Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World by David Brion Davis

Author:David Brion Davis [Davis, David Brion]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2006-04-01T07:00:00+00:00

IT WAS ONLY IN 1993 that students of slave resistance and general readers interested in the Civil War learned of a hidden slave conspiracy that might have had a considerable impact on the war’s western theater if timed, as the slaves had hoped, with the Union’s capture of the lower Mississippi Valley. I refer to the publication of Winthrop D. Jordan’s widely praised book, Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry Into a Civil War Conspiracy.67 Since the planters and other authorities involved made no pretense of conducting a trial, there are far fewer sources than for Vesey’s plot. Indeed, the main document is a record kept by a Mississippi planter, Lemuel P. Conner, of slave testimony given to a secret Examination Committee at an isolated racetrack in Adams County, Mississippi, in September and October 1861, five to six months after the war began. The interrogation of the slaves, conducted apparently with severe torture, led to the execution of more than forty blacks, including several privileged drivers of family carriages.

Jordan’s account of what I take to be a major slave conspiracy at the beginning of the Civil War is a venture in historical therapy, an attempt to overcome generations of denial and repression concerning the nature of racial interaction in America and the ultimate meaning of the Civil War. Jordan’s twenty-odd years of detective work represent an effort to master silence—the curtain of silence that fell over the whites’ discovery of and response to the Mississippi plot. As we hear the aspirations, the pain, the rage of African Americans—as opposed to “the-happy-go-lucky, lovable ol’ darkies of magnolia-blossom historic legend”—we come to realize that tyranny is a central theme of American history, that racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture.68

As Jordan makes clear, however, the “lovable ol’ darkies” were something more than legend. He quotes from a remarkable letter sent by the daughter of a Mississippi planter-politician to her husband, a Confederate officer then at the front in Virginia:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.