This is an index for Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History episode #68: Human Resources
You can find this episode and its reading list at: www.dancarlin.com
This index was created from the episode, but the titles are my own and are not endorsed by Dan Carlin.
For corrections, broken links or feedback you can contact me at: facbsas@gmail.com
Hope you find this index useful.
[1:46] "History is, often as not, our present politics projected onto the past" - Robert C. Davids (Atributed).
Timeline
Quotes and References
[0:00] Introduction - The Discussion of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
[4:40] Addicted to Bondage (Old Show). BUY IT
[7:03] Slavery was Common in History.
[8:41] Christopher Colombus, a man from the Middle Ages.
[11:22] Slavery in the World of the 14th Century.
[14:29] What started the Atlantic Slave Trade?
[16:53] Humans as Commodities.
[18:30] Historical Optimist: Progress Against Slavery.
[19:45] Historical Pessimist: Expansion for Slavery.
[21:31] Rennaissance: Collision of Christianity and Classical Philosophy.
[24:30] The Classical’s Justification of Slavery.
[27:35] Deep Sea Navigation.
[29:58] Direct European Connection with Sub-Saharan Africa.
[32:02] Fall of Constantinople. Shortage of Slaves for Europe.
[34:28] Portugal taps into the Existing African Slave Market.
[36:04] Entreprenurial Colonialism.
[39:54] Christopher Colombus’ Original Plan.
[42:59] America: The Green Banana.
[46:05] “Investment Problem”: The Germtastrophy.
[48:51] Thomas, Hugh - The Slave Trade - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
[50:20] Mann, Charles C. - 1493: How the Ecological Collision of Europe and the Americas Gave Rise to the Modern World - Wikipedia
“It was as if the suffering these diseases had caused in Eurasia over the past millennia were concentrated into a span of decades”.
[50:32] Davids, David Brion - Inhuman Bondage - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“The Ameridindians throughout the hemisphere had little capacity for resisting imported diseases, both temperate and tropical pathogens, including smallpox, malaria, yellow fever, influenza, typhus and the plague. Giving the previous isolation of the Western Hemisphere, this disaster has been called a "virgin soil pandemic". Even whites suffered heavy mortality -of the twenty-five hundred colonists who arrived in Hispaniola in 1502, one thousand died in a fairly short period of time- but the Spaniards were bewildered and some even horrified as the Indian populations seemed to evaporate before their eyes”.
[52:12] Davids, David Brion - Inhuman Bondage - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“While specialists differ with respect to numbers, which are necessary somewhat speculative, we are clearly considering the greatest know population loss in human history -that is, mortality as a percentage of population. The population of Central Mexico may well have fallen by almost 90 percent in seventy-five years. Estimates for Peru and Chile, where the diseases spread well before the arrival of the Europeans, are almost as high. The death rate was even worse in the Caribbean, where pestilence coincided with the encomienda system and much mass slaughter. Estimates of Hispaniola's pre-Columnbian Arawak/Taino Indian population range from about three hundred thousand to half a million; by the 1540s there were fewer than five hundred survivors”.
[58:44] De las Casas, Bartolome - A short account of the destruction of the Indies - Wikipedia
“It was upon these gentle lambs, imbued by the Creator with all the qualities we have mentioned, that from the very first day they clapped eyes on them the Spanish fell like ravening wolves upon the fold, or like tigers and savage lions who have not eaten meat for days. The pattern established at the outset has remained unchanged to this day, and the Spaniards still do nothing save tear the natives to shreds, murder them and inflict upon them untold misery, suffering and distress, tormenting, harrying and persecuting them mercilessly. We shall in due course describe some of the many ingenious methods of torture they have invented and refined for this purpose, but one can get some idea of the effectiveness of their methods from the figures alone. When the Spanish first journeyed there, the indigenous popula- tion of the island of Hispaniola stood at some three million; today only two hundred survive. The island. of Cuba, which extends for a distance almost as great as that separating Valladolid from Rome, is now to all intents and purposes uninhabited;" and two other large, beautiful and fertile islands, Puerto Rico and Jamaica, have been similarly devastated. Not a living soul remains today on any of the islands of the Bahamas, which lie to the north of Hispaniola and Cuba, even though every single one of the sixty or so islands in the group, as well as those known as the Isles of Giants and others in the area, both large and small, is more fertile and more beautiful than the Royal Gardens in Seville and the climate is as healthy as anywhere on earth. The native population, which once numbered some five hundred thousand, was wiped out by forcible expatriation to the island of Hispaniola, a policy adopted by the Spaniards in an endeavor to make up losses among the indigenous population of that island”.
[1:02:37] De las Casas, Bartolome - A short account of the destruction of the Indies - Wikipedia
“After the fighting was over and all the men had been killed, the surviving natives — usually, that is, the young boys, the women, and the children — were shared out between the victors. One got thirty, another forty, a third as many as a hundred or even twice that number; everything depended on how far one was in the good books of the despot who went by the title of governor. The pretext under which the victims were parceled out in this way was that their new masters would then be in a position to teach them the truths of the Christian faith; and thus it came about that a host of cruel, grasping and wicked men, almost all of them pig-ignorant, were put in charge of these poor souls. And they discharged this duty by sending the men down the mines, where working conditions were appalling, to dig for gold, and putting the women to labor in the fields and on their master’s estates, to till the soil and raise the crops, properly a task only for the toughest and strongest of men. Both women and men were given only wild grasses to eat and other unnutritious foodstuffs. The mothers of young children promptly saw their milk dry up and their babies die; and, with the women and the men separated and never seeing each other, no new children were born. The men died down the mines from overwork and starvation, and the same was true of the women who perished out on the estates. The islanders, previously so numerous, began to die out as would any nation subjected to such appalling treatment”.
[1:06:55] De las Casas, Bartolome - A short account of the destruction of the Indies (Penguin Version) - Wikipedia
“The story is now a famous one. That morning a recent arrival on the island, the Dominican Antonio Montesinos, delivered a sermon in the church of Santo Domingo. Taking his text from St. John, he drew an analogy between the natural desert in which the Evangelist had chosen to spend his life and the human desert which the Spaniards had made of the once fruitful, 'paradisiacal' island of Hispaniola. He then turned upon the colonialist. 'With what right' he demanded of them, 'and with what justice do you keep these poor Indians in such cruel and horrible servitude? By what authority have you made such detestable wars against these people who lived peacefully and gently on their own lands? Are these not men? Do they not have a rational soul? Are you not obliged to love them as yourselves?' Te last three questions were to become the referents of every subsequent struggle to defend the rights of the indigenous people of the Americas. For Las Casas, in particular, the third - 'Are you not obliged to love them as yourselves?'- was to guide his actions for the rest of his life”.
[1:05:16] Evolution of De las Casas’ Thinking.
[1:09:37] Cervantes, Fernando - Conquistadores
[1:12:43] Thomas, Hugh - The Slave Trade - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“A fillip to the African slave trade was naturally given by the trend towards the outlawing of Indian slavery in the Americas, as a result of the agitations of Bartolomé de Las Casas and other Dominicas.
An indication of the mood in 1544 us shown by a letter of Cristóbal de Benavente public prosecutor of the Supreme Court in Mexico, to the king: 'Every day the gold mines are giving less profit, because the lack of Indians slaves. In the end, if Your Majesty abolishes local slavery...," wrote Benavente, "there will be no alternative to allowing blacks into the land, at least in the mines”.
[1:14:05] Assigning Value to Human Life.
[1:17:35] Why Africans were more Valuable than Americans?
[1:18:22] Reason 1: Africans Knew how to use Old World Technology.
[1:20:31] Reason 2: First Generation African Slaves were, mostly, Soldiers.
[1:22:30] Reason 3: Resistant Against Old World’s Deceases.
[1:27:32] The Numbers of Slavery.
[1:15:43] Davids, David Brion - Inhuman Bondage - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“Throughout the New World, colonists agreed that the labor of one black was worth that of several Indians".
[1:20:49] Stevenson, Brenda E. - What is Slavery? - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
[1:28:17] Stevenson, Brenda E. - What is Slavery? - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“Approximately 12.5 million left for the Americas and the Caribbean. About 16 million purportedly were traded, not across the Atlantic, but rather to North Africa, on the coast of the Indian Ocean, and throughout the Middle East. But the 11 million or so who arrived in the Americas did not account for the millions, some believe at least four million, who died as part of slave-raiding warfare, during the forced marches to the slave-trading coasts or who perished in the Middle Passage —- the ocean trip from Africa to America — as a result of scurvy and other diseases, dehydration, starvation, harsh treatment, or suicide. Nor does it measure the millions who lost their homes and families, and who were physically displaced as a result of the trade”.
[1:29:30] Sugar: The First Yellow Banana
[1:32:20] Davids, David Brion - Inhuman Bondage - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“While Europeans settled each New World colony in a special and often fortuitous way, we can also see a more general pattern being repeated from Hispaniola and Brazil in the sixteenth century to Virginia and Carolina in the seventeenth. First, we note a strongly human element of greed, a desire for instant wealth from gold and silver, whether stolen from Indians, seized from the Spaniards by Dutch, British, or French pirate ships, or gained from forcing Indians to work in the mines for mineral welth.
In a second and usually later alternative, colonial leader turned to cash crops, such as tobacco and especially sugar, produced by slaves imported from Africa after initial experiments with Indian labor. [...] For reasons we will later examine the African workers could never come close to reproducing their numbers (except in the Chesapeake in the 1720s, and in South Carolina a half-century latter); hence the need for a continuing and growing stream of labor from Africa to make up for the slave mortality and to clear new land and found new colonies for cultivation. Much of the New World then came to resemble the death furnace of the ancient good Moloch, consuming Africans slaves so increasing numbers of Europeans, and latter white Americas, could consume sugar, coffee, rice, and tobacco".
[1:44:47] Davids, David Brion - Inhuman Bondage - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“In retrospect, it appears that the entire New World enterprise depended on the enormous and expandable flow of slave labor from Africa. Though in 1495 Colombus transported some five hundred Native Americans slaves to Seville, and dreamed of a profitable slave trade of American "Indians" to Iberia, Italy, Sicily, and the Atlantic islands, some African slaves arrived in the Caribbean at least as early as 1501. By 1820 nearly 8.7 million slaves had departed from Africa for the New World, as opposed to only 2.6 million whites, many of them convicts or indentured servants, who had left Europe. Thus by 1820 African slaves constituted almost 77 percent of the enormous population that had sailed towards the Americas, and from 1760 to 1820 this emigrating flow included 5.6 African slaves for every European. From 1820 to 1880 the African slave trade, most of it now illegal, continued to ship off from Africa nearly 2.3 million more slaves, mainly to Brazil and Cuba”.
[1:48:07] Frederick Douglas story: encounter with Irish indentured servants
[1:50:27] Stevenson, Brenda E. - What is Slavery? - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“By the beginning of the 1600s, the increase in the trade in slaves to accom- modate sugar and tobacco production, as well as gold and silver mining, also meant an increase in the numbers of persons in Africa, Europe, and the Americas involved in the trade and the numbers of New World locales where African workers arrived. Sugar, alone, accounted for the labor of 70 percent of the African imported slave labor in the New World over the centuries”.
[1:51:03] Stevenson, Brenda E. - What is Slavery? - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“The expansion of sugar cultivation beyond Brazil in the mid-seventeenth century, particularly to British and French islands in the Caribbean, was especially important in the development of this crop’s dominance and the corresponding growth in the numbers of Africans imported to cultivate it. These locales included Jamaica and Saint-Domingue - with planters who dominated the world market — along with the British islands of Barbados, St Kitts and Antigua, and the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Other crops, especially cacao in Brazil and tobacco in Barbados, also fed this early agricultural boom. By the eighteenth century, coffee and indigo were also important slave-produced exports”.
[1:52:18] The Slave’s Jobs. Not only Agriculture
[1:52:18] Stevenson, Brenda E. - What is Slavery? - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“While agricultural work was what occupied most enslaved people, they also worked in other sectors of the early colonial economies. Those in the first centuries of the Atlantic trade who came to reside in Brazil, for example, were also miners, herders, domestic servants, carpenters, wheelwrights, fisher- men, and lumbermen, or performed other skilled and day- labor work. In Spanish-speaking colonial America, particularly Mexico, enslaved sixteenth-century Africans, many like the Akan who were from the gold-mining regions of Ghana (Gold Coast), worked in gold and silver mines”.
[1:53:40] Frederick Douglas Story: First Encounter with Urban Slaves.
[1:57:34] Gates Jr., Henry Louise and Andrews, William L. (Editors) - Pioneers of the Black Atlantic - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
[2:01:10] Stevenson, Brenda E. - What is Slavery? - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“Enslaved Africans, therefore, entered the Atlantic trade through numerous avenues: as sold war captives, kidnap victims, social outcasts, criminals, as tribute payment, or drawn from the pool of bonded laborers traditionally found in many western and central African societies. Some were sold from one locale in Africa to another, and then eventually sold to Europeans bound for the market in the Americas. The trips that they took from their earlier places of residence or servitude to the coast for embarkment to the Caribbean or beyond could be hundreds of miles. Often, they were sold and resold along the way to the coast. They marched in single or double file, chained to each other with only the clothing they had on when taken, eating and drinking only what their captors provided. Exhausted, undernourished, physically, psychologically, and sexually abused, and often dehydrated as well, some became ill; others perished en route. It was only the beginning of their travails and their travels”.
[2:02:24] Waiting at the Shores of Africa.
[2:03:46] Walvin, James. - Freedom - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“Africans often spent longer on board the slave ships, anchor at the coast of Africa than in crossing the Atlantic. The ships accumulated their human cargoes slowly, from place to place. Where there were no facilities for holding Africans on shore, the ship acted as a floating prison, until the Master decided that he had enough enslaved people to set out across the Atlantic. Some ships, little more than hulks, acted as permanent offshore prisons, passing on their captives to others ships ready to sail.
In the 17th century, Dutch ships spent an average of a hundred and twenty days on the coast, British ships ninety-four. A century later, the Dutch spent an average of two hundred days on the coast, French ships a hundred and forty-three. In the mid to late 18th century British ships spend a hundred and seventy-three days on the African coast”.
[2:05:15] Crossing the Atlantic.
[2:07:40] Gates Jr., Henry Louise and Andrews, William L. (Editors) - Pioneers of the Black Atlantic - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship's cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable”. - Olaudah Equiano
[2:10:19] The Lasting Trauma.
[2:11:01] Only Protection of the Slaves: Their Value as Commodities.
[2:12:32] Laws to “Protect” Slaves.
[2:13:47] “Tricksy Laws”: Devil’s Advocate for the Past.
[2:15:02] Terrible Enforcement of the Laws.
[2:16:33] How many need to Change to Change society?
[2:17:20] The Slave Markets.
[2:15:59] Abraham Lincoln Witnessing a Slave Market.
[2:18:03] Meltzer, Milton - Slavery: A World History - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“After the walking skeletons has been disposed of the healthy slaves came next. Sometimes they would be marched through the town behind bagpipes and drown up for inspection by planters or their overseers on the public square. If a west Indian factor handled retails sales, he took 15 percent of the gross and another 5% of the net return. The "scramble”, however, was the customary way of handling a sale. By agreement with the buyer, a fix price was set for the four categories of slaves: man, woman, boy and girl. A day for the sale was advertised, when the hour came a gun was fired. The door to the slave-yard was flung open, and a horde of purchasers rushed in "with all the ferocity of brutes," said a man name Falconbridge, a slave ship surgeon, who witness several scrambles. Each buyer bent on getting his pick of the pack, tried to encircle the largest number of choice slaves by means of a rope. The slaves, helpless, bewildered, terrified, were yanked savagely, torn by one buyer from another. Some were so panicked by one such scramble on the island of Granada that they hurdled themselves over the wall and run madly through the town. Once, Falconbridge saw a scramble onboard a ship in Kingstone Harbour, when the buyers swept in to see their prey about 30 of the slaves leaped into the sea, but all soon were fished out”.
[2:20:35] Selling Slaves and Breaking Families Apart.
[2:21:41] Douglas, Frederick - Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglas - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“After the valuation, then came the division. I have no language to express the high excitement and deep anxiety which were felt among us poor slaves during this time. Our fate for life was now to be decided. We had no more voice in that decision than the brutes among whom we were ranked. A single word from the white men was enough — against all our wishes, prayers, and entreaties — to sunder forever the dearest friends, dearest kindred, and strongest ties known to human beings. In addition to the pain of separation, there was the horrid dread of falling into the hands of Master Andrew. He was known to us all as being a most cruel wretch, — a common drunkard, who had, by his reckless mismanagement and profligate dissipation, already wasted a large portion of his father's property. We all felt that we might as well be sold at once to the Georgia traders, as to pass into his hands; for we knew that that would be our inevitable condition, — a condition held by us all in the utmost horror and dread. I suffer more anxiety”.
[2:29:29] “Let me see your Papers”.
[2:30:09] Patyrollers / Paterollers (Patrollers).
[2:30:59] "Force and violence was the only impulse to action to which a slave can respond" - Bryan Edwards
[2:31:31] Sharples, Jason T. - The World That Fear Made - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“Individual enslavers wielded the lash, the most obvious instrument of attempted terror, not to mechanically prod enslaved people so much as to inflict freshly stinging examples of what could befall them if they displeased an enslaver.
The historian Edward Baptist has aptly characterized this as a system of torture for compelling labor and outward obedience from enslaved people, and a senventeenth-century traveler also described this as a system of 'torment[s]' and 'excessive tortur[e]s".
Enslaver throughout the colonies terrorized enslaved women and men with rape and its lingering trauma, and they threatened them with the possibility of physical pain, humiliation, confinement, or reassignment to a difficult labor.
They also used the chattel principle to threaten to separate families through sale, and they could send an individual to a new enslaver who was more sadistic or whose position in the economy involved a more grueling labor regime.
In wielding these instruments of fear, enslavers deliberately exploited peoples' human instinct to avoid doing whatever might lead to pain or loss. Coercion ins slavery depended on fear of violence”.
[2:31:21] Ground Zero Violence: The Whip.
[2:32:57] The “Slave Breaker”.
[2:34:01] Douglas, Frederick - Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglas - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“If at anyone time of my life more than another, I was made to drink the bitterest dregs of slavery, that time was during the first six months of my stay with Mr. Covey. We were worked in all weathers. It was never too hot or too cold; it could never rain, blow, hail, or snow, too hard for us to work in the field. Work, work, work, was scarcely more the order of the day — than of the night. The longest days were too short for him, and the shortest nights too long for him. I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!
Sunday was my only leisure time. I spent this in a sort of beast-like stupor, between sleep and wake, under some large tree. At times I would rise up, a flash of energetic freedom would dart through my soul, accompanied with a faint beam of hope, that flickered for a moment, and then vanished. I sank down again, mourning over my wretched condition. I was sometimes prompted to take my life, and that of Covey, but was prevented by a combination of hope and fear. My sufferings on this plantation seem now like a dream rather than a stern reality”.
[2:36:24] Meltzer, Milton - Slavery: A World History - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“They were about a hundred men and women of different ages, all occupied in digging ditches in a cane field, the majority of them naked or covered with rags.
The sun shown down with full force on their heads, sweat rolled from all parts of their bodies. Their limbs weighted down by the heat, fatigued with the weight of their picks by the resistance of the clayed soil, baked hard enough to break their implements. Strain themselves to overcome every obstacle, a mournful silence reigned. Exhaustion was stamped on every face, but the hour of rest had not yet come.
The pitiless eyes of the manager patrolled the gang and several foremen, armed with long whips moved periodically between them, giving stinging blows to all who, worn out by fatigue, were compelled to take a rest. Men or women, young or old”.
[2:38:24] Smith, Clint - How the Word is Passed - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“What is fascinating about Jefferson is that this is a flaw of which he was wholly cognizant. In Notes of the State of Virginia, he wrote, "There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal [...] The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retains his manners and moral undepraved by such circumstances”.
[2:40:50] Jefferson Foresees the Future.
[2:40:50] Jefferson, Thomas - Notes on the State of Virginia - Wikipedia
“For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest. […]
I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation”.
[2:45:46] Jenkins, William Sumner - Pro-Slavery Thought In The Old South - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“At the turn of the century sparring again took place in Congress on the slavery issue. Thatcher of Massachusetts asserted that Congress had the power to legislate on the subject because slavery was a political evil.
He [Tatcher] declared that the 700,000 slaves were public enemies, and “a greater evil than the very principle could not exist; it was a cancer of immense magnitude, that would some time destroy the body politic, except a proper legislation should prevent the evil”.
“The gentleman farther says that 700,000 men are in bondage. I ask him how he would remedy this evil as he calls it? but I do not think it is an evil; would he have these people turned out in the United States to ravage, murder, and commit every species of crimes? I believe it might have been happy for the United States if these people had never been introduced amongst us, but I do believe that they have immensely benefitted by coming amongst us”.
[2:48:53] Would you Feel Safe Living with Slaves?
[2:49:11] Kemble, Frances Anne - Journal of a Residence on a Georgen Plantation (1838 - 1839) - Wikipedia
“A most ominous tolling of bells and beating of drums, which, on the first evening of my arrival in Charleston, made me almost fancy myself in one of the old fortified frontier towns of the Continent [Europe] where the tocsin is sounded, and the evening drum beaten, and the guard set as regularly every night as if an invasion were expected.
In Charleston, however, it is not the dread of foreign invasion, but of domestic insurrection, which occasions precautions. [...] Of course, it is very necessary when a large class of persons exist in the very bosom of a community whose interest are known to be at variance incompatible with those of its other members. And not doubt this daily and nightly precautions are but trifling drawbacks upon the manifold blessings of slavery. [...] Still I should prefer going to sleep without the apprehension of my servants' cutting my throat in my bed, even to having a guard provided to prevent their doing so”.
[2:50:55] Family of 5 with 200 Slaves in Haiti.
[2:51:58] Meltzer, Milton - Slavery: A World History - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“Have pity for an existence witch must be eke out far from the world of our own people. We here number five whites, my father, my mother, my two brothers, and myself, surrounded by more than two hundred slaves. The number of our negros who are domestics alone coming almost to thirty. From morning to night wherever we turn their faces meet our eyes. No matter how early we awaken they are at our bedsides, and the custom which obtains here not to make the least move without the help of one of these negros servants, brings it about, not only that we live in their society the greater portion of the day, but also that they are involved in the least important events of our daily life. Should we go outside our house to the workshops we are still subject to this strange propinquity. Add to this the fact that our conversation is almost entirely to do with the help of our slaves, their needs, which must be cared for, the manner in which they are to be distributed about the estate and their attempt to revolt and you will come to understand that our entire life is so closely identified with that of this unfortunates, that in the end it is the same as theirs, and in spite whatever pleasure may come from that almost complete dominance, which is given us to exercise over them, what regrets do not assail as daily because of our inability to have contact and correspondence with others than this unfortunates so far removed from us in point of view, costumes and education”.
[2:57:37] Douglas, Frederick - Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglas - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin. I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember anything. It was the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it”.
[2:59:06] Yetman, Norman R. (Editor) - Voices from Slavery - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
[3:01:49] Painfotaiment (Old Episode) - LISTEN
[3:04:11] Walvin, James. - Freedom - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“On the eve of the French Revolution all of Europe's major maritime powers, and a number of thriving colonies in the Americas, were keen to have a share of the trans-Atlantic business of slavery.
Shipping Africans to the Americas and using them, and their offspring, to labor mainly in agricultural work, was a lucrative concern which no one seem capable to resist. A century later those same nations had banned the slave trade, had freed all their former slaves, and now were vehemently opposed to slavery. Not only was antipathy expressed on the upper echelons of power, in formal politics, government and diplomacy, but it also caught the imagination of millions of ordinary people, people who were increasingly well informed via the explosion of literacy and the world of cheap print.
To make the point more crudely, in the late 18th century most Atlantic slave owners and slave traders felt confident that they could ride out any criticism of slavery. By the late 19th century, they had all banished and only and eccentric would feel confident to defend slavery publicly in the West”.
[3:05:48] “The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, But It Bends Toward Justice” - Martin Luther King (Attributed).
[3:13:25] Davids, David Brion - Inhuman Bondage - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“The strongest card in the hand was their ability to indict the entire American nation for what appeared to be the most hypocritical contradiction in all human history: A nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition "that all men are created equal" happened also to be the nation, by the mid-nineteenth century, with the largest numbers of slaves in the Western Hemisphere”.
[3:13:55] The Slaves Instantly Noticed the Hypocrisy.
[3:15:47] The Founding Fathers Avoid Using the word “Slave”.
[3:16:34] Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
[3:18:14] Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.
[3:21:23] Thomas Jefferson’s Slave Children.
[3:22:23] Gabriel’s Rebelion.
[3:23:53] 19th Century: Growing Abolitionism.
[3:13:55] South Carolina: Slaves shout the rhetoric of the Revolution - “A Revolution within a Revolution”
[3:22:23] Gabriel’s Rebelion (1800) - Wikipedia
[3:24:40] Davids, David Brion - Datapoints about abolitionism campaigns in England. From 10k to 100k in a year, and 400k four years later.
[3:24:40] Davids, David Brion - Inhuman Bondage - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“In 1792 the government received 519 anti-slave-trade or antislavery petitions, containing some 390,000 signatures. The West Indies interest were stunned as the press began promoting the cause and a popular movement arose to boycott slave grown sugar (much as the North American colonies had earlier boycotted British imports)”.
[3:27:03] Stevenson, Brenda E. - What is Slavery? - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
List of abolitionist and black-assistance society. From almost nothing to new ones every year in 19 years.
[3:30:03] Stevenson, Brenda E. - What is Slavery? - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“Revolutionary-era blacks, slave and free, hardly relinquished the legal fight to end the trade or the institution of slavery to whites. As early as the first years of the 1770s, they began, individually, and in small groups, to petition legislatures and sue in court for their freedom. Most of their efforts were, however, undergirded by religious, philosophical (Enlightenment), and legal arguments that aligned with the ideals of the American Revolution. Their efforts, therefore, were supported, in part, by nascent, but growing, anti-slavery sentiment held by whites. The lack of economic incentive for slaveholding in many of the northern states also contributed to these complementary efforts. The results of the combination of advocacy from blacks and whites were tremendous, leading to the gradual regional isolation of the institution”.
[3:31:48] The Cotton Gin (Wikipedia) - Eli Whitney (Wikipedia)
[3:32:35] Thomas, Hugh - The Slave Trade - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“In 1790 slavery in North America, as opposed to North American participation in the slave trade to Cuba and elsewhere, seemed to be in decline. But Eli Whitney's fateful invention of the cotton gin, on Mrs Nathanel Greene's plantation at Savannah, Georgia, during the spring of 1793, and the realization that with the removal of the great hindrance hitherto to the large-scale cultivation of cotton (the taking of the lint from the seeds) 'one negro could produce fifty pound of cleaned cotton a day'“.
[3:33:28] Cotton Production Statistics.
[3:34:46] Walvin, James. - Freedom - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“Cotton was worth more than all the other US exports put together”. (Paraphrasing).
[3:36:10] Thomas, Hugh - The Slave Trade - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“In 1790 there were only 500,000, well acclimatized slaves in the United States, most of them of the second or third generation. Between 1800 and 1810 slaves within the United States increased by a third, and there was an increase of nearly another third in the next ten years, ti 1820. By 1825 the slaves in the United States numbered over a thrid of all slaves in the Americas. This trend would continue”.
[3:31:48] The Cotton Gin.
[3:40:14] C. L. R. James - Wikipedia
[3:40:39] Meltzer, Milton - Slavery: A World History - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“There was no ingenuity that fear, or depraved imagination could devise which was not employed to break their spirits and satisfy the lust and resentment their owners and guardians. Irons on the hands and feet, blocks of wood that the slaves had to drag behind them wherever they went, the tin plate mask, designed to prevent the slaves eating the sugar cane, the iron collar. Wiping was interrupted in order to pass a piece of hot wood on the buttock of the victim, salt, pepper, citrons, cinders, allows and hot ashes were poured into the bleeding wounds. Mutilations were common, limbs, ears and sometimes the private parts to deprive them of the pleasures which they could indulge without expense. Their masters poured burning wax on their arms and hands and shoulders. Emptied the boiling cane sugar over their heads, burn them alive, roasted them on slow fires, fill them with gunpowder and blow them up with a match. Buried them to the neck and smear them with sugar, that the flies may devour them. Fast them near to nests of ants or wasps. Made them eat their own excrements, drink their urine and lick the saliva of other slaves”. (Quoting C. L. R. James)
[3:42:31] Incoming Slave Revolts
[3:42:54] Raynal, Guillaume Thomas - A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies (Volume 3) - Wikipedia
“Let the ineffectual calls of humanity be no longer pleaded with the people and their masters. Perhaps, then have never been attended in any public transactions. If then, ye nations of Europe, interest alone can exert its influence over you, listen to me once more: Your slaves stand in no need either of your generosity or your counsels, in order to break the sacrilegious yoke of their oppression. Nature speaks a more powerful language than philosophy, or interests”.
[3:44:11] Raynal, Guillaume Thomas - A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies (Volume 4) - Wikipedia
“These are so many indications of the impending storm, and the negroes only want a chief, sufficiently courageous, to lead them on to vengeance and slaughter.
Where is this great man, whom nature owes to her afflicted, oppressed, and tormented children? Where is he? He will undoubtedly appear, he will shew himself, he will lift up the sacred standard of liberty”.
[3:45:36] Raynal, Guillaume Thomas - A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies (Volume 4) - Wikipedia
“This venerable signal will collect around him the companions of his misfortunes. They will rush on with more impetuosity than torrents; they will leave behind them, in all parts, indelible traces of their just resentment. Spaniards, Portuguese, English, French, Dutch, all their tyrants will become the victims of fire and sword. The plains of America will suck up with transport the blood which they have so long expected, and the bones of so many wretches, heaped upon one another, during the course of so many centuries, will bound for joy.
The Old World will join its plaudits to whose of the New. In all parts the name of the hero, who shall have restored the rights of the humans species will be blest; in all parts trophies will be erected to his glory”.
[3:47:38] Punishing Revolting Slaves.
[3:48:41] Maroon Communities.
[3:50:37] French and American Revolutions: New Inspiration for Slaves.
[3:54:16] Ambiguity in the Revolution’s Language: Tool for the Slaves.
[3:54:44] Saint-Domingue ask for Their Equal Rights in Paris.
[3:56:19] Saint-Domingue’s Race Obsession.
[3:57:27] Modern Racism: Dark Side of the Enlightenment.
[3:52:26] Tacky’s War (1760 - 1761) - Wikipedia / Berbice slave uprising (1763 - 1764) - Wikipedia
[3:55:35] Quadroon - Wikipedia
[3:56:32] Popkin, Jeremy D. - Facing Racial Revolution - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
[3:58:55] Popkin, Jeremy D. - Facing Racial Revolution - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“Revolutionary Saint-Domingue was one of the birthplaces of modern, pseudoscientific racism: in 1790, the baron de Beauvois, a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts in Cap Francais [...] became one of the first authors to assert unequivocally that blacks were an inherently inferior species of humanity, "different from the white race, physically and morally", their "faculties..., so to speak, nonexistent". None of these authors explicitly endorsed such a view, although all accepted the notion that whites represented a higher level of civilization than blacks”.
[4:00:19] Rich Freemen: Laws to Keep them in Place.
[4:01:46] Dubois, Laurent - Avengers of the New World - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“The Code Noir's stipulations about emancipation, however, like those regarding the treatment of slaves, were steadily undermined during the eighteen century. Attempting to counter the increasing size and power of communities of free people of color, colonial administrators required masters who freed their slaves to pay "liberty taxes", and they gradually made African ancestry a legal liability”.
“In the wake of the Seven Years' War, scattered discriminatory legislation against free people of color was systematized and expanded. A 1764 royal decree forbade people of African descent to practice medicine, surgery, or pharmacy. The next year another decree excluded them, from working in legal professions or in the offices of notaries. A 1773 law made it illegal for them to take the names of their master or white relatives on the ground that such a practice destroyed the "insurmountable barrier" which "public opinion" had placed between the two communities and which the government had ‘wisely preserved’“.
“A 1779 regulation made it illegal for free people of color to "affect the dress, hairstyles, style, or bearing of whites," and some local ordinances forbade them to ride in carriages or to own certain home furnishings. By the time of the Revolution free-colored were subjected to a variety of laws that discriminated against them solely on the basis of race”.
[4:07:34] Vincent Ogé (1757 - 1791) - Wikipedia
[4:08:02] Geggus, David (Editor) - The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“If the most prompt and effective measures are not taken, in firmness, courage, and constancy do not animate us all, if we do not quickly bundle together all our abilities, our means, and our effort, if we sleep for an instant on the edge of the abyss, let us tremble at the moment of our waking. Bloog will flow, our property will be invaded, the fruits of our labor destroyed, and our homes burned. Our neighbors, our friends, our wives and children will be slaughter and mutilated. The slave will have raised the standard of revolt. The islands will be no more than a vast and fateful inferno. With commerce destroyed, France will receive a mortal wound, and a multitude of decent citizens will be impoverished, ruined; we will have lost everything... But, gentlemen, there is still time to advert the disaster... If the Assembly wishes to admit me,... if it authorizes me to draw up and submit to it my plan, I will do so with pleasure and even gratitude, and perhaps I will be able to contribute to warding off the storm that rumbles above our heads...”.
[4:12:53] Walvin, James. - Freedom - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“The entire system depended, of course, on African slave labour. By 1789 about 600,000 were at work in the colony: over the previous century some 800,000 Africans were landed there. In recent years, Africans had been arriving in huge numbers: almost a quarter of a million in the six years between 1784 and 1790. Sometimes 30,000 or 40,000 African disembarked in a single year. Large numbers of them were young men - and many had been prisoners of war in Africa, i.e. they had military experience. Slaves now greatly outnumbered the French troops based in the colony, and it was the European military, their offshore navies and their colonial garrisons, that formed the ultimate guarantee of security against dangers posed by the enslaved”.
[4:18:10] Geggus, David (Editor) - The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“Thereafter, they shall be led to the main square of this town, where, on the side opposite the one used for the execution of whites, they shall have their arms, shins, thighs, and pelvis broken while alive on a scaffold erected for this purpose.
The High Executioner shall then place them on a cartwheel with their faces turned towards the heavens for however long it pleases God to maintain their lives. Thereafter their heads shall be cut off and exposed on stakes”.
[4:18:46] Instability of Saint-Domingue.
[4:20:30] "Whites, mulattoes, and blacks loathed each other. The poor whites couldn't stand the rich whites; the rich whites despised the poor whites. The middle-class whites were jealous of the aristocratic whites. The whites born in France looked down upon the locally born whites. Mulattoes envied the whites, despised the blacks, and were despised by the whites. Free negroes brutalized those who were still slaves. Haitian born blacks regarded those from Africa as savages. Everyone, quite rightly, lived in terror of everyone else. Haiti was hell, but Haiti was rich" - Paul Fregosi
[4:22:22] Slave’s Rising Leaders.
[4:23:39] Dutty Boukman (1767 - 1791) - Wikipedia
[4:23:47] Dubois, Laurent - Avengers of the New World - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“The most visible leader during the first days of the insurrection was Boukman, who had worked first as a driver and then as a coachman. Boukman was, it is believed, a religious leader, a role that would have earned respect among many slaves”.
[4:24:10] Dubois, Laurent - Avengers of the New World - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
Religious meeting lead by Boukman and an old African woman with “strange eyes and brisling hair” named Cécile Fatiman (Wikipedia).
“At the ceremony Boukman apparently proclaimed: "The god of the white man calls him to commit crimes: our god ask only good works of us. But this god who is so good orders revenge! He will direct our hands: he will aid us. Throw away the image of the god of the whites who thirst for our tears and listen to the voice of liberty that speaks in the hearts of all of us".
Those assembled took and oath of secrecy and revenge, sealed by drinking the blood of a black pig sacrificed before them. It was a form of pact probably derived from the traditions of West Africa”.
[4:24:10] Beginning of the Haitian Revolution.
[4:25:44] Massacres and Destruction.
[4:27:53] Popkin, Jeremy D. - Facing Racial Revolution - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“At the sound of a gunshot, my dog, who was laying in the gallery near my bedroom, started to bark loudly enough to weak me. Wrongly irritated by this continuous barking, I got to quiet him down, and then went to sleep. Fifth teen minutes later the poor dog started up again even more insistently. But alas it was too late to wander what was happening. The blacks had already taken over all the paths around the grand'case [the plantation owner's house]. Hearing the noise that they were making, I jump out of my bed and shouted: "Who goes there?" A voice like thunder answered me: "It's death!"At the same time, I hear a considerable number of gunshots and the voice of a horde of blacks who fill the house with these terrible words: "Kill, kill."
Seeing what was happening and having no way to escape, I run to get my pistols. Luckily for me, they were not loaded; I say luckily because if they had been, I would had defended myself, I would have killed some of these assailants and would not have been able to escape the coming of their blows”.
[4:34:46] Popkin, Jeremy D. - Facing Racial Revolution - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“The frightened families among our Neighbours met together at our plantation. The men armed to face the storm; the mothers, wives, sisters were lamenting and gathering in all haste a few precious effects. Desolation and fear were painting on all faces. The sky seemed on fire. Guns could be heard from afar, and the bells of the plantations were sounding the alarm. The danger increased. The flames at each moment were approaching and enclosing us. There was no time to lose; we fled. The victims who escaped at sword's point came to swell the number of fugitives, and recounted to us the horrors which they had witnessed. They had seen unbelievable tortures to which they testified. Many women, young, beautiful, and virtuous, perished beneath the infamous caresses of the brigands, amongst the cadavers of their fathers and husbands. Bodies, still palpitating, were dragged thought the roads with atrocious acclamations. Young children transfixed upon the points of bayonets were the bleeding flags which followed the troop of cannibals. These pictures were not exaggerated, and I more than once saw the sorrowful spectacle”.
[4:40:13] Dubois, Laurent - Avengers of the New World - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“The country is filled with dead bodies, which lie unburied. The negroes have left the whites, with stakes driven through them into the ground; and the white troops, who not take no prisoners, but kill everything black or yellow, leave the negros dead upon the field”.
“The head of white prisoners, placed on stakes, surrounded the camps of the blacks, and the corpses of black prisoners were hung from the trees and bushes along the roads that led to the positions of the whites”.
[4:41:29] Popkin, Jeremy D. - Facing Racial Revolution - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
The story of Gros and Johnny.
[4:43:26] “Our fate then we though no longer dubious, as it was, four of our miserable companies were unshackled, and conducted to the bottom of the scaffold, where he had them tied like as so many victims. To exercise his vengeance with the greater relish, this inhuman monster measured out the ground, and the hangman dared not lift the destructive weapon without his order; which, by a watch in his hand, was given every quarter of an hour. When this poor, afflicted wretches were at the gasp of death, we beheld Johnny, the mulatto Delile, and the Negro Godard, amidst these horrid torments, cutting piecemeal two of those whom they had thus butchered, trussing the other two, like a fowl ready prepared for the spit, toad-fashion, and drinking their blood”.
“A repetition of the same tragic barbarity succeeded the next day, and so on. Berchais, our commander, was doomed to another torture. Johnny immediately caused one of his hands to be severed, and then extended him upon a ladder, where he received two hundred lashes. They afterwards conveyed him in a cart to the town of Grand-Riviere, where he was suspended from a stake fixed in the ground by a hook that pierced him under the chin. This unfortunate man living in this condition six and thirty hours, and at the time Johnny had him taken down, he still palpitated. This monster, whose thirst for human blood could not be allayed, invented a fresh torture, which was that of roasting the remainder of the prisoners alive on a spit”.
[4:49:16] Léger-Félicité Sonthonax (1763 - 1815) - Wikipedia
[4:49:16] Étienne Polverel (1740 - 1795) - Wikipedia
[4:50:56] Dubois, Laurent - Slave Revolution in the Caribbean (1789 - 1804)
“Representatives of the French people, until now our decrees of liberty have been selfish, and only for ourselves. But today we proclaim it to the universe, and generations to come will glory in this decree; we are proclaiming universal liberty. [...] We are working for future generations; let us lunch liberty into the colonies; the English are death today”. - Georges Danton
[4:52:38] Toussaint Louverture (1743 - 1803) - Wikipedia
[4:54:09] Charles Leclerc (1772 - 1802) - Wikipedia
[4:58:35] Popkin, Jeremy D. - Facing Racial Revolution - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“From a distance, it looked like universal desolation. Our ruin was complete. One person hardly recognized the site of his own plantation, the other the plantation of a friend he sought in vain. What the fire had spared, hands even more destructive than the flames had reduced to dust. We felt as though we were marching on the ruins of the world. Sad playthings of fate, the plantation owners mixed in with the main body of the army dragged themselves along, lost in contemplation of their misery. Soldiers and civilians, all shared our sufferings; no black, no animal, no living creature interrupted the silence of these deserts, broken only by the rumbling of the cannon and the slow and measured pace of the troops”. - Charles Leclerc
“As they advance, they came across a horrible sight. Oh, what an abomination! Oh, inventive genius of cannibals! What did we see? White hands, from the wrist up, coming out of the ground, with the fingers pointing upwards. We stood petrified. Did they belong to bodies buried here? Had parricidal hands torn them from living victims, these hands that I must have held in my own? Ah! No doubt they belonged to a father, a friend, a mother. They might just have signed the manumissions of some of these monsters who had insulted them in their agony, who had made killing a game. These whites had been torn apart!... Their sufferings were over... What a terrifying rest! Their shades hover over our heads”. - Charles Leclerc
[5:00:45] Popkin, Jeremy D. - Facing Racial Revolution - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
Leclerc story about his plantations and his library, finding his copy of Guillaume Raynal’s book open at the page making reference to the black’s uprising. See [3:42:54].
[5:03:33] “There cannot exist slaves on this territory, servitude is therein forever abolished. All men are born, live and die free and French”.
“All men, regardless of color, are eligible for all employments”.
“There shall exist no distinction other than those based on virtue and talent, and other superiority afforded by law in the exercise of a public function. The law is the same for all whether in punishment or in protection”.
[5:06:08] Geggus, David (Editor) - The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“To give you an idea of my losses, the 7th Regiment arrived here with a one thousand three hundred and ninty-five men. It has, at present, eighty-three sickly, and a hundred and seven in the hospital. The rest has perished. The 11th light infantry arrived with one thousand nine hundred men. It has a hundred and sixty-three in service and two hundred and one in the hospital.
The 71st, which received about a thousand men has nineteen serving the colors and a hundred and thirty-three in hospital. It is the same with the rest of the Army. Try imagine then my position, in a country that has been in civil war for ten years, and were the rebels are convinced that we want to reduce them to slavery”. - Charles Leclerc
[5:06:58] Cold Blooded Phase of Violence.
[5:07:43] Geggus, David (Editor) - The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“Drowning is the usual way of putting to death black prisoners. I've been told that, on several occasions, thousands were drowned at the same time, and their bodies were often seen floating on to the shore.
Humanity is a casualty here. Those who are caught in the town secretly plotting against the French are hanged. Those who had done most harm, as leader or otherwise, are burned or devoured by dogs. The Commander in Chief has brought many large dogs from Havanan for this purpose”.
“Thus, we are no longer surprised to learn that the least of the tortures our prisoners endure is to be grilled or barbecued, sawn between two planks, have their eyes torn out with a bale-hook, and then be slashed with a cutlass and be hauled up under the armpits to expire under the blows of a cudgel, or be given the burning ankles torture, or other to be made to reveal information. In short, every violence that the most refined cruelty could invent. To be shot is a favor. What a war, good God, the fiercest days of combat in Europe do not expose the soldier to the suffering that the smallest skirmish, or ambush here can lead to”.
[5:09:57] These People will not Return to Slavery.
[5:11:12] Davids, David Brion - Inhuman Bondage - Wikipedia - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“In the fall of 1802, when Leclerc died of yellow fever while pleading to Napoleon for more troops, Chrisophe and Dessalines deserted the French. Leclerc's successor, General Rochambeau, then resorted to a policy of at least partial genocide. The French concluded that Saint-Domingue could be pacified only by exterminating most of the existing black and mulatto population, which could later be replaced by African slaves”.
“Napoleon's reversal of French policy showed that a white nation could reinstitute slavery, strip the free descendants of slaves of their rights, and kill even children of the stigmatized race if their families had been contaminated with ideas of liberty”.
[5:14:08] Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1758 - 1806) - Wikipedia
[5:16:03] Geggus, David (Editor) - The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“For fourteen years we have been the victims of our own gullibility and tolerance, defeated not by French arms but by the pitiful eloquence of their official proclamations. When, therefore, shall we tire of breathing the same air as they do? What do we have in common with this murderous nation? Its cruelty compared to our evident moderation, its color unlike our own, the wide seas that separate us, our avenging climate, all tell us that they are not our brothers and never will be. If they find refuge among us, they will again seek to cause trouble and to divide us”.
[5:19:09] Geggus, David (Editor) - The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History - Get it from Amazon via Dancarlin.com
“Finally, the hour of vengeance has struck, and the implacable enemies of the rights of man have received the punishment their crimes deserved. I raised over the guilty heads my arm that for too long had been restrained. At this signal ordained by a just god, your hands divinely armed set the ax to the ancient tree of slavery and prejudice. In vain had time and, still more, the diabolical politics of the Europeans encased it in triple armor. You stripped away this armor and placed it on your own breasts, becoming, like your natural enemies, cruel and pitiless. Like an overflowing torrent that roars, uproots, and carries all before it, your avenging passion had swept away everything in its impetuous path. May thus perish all who tyrannized the innocent, all oppressors of the human race. Yes, we have rendered unto these true cannibals: war for war, crime for crime, outrage for outrage. Yes, I have saved my country; I have avenged America”.
[5:24:13] Jefferson, Thomas - The Complete Works
“And the sooner we put some plan underway, the greater hope there is that it may be permitted to proceed peaceably to its ultimate effect. But if something is not done, and soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children. The "murmura venturos nautis prudentia ventos" has already reached us; the revolutionary storm, now sweeping the globe, will be upon us, and happy if we make timely prevision to give it an easy passage over our land. From the present state of things in Europe and America, the day which begins our combustion must be near at hand; and only a single spark is wanting to make that day to-morrow. If we had begun sooner, we might probably have been allowed a lengthier operation to clear ourselves, but every day's delay lessens the time we may take for emancipation”.
[5:28:33] “In just vindication of Haiti I can go step further. I can speak of her, not only words of admiration, but words of gratitude as well. She has grandly served the cause of universal human liberty. We should not forget that the freedom you and I enjoy today; that the freedom that eight hundred thousand colored people enjoy in the British West Indies; the freedom that has come to the colored race the world over, is largely due to the brave stand taken by the black sons of Haiti ninety years ago. When they struck for freedom, they builded better than they knew. Their swords were not drawn and could not be drawn simply for themselves alone. They were linked and interlinked with their race, and striking for their freedom, they struck for the freedom of every black man in the world”. - Frederick Douglas
