The history of British slave ownership has been buried: now its scale can be revealed

[Demeter]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/12/british-history-slavery-buried-scale-revealed?CMP=share_btn_tw

A new BBC documentary tells how a trove of documents lays bare the names of Britain’s 46,000 slave owners, including relatives of Gladstone and Orwell..AND BEN AFFLECK'S ANCESTOR...This year history gate-crashed modern America in the form of a 150-year-old document: a few sheets of paper that compelled Hollywood actor Ben Affleck to issue a public apology and forced the highly regarded US public service broadcaster PBS to launch an internal investigation.

The document, which emerged during the production of Finding Your Roots, a celebrity genealogy show, is neither unique nor unusual. It is one of thousands that record the primal wound of the American republic – slavery. It lists the names of 24 slaves, men and women, who in 1858 were owned by Benjamin L Cole, Affleck’s great-great-great-grandfather. When this uncomfortable fact came to light, Affleck asked the show’s producers to conceal his family’s links to slavery. Internal emails discussing the programme were later published by WikiLeaks, forcing Affleck to admit in a Facebook post: “I didn’t want any television show about my family to include a guy who owned slaves. I was embarrassed.”

It was precisely because slaves were reduced to property that they appear so regularly in historic documents, both in the US and in Britain. As property, slaves were listed in plantation accounts and itemised in inventories. They were recorded for tax reasons and detailed alongside other transferable goods on the pages of thousands of wills. Few historical documents cut to the reality of slavery more than lists of names written alongside monetary values. It is now almost two decades since I had my first encounter with British plantation records, and I still feel a surge of emotion when I come across entries for slave children who, at only a few months old, have been ascribed a value in sterling; the sale of children and the separation of families was among the most bitterly resented aspects of an inhuman system.

Slavery resurfaces in America regularly. The disadvantage and discrimination that disfigures the lives and limits the life chances of so many African-Americans is the bitter legacy of the slave system and the racism that underwrote and outlasted it. Britain, by contrast, has been far more successful at covering up its slave-owning and slave-trading past. Whereas the cotton plantations of the American south were established on the soil of the continental United States, British slavery took place 3,000 miles away in the Caribbean...

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[DamnYankeeInHouston]

1. It wasn't just the English or Americans.

My great great great grandfather was kidnapped as a boy by the French in the early 1700s and forced to work as a military slave. He was somewhat fortunate. When Sweden asked a Frenchman to come be its king, my ancestor went with him. Sweden did not have slavery so he was, to some extent, then free. We don't know where he came from. We assume Libya. We don't know what his name was - only the name assigned to him by the French. I often wonder what my real surname is.

[DavidDvorkin]

2. "Wasn't"?

I assume that's what you meant to type.

[DamnYankeeInHouston]

3. Thank you. I fixed it.

[hedda_foil]

4. Do you mean that his owner was Marshal Bernadotte?

He was a great confidante of Napoleon. I believe he married Napoleon's mistress. I bet I'm not the only old broad here that read a romantic/romanticized novel titled Desiree, about her as a teenager.

[BlueMTexpat]

5. Always loved that novel!

Glad to see a kindred spirit!

[DamnYankeeInHouston]

11. I don't know the name of his owner.

He was given the name Charles Antoine Francois La Fleur by the French - a pretty long and flowery name for a slave. La Fleur was a common military name. I don't know if he had a specific owner or was owned by the French army as a whole. He travel with a French guy who was asked to be the king of Sweden. I'd have to look through my family papers to retrieve the name of that guy. I thought it was strange that Sweden would ask some French guy to be their king. His surname became Zamore in Sweden. Zamore meant "the Moore." In Sweden, he was a kettle drummer. Kettle drums and trumpets were used to send signals to the far flung troops. Sweden liked to have a dark guy on a white horse to presumably scare the Finns, Danes and Norwegians. One of his sons had four wives (the perils of child birth) and sixteen children. Two of his children came to America - one was my great grandfather. He was not accepted by the Swedish population of Boston because he was so dark. The Swedes had learned racism in America. This family has one of the longest generations in all of Europe. My ancestor who was a slave lived in the 1700s. but that was only five generations before me. In 2001, I went with twelve family members to a family reunion in Sweden. It was an amazing experience. We all look white now unless we marry an Arab or Italian. Then the past shows up clearly in the children. We were followed by a Danish film crew doing a documentary on Africans in Scandinavia. Our Swedish cousins had the best documented history. The most touching part was being shown the hills still called Zamore Hills. My ancestor would face south to Africa and play his kettle drums. That really got to me. He never got to see his family again. I loved telling people that I was going to my Black family reunion in Stockholm and I've threatened to change my name to Anne X since I'll never know what my real last name is. I feel for all those who still suffer the abuse of slavery today.

[DamnYankeeInHouston]

14. My brother, who is fluent in French after living in Paris,

was very excited when he read this novel. He thought that maybe the Zamore in the story might be our ancestor. But it turns out that Zamore was a very common name given to Africans in Europe since it means "the Moore."

[BlueMTexpat]

6. You're absolutely correct that it wasn't just the British

and us. What a fascinating and wonderful heritage you have!

France continued with its slave trade - despite the republican ideals of the French Revolution in 1789 - until the first third of the 19th century. http://discoveringbristol.org.uk/slavery/routes/places-involved/europe/france/

For some interesting background about anti-slavery moments generally, check out Anti-Slavery International - the oldest human rights NGO in the world. It dates from 1839, but had precursor organizations, primarily affiliated with prominent Quakers, that worked very hard to abolish slavery from the 1700s. http://www.antislavery.org/english/who_we_are/default.aspx

Precursor abolitionist organizations were in part responsible for the Slave Trade Act of 1807 that abolished Britain's trade in slavery. http://abolition.e2bn.org/slavery_113.html

Their work continued through another precursor organization, the Anti-Slavery Society - officially the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions (SMEG) - that played a major part in the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. http://www.anti-slaverysociety.addr.com/huk-1833act.htm

Thomas Jefferson, himself a slaveholder, signed the Abolition of the Slave Trade bill in 1807. http://abolition.nypl.org/essays/us_constitution/5/ The bill did not stop slavery in the US, as we know only too well, but it did abolish the importation of slaves into "any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States." From then on, US slavery was institutionalized and did not depend on imports. Every one of us who has US ancestors dating back to the 1700s and earlier likely has at least one slaveholder in the bunch, I'm sorry to say.

For myself, I learned only last year that one of my earliest US ancestors from Wales who owned land in PA (which really surprised me!) had at least four slaves - noted in property records - who helped farm his land. And if any have seen the AMC TV series TURN: Washington's Spies, [http://www.amc.com/shows/turn] you can see that slavery existed in New England as well at that time. In fact, the British proclaimed that any slaves who ran away and fought for the British army would be freed when the war was over. http://www.revolutionary-war.net/slavery-and-the-revolutionary-war.html

Spain and Portugal both imported African slaves into Latin America. http://www.realhistories.org.uk/articles/archive/slavery-in-latin-america.html

And this is just the history of the Americas and Western European nations!

Anti-Slavery International very actively continues its work today. It is a global tragedy that this work is still necessary. http://www.antislavery.org/english/what_we_do/default.aspx

[Demeter]

8. It wsn't just in the distant past, either

There's modern slavery in much of the world, including pockets of victims in America.

And there's so many variations on it, as well, some of which aren't officially recognized as "slavery" by name---yet!

[BlueMTexpat]

17. Too true, which is one reason

why anti-slavery Human Rights NGOs are still absolutely necessary.

This is what the Anti-Slavery Society has to say about slavery generally in today's world. http://www.antislavery.org/english/slavery_today/

[DamnYankeeInHouston]

13. Thank you for all of this information you have shared.

I added more details to my ancestor's history in case you are interested.

[BlueMTexpat]

15. Thanks for letting me know.

I read your posts up thread ... as I said before, truly fascinating!

Here's more about Jean Bernadotte, Napoleon I's Marshal, who was asked to become the King of Sweden and whose descendants still rule there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Bernadotte

[hedda_foil]

16. Please add more details. Your ancestor's history is amazing.

[DamnYankeeInHouston]

18. I don't know how to post videos or photos.

I have a copy of the family history book in Swedish with a short translation into English from when we visited. I have two large family trees; one is from 1973 and a much larger one from 2001. I also have the Danish video with a text translation.

[Joe Chi Minh]

7. Corsair pirates used to raid British and continental coastal villages.

an interesting quote from the article linked below it:

"Thousands of Dutch, Germans and British 'languished for years in the chains of Barbary,' without the aid of organised clergy or state funds for their release. England set aside its 'Algerian Duty' from customs income to finance redemptions, but much of this was diverted to other uses. Large-scale ransomings - like the one headed by Edmund Casson that freed 244 men, women, and children in 1646 - were rare, with the result that Protestant Britons were often more demoralised and likely to die in captivity than European Catholics. As one ex-slave noted:

'All of the nations made some shift to live, save only the English, who it seems are not so shiftful as others, and... have no great kindness one for another. The winter I was in [captivity], I observ'd there died above twenty of them out of pure want.'"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/white_slaves_01.shtml

The more things change, the more they stay the same. If our British Tories could change the wage-slaves they've turned much of the population into, into slaves, period, they surely would. This is what they must be working towards, simply because they don't know how to stop, and what Pope Francis is inveighing against.

One of my ancestors owned a slave ship, a man called Blathwayte, who was a co-worker and colleague of Pepys at the Admiralty's offices, and I imagine would have had slaves, but there's nothing I can do about that. A vast number of African Americans are descended from William the Conqueror, so their ancestors pretty much enslaved most of the English poor under their rule. Not that any of this could possibly justify slavery. Then or now.

[Nitram]

9. But nowhere in the world was slavery practiced on the scale it was in the Southern U.S.

Documents from the Confederacy indicate the South wanted to expand their slave-holding empire into the Caribbean and Latin America.

[Joe Chi Minh]

10. I doubt if it was ever as vile elsewhere, either. Taking their children with their tender

consciences on a picnic, to watch a probably innocent African American being castrated, suspended above a fire and then lynched seems below any abyss of depravity imaginable.

And some of their more benighted descendants choose to name a new university hall after a character who was doubtless in the thick of it all. In their little Shangri-La of pathological hatred, they don't seem to consider what the rest of the world would think of them, if only it knew half of what the lynchers got up to.

[DamnYankeeInHouston]

19. Nothing is as warped to me as slave owners enslaving their own children.