Guest Blogger: Mariah McGill

It is IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Mariah McGill (pictured right) as today's guest blogger.
Mariah is the Ford Foundation Fellow with the Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy at Northeastern University School of Law. She graduated from Northeastern University School of Law in May 2009. Mariah has held legal internships at the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care, the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and the United States District Court for the District of Vermont.
Over the course of her fellowship, Mariah has been involved in a variety of projects to further the implementation of economic, social and cultural rights in the United States. She served as Institute Coordinator for the two-day Institute held at Northeastern University School of Law on October 14 and 15, 2010, entitled “Beyond National Security: Immigrant Communities and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.” The Institute brought together lawyers, activists and scholars to discuss the treatment of noncitizens in the United States and resulted in the drafting of the “Boston Principles on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of Noncitizens.”
Mariah has also been documenting Vermont’s healthcare reform efforts. She published an article in Clearinghouse Review entitled “Using Human Rights to Move Beyond the Politically Possible,” which explains the role the Vermont Workers’ Center has played in advancing a human right to healthcare in the State of Vermont. Mariah's guest post below discusses the incorporation of human rights principles into universal healthcare legislation passed in Vermont in May 2010.
Mariah dedicates her post to Sojourner Truth (left), the former slave, preacher, abolitionist and women's rights activist (prior IntLawGrrls posts) of whom Mariah says:

I've always found her "Ain't I a Woman" speech delivered at the 1851 Akron Women's Rights Convention to be particularly inspiring.

Today we are honored to include Sojourner Truth in our list of foremothers just below the "visiting from..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

On February 11

On this day in ...
... 1802, Lydia Maria Child (right) was born in Medford, Massachusetts. Raised in an educated family, she'd published 2 novels and founded annual publication, Juvenile Miscellany, by age 25. Married a year later, she and her husband became active in the slavery abolition cause; she "startled conventional circles with her Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833)," and later became the editor of an abolitionist newspaper. She was a vocal opponent of capital punishment. A women's rights activist as well, another notable publication of hers was History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations (1835). Child "also helped Harriet Jacobs publish her compelling autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)." Child died in 1880. (photo credit) Perhaps the creation of hers that's best known today is the Thanksgiving ditty, "Over the River and through the Woods."

(Prior February 11 posts are here, here, and here.)

Forthcoming---American Social History: Slavery Moves From Being A Political Problem To A Moral Issue

America Aflame: How The Civil War Created A Nation, David Goldfield, Bloomsbury Press, 640 pages, color and b/w illustrations, notes, index, $35.00, March 15, 2011.

Publishers Weekly: "This sweeping, provocative history of America from the 1830s through Reconstruction has two grand themes. One is the importance of evangelical Protestantism, particularly in the North and within the Republican Party, in changing slavery from a political problem to an intractable moral issue that could only be settled by bloodshed. The second is the Civil War's transformation of America into a modern industrial nation with a powerful government and a commercial, scientific outlook, even as the postwar South stagnated in racism and backward-looking religiosity. UNC-Charlotte historian Goldfield (Still Fighting the Civil War) courts controversy by shifting more responsibility for the conflict to an activist North and away from intransigent slaveholders, whom he likens to Indians, Mexicans, and other targets viewed by white evangelical Northerners as "polluting" the spreading western frontier. Still, he presents a superb, stylishly written historical synthesis that insightfully foregrounds ideology, faith, and public mood The book is, the author writes, "neither pro-southern nor pro-northern," but rather "antiwar." Goldfield's narrative of the war proper is especially good, evoking the horror of the fighting and its impact on soldiers and civilians. The result is an ambitious, engrossing interpretation with new things to say about a much-studied conflagration."

Gilbert Taylor, Booklist: A specialist in southern history, Goldfield assesses Civil War causes and consequences chronologically from 1834 to the termination of Reconstruction. Why begin in 1834? That year a Boston mob destroyed a Catholic convent; for Goldfield, that event is symbolic of a toxic factor in the period’s politics, evangelical Protestantism. Arguing that it promoted eschatological mentalities on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, Goldfield, as his narrative navigates the 1850s, personifies evangelicals’ influence in Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe and in southern preachers who sermonized on God’s sanction for southern rights, slavery included. The overtly religious aren’t the sole culprits in Goldfield’s interpretation. He critiques the increasing inflexibility of such politicians as former Whigs Abraham Lincoln and Alexander Stephens. Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman stroll through Goldfield’s pages as eyewitnesses while he considers that the South’s fear for slavery’s future and for its exclusion from industrialization and westward expansion underlay variously argued causes of the war. But it is his emphasis on the religious angle that readers may find distinctive among Civil War overviews."

CWL is looking forward grabbing a copy ASAP; too bad the book is released a week after spring break but will have to be added to the May [post-finals week] reading list.

On January 17

On this day in ...
... 1861 (150 years ago today), despite freezing weather, hundreds rallied in Montreal to protest a Toronto court's acquiescence to American demands for the return of an escaped slave accused of killing a man. The accused, John Anderson (left), was among the estimated 20,000 escapees who'd fled to Canada since the 1850 enactment of a strict U.S. requiring northern states to return slaves. (photo credit) On appeal, another court would permit Anderson to remain in Canada.


(Prior January 17 posts are here, here, and here.)

News---200th Anniversary: Before the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, 1811 Slave Revolt

The Largest Slave Revolt in U.S. History Is Commemorated, Littice Bacon-Blood, The Times-Picayune, January 04, 2011,

More than a century before the first modern-day civil rights march, there was Charles Deslondes and his make-do army of more than 200 enslaved men battling with hoes, axes and cane knives for that most basic human right: freedom. The 200 year anniversary of the 1811 Slave Revolt in St. John and St. Charles Parishes that reverberated around the country because of the large number of enslaved people involved, the organized nature of it, and oddly enough -some say it finally demonstrated that all was not well among those held in bondage. Destrehan Plantation, along with Tulane University and African American Museum in Treme are hosting a yearlong look at the uprising that stared Jan. 8, 1811 through a series of events and exhibits. The commemoration starts with the exhibit opening at Destrehan on Jan. 8, 2011.

They spoke different languages, came from various parts of the United States, Africa and Haiti, and lived miles apart on plantations along the German Coast of Louisiana. Yet after years of planning at clandestine meetings under the constant threat of immediate death, they staged a revolt on Jan. 8, 1811, that historians say is the largest uprising of enslaved people in this country.

"Slavery was very harsh and cruel, but the slaves themselves were not mindless chattel with no aspirations and no basis for humanity,'' said John Hankins, executive director of the New Orleans African American Museum. "This revolt demonstrates that there were people willing to make the ultimate sacrifices to better not just themselves but other people."

To mark the 200 year anniversary of that revolt, Destrehan Plantation, in conjunction with Tulane University and the African American Museum, located in Treme, is organizing a yearlong look at the uprising that reverberated around the fledgling nation because of the large number of enslaved people involved, its military strategy and oddly enough, because it demonstrated that all was not well among those held in bondage.

"I don't think the United States as a whole understood that the enslaved black population were as unhappy as they were,'' said Hazel Taylor, the special project coordinator at Destrehan Plantation. "Slave owners had a tendency to say that (slaves) were happy. What this did was put awareness on the people who were being oppressed."

It occurred just a year before Louisiana gained statehood and 50 years before Louisiana and 10 other southern states voted to secede from the union in favor of forming the Confederacy. One of the central issues driving the secession, historians say, was an attempt to keep slavery legal because of its huge economic benefits for farmers. Still the battle remains largely unheard of outside historical circles, according to Taylor and others who hope the year's events will change that.

"These were real people and we have many of their names and we hope to encourage people to continue to study these brave individuals," Hankins said. "We want to provide the platform for a discourse about these moments in history and in this case a very important movement. What we want to do is put the Slave Revolt of 1811 into the national discourse to give it just due."

"It's an introduction to the subject, a museum exhibit that you can walk through and get a whole picture of what happened,'' Taylor said. While historians may differ on whether there was one specific catalyst for the uprising, the historical accounts of the events that unfolded on Jan. 8 are generally uniform. It started in LaPlace on the Woodland Plantation, led by Charles Deslondes, the son of an enslaved black woman and her white owner.

Deslondes, along with more than 200 others known mainly by first names, were headed to New Orleans in the hopes of joining with other revolution-minded free and enslaved black people. Historian Daniel Rasmussen spent two years researching the revolt as part of his senior thesis at Harvard University and has expanded his initial work into a recently published book, called "American Uprising: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt." According to Rasmussen, the revolt had been planned for years and was "highly organized."

"There were 11 separate leaders of the revolt, representing various different ethnic groups. In my book, I profile a few of these leaders, mainly Charles Deslondes, Kook, and Quamana. Kook and Quamana were Asante warriors brought over from Africa a mere five years before," Rasmussen said. "Charles Deslondes was the half-white son of a planter who had risen to the rank of driver, but was, actually, the ultimate sleeper cell, plotting revolt. These leaders took advantage of clandestine meetings in the cane fields and taverns of the German Coast, the slave dances in New Orleans, and the vast network of slave communications that extended throughout the Caribbean."

Full Text is continued at Times-Picayune

On November 29

On this day in ...
... 1781, a 3-day massacre began when crewmembers tossed 54 African persons held in slavery out of the ship Zong and into the Atlantic Ocean. More than 120 persons would perish in this manner -- undertaken by the ship's captain, who aimed to file an insurance claim for the at-sea loss. "Another ten, in a display of defiance at the inhumanity of the slavers, threw themselves overboard and, in the words of a contemporary account, 'leaping into the sea, felt a momentary triumph in the embrace of death.'" (credit for photo of commemorative plaque, unveiled in 2007 in Jamaica) The insurance claim would be denied, but no one would be prosecuted in the incident; however, it provoked antislavery abolitionists to greater action.


(Prior November 29 posts are here, here, and here.)

On October 28

On this day in ...
... 1830 (180 years ago today), the couple at right, Nancy and Josiah Henson, and their 4 children arrived in Canada, having escaped slavery in Maryland on the Underground Railroad. He would become pastor of a church in Dresden, Ontario, and start a technical school. He is said to have been the model for the lead character in Uncle Tom's Cabin, the antislavery novel published, as we've posted, by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

(Prior October 28 posts are here, here, and here.)

Look On! Suffragists

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy films.)

Just finished watching Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony. The several-years-old documentary is available on Netflix as well as in DVD.

It's worth watching, though best watched in several segments. By filmmaker Ken Burns, it 1st aired as a documentary series on PBS, which maintains an informational website. As is common in works of the kind, the repetition of static photos (necessary given how little motion picture footage there was back in the day), coupled with folksy-Americana music, can make one a bit drowsy at times.

But stick with it. The story's a good one -- one of which this 'Grrl knew precious little.

Told well are the life journeys of 2 very different persons, at one in their passion for changing the role of women in the United States:

► Elizabeth Cady Stanton (near right), a mother, wife, and writer, loved good food and took care to keep her hair curled.

► Susan B. Anthony (far right) was an austere, cerebral woman who never married.

They met in 1851 in Seneca Falls, New York, where 3 years earlier Stanton had convened the 1st-ever women's rights convention. From then on, the 2 (both IntLawGrrls foremothers) worked tirelessly together for women's rights -- especially, for the enfranchisement of women.

Particularly interesting in Not for Ourselves are the moments when that last, singular goal conflicted with others. The conflict saw the women, who'd been staunch activists on behalf of abolition, oppose post-Civil War Reconstruction Amendments because they kept from women what they granted to former slaves. And as the goal of women's suffrage grew nearer, they distanced themselves from African American women in an effort to shore up support in the South. Conflict also arose between the 2 women themselves. The 1890s publication, by an ever-more-radical Stanton, of The Woman's Bible drew censure from the movement she'd started -- a movement that Anthony chose to continue to lead notwithstanding its ouster of her longtime friend and ally. As a result Anthony, alone, appears on the 1st U.S. coin depicting a woman.

Both women would pass away more than a decade before their work took form in the 19th Amendment. This film serves as a reminder of their legacy.

Guest Blogger: Yvonne McDermott

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Yvonne McDermott (left) as today's guest blogger.
Yvonne is a Ph.D. candidate and doctoral research fellow at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland-Galway, where she is also a Lecturer on Children's Rights. Her research focuses on due process in international criminal proceedings, and her guest post below examines the jurisprudential doctrine of abuse of process, an ongoing issue in 3 International Criminal Court cases now proceeding against defendants from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Yvonne holds a Diploma in Irish (Gaeilge), a Bachelor of Corporate Law and a Bachelor of Laws from the National University of Ireland, Galway. In 2008, Yvonne earned an LL.M. cum laude in Public International Law from Leiden University in the Netherlands. Her scholarship includes the journal article Victims and International Law: Remedies in the Courtroom (2009), for which last year she was named the inaugural recipient of the Böhler Franken Koppe Wijngaarden advocaten Hague Academic Coalition Award for Young Professionals. Yvonne is the Managing Editor of the Oxford Reports in International Criminal Law.
Yvonne chooses to dedicate her post to 2 Irish women. Both "are perhaps better known for their associations with famous men," she writes, but both "deserve to be recognised in their own right." Yvonne continues:

Mary Ann McCracken [left; 1770-1886], the sister of executed United Irishman Henry Joy McCracken, was born in Belfast. She too was committed to social reform, and was a dedicated philanthropist and activist, committed to helping the poor of Belfast,
pioneering for equal rights for women and the abolition of slavery. There are descriptions of her at the age of 88 handing out leaflets at the docks of Belfast to those heading for the southern ports of the United States, where slavery was still practiced.
Maud Gonne [below right; 1866-1953] was born in England but her legacy is cemented as a pivotal player in the Irish struggle for independence. She was particularly involved in countering evictions and in famine relief in counties Connaught in the late 19th century. She was the founder of Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland), an Irish nationalist feminist organisation, in 1900, and was fiercely devoted to the promotion and preservation of Irish culture through the arts. In spite of her own achievements, Maud Gonne is often celebrated as the muse of William Butler Yeats and the mother of diplomat and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Seán MacBride.

Today Gonne (prior post) and McCracken join the foremothers' list just below our "visiting from..." map in the righthand column -- and thus also join what Yvonne aptly calls "the wonderful Mná na hÉireann so honoured on this blog before me." The "Women of Ireland" to whom she refers are foremothers Grace O'Malley/Gráinne Ní Mháille, Eva Gore-Booth, Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, and Constance Markiewicz.

Heartfelt welcome!

News---Preservationist Sleeps in Slave Cabins to Save Them

Sleep-Ins Staged To Save Slave Cabins: Historian Wants To Highlight Need To Preserve Structures, Bruce Smith, Associated Press, July 23, 2010

When Joe McGill spreads his sleeping bag on the floor of a slave cabin, he knows that spending the night there will conjure the specter of slavery. "If I were a firm believer in ghosts and spirits and things of that nature, I don't think I could do this," said McGill, a preservationist who is working to preserve buildings that are part of a past that many prefer to forget.

One night he heard dogs in the distance - a sound that recalled the search for runaways during slavery. He awoke on Mother's Day morning in a cabin thinking of children being sold from their mothers. Then he walked to the black graveyard on a plantation near Charleston. "I thought, this is why I'm doing this - for those people in those graves to give them a voice for what they endured," said McGill, 48.

McGill, a program officer with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, will spend Saturday night in a cabin at Hobcaw Barony near the coastal community of Georgetown. It will be the fifth night this year that he has slept on a cabin floor, trying to attract attention to the need to preserve the structures and the history they hold.

McGill, who is black, is also a reenactor with the 54th Massachusetts, the black Union regiment that fought at Battery Wagner on Charleston Harbor during the Civil War. He said spending the night in the cabins helps him connect with his ancestors. He first slept in a cabin at Boone Hall Plantation near Charleston a decade ago as part of a program for The History Channel entitled "The Unfinished Civil War" which focused on the dispute over the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina Statehouse. He returned to the cabin project this year, meeting reporters wherever he goes to draw attention to the buildings. He said preserving the cabins requires local efforts and his goal is to encourage people to save the ones that are left. The cabins where McGill has stayed - such as those at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens near Charleston - have already been restored. But many others have been neglected.

McGill started in May with a list from the state Historic Preservation Office showing cabins at about 30 sites. He feels his effort is already helping because since he started the sleep-ins, three more cabins have been identified. McGill plans to sleep later this summer in a cabin in Anderson, in upstate South Carolina, and this fall in cabins in Alabama. "There once were thousands of slave cabins in South Carolina, mainly near the coast in the state's largest plantations. Many have not survived because they were modestly constructed of wood or because people didn't want a connection with a dark chapter of history," he said.

"When it comes to slave cabins, you are talking about a part of history that some folks would rather forget," said McGill. "I come from a chain of thought that to know is better," he said, adding that just as a plantation house tells a story, so, too, does a modest cabin. Andy Chandler, who helps administer the National Register of Historic Places for the Historic Preservation Office, said there are no firm figures on how many cabins are still standing in the state.

There are about 1,300 register listings in South Carolina and some may include sites with cabins. But, he said, since some sites have been on the register for decades, some of the cabins may not be there any more. And people who recommend sites for inclusion on the registry don't always see slave cabins as worth mentioning. "In the preservation field we have always considered them significant," he said. "But the historic preservation community is a limited part of our larger community."

Text Source: KSBW
Top Image: A South Carolina Slave Cabin
Middle Image: South Carolina Slave Cabins
Bottom Image: South Carolina Slave Cabin

Transnational slavery

Over at Legal History Blog, Ariela Gross (below left), John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, points to a interesting trend -- a turn to comparative and transnational legal research on the history slavery. It's legal research with a twist:

The turn away from law in the social history of slavery in the 1970s through the 1990s coincided with a turn away from comparison. Returning to law, but from a bottom-up rather than top-down perspective, may allow us to escape some of the exceptionalism that has marked studies of the U.S. South – and the U.S. more generally – without falling prey to the overdrawn contrasts of an earlier generation of scholarship.

Full post, with names of scholars working in this area, is here.

On June 28

On this day in ...
... 1635 (375 years ago today), the Compagnie des Îles de l'Amérique established a French colony at Guadeloupe (right), a Caribbean archipelago about 10 times the size of Washington, D.C., where the explorer Christopher Columbus had landed in 1493. "By 1674, Guadeloupe was annexed to the Kingdom of France and a slave-based plantation was established." Britain and other countries wrestled for control of the territory, but French colonization was confirmed in the 1815 Treaty of Vienna, and slavery was abolished in 1848. Guadeloupe remains a French colony and so is a member of the European Union.

(Prior June 28 posts are here, here, and here.)

On June 17

On this day in ...
... 1876, Harriet Scott (left) died in St. Louis nearly 2 decades after issuance of the U.S. Supreme Court judgment in Scott v. Sandford (1857), in which she and her co-plaintiff husband, Dred Scott, had lost their suit to avoid being returned to slavery. The Court held that no one descended from African ancestors held as slaves could be U.S. citizens; thus the Scotts were denied the privilege of litigation in U.S. courts. The Scotts had been freed months after the decision. He worked as a hotel porter till his death from tuberculosis in 1858; she was a laundrywoman. As posted at Legal History Blog, she's the subject of a 2009 biography, Mrs. Dred Scott, by Iowa Law Professor Lea VanderVelde (right).

(Prior June 17 posts are here, here, and here.)

On June 4

On this day in ...
... 1917, the 1st Pulitzers were awarded, and the all-male board gave a prize to women won in 1 of the 4 categories. The winning book in the Biography or Autobiography category was Julia Ward Howe (1916), written by Laura E. Richards (left) (credit) and Maude Howe Elliott assisted by Florence Howe Hall. All 3 were daughters of the subject of the 2-volume work, the slavery abolitionist and women's suffragist at right (credit) who, as we've posted: in 1862, wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," an anthem that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln said precipitated the Civil War, then 8 years later wrote an antiwar poem that launched Mother's Day. Ward Howe died at age 91 about 5 years before her daughters earned the prize.

(Prior June 4 posts are here, here, and here.)

Intercountry adoptions, a conversation

(Part 1 of a 3-part IntLawGrrls guest contribution, an interdisciplinary conversation on intercountry adoptions between Professor Michele Bratcher Goodwin and Dr. Patricia Y. Jones. Inspired by a recent news story, it follows the publication this February of a book Michele edited, Baby Markets: Money and the New of Creating Families)
United States and Russian officials have been discussing what to do about U.S. adoptions from Russia. The meetings come on the heel of the story that Justin Hansen, a 7-year-old Russian boy, was sent back to Russia by his adoptive mother, Torry Hansen, a nurse from Tennessee. While most of the attention in the case has focused on her behavior, little has been explored about the complex issues associated with Russian adoptions.
Russia and former Soviet bloc countries have been a draw for Americans. Couples from the United States adopt more Russian children than any other nation.

But this story made headline news because of a controversial, and rather unorthodox decision made by his adoptive mother, along with his adoptive grandmother: They sent him back to Russia, with an “unaccompanied minor” ticket and a note. Their personal decision has become the subject of international policy and adoption politics, drawing significant scrutiny to international adoptions, and raising questions as to why Americans pass over plenty of children available for adoption in the United States. Critics and child advocacy groups wonder why the women did not try harder.

We endeavor here to discuss the underlying issues.

Patricia: It’s reported that the adoptive mother only had “Justin” in her home for six months. That's hardly enough time for either parent or child to get beyond any adjustment issues to a new home, family and culture. While we don’t know the full story and what she did try, sending him back is another rejection, and one that can be psychologically traumatizing. There are so many messages in that: “You are unloveable,” “You are not wanted,” “You are not worth investing in.”

When we have biological children, we don’t know what we are going to get, and we don’t get to send them back. The hopeful aspiration is that the commitment to adopted children will be the same as one we would have to a biological child.

Michele: In their defense, the mother and daughter pair asserted that they tried everything in their power to integrate the child into his new American life -- including changing his name from Artyom, and giving him a loving home. But ultimately they feared for their safety. They allege that the adoption agency lied to them about his emotional and mental health. In the note sent with the child, the adoptive mother wrote:

'This child is mentally unstable. He is violent and has severe psychopathic issues/behaviors. I was lied to and misled by the Russian Orphanage workers and director regarding his mental stability and other issues.'

Patricia: How would you (or your child) feel if you were taken to Russia? Given strange food, isolated from anyone who spoke your language? Told “you are lucky to be here” in a language you did not understand? And stripped of your name -- how was that understood by the child? A name is a source of identity and connection to culture. Stripping persons of their name is a means of culturally isolating them, and basically communicating that their culture or nationality is not acceptable. It was a common practice during slavery. While a loving home may have been the intent of these women, one could question the loving home premise. I am not sure the child felt loved; in fact his behavior suggests he was very unhappy and not adjusting. Because the adoptive mother did not know the child’s primary language, she was incapable of communicating with “Justin” about his discomfort.

As a psychologist, I am concerned that the mother was unfamiliar with her adoptive child’s native language. At 7 this is his primary language. A thorough assessment would have noted the language barrier as possibly interfering with the adequate parenting of this child. A good home assessment would also include some exploration of the parent’s familiarity with, affinity for, and capacity to affirm the child’s culture. The quality of preparation for prospective parents to adopt transnationally varies from agency to agency.
Michele: This case and others raise a number of urgent issues about international adoptions, including the:

► Exploitation of children,

► Vulnerability of adoptive parents,

► Market structure of adoptions, which incentivizes placements at all costs,

► Morality of “returning children” as if they are items from a store, and

► Lack of capacity for some adoptive parents to meet the challenges of raising children from different cultures.

(Still to come: Part 2 & Part 3)

CWL on "The Blade Was At My Own Breast": A Runaway Slave Mother Kills Her Child

'The Blade Was At My Own Breast': Slave Infanticide in 1850s Fiction, Sarah N. Roth, American Nineteenth Century History, 8:2, June 2007, 169-185.

Anti-slavery authors searched for events to fictionalize so as to heighten the agitation of a northern readers. In January 1856 such an event occurred. In a year that included John Brown's Pottawatomie Massacre and Preston Brooks, one of South Carolina's representatives, attempted homicide of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, other attempted murders and a homicide occurred. On January 27, Margaret Garner attacked her four children and killed one of them, a two year old. Garner and her children had runaway from Kentucky but were surrounded by slave catchers in Ohio. It was a front page story in the North but never appeared in print in the South.

Garner's infanticide caused a dilemma for Northern authors. Would white, middle class readers have sympathy for a murdering mother? Having committed an 'unnatural act' such as killing her own child, would Margaret Garner's story turn audiences away from slave mothers? If slave mothers were savages then why should they be set free on Northern soil?

Later that summer, Harriet Beecher Stowe author of Uncle Tom's Cabin published Dred. It contained an instance when a slave mother killed her two children. Other authors did attempt to portray such an instance in their own fiction. Race, femininity, motherhood, enslavement and violence directed toward children became entwined in these novels.

Garner herself was of West African descent, lived her entire life as a slave, and had murdered one of her own children. Northern readers were far removed from her.
Authors added attributes to their fictional Garner in order to develop sympathy in the readers. In two novels, Garner became nearly white with only a tincture of black blood. In other stories Garner's character spoke of salvation of death for the female child who would later be sexually assaulted by a white slaveholder. In the Victorian ante-bellum world a mother who murdered a child violated the sacred charge given to all mothers to protect their children.

Authors stressed that the Garner character was fulfilling rather than rejecting this sacred charge. With only one option of putting a child out of harm's, mothers slew their children. Infanticide was not an act of beast-like violence but one of desperate sacrifice. Women characters in antebellum fiction could engage in violence in only one way---suicide. Suicide was self-determination. In suicide, women remained victims.

A large number of antebellum fictional characters who were female slaves, committed suicide. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Lucy drowned herself when she learned her child had been sold away from her. In another story, a female slave drank poison rather than submit to her new owner, a rapist. In Another story, a female slave threatened suicide after her rescuer from slavery attempted rape. When mothers killed children to prevent the child's destruction at the hands of a rapist, they were also committing suicide by suppressing their innate maternal instincts to preserve the child.

Women in antebellum sentimental novels resorted to violence to protect their chastity, their faith and the safety of their child. Violence became logical when the choice was made in the face of abuse and harm by a slaveholder. Yet during the course of the plot, slaveholders who attacked women and young adults were not assaulted by women. The slaveholders were undone by other circumstances in the story.

Traditional abolitionist images of women as victims were there in antebellum stories. Yet they became more assertive and defiant in the face of violent authority.

Text by CWL.

Top Image Source: Newspaper Clipping

Second Image Source: Painting

On April 27

On this day in ...
... 1848, the Conseil of the provisional government of France issued Décret relatif à l'abolition de l'esclavage dans les colonies et les possessions françaises, which outlawed slavery in all French territories. The decree stated in part:

A l'avenir, même en pays étranger, il est interdit à tout Français de posséder, d'acheter ou de vendre des esclaves, et de participer, soit directement, soit indirectement à tout trafic ou exploitation de ce genre. Toute infraction à ces dispositions entraînera la perte de la qualité de citoyen français.

That is,

In the future, even in foreign countries, every French person is forbidden to possess, to purchase, or to sell slaves, and to participate directly or indirectly in the trafficking or exploitation of slaves. Every infraction of this provision will be subject to loss of French citizenship.

This was not France's 1st go-round on the issue: Slavery had been abolished in 1794, during the French Revolution, but then was reinstated in 1802 by Napoleon. (credit for photo of 1998 commemorative stamp)



(Prior April 27 posts are here, here, and here)

Human Rights in My Backyard: Feeling Blue About Being Purple

My home state of Virginia is supposed to be a purple state, but it hasn’t felt very purple lately.
On Wednesday, the Virginia General Assembly voted to restrict state funding for abortions when the health of the mother is at risk. According to the Washington Post:

On a 20 to 19 vote, the Democratic-led Senate agreed to an amendment proposed by McDonnell (R) that would limit state funding for abortions to those performed in cases of rape or incest or when the life of the mother is at risk. Nothing in state law previously prohibited Medicaid-funded abortions in instances when the health of the mother was in jeopardy.

The proposal to restrict state funding came from Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, a staunch conservative who took office on January 16, 2010. Abortion rights supporters fear that the measure will affect all Medicaid abortions at public hospitals in the state except those that fit into the narrow exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother. This latest insult to women’s rights comes on the heels of McDonnell’s comments about a week ago, in which he declared April to be Confederate History Month and intentionally omitted anti-slavery language in his Proclamation. He infuriated civil rights leaders in the state and attempted to defend his actions by minimizing the role of slavery in the war. McDonnell’s efforts to mobilize the conservative base in this purple state may do real harm in the lives of women and people of color in the state – and may, regrettably move us from purple to red.

News: Confederate History Month, Slavery, Treason and Courage

Confederate History Storm: Slavery, Treason, And True Southern Courage, Allen C. Guelzo, Christian Science Monitor, April 9, 2010.

Governor Bob McDonnell’s controversial proclamation of Confederate History Month should help us remember the South’s rebellion for what it really was.

“I am no minister of hate,” wrote the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1871. But as he watched Northerners in the years after the Civil War turn to teary-eyed embraces of their former Confederate enemies at postwar reunions and veterans’ meetings, he was appalled. “May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget the difference between ... those who fought to save the Republic and those who fought to destroy it.”

Douglass can be forgiven a certain measure of resentment toward the Confederacy. After all, he was born a slave in Maryland, escaped as a runaway in 1838, turned to a public career as an abolitionist newspaper editor and lecturer, and sent two sons to fight in the Union Army. But he had a point that Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) might have been wise to ponder before Tuesday, when he proclaimed April as Virginia’s “Confederate History Month.” Just what is it, exactly, that Governor McDonnell is proposing to honor?

McDonnell’s proclamation is actually a comparatively bland statement, asking Virginians to acknowledge those “who fought for their homes and communities and Commonwealth in a time very different than ours today.” Absent were any endorsements of states’ rights and the “Lost Cause.” It was simply a declaration that Virginia’s decision to secede from the United States and attach itself to the Confederacy in 1861 “should be studied, understood and remembered by all Virginians.”

The problem lies with something else McDonnell airbrushed out of his initial proclamation: slavery. The proclamation describes the Civil War as “a four year war between the states for independence.” That is true, but it’s like saying that the Titanic sank because it filled up with water.

The proclamation only raises the question of why Virginia and the other confederate states should have yearned for independence in the first place. Twist and turn as we may, the answer to that question always comes back to this: the enslavement of 3.9 million black people. This is not to say that other factors didn’t come into play.

The Southern states had serious grievances with their Northern counterparts over economic policies. Foreign visitors and commentators noted that Southerners had developed a distinctly different regional culture. And there was a long history of disagreements about how much political autonomy individual states possessed within the federal Union created by the Constitution. But if slavery was not the only issue that went into the making of the Confederacy, it was unquestionably the paramount one.

None of the others would ever have brought matters in 1861 to civil war had it not been for the razor-edge given them by slavery. And you do not have to dig very far into the letters, diaries, and speeches of Confederate soldiers and civilians to find out how important the defense of slavery and white racial supremacy was to them.

“Slavery is the only base on which a stable republican government ever was or ever will be built,” announced a Nashville newspaper on the eve of secession. Although only a third of white Southern households owned slaves at the outbreak of the Civil War, as many as 50 percent of Southern households had owned a slave at some time.

Even those who did not own slaves regarded slavery as the bulwark of white supremacy: “The strongest pro-slavery men in this States,” boasted a Louisville newspaper editor, “are those who do not own one dollar of slave property.” And slaveholders and the sons of slaveholding families were generously represented in the Confederate armies. In Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, rates of slaveholding ran as high as 47 percent.

Defending the slave system is scarcely something Virginians can look back on with pride. But even less admirable was the willingness of Virginians to commit treason as part of that defense. Treason is not an easy word to use these days. In modern ears, it has the ring of jingoism and Joe McCarthy, and in our multicultural reverence for diversity, we find it’s become easier to label as “dissenters” people who ask God to damn America or who sell their country’s weapons blueprints to the highest bidder.

But what other word are we to use for American soldiers (like Robert E. Lee) who repudiated the oath he had sworn to defend the Constitution? Or for US senators (like Jefferson Davis) who raised their hand against the flag they were born under and brought on the deaths of 620,000 Americans?

And why is Virginia’s governor celebrating secession, when 31 of Virginia’s westernmost counties in 1861 balked at joining the Confederacy and formed, first, a pro-Union government-in-exile, and then a completely new state of West Virginia in 1863?

If treason has become too embarrassing a word, then so has loyalty, and we may as well forget the courage of the west Virginians, as well as those 300,000 other Southerners from Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and (yes!) Virginia who stayed faithful to the Union and fought in its ranks during the Civil War.

We are now within a year of the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War, and unfortunately, McDonnell’s proclamation has been the most prominent reminder of that anniversary. Congress has failed to create a national commission like the one it authorized for the Civil War Centennial, and the states that have formed local Sesquicentennial Commissions have generally stacked them with political hacks and low-visibility museum managers.

The brouhaha over the proclamation forced McDonnell to issue a belated codicil to his proclamation Wednesday, apologizing for the omission of slavery. But this will probably only have the result of forcing celebrations of the Sesquicentennial further into the shadows, as it dawns on the politicos that any public mention of the Civil War is going to alienate some constituency. The only thing worse, as Frederick Douglass might have warned us, than remembering the Civil War wrongly, is not to remember it at all.

Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College, and the author of “Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President.”

Text Source: Christian Science Monitor, April 9, 2010

Image Source: Top, Gilbert Gaul; Middle and Bottom, Don Troiani

On April 13

On this day in ...
... 1828, a 7th child, Josephine, was born into the Grey family (relatives of the Prime Minister who leant his name to Earl Grey tea) in Northumberland, England. In 1852 she married George Butler. Josephine Butler (right) had been a feminist since her 20s, and she and her husband were radicals for their times, opposing slavery and supporting the Union during America's Civil War. After the couple's only daughter died, Josephine began to do charity work. She's best known for her campaigns to improve the health and lives of prostituted children and women, by taking part in international campaigns against human trafficking and by eliminating laws that discriminated against prostitutes. Butler, who chronicled her work in a memoir entitled Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (1896), died in 1906.

(Prior April 13 posts are here, here, and here)