"The Harlot, Slavery" Senator Charles Sumner May 19th, 1856

Compromise of 1850 and Bleeding Kansas

On May 19th, 1856, Senator Charles Sumner began delivering his infamous speech, "Crimes Against Kansas." It would take him five hours over two days to deliver the entire 112 pages, but the reverberations of the speech would be felt for years across the country, as well as in the Longfellow household.

In this speech, Sumner took up the crusade for abolition in earnest. He charged his fellow senators with allowing the extension of slavery into the territory of Kansas, causing fighting there and undermining the nation's democratic institutions. He also personally attacked Senators Stephen Douglas and Andrew Butler. Sumner used his oratorical wit to call Douglas a "noise-some, squat, and nameless animal," and to mock Butler's sense of chivalry in the speech's most famous quote. He charged Butler with taking: "a mistress . . . who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean, the harlot, Slavery."

Two days later, a member of the House and relative of Butler, Preston Brooks, beat Sumner with a cane for the speech.

Back in Cambridge, Sumner's close friend, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, wrote in his journal: "Was walking in the garden, when Owen arrives, and in a voice broken by sobs tells me that Sumner has been brutally beaten in the Senate house by a Mr. Brooks…. O Southern 'chivalry!'" Sumner would spend part of his convalescence in western Massachusetts, Europe – and at the Longfellow house. It took Sumner three years to return to the Senate, though he never fully recovered from his injuries. This incident was a symptom of the larger debate over the institution of slavery in the United States and did much to further polarize the North and South. Sumner and Brooks became martyrs for their respective political causes. The event helped to push the country down the path to civil war five years later.

- Ranger Anna

[1856 lithograph cartoon depicting Preston Brooks' attack on Charles Sumner in the U.S. Senate chamber by John L. Magee. Courtesy Boston Athenæum]

The Compromise of 1850

The plan was set forth. The giants — Calhoun, Webster, and Clay — had spoken. Still the Congress debated the contentious issues well into the summer. Each time Clay's Compromise was set forth for a vote, it did not receive a majority. Henry Clay himself had to leave in sickness, before the dispute could be resolved. In his place, Stephen Douglas worked tirelessly to end the fight. On July 9, President Zachary Taylor died of food poisoning. His successor, MILLARD FILLMORE, was much more interested in compromise. The environment for a deal was set. By September, Clay's Compromise became law.

The "Great Compromiser," Henry Clay, introduces the
Compromise of 1850 in the Senate.

California was admitted to the Union as the 16th free state. In exchange, the south was guaranteed that no federal restrictions on slavery would be placed on Utah or New Mexico. Texas lost its boundary claims in New Mexico, but the Congress compensated Texas with $10 million. Slavery was maintained in the nation's capital, but the slave trade was prohibited. Finally, and most controversially, a FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW was passed, requiring northerners to return runaway slaves to their owners under penalty of law.

North Gets	South Gets
California admitted as a free state	No slavery restrictions in Utah or New Mexico territories
Slave trade prohibited in Washington D.C.	Slaveholding permitted in Washington D.C.
Texas loses boundary dispute with New Mexico	Texas gets $10 million
	Fugitive Slave Law

Who won and who lost in the deal? Although each side received benefits, the north seemed to gain the most. The balance of the Senate was now with the free states, although California often voted with the south on many issues in the 1850s. The major victory for the south was the Fugitive Slave Law. In the end, the north refused to enforce it. Massachusetts even called for its nullification, stealing an argument from John C. Calhoun. Northerners claimed the law was unfair. The flagrant violation of the Fugitive Slave Law set the scene for the tempest that emerged later in the decade. But for now, Americans hoped against hope that the fragile peace would prevail.

Beginnings of the Vast Divide: Who Really won the War for Independence?

Royall House & Slave Quarters
Medford Ma.

On March 19, 1810, future industrialist Francis Cabot Lowell purchased the Royall estate from the collaborative of Boston businessmen who had bought it from Isaac Royall's granddaughter and heir 4 years earlier. Lowell subdivided the land and by May 22 had sold the parcel containing the mansion and slave quarters to the Tidd family, who would own it for 50 years.

 

Early cotton mill Waltham Mass.

In June, Lowell sailed to England, his trip presumably financed, at least in part, by his recent real estate transactions.

There he toured the flourishing textile mills “for the purpose of obtaining all possible information on the subject, with a view to introduction of the improved manufacture in the United States.” Britain kept a close hold on its advanced milling technology, allowing neither plans nor textile workers to leave the country, so Lowell memorized the power looms' construction as a way to bring this technology home.

Upon his return in 1812, Lowell formed a company to expand upon what he'd seen in England, building the world's first fully integrated textile mill in Waltham, Mass., (shown here) where "cotton entered as a bale and left as a bolt." This idea would soon spread to other New England cities, changing the region's agricultural economy to one based in industry. By 1826 there were 400 cotton mills in New England, and by 1831 nearly 800 mills in 12 states processed 78 million pounds of cotton into 230 million yards of cloth.

Fueled by the invention in 1793 of the cotton gin by Westborough, Mass., native Eli Whitney, and the demand of the growing Northern textile industry, cotton production in the American South became increasingly dependent on plantations and slavery. The number of enslaved laborers in the cotton industry increased from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million by 1850                                      
                   *************************************************************
appended

The “Great Divergence”

 Sven Beckert (Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Knopf) relates how in 1898, the German ambassador to the United States approached Booker T. Washington, asking him to send students and professors—the sons and grandsons of slaves—from Tuskegee to Germany and then on to the West African colony of Togo to transform cotton agriculture there: “an amazing story of African Americans advising deeply racist German colonialists in Togo about how to make local peasants produce cotton for world markets.”

Beckert himself has sought to answer this big question through a decade-long study of cotton—the commodity that started the Industrial Revolution and, he argues, shaped the present global capitalist system: glorious at its best, but at its worst, a “race to the bottom” that seeks the cheapest labor and materials. Beckert’s work has culminated in Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Knopf), to be published in December.
 As he writes in the introduction:

Particularly vexing is the question of why, after many millennia of slow economic growth, a few strands of humanity in the late eighteenth century suddenly got much richer. Scholars now refer to these few decades as the “great divergence”—the beginning of the vast divides that still structure today’s world, the divide between those countries that industrialized and those that did not, between colonizers and colonized, between the global North and the global South.

Taking a global perspective sheds fresh light on capitalism’s reliance on transoceanic connections, such as the simultaneous rise of industrial wage labor in Europe and slave labor in America. “We have hundreds of books on the Industrial Revolution in England,” says Beckert, “and these books focus, as they should, mostly on the expansion of cotton manufacturing, because that’s the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. central to industrial capitalism as it emerges in the nineteenth-century.”

Slave children picking cotton

And then we have hundreds of books on the expansion of slave agriculture in the United States. But these stories are, as I show, very tightly linked to one another because with the growth of cotton manufacturing in Europe, huge needs for cotton emerged there. And since cotton does not grow on the continent of Europe, but it grows very well in places like…the United States, there is a huge expansion of cotton agriculture there, almost all of it based on slave labor. Slavery is Slavery is central to industrial capitalism as it emerges in the nineteenth-century.”

Beckert tells how in 1785 British customs agents in Liverpool seized bags of cotton from an American ship when it sought to deliver the cargo. They didn’t believe the cotton came from the United States because at that time the plant was grown almost exclusively in the Ottoman Empire, the West Indies, Brazil, or India. “That the United States would ever produce significant amounts of cotton…seemed preposterous,” he writes. It was, he concludes, a “spectacular misjudgment,” given the ensuing transformation of the American South from producing “tobacco, rice, indigo, and some sugar” to producing cotton.

~~it upends the American sense of independence and self-determination: European industrialists and financiers were key to this transformation of the American South.

Walter A. Plecker: America's Potential Hitler AD Powell Open Salon Oct 23 1924

MARCH 10, 2011 1:48AM

 

Walter A. Plecker: America's Potential Hitler

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NOTE: W.A. Plecker, acting as Virginia's first Registrar of Vital Statistics, was determined to "mark" all Melungeons as not-white. Here is one of many articles and essays that he wrote and published on behalf of the American eugenics movement, a movement with haunting similarities to Hitler's genocide against European Jews and Gypsies. The views expressed below are those of W.A. Plecker and his racist colleagues; they are presented here to illustrate the hostility and vigor he showed inpersecuting mixed-ancestry Americans. An excellent discussion of Plecker'sdubious "legacy" can be found in Pocahontas'People by Helen Rountree.

VIRGINIA'S ATTEMPT TO ADJUST THE COLOR PROBLEM*
W. A. Plecker, M.D., FELLOW A.P.H.A.
State Registrar of Vital Statistics, Richmond, Virginia
* Read at the joint session of the Public Health Administration and Vital
Statistics Section of the American Public Health Association at the
Fifty-third Annual Meeting at Detroit Michigan, October 23, 1924. This copy from The American Journal of Public Health, 1925.
When two races live together there is but one possible outcome, and that is*the amalgamation of the races. The result of this will be the elimination ofthe higher type, the one on which progress depends. In the mixture the lower race loses its native good qualities which may be utilized and developed in the presence of a dominant race.
 The mongrels are superior in mental power to the lower race. They are more cunning and more capable, but they lack the creative power of the higher race, and cannot sustain a lasting civilization that will rank with the best of the world.
 History affords many examples. Egypt in the day of her greatness was white.  But the white Pharaohs began to extend their dominion south into the negro land, and to bring back multitudes of captives for laborers and soldiers, special mention being made also in their records that women in large numbers
were included. Interbreeding with these negroes began and continued through many centuries until the country became largely negroid.
 The climax was finally reached when one of the Pharaohs took to himself a negro wife and his mulatto son Taharka succeeding to the throne. The colorline had vanished and with it Egypt's greatness. Assyrian invaders met with no effective resistance. From that day to this Egypt has been a mongrel nation, incapable of initiative, and now dependent upon foreign protection and leadership.
 India affords a parallel example. Four thousand years ago the invasion of India by Aryans occurred. These came into contact with a mixed population of white-yellow- black composition. The conquerors attempted to prevent their own amalgamation with the natives by establishing a rigorous caste system, which was not like the present one based upon occupation, but upon color.
This system failed, and though caste is still in force in India the reason for it no longer exists.
Modern South Africa is a melancholy example of what may occur when the intermixture which inevitably results is hastened by fanatical religious teaching and misguided legal interference from the mother country.  Major E.S. Cox, who spent years in that region and in other countries studying race conditions, in his book "White America," (White America Society, Richmond, VA) gives a graphic account of the struggle made by the determined colonists against the imposition. They lost out, and the population of Cape Colony province is today largely mixed, showing how quickly this condition results when the natural process is speeded up by negrophilism and the law.
Let us return now to our own country, and, as we are considering Virginia, to that state in particular.
There are about twelve million negroes; of various degrees of admixture in the Union today. Of the population of Virginia, nearly one-third is classed as negro, but many of these people are negroid, some being near-white, some having actually succeeded in getting across into the white class.
 The mixed negroes are nearly all the result of illegitimate intercourse.The well known moral laxity resulting from close contact of a civilized witha primitive race makes illegitimate intermixture an easy matter. This is illustrated by the fact that the illegitimate birth-rate of Virginia negroes is thirty-two times that of Rhode Island, while the District of Columbia rate is thirty-seven times, and that of Maryland forty-six times.
 In the days when slavery was still a blight upon our state, it was quite acommon occurrence for white men to father children born to the negroservants. The history, as related to me, of at least one colony of people known as "Issue" or "Free Issue," now spread over several counties, is that they originated in part in that manner.
It was considered undesirable to retain these mulattoes on the place, bearing the family name, and a number from one county were given theirfreedom and colonized in a distant county. These intermarried amongs tthemselves and with some people of Indian- negro-white descent, and receivedan additional infusion of white blood, either illegitimately or by actual marriage with low-grade whites.
 At present these people are claiming to be white, or Indian, and under theformer law when a person with one-sixteenth negro blood could be declared white, they were able in some instances to establish their claim legally.
 These mixed breeds are not classed as white by the people of the community, and they will not associate with the genuine negroes. Five hundred or more in number they thus constitute a class of their own, and a serious problem in that county and others to which they migrate. If refused classification as white they claim to be Indian, and as such have been accepted in the birth reports to avoid listing them as white.
 In a recent test case, the court upon evidence submitted from our birthrecords reaching back to 1853, and from the testimony of old residents, decided that these people under the new "Racial Integrity" law cannot be permitted to intermarry with whites.
Another large colony which extends over into North Carolina probably has a similar origin. We have also compromised with these, and accept certificates as Indians, which indicates to us that they are not white.
 In another county are about forty descendants of an illegitimate mating of a negro man and white woman four generations back. All of these haveformerly succeeded in being classed as white. though under the new law our office has supplied to the clerks who issue marriage licenses, school authorities, commonwealth's attorneys, physicians and local registrars, a complete family tree, with the injunction to class them as colored.
 Similar conditions exist in other localities, though not yet so far advanced. A case was recently discovered where a white man married a mulatto woman (probably in another state), and now has nine children, four of them being reported to our office as white. Investigation revealed the fact that two other women bearing the same family name had mated with white men and were raising large families of children.
 Another man whose birth was reported in 1878, both parents being registered as colored, had the court declare him a white man under the one-sixteenth law; married a white woman, and has four children reported as white by physicians.
 The question of their color was referred to our office by the school authorities when the facts were discovered, and the white school advised under the new law not to receive them, though they engaged a lawyer to assist them.
 These examples illustrate the fact that even in Virginia where the questions of race and birth receive as much attention as anywhere in thecountry, the process of amalgamation is nevertheless going on, and in some localities is well advanced. Complete ruin can probably be held off for several centuries longer, but we have no reason to hope that we shall prove the one and only example in the history of the world of two races living together without amalgamation.
In Mexico, much of South America and the West Indies the process is practically complete, the mixture being Spanish or Portuguese, Indian and negro. Some portions of southern Europe have undergone a similar admixture.  Immigrants from these lands to this country, while really negroid, are classed as white.
 Several South American countries, or portions of them, still retain a considerable degree of race purity, which is being maintained by European immigration.
The immigration law recently passed by our Congress will stop the legal admission of Mongolians and will check much of the negroid immigration from elsewhere in the old world, but it will not prevent negro and negroidimmigration from other parts of the western hemisphere. It is estimated that there are today from 500,000 to 750,000 Mexicans in the state of Texas alone, and that Mexicans compose more than half of the population of .
 But it is possible to stop the legal intermixture, and that Virginia has attempted to do in the above mentioned law, which defines a white person as one with "no trace whatsoever of blood other than Caucasian," and makes it a felony punishable by confinement for one year in the penitentiary to make a willfully false statement as to color.

 Clerks are not permitted to grant licenses for white persons to marry those with any trace of colored blood. It is needless to call attention to the sad plight of a white person who is thus imposed upon or of a white woman who under such circumstances would give birth to a child of marked negro characteristics, as will occur from time to time under Mendel's law.
The new law places upon the office of the Bureau of Vital Statistics much additional work, but we believe it will be a strong factor in preventing the intermarriage of the races and in preventing persons of negro descent from passing themselves off as white.
We are greatly encouraged by the interest and cooperation of physicians, local registrars, clerks, school authorities, the general public, and even the midwives. Our success during the first four months of the enforcement of this law, in securing more accurate statements as to color on our birth certificates and in correcting previously existing errors is far beyond our expectation.
The states which now permit free intermarriage of the races, as listed in"American Marriage Laws", (Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 1919) are:
Connecticut, District of Columbia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan,
Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York,
Ohio, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and
Wyoming. The most urgent need is the speedy adoption by these states and the
District of Columbia of a law forbidding the intermarriage of the white and colored races.
The white race in this land is the foundation upon which rests its civilization, and is responsible for the leading position which we occupy amongst the nations of the world. Is it not therefore just and right thatthis race decide for itself what its composition shall be, and attempt, as Virginia has, to maintain its purity?
 This is working no hardship and no injustice upon the other races; for the same effort tends at the same time to maintain the purity of their races as well.
 That the mongrel races are liable to perpetuate the undesirable qualities of both their constituent stocks is abundantly demonstrated by a study of the larger and older of the mongrel groups in Virginia, as well as upon a study on a far larger scale in various other parts of the world.
The colored races therefore should be equally zealous in preventing both the legal and illegal admixture of the races. We are glad to say that the true negro of Virginia is beginning to appreciate this point and is agreeing to the wisdom of this movement. Our chief trouble is with some of the near-whites who desire to change from the colored to the white class.
 ___________________________________________________

Virginia Health Bulletin, November 1925
Vol. XVII, Extra No. 12
Shall America Remain White? *
By W. A. Plecker, M. D.
From the Booklet:
THE NEW FAMILY AND RACE IMPROVEMENT
Fifth of NEW FAMILY SERIES
Issued by
Bureau of Vital Statistics
State Board of Health
Richmond, VA
1925
* Read before Section on Public Health, Southern Medical Association,
Eighteenth Annual Meeting,
New Orleans, La., Nov. 24-17, 1924.
The negro as a laborer is valuable, and if it were possible to preserve the race in purity with him in our midst, he would be a great asset.  Because this cannot be done, and because the mixed breeds are a menace and not an asset,we have them as the greatest problem and most destructive force which confronts the white race and American civilization.
 Both remote and recent history of many nations shows that in none of them have white and colored races lived together without ultimate amalgamation, and without the final deterioration or complete destruction of the white or higher civilization.
 We behold with awe the evidences which we now find in Egypt of the wonderful civilization of the past, when that country was white. The Pharaohs extended their conquest south and brought back as captives large numbers of negro men and women. Intermixture of the races began and progressed to such a point that one of the Pharaohs took as wife a negro woman whose son succeeded to the throne. This was about the time when Jeremiah the Prophet warned Israel to break with Egypt and affiliate with Babylon.  His warning was disregarded, Egypt was as a broken staff upon which to lean. The fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity resulted.
 Egypt, then a mongrel nation, soon went down before Assyria and is today a feeble and helpless nation of brown-skinned people devoid of initiative and dependent upon white leadership and protection.
 Four thousand years ago, India was ruled by Aryan conquerors, who instituted an elaborate caste system to prevent intermixture of the races. This system failed and the few survivors who might be called white are now looked upon as curiosities.
 South America and Mexico were subdued by Spanish and Portuguese adventurers, who began at once to raise up a mixed breed.
 Indians would not make docile slaves, and negroes in large numbers were brought in.
Much of South America and Mexico is today inhabited by a mongrel race of white-black-red mixture, one of the most undesirable racial intermixtures known, as I can testify from my own observation of similar groups in Virginia.
 Professor A. E. Jenks, of the University of Minnesota, and his assistant,made a house-to-house study of families the result of mixed marriages, the marriage records not even showing the color of the man and woman. These people have in Minneapolis an organization known as the Manassas Society, membership in which is dependent upon the intermarriage of a negro man and white woman. Already 200 such families are included in this society, with probable omissions.
 Similar conditions exist in many parts of the North and West. That condition alone, if unchecked, will in a few centuries legally mongrelize that portion of our country.
If we turn our eyes southward, we find a different but even more serious situation. None of our Southern States permits the intermarriage of whites and pure blacks, but all except Virginia and perhaps two others allow the intermarriage of whites with those of one-sixteenth or one-eighth negro blood.
 This serious situation calls for the speedy enactment of laws based upon that of Virginia, which defines a white person as one with no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian and forbids the intermarriage of whites with those with the slightest trace of negro blood.
 Clerks who issue marriage licenses are required to assure themselves that both parties are white, according to the new definition, when that fact is claimed and are instructed to withhold the license, when in doubt, until satisfactory proof is submitted to them.
 The enforcement of the law naturally falls upon the Bureau of Vital Statistics, to which are reported the births, deaths, marriages and divorces of the State, all of which require a statement as to color.  Our office has accepted this task and has undertaken seriously, as far as possible, to secure from all sources the truth as to this point.
 Circular letters have been sent to all clerks physicians, local registrars, undertakers and midwives, with copies of the law, urging them to use all possible care to furnish us with correct statements.
School authorities have been reached through their journal, and the public is being instructed by newspaper articles and lectures.

Racial Integrity Act of 1924

 Much interest has been aroused and many cases of mixture are being called to our attention.
When this condition is found on the birth certificate if the mother has other children, we refer back to previous births to the same parents and make the certificates agree. We have thus caught a number of families in the act of passing over from the colored to the white class, some of their children being already recorded as white and some as colored.
 Our custom is to notify the head of the family that this situation cannot be allowed and that if one of his children is colored, they are all colored.
 The case is different, however, when the process of intermixture has so far advanced that communities of mixed breeds have been formed, particularly if they have or claim to have some intermixture of Indian blood.

Virginia Health Bulletin, November 1925
Vol. XVII, Extra No. 12
Discussion (by other doctors)
From the booklet:
THE NEW FAMILY AND RACE IMPROVEMENT
Fifth of NEW FAMILY SERIES
Issued by
Bureau of Vital Statistics
State Board of Health
Richmond, VA

 Dr. A. T. McCormack, Louisville, Ky. - I had the opportunity of going to Panama, where every race had contributed something, and the negroid influence was predominant, and where degeneration of all races had been more rapidly brought about by that element. I think it of extreme importance to white civilization to prevent the contamination.

Dr. W. A. Evans, Chicago, Ill. --Dr. Plecker calls attention to the fact that, independent of the strength or weakness of the strain, when strains are crossed there is begotten a something which fails to have the characteristics of either parent stock. That is well recognized in animal breeding.
The health officer, whether working in epidemiology or not, who does not recognize racial hygiene and racial peculiarities, the advantages and disadvantages of mixing these stocks, is failing in the responsibility that rests upon his shoulders.

Dr.Geo. Dempsey, New Orleans, La. - No mixture of Japanese, Chinese, negro, etc., has ever attained the high pinnacle for which the white race is known.

Dr Carl F. Raver, Charleston, W. Va. -- During slave days it no doubt was advantageous, from a commercial standpoint, to produce as many offspring of negro parentage as possible and many slave owners must have encouraged the mixing of the races.
 This produced the mulatto. Now it is this mulatto, or his offspring, thatis causing all the trouble. They do not wish to be classed as negroes and, if light enough in color, try to pass as white and marry into white families. Every possible means should be used to prevent this. The strongest weapon is public opinion. Public opinion allowed the mulatto to become started as an institution. It condoned the situation.

 For more information please follow this link

http://historical-melungeons.com/plecker.html

Scott Preston Collins: Indian Mulatto Black and White

The definition of mulatto in the American South, was applied also to persons with an admixture of Native American and African Americans, not just mixed with white in general. I have to correct you the Moors were also black Africans. Spain was occupied by the Moors around 711 AD, when the African Army crossed the Strait of Gibraltar. Under the US Census any individuals with ancestry from North Africa, or the Middle East is considered white, just saying.

Indians Turned into Negros and Mulattos

"Legal definitions of Indian abound; according to a 1978 congressional survey, there were upwards of 33 separate definitions of "Indian" used in federal legislation. The number of definitions increased when tribal enrollment statutes were included."

Brownell (2001) p278, Garroutte 2003, 16

The following by Steven Pony Hill in his work "Patriot Chiefs and Loyal Braves"

http://sciway3.net/clark/freemoors/CHAPTER1colonial.htm

"Arguably the most influential event to occur in the 1600's happened in 1660 when Virginia determined that "…an Indian sold by another Indian or an Indian who speaks English and who desires baptism will now receive his or her freedom." This allowed many Algonquin and Siouan war captives held in slavery in the colonies to regain their freedom, but it also provided incentive for their masters to downplay the Indian ancestry of those in servitude in order to retain them. These former slaves quickly rejoined their tribesmen bringing with them their acquired skills as carpenters, wheelwrights, and ferry operators. Most importantly, these newly freed Indians brought with them their new English names and Christian religion. Unfortunately they also retained the stigma of being former slaves, a condition which would cause their white neighbors to eye them with suspicion for generations."

As pointed out by Joanne Pezzullo:

Relabeling Indians into Mulattos in Virginia

Virginia

October 1705-CHAP. IV. An act declaring who shall not bear office in this country.

[The text of this act suggests that a free man of color did hold an office sometime before October of 1705. The statute contains the first definition of a mulatto in Virginia's laws.]

''Be it enacted and declared, and it is hereby enacted and declared, That the child of an Indian and the child, grandchild, or great grandchild, of a negro shall be deemed, accounted, held and taken to be a mulatto.''

Source: Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large, vol. 3, pp. 250-251, 252.

I think that *Henings Statutes at Large* predates Wikipedia. Note the Virtual Jamestown site says this 1705 law was the FIRST DEFINITION OF A MULATTO IN VIRGINIA LAWS and it states THE CHILD OF AN INDIAN shall be deemed, accounted, held and taken to be a MULATTO.

http://www.virtualjamestown.org/laws1.html

South Carolina

Mulatto and Free Person Of Color Not Negro

Wicazo SA Review

The Red Pencil Review

Fall 1995 Vol. XI No. 2

"The Use of Racial and Ethnic Terms in America: Management by Manipulation" by Jack D. Forbes

Pages 58 and 59

"In 1857, a William Chavers was charged "as a free person of color" with carrying a shotgun. Chavers was able to win his case eventually...because he is charged as "a free person of color" whereas...the act...makes it penal for any "free negro" to carry arms...Free persons of color maybe...persons colored by Indian blood. The indictment cannot be sustained."

Page 55

"In 1719, South Carolina decided who should be an "Indian" for tax purposes since American slaves were taxed at a lesser rate than African slaves. The act stated:

And for preventing all doubts and scruples that may arise what ought to be rated on mustees, mulattoes, etc. all such slaves as are not entirely Indian shall be accounted as negro.

This is an extremely significant passage because it clearly asserts that "mustees" and "mulattoes" were persons of part American ancestry. My judgment (to be discussed later) is that a mustee was primarily part-African and American and that a mulatto was usually part-European and American. The act is also significant because it asserts that part-Americans with or without African ancestry could be counted as Negroes, thus having an implication for all later slave census."

http://www.usgwarchives.net/va/lunenburg.htm

http://files.usgwarchives.net/va/lunenburg/census/sun001.txt

In the 22nd year of George II, October, 1748,[66] an act was passed

covering the subject of tithables, and repealing the above noticed act of

4th Queen Anne, and 12th George II, to be in force "from and immediately

after the tenth day of June, which shall be in the year of our Lord, one

thousand seven hundred and fifty-one."

This law defined tithables as "all male persons of the age of sixteen

years and upwards, and all negroe, mulatto, and Indian women of the same

age, except Indians tributary to this government and all wives of free

negroes, mulattoes, and Indians, except as before excepted," and "excepting

such only as the county court, for charitable reasons appearing to them,

shall think fit to excuse."

How Native Americans Became "W, C, B, M or FPC"

NATIVE INTELLIGENCE, a column by Jack D. Forbes, Native American Studies, University of California, Davis

"The Federal government began to use "degree of blood" in the latter part of the nineteenth-century, especially in relation to the enrollment of persons before the Dawes allotment commission. The use of "full," "one-half" etc. at that time was both an extension of the previous racist system and also a step in terminating Native Americans. Persons with greater amounts of white ancestry were assumed to be more competent than persons with lesser amounts. In other words, the degree of white blood was much more important than the degree of American ancestry. The white blood entitled an Indian citizen to greater privileges, including being able to have "wardship" restrictions removed, being able to sell property, acquire the right to vote in state and federal elections, and so on.

"Thus it may be that many persons chose to exaggerate their amount of white ancestry when enrolling. Persons without white ancestry were restricted persons, with the Bureau controlling their financial lives. It was also expected that when a person became "competent" (white enough) he would no longer be an Indian and that process would eventually terminate a tribe's existence.

"Thus the recording of blood quantum is both a product of white racism and of white social science theories of a racist nature, and also a product of a plan wherein Native nations are expected to vanish when the white blood quantum reaches a certain level (above three-fourths, for example). For this latter reason alone, the use of blood quantum is exceedingly dangerous for Native Nations today, although the Bureau and some eastern Oklahoma Indians don't seem to care about this danger."

From War to Self-Determination

A history of the Bureau of Indian Affairs

http://www.americansc.org.uk/Online/indians.htm

http://www.thefiatlux.com/.../experts-agree-bureau-indian...

http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/opinion/30272599.html

From Joanne Pezzullo's site and the excerpt from Steven Pony Hill...

"1741-1745…..Robin a Negro Man now in possession of Thomas Cocke, Gent., petitioning for leave to sue for his freedom.

- Robin, an Indian Plt. Against Thomas Cocke Genbt. Deft. In Trespass Assault and false imprisonment…We find that James Jones late of Prince George County in the year of our Lord 1693 was in the possession of an Indian girl named Sarah as a slave and that we did find the said girl in the year aforesaid was 4 years old. We find that the parents and Native Country of the sd. girl were Heathens and Idolators. We find that the aforesaid girl did live and die in the service of the aforesaid James Jones as a slave. We find that the Plt. Robin is the issue of the aforesaid Indian Sarah.

(Robin is described as a Negro until he proves his Indian descent, then he is described as Indian…use of the term is influenced by his servitude)"

This excerpt is one of many that can be found at...

http://www.historical-melungeons.com/mixed_bloods.html

...this proving that Negro, Mulatto and Mustee were dependent upon the status of servitude and not ethnicity. Indians and Indian mixed bloods could thus be labeled as Africans without proven merit. On the contrary the person or persons labeled as Negro, Mulatto and Mustee had to prove their ancestry even way back then. Our Native American Indian ancestory has been challenged for hundreds of years.

Lincoln’s Decision: Save the Union First; Slavery, No so Important

 

The fanatical right in the US has a problem on its hands and that problem is American history. History tells a tale that does not fit the narrative of the Tea Party and libertarian version of American’s founding and history.

That was evident this week, when former senator Jim DeMint, who is head of the Heritage Foundation, a libertarian think tank, made the claim that it was not the government that freed the slaves, but faith.

Talking to Jerry Newcombe on the radio show  Vocal Point, DeMint said, “[Abolitionism] came from a growing movement among the people, particularly people of faith, that [slavery] was wrong.” DeMint goes out of his way to say big government had nothing to do with freeing the slaves; it was on the Constitution and Lincoln, because obviously neither of those is big government. DeMint goes on to say:

The reason that the slaves were eventually freed was the Constitution; it was like the conscience of the American people. Unfortunately there were some court decisions like Dred Scott and others that defined some people as property, but the Constitution kept calling us back to ‘all men are created equal and we have inalienable rights’ in the minds of God. But a lot of the move to free the slaves came from the people; it did not come from the federal government. It came from a growing movement among the people, particularly people of faith, that this was wrong. People like [British abolitionist William Wilberforce] who persisted for years because of his faith and because of his love for people. So no liberal is going to win a debate that big government freed the slaves. In fact, it was Abraham Lincoln, the very first Republican, who took this on as a cause and a lot of it was based on a love in his heart that comes from God.

DeMint misses some important historical points here. For starters, while he is correct that Lincoln was a Republican, he ignores the history of the Democratic and Republican parties and their ideologies at the time. The roles of the party had been reversed and did not fully change place until around the time of President Roosevelt’s New Deal.

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Secondly, there is no historical evidence Lincoln governed with faith. Lincoln never joined a specific religion, yet he did appear to believe in some form of God or deity. This however is not sufficient evidence that Lincoln fought to free the slaves because of a religious or faith-based obligation to do so.

DeMint also misses another important piece to the historical puzzle: most churches refused to take part when offered a leading role by abolitionists. As historian John R. McKivigan explains in his book  The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches 1830-1865, “All but a few small denominations balked at a commitment to uncompromised abolitionist principles and programs. As a result, civil war and government ended slavery in 1865.”

History is not on the side of DeMint, who is fighting to change the country’s history to fit a new narrative he has for the Tea Party and the far right. DeMint knows the true history of this country is built upon the backs of liberals, union men and women, and those who fought against an oppressive South, ruled by then conservative Democrats, who are now in turn the conservative right’s Republican Tea Party.

While crediting Lincoln with freeing the slaves is actually historically inaccurate in his intentions, it is correct that the war Lincoln chose to fight did bring an end to slavery. Lincoln himself said he was not interested in freeing the slaves when going to war—his goal was preserving the Union, and freeing slaves happened to be a later part of his military strategy.

Lincoln wrote in a letter to abolitionist Horace Greeley in 1862:

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing  any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing  all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

So while in the end Lincoln’s decision to go to war with the South to save the Union did result in the freeing of the slaves, this was not his intention. DeMint is continuously wrong in his assertions and his invented history in which his party saved the day and freed the slaves without big government, only a Constitution and God himself.

This narrative DeMint is trying to create has a thorn in its side that it does not even try to remove, and that is that the South still holds onto anger over its Civil War loss. They still fly Confederate flags and refer to the war not as the Civil War, but as the war of northern aggression. Some cities still have monuments erected in celebration and remembrance of fallen Confederate heroes. This does not sound like the narrative of those who hold faith so deeply they fought to free slaves. Instead, it tells a tale of a radical Christian Right that fought to the death for its “god-given right” to own slaves.

This does seem to be the latest trend in Tea Party politics; if only history were different and they could be the heroes, their lost political capital could be regained. They want to appear as though they stand against tyranny and will fight for the little person.

Inventing history and creating heroes out of thin air is what the Tea Party is trying to rally behind. These are the exact events we are watching play out in Nevada right now, with rancher Cliven Bundy taking up arms with a band of libertarian fanatics against the Bureau of Land Management.

Bundy stopped paying his federal fees for letting his cattle graze on government-owned land and went as far to say, “I don’t recognize [the] United States government as even existing.” This type of delusional rhetoric is exactly what the Tea Party is about.

Their desire to enact a political revolution is so obsessive they are willing to cling to anyone with a gun who will stand up against the US government. They ignore the fact that Bundy is nothing more than the freeloaders they campaign against, refusing to pay his rent and stealing from the US government by using its land to feed his cattle.

Apparently, a white Tea Party libertarian is a revolutionary, and a group of them are national heroes; yet when police evict a minority family from their home at gunpoint because they failed to make rent, the minorities are freeloaders living off the American citizens tax dollars.

Just as DeMint is fighting to change the history of America to include his band of slave owners as abolitionists, the party is trying to use someone like Bundy, who for all intents and purposes is a domestic terrorist, as a national icon against their invented tyrannical government.

False narratives are the sign of a party in its death throes. We are witnessing a party struggling to stay relevant in a world that has become increasingly liberal. The erratic behavior from the right is nothing but a response to the current climate that shows liberalism has won.

Markos Moulitsas of Daily KOS writes, “But if you wonder why conservatives seem to carry perpetual grievances, it’s because they know they have lost. The entire world around them has left them behind. Heck, they’ve created an entire alternate media world in which to cocoon themselves. But they know they’ve lost.”

The right knows the fight is moving out of their hands: more than a dozen states have legalized gay marriage, their religious beliefs are being squeezed out of government, and the population is done with pampering the corporate elite.

This changing political climate has the right scared and backed into a corner. It should come as no surprise they are lashing out and grasping at straws. From extremists pointing guns at federal agents to a retelling of historical events, the Tea Party rhetoric machine is gassed up and ready to spread mythology and endorse violence and terrorism until its final breath.

The Great Hunger

Irish Potato Famine

On June 29, 1846, the resignation of British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel was announced. Peel's Conservative government had fallen over political fallout from repeal of the Corn Laws which he had forced through Parliament. His departure paved the way for Charles Trevelyan to take full control of Famine policy under the new Liberal government. The Liberals, known as Whigs in those days, were led by Lord John Russell, and were big believers in the principle of laissez-faire.

Once he had firmly taken control, Trevelyan ordered the closing of the food depots in Ireland that had been selling Peel's Indian corn. He also rejected another boatload of Indian corn already headed for Ireland. His reasoning, as he explained in a letter, was to prevent the Irish from becoming "habitually dependent" on the British government. His openly stated desire was to make "Irish property support Irish poverty."

As a devout advocate of laissez-faire, Trevelyan also claimed that aiding the Irish brought "the risk of paralyzing all private enterprise." Thus he ruled out providing any more government food, despite early reports the potato blight had already been spotted amid the next harvest in the west of Ireland. Trevelyan believed Peel's policy of providing cheap Indian corn meal to the Irish had been a mistake because it undercut market prices and had discouraged private food dealers from importing the needed food. This year, the British government would do nothing. The food depots would be closed on schedule and the Irish fed via the free market, reducing their dependence on the government while at the same time maintaining the rights of private enterprise.

Throughout the summer of 1846, the people of Ireland had high hopes for a good potato harvest. But the cool moist summer weather had been ideal for the spread of blight. Diseased potatoes from the previous harvest had also been used as planters and sprouted diseased shoots. At first, the crop appeared healthy. But by harvest time the blight struck ferociously, spreading fifty miles per week across the countryside, destroying nearly every potato in Ireland.

A Catholic priest named Father Matthew wrote to Trevelyan: "In many places the wretched people were seated on the fences of their decaying gardens, wringing their hands and wailing bitterly the destruction that had left them foodless."

There were only enough potatoes to feed the Irish population for a single month. Panic swept the country. Local relief committees were once again besieged by mobs of unemployed demanding jobs on public works projects. The Irish Board of Works was once again swamped with work proposals from landlords.

Trevelyan's free market relief plan depended on private merchants supplying food to peasants who were earning wages through public works employment financed mainly by the Irish themselves through local taxes. But the problems with this plan were numerous. Tax revues were insufficient. Wages had been set too low. Paydays were irregular and those who did get work could not afford to both pay their rent and buy food. Ireland also lacked adequate transportation for efficient food distribution. There were only 70 miles of railroad track in the whole country and no usable commercial shipping docks in the western districts.

By September, starvation struck in the west and southwest where the people had been entirely dependent on the potato. British Coastguard Inspector-General, Sir James Dombrain, upon encountering starving paupers, ordered his subordinates to give free food handouts. For his efforts, Dombrain was publicly rebuked by Trevelyan. The proper procedure, he was informed, would have been to encourage the Irish to form a local relief committee so that Irish funds could have been raised to provide the food.

"There was no one within many miles who could have contributed one shilling...The people were actually dying," Dombrain responded.

Many of the rural Irish had little knowledge of money, preferring to live by the old barter system, trading goods and labor for whatever they needed. Any relief plan requiring them to purchase food was bound to fail. In areas where people actually had a little money, they couldn't find a single loaf of bread or ounce of corn meal for sale. Food supplies in 1846 were very tight throughout all of Europe, severely reducing imports into England and Ireland. European countries such as France and Belgium outbid Britain for food from the Mediterranean and even for Indian corn from America.

Meanwhile, the Irish watched with increasing anger as boatloads of home-grown oats and grain departed on schedule from their shores for shipment to England. Food riots erupted in ports such as Youghal near Cork where peasants tried unsuccessfully to confiscate a boatload of oats. At Dungarvan in County Waterford, British troops were pelted with stones and fired 26 shots into the crowd, killing two peasants and wounding several others. British naval escorts were then provided for the riverboats as they passed before the starving eyes of peasants watching on shore.

As the Famine worsened, the British continually sent in more troops. "Would to God the Government would send us food instead of soldiers," a starving inhabitant of County Mayo lamented.

The Irish in the countryside began to live off wild blackberries, ate nettles, turnips, old cabbage leaves, edible seaweed, shellfish, roots, roadside weeds and even green grass. They sold their livestock and pawned everything they owned including their clothing to pay the rent to avoid certain eviction and then bought what little food they could find with any leftover money. As food prices steadily rose, parents were forced to listen to the endless crying of malnourished children.

Fish, although plentiful along the West Coast of Ireland, remained out of reach in water too deep and dangerous for the little cowhide-covered Irish fishing boats, known as currachs. Starving fishermen also pawned their nets and tackle to buy food for their families.

Making matters worse, the winter of 1846-47 became the worst in living memory as one blizzard after another buried homes in snow up to their roofs. The Irish climate is normally mild and entire winters often pass without snow. But this year, an abrupt change in the prevailing winds from southwest into the northeast brought bitter cold gales of snow, sleet and hail.

Black Forty-Seven

Amid the bleak winter, hundreds of thousands of desperate Irish sought work on public works relief projects. By late December 1846, 500,000 men, women and children were at work building stone roads. Paid by piece-work, the men broke apart large stones with hammers then placed the fragments in baskets carried by the women to the road site where they were dumped and fit into place. They built roads that went from nowhere to nowhere in remote rural areas that had no need of such roads in the first place. Many of the workers, poorly clothed, malnourished and weakened by fever, fainted or even dropped dead on the spot.

The men were unable to earn enough money to adequately feed themselves let alone their families as food prices continued to climb. Corn meal now sold for three pennies a pound, three times what it had been a year earlier. As a result, children sometimes went unfed so that parents could stay healthy enough to keep working for the desperately needed cash.

A first-hand investigation of the overall situation was conducted by William Forster, a member of the Quaker community in England. He was acting on behalf of the recently formed Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends, with branches in Dublin and London. The children, Forster observed, had become "like skeletons, their features sharpened with hunger and their limbs wasted, so that little was left but bones, their hands and arms, in particular, being much emaciated, and the happy expression of infancy gone from their faces, leaving behind the anxious look of premature old age."

Nicholas Cummins, the magistrate of Cork, visited the hard-hit coastal district of Skibbereen. "I entered some of the hovels," he wrote, "and the scenes which presented themselves were such as no tongue or pen can convey the slightest idea of. In the first, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged horsecloth, their wretched legs hanging about, naked above the knees. I approached with horror, and found by a low moaning they were alive -- they were in fever, four children, a woman and what had once been a man. It is impossible to go through the detail. Suffice it to say, that in a few minutes I was surrounded by at least 200 such phantoms, such frightful spectres as no words can describe, [suffering] either from famine or from fever. Their demoniac yells are still ringing in my ears, and their horrible images are fixed upon my brain."

The dead were buried without coffins just a few inches below the soil, to be gnawed at by rats and dogs. In some cabins, the dead remained for days or weeks among the living who were too weak to move the bodies outside. In other places, unmarked hillside graves came into use as big trenches were dug and bodies dumped in, then covered with quicklime.

Most died not from hunger but from associated diseases such as typhus, dysentery, relapsing fever, and famine dropsy, in an era when doctors were unable to provide any cure. Highly contagious 'Black Fever,' as typhus was nicknamed since it blackened the skin, is spread by body lice and was carried from town to town by beggars and homeless paupers. Numerous doctors, priests, nuns, and kind-hearted persons who attended to the sick in their lice-infested dwellings also succumbed. Rural Irish, known for their hospitality and kindness to strangers, never refused to let a beggar or homeless family spend the night and often unknowingly contracted typhus. At times, entire homeless families, ravaged by fever, simply laid down along the roadside and died, succumbing to 'Road Fever.'

Soup Kitchens

Trevelyan's public works relief plan for Ireland had failed. At its peak, in February and March of 1847, some 700,000 Irish toiled about in useless projects while never earning enough money to halt starvation.

Now, in Cork harbor, the long-awaited private enterprise shipments of Indian corn and other food supplies had finally begun arriving. Food prices dropped by half and later dropped to a third of what they had been, but the penniless Irish still could not afford to eat. As a result, food accumulated in warehouses within sight of people walking about the streets starving.

Between March and June of 1847, the British government gradually shut down all of the public works projects throughout Ireland. The government, under the direction of Prime Minister Russell, had decided on an abrupt change of policy "to keep the people alive." The starving Irish were now to be fed for free through soup kitchens sponsored by local relief committees and by groups such as the Quakers and the British Relief Association, a private charity funded by prosperous English merchants.

The Soup Kitchen Act of 1847 called for the food to be provided through taxes collected by local relief committees from Irish landowners and merchants. But little money was ever forthcoming. Ireland was slowly going bankrupt. Landlords, many of whom were already heavily in debt with big mortgages and unpaid loans, were not receiving rents from their cash-strapped tenants. Merchants also went broke, closed up their shops, then joined the ranks of the dispossessed, begging on the streets.

Daily soup demand quickly exceeded the limited supply available. In Killarney, there was just one soup kitchen for 10,000 persons. Cheap soup recipes were improvised containing stomach-turning combinations of old meat, vegetables, and Indian corn all boiled together in water. To a people already suffering from dysentery, the watery stew could be a serious health risk. Many refused to eat the "vile" soup after just one serving, complaining of severe bowel problems. Another dislike was the requirement for every man woman and child to stand in line while holding a small pot or bowl to receive their daily serving, an affront to their pride.

By the spring, Government-sponsored soup kitchens were established throughout the countryside and began dispensing 'stirabout,' a more substantial porridge made from two-thirds Indian corn meal and one-third rice, cooked with water. By the summer, three million Irish were being kept alive on a pound of stirabout and a four-ounce slice of bread each day. But the meager rations were not enough to prevent malnutrition. Many adults slowly starved on this diet.

In the fall of 1847, the third potato harvest during the Famine brought in a blight-free crop but not enough potatoes had been planted back in the spring to sustain the people. The yield was only a quarter of the normal amount. Seed potatoes, many having been eaten, had been in short supply. Planters had either been involved in the public works projects or had been too ill to dig. Others were simply discouraged, knowing that whatever they grew would be seized by landowners, agents or middlemen as back payment for rent. The rough winter had also continued to wreak havoc into March and April with sleet, snow, and heavy winds, further delaying planting. Seed for alternative crops such as cabbage, peas and beans, had been too expensive for small farmers and laborers to buy.

Many landlords, desperate for cash income, now wanted to grow wheat or graze cattle and sheep on their estates. But they were prevented from doing so by the scores of tiny potato plots and dilapidated huts belonging to penniless tenants who had not paid rent for months, if not years. To save their estates from ruin, the paupers would simply have to go.

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