civil War the only pre-made ready to wear clothing of any kind for civilians was made for sailors. Sailors were their own rootless class, and they didn't often have wives and sisters at home to make clothes for them, particularly if they shipped out of an English port and wore their clothes out prior to returning to it, but they stopped in an American port, or any version of that you might imagine.
Interestingly, the only other group for whom ready to wear clothing were made, at least in North America, was for slaves.
Port towns had ready to wear clothing made in a single size. Most sailors were pretty good with a needle and thread as it was necessary knowledge for the age of sail, and they or a member of the crew had to tailor what they bought to fit after they bought it.
This, by the way, was a pretty common male role. In addition to civilian sailors, and slaves, soldiers also had ready to wear clothing issued to them, and it too tended to be altered by a member of the company, which in the case of cavalrymen at any rate, was usually a saddler, who had to be particularly adept with needle and thread. Interestingly, this role carried through all the way to the end of the horse cavalry and artillery and was picked up by parachute riggers for the airborne during World War Two, who likewise were good with needle and thread and who heavily altered the uniforms issued to U.S. paratroopers. Modern riggers should be envious of their Second World War predecessors skills.
Clothing for slaves was advertised as "Negro Clothing", for what it's worth. It was produced by seamstresses working for low pay, better than that for slaves, which was nonexistent, but hardly a wealthy class. Singer, the sewing machine company, actually noted in its advertisements that its sewing machine was particularly suitable for making "Negro clothing".
As an example of the operation of Yeoman's Fourth Law of History, it was the Civil War itself that really got ready to wear clothing rolling. Military clothing, unlike that for sailors and slaves, was sized. What it wasn't, prior to the war, was massed produced. The war took care of that.
While we don't tend to think of military clothing of being readily adaptable to civilian wear, in facts it's an old maxim, which had broad truth to it, that all men's clothing comes from war or farming, although in recent years some of it seems to have come from toddler departments. While the uniforms of Civil War ear soldiers don't look immediately close to civilian wear, particularly as the war went on, they were much closer than we might at first imagine. In terms of clothing, the soldier wore wool undergarments (an unpleasant thought) wool trousers, a cotton shirt, and a wool coat year around, unless for some reason he chose to strip himself of the coat in hot weather, which was rare, or to equip himself with some civilian clothing that could be worn under the wool trousers and coat.
Mass production of Army uniforms lead to post-war mass production of clothing in general. The entire industry exploded after the war, as clothing was really expensive in general, and this offered a cheaper way to obtain this basic need. By the 1920s, ready to wear clothing had so expanded that it had taken over the female clothing market in addition to the male.
As mass production clothing rose, it had a leveling effect. Finely tailored bespoke clothing had a much different appearance than "home spun". It was easy to tell the difference from a wealthy person, or an in town professional, and a farmer or rural person simply by this fact. When mass-produced clothing came in, it not only represented a cheaper option, it was frankly also generally better looking than homespun was likely to be. That upgraded the appearance of people of more modest means, and over time it also caused those of middle class income to opt for the cheaper option as well, and even some wealthy individuals did. It's no wonder then that when we look at scenes of the 1920s through the early 60s that so many people we know to be of modest means were "well-dressed". While still a significant expenditure, they were able to "dress up" to a higher standard, while those of middle class and even wealthy means would "dress down" to it. There were, of course, exceptions.
This didn't mean that everything was off the rack, and particularly with more dress wear, some tailoring was needed. If a person bought a suit, for example, it would often need alternation by a tailor. The same was true for dresses, with it often being the case that more was required for women's wear. Still, there's a big difference between going into Brooks Brothers, for example, and buying a suit that's finished by a tailor, and going into a tailor to have a suit made.
For much in the way of daily wear, however, ready to wear really took over by the early 20th Century. People generally don't have, for examples, shirts made, J. Gatsby not with standing. Most sizing problems, even with suits, have long been adjusted with belts and suspenders. Nobody has their "new blue jeans" sewn by a seamstress, and only a few would ever have them tailored.
Which gets us to a claim I saw the other day that "everything now is poorly made". Is it? We'll take a look at that.
Sources:
Much of this entry relies upon the excellent:
A Brief History of Mass-Manufactured Clothing
Sofi Thanhauser on the Early Days of Ready-to-Wear
By Sofi Thanhauser
Today is Memorial Day.
I've done a Memorial Day reflection post a couple of times, and I did a short history of Memorial Day once on our companion blog here:
It's worth remembering here that Memorial Day has its origin in a great act of national hatred, the Civil War. That is, the day commenced here and there as an effort to remember the Civil War dead, which, at the end of the day, divide sharply into two groups; 1) those who gave their lives to keep their fellow human beings in cruel enslaved bondage, and those who fought to end it.
Now, no doubt, it can be pointed out that those who died for slavery by serving the South, and that is what they died for if they were killed fighting for the South, didn't always see their service that way. It doesn't matter. That was the cause they were serving. And just as pointedly, many in the North who went as they had no choice were serving to "make men free", as the Battle Hymn of the Republic holds it, irrespective of how they thought of their own service.
And it's really that latter sort of sacrifice this day commemorates.
The first principal of democracy is democracy itself.
And because of that, it is inevitably the case that people will win elections whom you do not wish to. Perhaps you may even detest what they stand for.
Democracy is a messy business and people, no matter what they claim to espouse, will often operate against democratic results if they don't like them. In the 1950s through at least the 1990s, the American left abandoned democracy to a significant degree in favor of rule by the courts, taking up the concept that average people couldn't really be trusted to adopt a benighted view of the liberalism that they hoped for which would be free of anything, ultimately, liberally. An enforced libertine liberalism.
The results of that have come home to roost in our own era as a counter reaction, building since the 1980s, has now found expression in large parts of the GOP which have gone to populism and Illiberal Democracy.
We have a draft thread on Illiberal Democracy, which is a term that most people aren't familiar with, but it's best expressed currently by the Hungarian government of Viktor Orban, to the horror of Buckeyite conservatives like George F. Will.
Defining illiberal democracy isn't easy, in part because it's most commonly defined by its opponents. Setting aside their definitions, which it probably would be best defined as is a system in which a set of beliefs and values are societally defined and adopted which are external to the government and constitution of a county, and a democracy can only exist within it. The best historical example, if a good one can actually be found, might be Vichy France, which contrary to some assumptions was not a puppet of Nazi Germany so much as a species of near ally, but which had a right wing government, with elections, that operated only within the confines of the beliefs of the far right government.
Much of what we see going on now in the far right of the country, which is now the province of the GOP, is described in this fashion, although not without its ironies. Viewed in that fashion, the January 6, insurrection actually makes sense, as the election was "stolen" because it produced the wrong results, culturally. I.e., if you assume that the basic concepts of the Democratic Party fall outside of the cultural features which the far right populist wing of the GOP holds as legitimate, such an election would be illegitimate by definition.
The United States, however, has never viewed democracy that way. Not even the Confederate South, which may be the American example that treads on being the closest to that concept, did. The Southerners felt comfortable with human bondage, but they did not feel comfortable instituting an unwritten set of values into an unwritten constitution. Slavery, the core value of the South, was presumed justified, but it was written into the law.
Much of the nation now does.
Indeed, in the Trump wing of the GOP, or the wing which came over to trump, and brought populist Democrats into the party, that is a strong central tenant. When the far right in the current GOP speaks about being a "Constitutional Conservative", they don't mean being Constitutional Originalists. Rather, they are speaking about interpreting the Constitution according to a second, unwritten, and vaguely defined "constitution".
The ironies this piles on are thick, as the unwritten social constitution this piles on looks back to an American of decades ago, much of which has indeed unfortunately changed, but much of which the current backers of this movement are not close to comporting with themselves. The imagined perfect America that is looked back towards, the one that we wish to "Make Great Again", was culturally an Anglo-Saxon Protestant country, or at least a European Christian one, with very strong traditional values in that area. Those who now look at that past as an ideal age in part because social movements involving such things as homosexuality and the like need to appreciate that the original of the same set of beliefs and concerns would make heterosexual couples living outside of marriage and no fault divorce just as looked down upon. Put another way, the personal traits of Donald F. Trump, in this world, would be just as abhorrent as those of Barney Frank.
This is not to discuss the pluses or minuses of social conservatism or of social liberalism in any form. That's a different topic. But American democracy, no matter how imperfect, has always rested on the absolute that its first principal of democracy is democracy. Taken one step further, a central concept of democracy is that bad ideas die in the sunlight.
That has always proven true in the past, and there's any number of movements that rose and fell in the United States not because they were suppressed, but because they simply proved themselves to be poor ideas. In contrast, nations which tried to enforce a certain cultural norm upon their people by force, such as Vichy France or Francoist Spain, ended up doing damage to it, even where some of the core values they sought to enforce were not bad (which is not to excuse the many which were).
All of that may seem a long ways from Memorial Day, but it's not. No matter how a person defines it, as the end of the day the lost lives being commemorated today were lost for that concept of democracy and no other. Those who would honor them, from the left or the right, can only honor them in that context.
That means that those who would support insurrections as their side didn't win, aren't honoring the spirit of the day. And those who would impose rule by courts, as people can't be trusted to vote the right way, aren't either.
Related threads:
This passed Congress earlier this week, and was signed into law today. Unusually, the impact is truly immediate.
For those who might not know, Juneteenth commemorates the news of the Emancipation Proclamation reaching Texas, which would have been the Confederacies most distant territorial assertion.
Governor Gordon Responds to Federal Recognition of Juneteenth Holiday
CHEYENNE, Wyo. – Today, President Biden signed a law creating a federal holiday recognizing Juneteenth. Governor Gordon has also signed a proclamation recognizing the significance of the day, which commemorates the end of slavery, while encouraging self-development and respect for all cultures. Wyoming has recognized the Juneteenth holiday since 2003, when the state legislature passed a bill establishing the holiday on the third Saturday of the month.
Because of the President's action, Friday June 18, 2021 is a holiday for most federal employees per the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. In Wyoming the Legislature has set State Holidays. While tomorrow will not be a state holiday, the Governor will work with lawmakers to consider this option for future years.
“Freedom is always a cause for celebration and this is a momentous day in our nation’s history. I encourage people to observe this commemoration of the full enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation, which embodies the values of all Americans,” Governor Gordon said.
--END--
Today In Wyoming's History: Wyoming Myths. Sacagawea: Mural in the Montana State House by Edgar Paxson depicting Sacagawea and the Corps of Discovery in Montana. Sacagawea's actual appearan...
When the Corps of Discovery went into winter camp after their first year of trekking across the western half of the continent they voted on the location and decided it by majority vote.
Both Sacagawea and York were given a vote.
Special Field Orders No. 15.
Headquarters Military Division of the Mississippi, In the Field, Savannah, Ga., January 16, 1865.
I. The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the Saint Johns River, Fla., are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the BLACKS now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States.II. At Beaufort, Hilton Head, Savannah, Fernandina, Saint Augustine, and Jacksonville the blacks may remain in their chosen or accustomed vocations; but on the islands, and in the settlements hereafter to be established, no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves, subject only to the United States military authority and the acts of Congress. By the laws of war and orders of the President of the United States the negro is free, and must be dealt with as such. He cannot be subjected to conscription or forced military service, save by the written orders of the highest military authority of the Department, under such regulations as the President or Congress may prescribe; domestic servants, blacksmiths, carpenters, and other mechanics will be free to select their own work and residence, but the young and able-bodied negroes must be encouraged to enlist as soldiers in the service of the United States, to contribute their share toward maintaining their own freedom and securing their rights as citizens of the United States. Negroes so enlisted will be organized into companies, battalions, and regiments, under the orders of the United States military authorities, and will be paid, fed, and clothed according to law. The bounties paid on enlistment may, with the consent of the recruit, go to assist his family and settlement in procuring agricultural implements, seed, tools, boats, clothing, and other articles necessary for their livelihood.III. Whenever three respectable negroes, heads of families, shall desire to settle on land, and shall have selected for that purpose an island, or a locality clearly defined within the limits above designated, the inspector of settlements and plantations will himself, or by such sub-ordinate officer as he may appoint, give them a license to settle such island or district, and afford them such assistance as he can to enable them to establish a peaceable agricultural settlement. The three parties named will subdivide the land, under the supervision of the inspector, among themselves and such others as may choose to settle near them, so that each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground, and when it borders on some water channel with not more than 800 feet water front, in the possession of which land the military authorities will afford them protection until such time as they can protect themselves or until Congress shall regulate their title. The quartermaster may, on the requisition of the inspector of settlements and plantations, place at the disposal of the inspector one or more of the captured steamers to ply between the settlements and one or more of the commercial points, heretofore named in orders, to afford the settlers the opportunity to supply their necessary wants and to sell the products of their land and labor.IV. Whenever a negro has enlisted in the military service of the United States he may locate his family in any one of the settlements at pleasure and acquire a homestead and all other rights and privileges of a settler as though present in person. In like manner negroes may settle their families and engage on board the gunboats, or in fishing, or in the navigation of the inland waters, without losing any claim to land or other advantages derived from this system. But no one, unless an actual settler as above defined, or unless absent on Government service, will be entitled to claim any right to land or property in any settlement by virtue of these orders.V. In order to carry out this system of settlement a general officer will be detailed as inspector of settlements and plantations, whose duty it shall be to visit the settlements, to regulate their police and general management, and who will furnish personally to each head of a family, subject to the approval of the President of the United States, a possessory title in writing, giving as near as possible the description of boundaries, and who shall adjust all claims or conflicts that may arise under the same, subject to the like approval, treating such titles altogether as possessory. The same general officer will also be charged with the enlistment and organization of the negro recruits and protecting their interests while absent from their settlements, and will be governed by the rules and regulations prescribed by the War Department for such purpose.VI. Brig. Gen. R. Saxton is hereby appointed inspector of settlements and plantations and will at once enter on the performance of his duties. No change is intended or desired in the settlement now on Beaufort Island, nor will any rights to property heretofore acquired be affected thereby.By order of Maj. Gen. W. T. Sherman:L. N. DAYTON, Assistant Adjutant-General.— William T. Sherman, Military Division of the Mississippi; 1865 series - Special Field Order 15, January 16, 1865.
