9/8/23

 Friday, September 8, 2023

In bed at 9:30, up at 3:03, unable to sleep.  59°, high of 67°, cloudy day ahead, AQI-15😊, wind N at 11, 6-11/15, DPs in the 50s .  Sunrise at 6:23 at 81°E, sunset at 7:14, 12+51.

Wisconsin's minority-rule.  Two op-ed columns in this morning's NYT: Wisconsin Republicans Try to Subvert Democracy, Again by Michelle Goldberg and A Breathtaking Contempt for the People of Wisconsin by Jamelle Bouie, both about Republican planning to impeach and render a nullity supreme court justice Janet Prostasciewicz, who was elected to the court with an 11 point margin of victory over Daniel Kelly.  I am only surprised that the Wisconsin Republicans have not yet tried to revive the death penalty in the state, probably because Democratic gov Evers would veto the bill, although that would seem to be an inducement to proceed with it rather than a hindrance.  They are probably waiting for some heinous murder, preferably of a White cop by a Black or immigrant Hispanic perpetrator to serve as a stimulus of widespread animus.

Josiah Henson, Uncle Tom, and Reinhold Niebuhr.  In today's The Atlantic online a story by Clint Smith entitled "The Man Who Became Uncle Tom."  For a time in his life, Josiah Henson served as an overseer of other slaves.  "But Henson was not Uncle Tom. Despite being forever linked with the fictional character after Stowe revealed him as a source of inspiration, he longed to be recognized by his own name, and for his own achievements. And he publicly wrestled with the role he had played, as an overseer, in abetting slavery’s violence and cruelty.  Henson’s biography and legacy, I came to see, defy easy categorization. His is not a linear story of triumph over hardship. Rather, it is a story that reflects the complexity and moral incongruence that animated the lives of enslavers and shaped the lives of the enslaved. It is a story of how a man who was at once a victim and a perpetuator of slavery’s evils tried, and failed, and hoped, and evolved, and regretted, and mourned, and tried again. It is a story that reveals the impossibility of being a moral person in a fundamentally immoral system." (Emphasis mine)

Clint Smith is a staff writer on The Atlantic and is the author of "How the Word Is Passe", a book I read last year about how the facts of slavery and all it entailed are passed in different locales where slavery was the economic way of life.   Interesting learnings from his article: 

 (1) I hadn't known that slave labor overseers could be Black; I always assumed them to be White.  Henson was a Black overseer, working to curry favor with his enslaver. "Some historians have estimated that as many as two-thirds of overseers were Black. Even Uncle Tom, at the end of Stowe’s novel, is beaten to death by two Black slave drivers."

 (2)  Henson was charged with moving an entourage of 21 slaves to Kentucky, a slave state.  They went by boat on the Ohio River, with Ohio to the north, a free state.  Henson declined the advice he received in Cincinnati to debark and stay in Ohio to escape from his and his charges' enslavement.  He reported that he was moved by the Biblical exhortation to slave to obey their masters.  "Henson was a preacher on the Riley plantation, and his hesitancy stemmed in part from his religious conviction. “The duties of the slave to his master as appointed over him in the Lord, I had ever heard urged by ministers and religious men,” Henson said. Believing that God wanted him to be a man of his word, Henson told the other enslaved people in his party to get back on the boat—he had made a promise to bring them to Kentucky." 

 (3) In the sections of de Tocqueville's Democracy in America that I've been reading, he speaks the Ohio River as the dividing line between Slave States and Free States, and the starkly different conditions that obtained on the two banks of the river, Ohio prosperous and growing, Kentucky, stagnant.  

(4)  Henson wrote that he suffered for his complicity in the continued enslavement of his 21 charges: "Often since that day has my soul been pierced with bitter anguish, at the thought of having been thus instrumental in consigning to the infernal bondage of slavery, so many of my fellow-beings. I have wrestled in prayer with God for forgiveness."  I had thoughts of the Last Judgment and the Great Mirror.

(4) The article (and Henson's autobiography) illustrate how the enslaved Blacks were treated simply as chattels, assets, and property.  Henson's enslaver was in debt and his creditors were about to levy execution of a legal judgment against his slave.  Eventually, the enslaver did sell all the 21 Kentucky slaves to others, exempting from the sale only Henson and his family.  "Henson watched as the people he had led from Maryland to Kentucky were sold. He watched them cry. He watched them beg. He watched them get hauled away. He knew that this would not have happened but for his decision to leave Ohio. This was the price of the piety that [Harriet Beecher] Stowe so admired."

 (5) Henson described the effects of being 'sold South', a common economic occurrence by Tidewater (Delmarva) slave owners as tobacco markets weakened and cotton markets flourished, as I leaned in American Nations, by Colin Woodard (birthday gift from Sarah):

Two years later, accompanying Amos Riley’s 21-year-old son on a trip to New Orleans, Henson stopped in Vicksburg, Mississippi. He saw many of the people from Maryland whom Riley had sold. “It was the saddest visit I ever made,” he later said.

Four years in an unhealthy climate and under a hard master had done the ordinary work of twenty. Their cheeks were literally caved in with starvation and disease. They described their daily life, which was to toil half-naked in malarious marshes, under a burning, maddening sun, exposed to poison of mosquitoes and black gnats, and they said they looked forward to death as their only deliverance. Some of them fairly cried at seeing me there, and at the thought of the fate which they felt awaited me. Their worst fears of being sold down South had been more than realised. I went away sick at heart, and to this day the remembrance of that wretched group haunts me.