Tag Archives: slavery

Lincoln and the Broken Politics of His Time

12 Feb 2022 By in Special days Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

On this day in 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born.  He was born into an American heyday, when the new United States (having fended off the British in the War of 1812) were mushrooming.  In 1809, the nation consisted of seventeen states, the westernmost being Ohio, along with a vast territory that pioneers were flooding into, appropriating from natives, and organizing.  Lincoln was born to one such pioneer family and grew up in Illinois, which became a state when he was nine.

By the time Lincoln became president, the number of states had doubled.  The nation stretched to the Pacific.  His milieu was morphing as quickly as he was, a reckless proliferation the politicians could barely control.  The gargantuan Lincoln, with his terrible grooming, was a perfect embodiment of this rough hasty time. Continue reading →

Stampede of Slaves from Hampton to Fort Monroe

7 Feb 2022 By in History Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Southern slaves emancipated by the movement of the Union troops fled into a war zone laced with hazards and potential catastrophes. Suddenly freed from their owners, many ran off without a chance to think, forsaking what shelter and sustenance they had had. They ran from places that were familiar, taking nothing, since for the most part, slaves were legally prohibited from owning property. They had their clothes on their backs. They ran from former masters toward the safety, the more certain freedom, that they understood Continue reading →

Freedmen Leaving the Plough

4 Feb 2022 By in History Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

During the Civil War, the movement of Union troops through the slave states brought emancipation to the enslaved.  This drawing by Union sketch artist A. R. Waud captures one such moment, as field slaves on horseback jubilantly greet advancing Union troops and leave  the plough they are hauling, knowing they are free.

Waud accompanied the Union army during virtually the whole of the Civil War, capturing the truths of the war with his drawing as no other medium could.  Thanks to his efforts and those of other documentarians, later Americans can catch glimpses of a wildly tumultuous period in black history, when millions who had endured the tragedy of bondage enjoyed self-possession for the first time.

Image: Waud’s “Negroes Leaving The Plough,”
published with descriptive text in Harper’s Weekly, March 26, 1864,
from this source.

A Storybook Dream of Reconstruction

2 Feb 2022 By in History Tags: , , , , , , ,

In the years immediately after the Civil War, the victors imagined that the US was on the verge of becoming a racially just society. For four long years, Americans had warred against one another over the issue of slavery and whether the states had a right to secede.  The Confederate states had staked everything on these ideas.  Their determination to cling to them became a matter of pride and at last shame and bitterness, because in the end, they could not carry the argument even with the aid of cannons and guns.  When the Union won in 1865, shouldn’t the argument have been over, too? Continue reading →

Where Democracy Is Greener

21 Sep 2021 By in International Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

Crouched form sculpted by an unknown Haitian artist, probably enslaved.


The Haitians at Del Rio

Over one weekend, some 15,000 people, mainly Haitians, suddenly appeared at the Mexican border of the US, wanting to come in.  They fled Haiti because Haiti is broken down.  Its resources are meager and mismanaged.  Its political culture is corrupt; its government, dysfunctional.  Its last democratically elected president, Jovenel Moïse, was mysteriously assassinated, possibly by a clique of private outside adventurers.  He left Haitian government in a precarious position, for he had been hollowing out and disabling its already puny civic institutions.  Haiti is a Somalia in the making, where utter lawlessness could follow a decline in stable control. Continue reading →