An invitation

[Dave Grubb]

I imagine most know at least some of the story of Sally Heming, sister-in-law, slave, companion and mistress of Thomas Jefferson and how she accompanied Jefferson to France to look after the Jefferson children and tend to Jefferson's "needs".

Today I am confronted, with what seemed to be wide spread, another similar story of Abigail (no known last name), a slave to John Jay and also taken to France during his service there.

I encourage you to take 15 minutes to meet Abigail and "touch" her life.

I do not often use the audio version, but I did for this and was well rewarded.

[Mike]

Interesting read, unfortunately without a real finding of what the author sought.

[Dave Grubb]

What comes across to me is the same thing that confronts me often as I read these accounts and that is the fact that almost without exception these people were dehumanized,
Abigail was taken from her "home" here to France,leaving family behind. At some point Jay's wife wrote a letter asking if she still had a husband but if there was a response it has been lost.
The very fact that she died in France but no record of her person remains,
The apparent lack of concern by Franklin et al only serves to put an explanation point on this loss of human dignity.
I find it terribly sad.

[UTAH]

Like many Utahans, I've researched my family history. As far as I know, there's no interactions between slaves and family members. I hope that bodes well, but can one really know what relatives did before they came to the USA? And, even if we did find connections to slavery, what would that mean in our current day?

Hunter

[mgrist]

Like many Utahans, I've researched my family history. As far as I know, there's no interactions between slaves and family members. I hope that bodes well, but can one really know what relatives did before they came to the USA? And, even if we did find connections to slavery, what would that mean in our current day?

Hunter

Some can't let go of the past. History from the beginning until now is sad and a abomination to the fine Christain life that most think they lead now. I think a lot and read a lot about the Indians we mascaraed and the Irish that were starved to death and the Jews. The Vikings and Stalin and the despots in Asia and Africa that randomly killed millions upon millions of people, how many others have been murdered etc... why horror and sorrow is almost always applied to Blacks alone is Ludacris. I guess it's a case of the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

[mgrist]

And no Dave I mean to take nothing from your post and I'm not stalking you I'd have written the same thing no matter who wrote it. So sorry if I have some how diminished your post.
I will say that I'd have been much happier being a rich mans mistress than picking cotton. Separation was common it's hard but it happened whether you were picking cotton or traveling the world.

[Dave Grubb]

And no Dave I mean to take nothing from your post and I'm not stalking you I'd have written the same thing no matter who wrote it. So sorry if I have some how diminished your post. I will say that I'd have been much happier being a rich mans mistress than picking cotton. Separation was common it's hard but it happened whether you were picking cotton or traveling the world.

I took no offense. You seem to think that I have a motive (white guilt?) for sharing this---that is not the case. I had no part in slavery and feel no need to wrap myself in the guilt which should be born by those who did---although, I also accept that few of them ever gave it any thought. I can both feel sorrow at the inhumane treatment (no matter how well fed or clothed) of slaves and at the sametime realize the shame that should accompany it is not mine.

I have studied the history of slavery (it goes back to the beginning of recorded history) to possibly look at that rich man's mistress in a different way than I once would have. Her "condition" is not fully defined by her physical trappings, look more deeply and (in the case of a slave) look at her family who she is now separated from, possibly including her children---who may be sold off in her absence and never learn where they have gone. I can go on, but you get the picture. I can't fix that, but I can learn from it.

Thomas Jefferson has been (and remains) one of my most highly regarded of our founding fathers---but I am unable to reconcile, or forgive his treatment of Sally Hemings. Thomas Jefferson was a brilliant man, a critical thinker, why didn't he see his treatment of Sally Hemings as denying her humanity? I know----it was acceptable in that day---I'm sorry, that doesn't justify someone like Jefferson not realizing what he was doing.

Please let me put that "relationship" in context. Sally was his sister-in-law (1/2 sister of Jefferson's wife who died), she was also his slave, who he inherited from his late wife's estate. Sally was "property".
She accompanied him to France to care for his children. Once back in the United States, Sally took up residence at Monticello---not in the "big house" but in a small one room house on "slave row".

By all accounts she would go to that small house to sleep---never remaining in Jefferson's bed---where they jointly created six children---who also became slaves---and more property! Nearing death Jefferson gave his children their freedom---but Sally was too valuable to chance her leaving and it was left to Jefferson's first two children, born to Sally's half sister, to grant Sally her freedom.

To the greater shame of Jefferson, he dealt daily with learned people who avidly disapproved of slavery and spoke openly to it's inhumanness.

I am left with a conundrum, on one hand I have tremendous admiration for the man who wrote:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

...and could concurrently compartmentalize Sally Hemings as "property", totally without humanness

I am sorrowful for the treatment of slaves and I acknowledge that sorrow, but the shame is not mine, the shame is on those who refused to see slavery for what it was.

As a bit of a postscript: Sally was only 1/4 black---she was the progeny of a long line of "used" women. Sally's mother was the property of Jefferson's father-in-law, who in turn impregnated Sally's mother. Sally's mother was the progeny of a slave woman and a white ship's captain (ie slaver).



Slavery continues to this day and continues to be a black mark on humanity to this day

[mgrist]

I am left with a conundrum, on one hand I have tremendous admiration for the man who wrote: etc...

I understand Dave but I feel I can admire the good and condemn the obvious evil if you will. I've met very few people who were perfect so to speak. We all have different opinions on all things slavery is obvious, it's wrong. But were it not for that there would be something else. Was he a great man with faults or an evil man that had some good in him? There are far to many evils for me to judge.
As I've mentioned a hundred times my dad taught me to hate from day one, his opinions were shared by a lot of people 70 years ago. I don't think I was evil because of what I was taught by my dad and people in general, but it has taken a long time for me to change my views by using my own mind instead of my dads. My home wasn't a democracy.

[Dave Grubb]

This was extracted from today's NYT---slavery lives:

BERLIN — A German court on Tuesday convicted an Islamic State fighter for crimes against humanity and war crimes for tying up a 5-year-old Yazidi girl he had bought as a slave in Iraq, and leaving her in scorching heat to die of thirst.

The 29-year-old man, identified only as Taha Al-J. under German privacy laws, was sentenced to life in prison and ordered to pay 50,000 euros, or about $57,000, in compensation to the girl’s mother, who was a co-plaintiff in the case and was present when the verdict was read.

It was the first genocide conviction of a fighter for the Islamic State, which systematically persecuted the Yazidi ethnic group in Iraq, according to Christoph Koller, the judge overseeing the trial in Frankfurt. During its reign, the Islamic State killed thousands of Yazidi men, and kidnapped and forced into slavery thousands of Yazidi women and girls.

“This is the moment Yazidis have been waiting for,” Amal Clooney, a human rights lawyer and a member of the mother’s legal team, said in a statement. “To finally hear a judge, after seven years, declare that what they suffered was genocide.”

Even though neither the victim nor the killer were German, and the crime occurred in Falluja, Iraq, the trial was held in Germany on the principle of universal jurisdiction, which German courts have been using to try people accused of war crimes in countries like Iraq and Syria.

During the trial, which started in April 2020, the mother testified that she and her child were held captive by Taha Al-J. and his wife, Jennifer W., for several months in 2015 after the couple purchased them as slaves.

At their home in Falluja, Iraq, the mother said she was forced to do menial work in tough conditions, while the girl was supposed stay out of the way. One day, after the 5-year-old girl had wet her bed, Taha Al-J. took her out into the midday heat and tied her to a window grate, and left her there to die of thirst, she testified.

The girl’s mother, whose identity is being kept secret for safety reasons, lives in Germany under a witness-protection program. According to Deutsche Welle, she testified through a translator on five different occasions in Frankfurt.

Taha Al-J. was arrested in Athens in May 2019 on a European arrest warrant and extradited to Germany under the principle of universal jurisdiction. Last month, in a separate trial held in Munich, Jennifer W., who is a German citizen, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for allowing the girl to die.

Kudos to Germany

As an after thought regarding Jefferson---I have wondered---with no information to prompt the thinking--if the famous fall out between Jefferson and John Adams, who was stanchly anti-slavery might have been the catalyst that drove them apart

[Mike]

I am glad the terrorist is being punished. That said, the rest of this post goes a bit off-topic. Maybe we should open a new thread for this.

I have never heard of "universal jurisdiction" and, after looking it up, I completely disagree with the pretense, especially when carried out by a self-proclaimed "master race". What could possibly go wrong? Using this reasoning, the Germans could just as easily have snatched Ted Bundy and tried him in Germany. No matter how heinous a crime, a U.S. Citizen should not be prosecuted in another country for crimes committed in the U.S.

Henry Kissinger said

that universal jurisdiction is a breach of each state's sovereignty: all states being equal in sovereignty, as affirmed by the United Nations Charter, "[w]idespread agreement that human rights violations and crimes against humanity must be prosecuted has hindered active consideration of the proper role of international courts. Universal jurisdiction risks creating universal tyranny – that of judges." According to Kissinger, as a logistical matter, since any number of states could set up such universal jurisdiction tribunals, the process could quickly degenerate into politically driven show trials to attempt to place a quasi-judicial stamp on a state's enemies or opponents.

Wikipedia

[Dave Grubb]

You make a very valid point that I did not give any thought---I focused on the bad guy getting his due.

I am fine if you would like to move it to a new thread.

[Mike]

Until several days ago I had no idea of the extent of enslaved Native Americans by the White invaders. It seems that from the beginning the colonists enslaved and traded Native Americans in large numbers. I always thought they were just killed, which is an atrocity in itself.

Native American slavery “is a piece of the history of slavery that has been glossed over,” Fisher said. “Between 1492 and 1880, between 2 and 5.5 million Native Americans were enslaved in the Americas in addition to 12.5 million African slaves.”
[snip]
New Englanders’ motivations for enslaving Native Americans included making money and clearing land for colonists to claim, Fisher wrote. It was also easier to remove Native Americans from the region than to sell them locally and risk having the Native Americans run away to find refuge.


Fisher also argues that there was an ideological component to enslaving Native Americans. Among colonists, “there was a presumption involving the innate inferiority of natives,” he said.


“There were proto-racial notions of European superiority, plus an appetite for land,” he said. “If you look at the history of the colonies, slavery happens almost right away.”


Fisher said he is increasingly convinced that, for colonists, “slavery was a normal part of their mental framework.”

Colonial Enslavement

And in the West:

Early travelers to the American West encountered unfree people nearly everywhere they went: on ranches and farmsteads, in mines and private homes, and even on the open market, bartered like any other tradable good. Unlike on southern plantations, these men, women, and children weren’t primarily African American; most were Native American. Tens of thousands of Indigenous people labored in bondage across the western United States in the mid-19th century.
[snip]
When the United States seized more than half a million square miles of western territory from Mexico in 1848, American colonists adopted Indigenous servitude and the profits it generated.


One year later, thousands of aspiring miners began rushing toward California’s gold country—and toward Native homelands. Slave hunters raided Indigenous communities and carted their captives to gold-digging sites. There, miners bought, sold, and killed California Indians with impunity. The Gold Rush marked the beginning of what modern historians rightly regard as a genocide of California Indians, in which the Indigenous population plummeted from about 150,000 in the late 1840s to 30,000 roughly two decades later.


California was a free state in name only. By the mid-1850s, white southerners had sent an estimated 500 to 1,500 enslaved Black people to the state—largely to labor as gold miners—despite the constitutional prohibition on slavery there. For those who didn’t or couldn’t bring Black slaves with them, California Indians proved a readily accessible alternative.

What Slavery Looked Like In The West

[Truckman]

That's news to me too...Maybe that's why LeVoyageur always seemed mad when he posted here......Ben

[Dave Grubb]

I have a habit of asking people in a new "land" for me about their indigenous peoples---and universally that answer is not one to be proud of. To date---the worst of all was when I was hunting in Newfoundland I asked my guide that question but was completely unprepared for his answer------"there aren't any".

I asked how that was and he said---"cause we killed em all". When I got home I researched that answer only to find out he wasn't kidding

[Sandman]

my buddy from Argentina says the same thing.. The Spanish brought them the word of God and gave them measles.. they are all gone..

but before they died they gave the Europeans Syphilis.. kinda the last laugh..