Tea at Trianon: The Atlantic Slave Trade

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, February 12, 2021

The Atlantic Slave Trade

Slave market in New York

From History:

The United States was not alone in outlawing the slave trade—all major slaving nations abolished it by 1836—but that didn’t end anti-Black racism or the profit motive. Global demand for sugar, coffee and cotton grew enormously in the 1800s, and planters in the Americas sought captive laborers to help them meet it. Traffickers themselves had big incentives to defy international abolition: Profits for slave traders rose to 90 percent, up tenfold from a century earlier.
The United States played a key role in this illegal traffic from the start. Slave traders brought some 8,000 captives to the American South in the decades after the 1807 ban, including hundreds just before the Civil War. Among the last captives brought to U.S. soil was Oluale Kossola (renamed Cudjo Lewis), a young Yoruba man who sailed aboard the Clotilda, the last slave ship to arrive in the United States in 1860; before his death in 1935, he gave a powerful series of interviews to anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, chronicling the trauma of being captured, sold and shipped to a foreign place to live—and labor—in bondage. (Read more.)

From Voice of America:

Slavery in America is usually associated with Africa and the American South. But Ohio State University historian Margaret Ellen Newell told VOA that up until 1700, Native Americans comprised the majority of slaves in America.

“The first documented case was in 1605, when an English expedition captured four Wabanakis in what’s now Maine and brought them back to London,” Newell said. “The expedition was run by a man named Ferdinando Gorges, who hoped to establish a colony in northern New England and was looking for captives to use as guides and interpreters.”

Since the start of their settlement, Puritan colonists sought Indians as indentured servants as a solution to labor shortages, she said. (Read more.)