Crime and Punishment - based on The Crisis of Imprisonment by Rebecca M. McLennan (2008)

Moving away from the journey of enslaved Africans in American towards Emancipation, Rebecca McLennan's book The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941 (2008) traces the long history of convicts towards an abolition of their own. The U.S. penal system developed distinctly from the sanguinary, capital punishment system of Europe. In American taxonomy, a convict is inferior to the free laborer, and thus subjected to the intense "other-ing" that is endemic to our nation. Yet, even as convicts, their keepers and the general public sought to create institutions worthy of our founding ideals - even for the lowest classes in society - the convict class itself was stratified by race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation for generations, thus unnecessarily prolonging the path of reformation and intensifying the crisis within our prisons.

After the signing of the Declaration of Independence, new Americans had an ideology, a moral compass, to guide them in the business of empire-building. Freedom of choice, religion, the right to work and to participate in the fledgling democracy led the U.S. to call into question the legitimacy of European criminal institutions and treatment. Should life and death be in the hands of one, or even a few persons? The United States was not a monarchy or a dictatorship, as this interfered with the freedoms fought for in the new republic. Instead, the principle of proportionality was adopted early on, forcing prisoners to pay for their crimes to society with their time rather than their lives. In 1786, lawmakers began to experiment with deterrence theory, which favored a system of hard convict labor over that of capital punishment (33). The ensuing "wheelbarrow men" as the laboring convicts were dubbed, were quickly deemed "weak, failing, unrepublican and ugly" (35). As criticism and derision against the public spectacle of the wheelbarrow men intensified, the "house of repentance," today's penitentiary, came into view (36). The goal was not to goad prisoners into further criminal acts (as the mockery of the wheelbarrow men proved most useful for), but to compel a convict to submit to "soul surgery" and examine the consequences of previous decisions, while simultaneously keeping the general public at bay and in the dark as to what conditions convicts were subjected to within prison walls.

The penitentiary system was more humane than its predecessor, but negligible as to if it was more ethical or efficacious. Although servitude - involuntary or otherwise - was progressively frowned upon over the course of the nineteenth century, state government began to push hard, productive labor after 1830, which led to the contract prison labor system, under which convict labor was sold to private interests (54). Nonetheless, keepers and prison officials were keen to recognize a "relationship of dependency" (72) between convict and personnel. It behooved officials to treat convicts with dignity and respect. This realization paved the way for the field of penology to flourish during the Gilded Age and the early Progressive era, up to the country's decision to enter the Great War in 1917. The new convict was a "man" and socialized (gendered) to be a better man upon release. At times, this path of reformation was impeded by private interests, or public perception. It was always hindered by the racist and sexist notions of the eras, as women and blacks were routinely excluded from  - or extensively delayed the benefits of - reform by custom and law.

In connecting this text with the larger themes of citizenship and freedom from this semester's canon of historiography, McLennan skillfully portrays the convict as an "other" much like the enslaved or freed black American, whose livelihood, and democratic potential was in the hands of (other) white men. Several times she discusses the abolition of the contract prison labor system, or of socializing convicts to eventually fit the ideal of manhood, much in the way historians have pieced together white male perceptions of the black experience up to and beyond Emancipation. This verbiage necessitates a deeper read of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, as convicts are explicitly excluded from being full citizens, having the right to vote, and being free from slavery by any other name. This denial of democracy underscores the "other-ing" of convicts as now their history can be examined with methods similar to those used to flesh out the black experience in America.

McLennan focuses on the New York state penal system throughout the text, as New York was primed for reform with the established prisons at Auburn, Clinton and Sing Sing, as well as the melodrama of Tammany Hall, a New York political organization that produced several influential politicians who in turn produced several influential wardens. Outside of New York, McLennan tells of the status of prisons in other industrial states north of the Mason-Dixon line. This strengthens her narrative that hard, productive labor in industrial sectors propelled penal reforms. While Southern carceral patterns are introduced, they are not given the same exposure in McLennan's book. By including Southern penal institutions, McLennan would have been forced to step away from America's Industrial Revolution and center her research on the racism and sexism that plagued the South as evidenced in last week's read on the "problem South." For what the South lacked in legal, economic, social and public health advances, one can imagine McLennan's book as a very different text had Southern penal history been a larger part.

Despite America's history of enslavement of African Americans, in the 21st century Black prisoners in the Deep South were forced to pick cotton on former plantations or face disciplinary punishment. The 13th Amenment's prohibition on slavery expressly does not apply to incarcerated people. Pictured, prisoners at Parchman State Prison in Mississippi in 1996. (source: Twitter on 15 April 2015)

Eventually, McLennan shows that during the High Progressive era, penologists inspired by Thomas Mott Osborne used Sing Sing as a test case for a smorgasbord of social reforms intended to include the convict and understand his condition and proclivity to crime. It was during this time that prisoners formed internal democracies, circulated periodicals, formed intramural athletic leagues and undertook financial literacy training and general education courses. Under the ministrations of penal psychiatrist Bernard Glueck, strides were made in documenting and organizing data, especially that which lead an academic inquiry into the nature of homosexuality in prisons and the epidemiology of sexually transmitted diseases. On the watch of the "new penologists," prisoners received specialized health care (and "other-ing") for diagnoses of STDs and mental infirmities. Whereas Foucault argued that work gangs yielded the prison system, McLennan's argument is that the move from hard, productive, for-profit convict labor necessitated the modern penal institution. The new penology focused on the whole convict and not the capacity that was profitable. Both are correct in that work gangs were not a lasting solution, as convicts are people that cannot be reduced to beasts of burden. As rehabilitation became the only viable solution, the nature of the American penal system had to give. It's first steps are documented well in this text.

McLennan's book was extremely easy to read, although I admit to tiring of the word "crisis" used redundantly throughout. In the Acknowledgments, McLennan states that the book "originated as a doctoral dissertation and....matured as a book manuscript" (xi) before, over some time, it was published. My only critique is that the book lacks continuity, as within each chapter, I felt the need to wade through the redundant terms and information before getting to the argument at hand. I could tell that the author had developed this tome over time and as independent pieces; well done in that regard. She left no stone unturned in her patient dissection of this long history. McLennan is precise, thorough and efficient in her wrtiing. Her perspective is hers alone and represents a unique voice in the scholarship on penological reform in industrial America.


~ dls

The Problem - from "The Problem South: Region, Empire and the New Liberal State: 1890-1930" by Natalie J. Ring (2012)

I enjoyed this week's read immensely. Throughout the course of this semester, the texts tackled by myself and my cohort have journeyed through 19th-century America with an eye for issues concerning race, citizenship, gender and how the taxonomy of such arose and developed in our nation. In The Problem South by Dr Natalie J. Ring, we step beyond physical Reconstruction to a cultural Reconstruction that while it began in the South, impacted and continues to impact the entire country. As Dubois wrote in 1903, "the problem of the twentieth century, is the problem of the color-line" (The Souls of Black Folk, 1903).

Ring introduces Victorian sociocultural evolutionism as the method leading social scientists used to "diagnose" the "ills" of the South (44-45). This coincides with the voices of the class of black intellectuals of the era who wrote on the roots of American regionalism. These individuals of color were largely male, and academy-trained. They were sociologists, historians and anthropologists from some of the nation's leading Historically Black Institutions and primarily-white institutions as well. This book contextualizes the rise of social science and liberal arts education for black Americans and subsequently observes a shift of the the "burden of responsibility of blacks" to blacks themselves. During this era, my own alma mater where I received initial social science training was founded (134 years ago yesterday!). This book is useful in understanding the influence of all branches of social science not unlike Victorian sociocultural evolutionism, and the scholarship that emerged from black academics like DuBois and Miller, and lay-person ground-zero activists such as Ida B. Wells.

Ring also leans heavily on the rhetoric and metaphor of the time that frequently employed militaristic language (68) to combat the "Menace of the Diseased South" and the "White Plague of Cotton," the clever titles of the second and third chapters, respectively. Chapter two ties early tropical medicine and labor productivity to health outcomes among poor whites in the South. The region was beginning to be compared to "similar" locations worldwide, thus situating the American South in the larger "Global South." Chapter three exposes the banana republic status that King Cotton forced, and the Farm Demonstration Movement that saw the Federal Government push crop diversification and agricultural reform and efficiency - all of which challenged not only King Cotton, but the legacy of slavery. The Farm Demonstration Movement tied the natural sciences of entomology, geology and horticulture to the sociology, economics and again, comparative studies with other nations (123). These venues which operated their economies on a color-coordinated division of labor together made up the Global South.

In the sense that the North "occupied" the South financially (by means of commercial investment in slaves and cotton and legal control during Reconstruction) the South could be considered a colony no different from colonial contemporaries such as the Philippines and South Africa. So what then, if anything, makes the "problem" of the American South unique? The presence of Black Americans. No longer African, and no longer enslaved, the vociferous efforts of black people to obtain democracy in postbellum America were remarkable. Their initiative complicated the core of Southern society which was fixated on white supremacy. When industrial blacks began to aggressively pursue education and citizenship on their own terms and by their own means, the propaganda of the "forgotten man (and woman)" meaning the poor white, began to surface as a rebuttal (153). The recurring theme of Ring's book is the paradoxical nature of South, that for all her promise and potential, her dedication to racial taxonomies would mar her lovely nose to spite her face. The "problem" of the South was the South herself. Even as she pushed into the twentieth century full of momentum for educational reform and gender equality, she was hindered by a nostalgia for power to wield. As long as the "poor white" was white first, the South's desperate grab for racial privilege would plague its efforts to mature.

Often white reading, I found it difficult to situate this book chronologically. The symptoms that the North saw in the South I derisively identified today in the social trials that the ghosts of Sean Bell and Eric Garner had to endure because they had been Black men (in the North) during their lives, and arguably (?) killed for that same reason. The problem of the south remains a problem today with the myriad positive and negative responses to the police violence against blacks nationwide. Our nations leaders cannot agree or admit to the disease that is state-sanctioned violence against people of color. The whitewashing of the #BlackLivesMatter movement to #AllLivesMatter is my generation's "forgotton man" mantra. We can still examine the American problem (no longer Southern, if it were truly ever just that) with race in comparison to Brazil, South African and India among other places. The problems of yesteryear documented in Ring's text remain relevant, is problematic in itself.

The Hypocrisy of American Democracy - Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. DuBois (1935)

So for the past couple of weeks I've been tweeting about reading DuBois' prophetic, epic and encompassing tome Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880. Today I led a discussion on the text with two classmates in a graduate history seminar I'm enrolled in this term as an elective. I took the initiative to live tweet the discussion and summarize both the book and our class chat here.

1. On Democracy.

So in the introduction, DuBois notes that the original title, however subtle, was Black Reconstruction of Democracy in America. It was shortened by the editor, but the impact democracy had on the book was not lessened in the least. Democracy as DuBois defines it is access to education and political participation and representation. The "problem" of democracy as posed by leaders at the time of Reconstruction is if freed blacks receive the same "democracy" as whites, then the potential to have say in the direction of the country could be in the hands of any person of any color. This, was problematic. Using very Marxist labor language (classes, dictatorships, labor, demands, equality, et cetera) and a stunning arsenal of persuasive rhetoric, DuBois asserts that democracy as we envision it is a farce compared to democracy as it's actually applied. He affects a scolding tone to chastise the "poor white" worker for not joining his cause to that of the freed slave and focusing their joint strength on "capital," the wealthy planter class of the South or the Northern industrialists. Instead, DuBois laments, whites chose to maintain the color caste economic and political systems in place from slavery and failed to position the United States towards economic equality. In his book, democracy is not only a failed ideal, but a literary device. Democracy becomes a character alongside the freed black, the poor white and the planter. Democracy is intended to be a protagonist in the story of Reconstruction, but true events have framed democracy as anathema to what American seemed to really want: inequality and class wars.

2. On politicizing history.

Okay. So Black Reconstruction might have an agenda. It's hard to write a neutral telling of history especially when modern writers have the benefit of hindsight! But in his defense, DuBois did not set out to write a neutral history of Reconstruction. He was taking aim at the Dunning School which dominated the scholarship on Reconstruction at the time. The Dunning School espoused a white supremacist perspective and did nothing to acknowledge that this was the case. So the conclusion that Reconstruction was bad for the South was based on bias. DuBois makes it clear that the field was devoid of other perspectives, so he gets in front of any lean his book takes. Since DuBois is black and writing in the 1930s, one could assume he is going to defend the black and blaspheme the white antebellum way of life. But DuBois examines the impact of Emancipation on all characters, black and white, as well as the implications of "humanity" as this is in flux as well. While the nation reels from the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments which freed slaves, granted citizenship and voting rights, respectively, what is to be said of the white worker? Using President Andrew Johnson's (brief) time in the White House as a guide, we see that the identity of white America was just as fragile then too. Kudos to DuBois for showing us how to think and write outside of ourselves.

3. On writing style.

With over 700 pages of long history over the Reconstruction era, DuBois is surprisingly (and refreshingly) short on citations. No doubt, Black Reconstruction is the go-to for history buffs interested in the era, but at the time of its publication, DuBois was using broad, easily verifiable declarative statements to tell his story. Statistics on the number of slaves and non-slaveholding whites at the time of the Civil War, for example, give the scope of DuBois' America. Long quotations from leading politicians of the day are "google-able" and the oratorical excerpts (though lengthy) give the tone and feelings of uncertainty of yesteryear to the modern reader. And let's not neglect how DuBois waxes poetic at the end of each chapter, exploding in a flurry of descriptive words and imagery before capping each sections with a poem. Nice touch.

4. On Race and Class.

So which is the bad guy in this book? Race or class? Antebellum America was pretty delineated: you were either slave or free (which racially, means black or white) and if free, you either owned slaves (Planter class) or did not (poor white class). After Emancipation, DuBois says the nation would have been that much closer to solving the economic inequality issues we continue to see to this day, had the poor white denounced the color caste system and teamed up with the freed black against "capital;" which at the time, is the wealth-holding planter class of the South or the industrialists of the North. DuBois is heavily critical of the need to overpower the planters and industrialists. His own version of propaganda writing is then formulated from telling what "should have" happened and "why" it did not. Had the races joined together against, class, the racial and social upheavals that continue to manifest in the wake of Reconstruction could have been avoided.

5. On Gender.

DuBois speaks more of "mankind" and "men" then of women. This is not the text for how Reconstruction affected or was shaped by women, black or white.

6. On the legacy of Black Reconstruction.

In light of the larger scholarship of Reconstruction-era historiographies, Du Bois is the emphatic source of of the (largely) unbiased, long history of the time. 80 years after it's debut, modern historians are citing this book with surprising frequency, implying that DuBois' take on the era was ahead of his time, and after discounting for his own biases, was spot on for future intellectuals to tap into. It's an incredibly relevant book all these years later.

One day, I'll have my doctorate in economics and I will teach a class on the Economic History of Black America. Trust, this book will be on the reading list.

cheers,

dls

Slavery on Trial - based on Beyond Freedom's Reach by Adam Rothman (2015)

Adam Rothman's Beyond Freedom's Reach: a Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery (2015) is a circuitous telling of the era surrounding Emancipation when black Americans were particularly susceptible to becoming victims of kidnapping, as slave owners desperately tried to maintain their way of life. As the new social order took form in the South, the planter class fled to U.S. states and territories with inconsistent oversight and "slave havens" in the Caribbean. In this book, Rothman tells the story of Rose Herera, a domestic slave in Louisiana whose family straddles slavery and freedom, while being torn apart by slavery and freedom.

Telling a female slave's story 150 years after Reconstruction is a formidable feat, but Rothman had two factors working in his favor. First, he was fortunate to stumble across an incredible primary source: an 1866 report to the Secretary of State presented to the U.S. Senate on the "kidnapping of colored persons in the southern states for the purpose of selling them as slaves in Cuba.' This source is unique in its specificity and in its championing of certain universal human rights during this time. Through Rose's story, Rothman can highlight an important but relatively unknown international conspiracy to preserve the institution of slavery and its profits, while simultaneously utilizing the technique of microhistory. This historiographical method of writing focuses on the experiences of a single person or household in order to discover "new insights into how people actually lived" (6). In the end notes to the prologue, Rothman writes that the microhistory was "pioneered by social historians of early modern Europe" (End note 8, for pp. 3-7). In providing the reader swatches of Rose's life as a mother, wife, activist, woman and yes, a slave, he successfully executes her microhistory with brevity and completeness.

Using a court case as a primary source advances the impact of this book. It demonstrates the gravity of the trend of black kidnappings (and rumors of such) and the social and legal volatility of the day. Rothman often writes that the era of Emancipation was unevenly distributed across geography and circumstance. "...the forward march of freedom was erratic and could be reversed" (163). Were it not for this court case documented in Congressional hearings, her story and others like it may have succumbed to simply being rumors and not the impetus for Federal action.

Another simplification Rothman sidesteps is the reduction of Rose Herera's life to that of her status as a slave. Rather, he tells Rose's history as conditioned by the institution of slavery. The ultimate effect is that at the culmination of the narrative, "as a moral drama, nothing less than slavery itself was on trial" (137). It is to be noted that if Rose's agency was ever circumscribed by her circumstance, Rothman's microhistory is no evidence of that. As a slave, she chooses to marry a free man of color, George Herera. Together, they father 5 children. The eldest three are the precious cargo that is spirited (illegally) away by a Mrs Mary De Hart. By law, Rose was property of the De Hart family, as were her children. Although George was free, Rose and her children were not. In making slavery hereditary through the mother, Southern planter aristocrats were able to maintain profits by claiming the mother's offspring into perpetuity, rather than facing extralegal and exorbitant charges for human trafficking and import. Laws such as this provide a valuable framework for Rothman's text. As the rights of black Americans were in flux, so was the nation, and the speed and conclusion of Rose's plight is proof of that.

George Herera's agency is difficult to ascertain. By law and custom, the paternity of the Herera children was stricken from baptismal records, furthering the pro-slavery ideology that slave owners were symbolic and absolute providers for their slaves, and thus, the father figure. George could not live with Rose. George could not stop Rose from being imprisoned, nor was he able to resist Mrs De Hart's abduction of their three eldest children to Cuba. But he does push back mightily against the notion that slave families were creations of their masters. By owning the slave legally as a commodity, taking authority as a parent would, and disciplining with only one's conscience as oversight, the slave owner believed that all relationships the slave had were also manifestations of the owner. However in 1863, George pens a letter to the highest-ranking Union official in New Orleans informing the Major General that his wife is imprisoned and his children were in danger of being kidnapped by their owner (then, a Mrs Roland, Mary De Hart's aunt and the Hereras' owner, on paper). Rothman writes that George tied "his family's (my emphasis) plight to transcendent principles of right and wrong. Rose and her children may have belonged to her owner as property, but they also belonged to him, and the mother and children belonged together" (110). Rothman further notes that Herera signed the letter in his own name, indicating he was literate, the words were his own, and the agency was his own.

Finally we can look examine the negotiation and power struggle between Mary De Hart and Rose Herera. Compared to the intensely and frequently violent abuse that took place between the domestic slaves and their mistresses in the book we read last week, Rothman's female leads are confronting Emancipation in a different place under very different circumstance. The prolonged discipline that Rose receives in light of her agency is at the hands of local jailer, after her arrest for allegedly assaulting her owner, Mrs Roland. That she was jailed and not beaten - or worse - is one deviation from Glymph's text. In 1865, Rose denied Mrs Roland's charges in provost court (102), which may have been deemed "sassy" or "insolent" as in Glymph's history, but to deny an owner in court is evidence of the asymmetry of Emancipation across time and space. Another interesting diversion from last week novel is that black people can - for the first time - testify against white people. This uniform application of rights brings into focus the "many civil wars" of New Orleans that were being waged in the "twilight of slavery." In an even more intriguing development of Emancipation, Rose presses charges against De Hart after she's spirited the children to Cuba and returned to Louisiana. Now a freed woman, she requests her lawyer to arrange for her former mistress' arrest and detainment on charges of kidnapping. In what can only be described as an amazingly short amount of time and courageous amount of agency, Rose is able to find recourse for her children against her former owner in the throes of the legal system.

The characterizations that Rothman tackles challenge the supposed perimeters of citizenship, freedom, race, class, gender and right. Their individual stories help shed light on the gray areas they waded through in the legal and social landscapes of the emancipated South.


~ dls

Agency Under Fire : Out of the House of Bondage by Thavolia Glymph (2008)

Most appropriate for Women's History Month, this week's reading for my graduate history seminar takes a rare perspective of women's labor history in the American South. The violence of slavery is usually envisioned at the hands of men, outdoors; say, an overseer whipping a field hand. But this text examines the hegemony among women inside the plantation household, a space both public and private, intimate and impersonal, before and after Emancipation.

In Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, Thavolia Glymph uses the dichotomies of the plantation household as the environment most likely to have housed interactions between enslaved women and their mistresses. Domination and abuse of enslaved women would have largely occurred in the plantation household, which in itself represented "a field of power relations and political practices" between and within races and genders (2). The creation and use of the plantation household is quite useful in that before Emancipation, white women were the de facto managers of the home, during the Civil War they were witness to a major transfiguration of the home, and after Emancipation they were the unwilling participants to a historic shift in women's work in the home. White women were at all once owners and then employers. Black women were surviving silently and then living loud and vocal, propelling both races of women out of the plantation household into a (more) free society.

"Free labor" in this book is similar to how I interpreted it while reading Coolies and Cane a few weeks ago.  After Emancipation, living as a black woman in a free wage society largely meant obtaining the right to move freely in the world at-large and the world of work. She slowly obtained the option to choose the right to work, and with that, the right to be fired. As the threat and reality of perpetual corporal punishment at the hands of owners faded into the past, she began to use her voice, one that had silently accompanied generations of active resistance to slavery. With Emancipation she had obtained the voice to quit, and in at least one case documented in the text, the right to take legal action for wrongs committed by an employer (191). Her newly acquired job mobility in domestic service widened her sphere of influence to other homes transfigured by the Civil War. She and her sisters in the South could hire out their skills as washerwomen, cooks, and seamstresses, among a variety of other vocations that had previously made up the plantation-era division of labor they had been forced into. Another use of black women's voices and choices were the increased information networks - gossiping - that provided a means of avoiding violent or unfair homes. Using her voice to leave unsafe work sites and convey intimate details about behaviors and employment practices radically changed how white women interacted with their environments and their employ, while allowing black women another channel through which to express distrust, anger, hurt and frustration with racism.

Glymph's plantation household can first be considered a private residence, as we think of our homes today; intimate and personal. In the proslavery ideologies of the time, slaves were part of the "family" and thus a part of the private nature of the household. Glymph does not shy away from the hygienic and very often, sexual demands white owners made their slaves meet for their personal comforts. But in practice, a slave was an economic resource used to provide goods and services that were desired by owners, usually, a biological, white family. The ownership of a slave meant there existed a public component to the plantation household that governed the rights of owners over their property. It was this explicitly public ownership that black women resisted, first with their actions and later with both their actions and voices. Glymph admits that the "historiography of American slavery tends to be squeamish about the inherent violence of the arrangements slavery required (57)." Black women of the time could not afford to be squeamish about the violence they faced, and quite often opposed the abusive and violent tactics of their mistresses.

Earlier in the term, we read a paper by Walter Johnson, a Harvard professor of African/African-American history, entitled "On Agency" (2003). In it, Johnson asserts that agency is more than simply human volition or will. If it can be reduced to such, then it voids the personal efforts of the slave to actively engage in and defy her oppressive state while in the midst of it. Slaveholder expectations of black women reduced their agency to "acting out" rather than being a deliberate response to systematic racism. "Rendered childlike and irresponsible, slave women could also not be serious contenders for the status of rebels (94)." Such gendered notions on warfare held by white men and women alike meant they frequently misinterpreted incidents of rebelliousness. Glymph writes further on that page that whites depended on a "prevailing pattern of who would be charged with concerted rebelliousness," and black women, by and large, were not suspect. This evidence of early racial profiling prevented white planter class Southerners from anticipating the new levels of interaction in the plantation household with black women after the War.

Decorum and custom demanded that white women respond to the voice of black women. The image and respect of the Southern mistress stemmed from an (ironically) patronizing submissiveness to the ingrained patriarchy that characterized the home during the 19th-century. Glymph describes the "good" mistress paradigm as the white woman who has "dedicated her life to the never-ending task of managing her household and caring for her family and slaves in sickness and in health. Her comeliness was due in no small measure to her ability to satisfy all who depended on her, to manage a household rent by inequalities of race and gender with seeming equanimity (19)." The prototypical Southern Lady was expected to be fragile and protected by her man, the master of his domain and slaves. This typical view of Southern women deserves Glymph's perspective. Her book is not only about black women, but white women and the patriarchal weight they were subjected to along with the slaves, especially those who were female. By joining their struggles as women then pitting them against the other as blacks gained their voice in labor negotiations, Glymph gives a 360-degree view of power relations among women during this time. Both the lens of race and that of gender are necessary to complete this picture. Glymph tends to leave the details on the patriarchy to the reader, however, choosing to elaborate on how women of different races found their work lives forever changed. This is a benefit as there is considerably less scholarship on women exercising agency during the 19th-century, so the book finds fertile ground in the audience of women's history and American history readers.

This book is unique in its presentation of the economic principle-agent problems of women in the Emancipation era. In another twist of irony, seeing as how I am a single, educated, Southern economist, "economy' was a virtue of Southern women even then, save that in the past, it exemplified a woman who ran her plantation household with the utmost domestic efficiency, meting out directives and punishments as needed to suit her desires. As a black woman, I am far from that manifestation of economy in any era. However, it begs the question of the agency of those "women of economy" who came before me. Was it their choice as white women to be executives of the Reconstructive homestead, especially as legions of newly freed black women actively chose to pursue an education at newly founded institutions such as Spelman College (my alma mater), and the demands of satisfactions of their own private family life? As black women exercised their voice and choice for work, white women had no choice but to find and preserve some agency of their own to maintain their image of the genteel, mannered, micro-managing matriarch. This meant negotiating with former slaves, finding new solutions to run the household smoothly, and in many cases, going into the work force themselves to find their own voice. Glymph's story is not a story about white women or black women, but a story about women who work, worked together, and worked towards a new future.


dls

Pleading the 14th Amendment: More Than Freedom by Stephen Kantrowitz (2012)

Spanning the years 1829-1889, black Americans' fight for freedom, and subsequently, citizenship, was in constant transition, and would continue to be well into the present-day. Although nominal citizenship was bestowed by the Federal Government via the 14th Amendment in 1868, the social, economic and political privileges that accompanied white citizenship were not that of "colored citizenship" during this era.

In his book More than freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889, author Stephen Kantrowitz writes that after the Civil War, the community of blacks in Boston, Massachusetts were instrumental in the "remaking of the postemancipation South" and pressed for "broader and more capacious laws of equal citizenship" while "insisting that whites who continued to exclude them by law or custom stood in opposition to the victorious Union and the egalitarian 'spirit of the age,'" (Kantrowitz 4). By stating that citizenship was validated both by law and by custom, Kantrowitz opens the door to the spectrum of equality in 19th-century America across race, class and gender. Whereas white male citizens had private property rights and suffrage, black males - and at a much slower rate, black women - were granted these rights in name only at first, and over time, made strides towards full engagement and respect in the milieu. Kantrowitz does adequately well in taking the time to discuss what black women activists were doing alongside the men, but several well-known female freedom fighters were left out, leaving to the imagination the concept of "citizenry' for a women. This book defines citizenship as being both the legal and social attainment of equal standing with any other (male) American.

Symbolically, blacks were squared off against the 'Slave Power' that had (for lack of a better word) enslaved white America since the 1700s. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was the litmus test of citizenship in that non-citizens were slaves and only citizens could vote to repeal the law. Nonetheless, Kantrowitz displays black resistance during these year as well as during and after the Civil War. Between 1829 and 1860, blacks claimed their own citizen status by establishing their own institutions and meeting places such as churches, conventions, schools and lodges that housed the Prince Hall Freemasons, an organization that the author stresses in its significance. The Freemasons embraced principles of universal citizenship and white British members initiated the first black members in 1775 after they were previously rejected by colonial Freemasonries. In Boston, black nomenclature for self-identification presented the race as "African" first in the 1700s and later as "people of color" (1830s), "Negro," "colored Americans," "Africamericans," and occasionally as the "nominally free" (35). Consider also the fact that the Boston Public School System was desegregated in 1855 and a strong sense of black patriotism with frequent references to Crispus Attucks' martyrdom during the American Revolution. In fact, the source of inspiration for the struggle most present to Black Bostonians was the American Revolution and not the Haitian Revolution. Kantrowitz chooses to focus on the former, but in light of emancipation in contemporary societies, it would have enhanced the book even more to see how blacks were borrowing from or contributing to the global trend of freedom during this era. Black Boston was literate and engaged and perhaps historical documentation might connect them to the movement beyond their borders (domestic and international) in a meaningful and relevant way.

During the War years, blacks immersed themselves in military service to the objections of the law and white society. When blacks were not permitted to join the military (although they had served in previous wars) or the city militias, they created their own drill companies. With the passing of the Militia Act of 1862, blacks gained (nominal) citizenship and the employment opportunities afforded them by the military, although equal  pay with white laborers would be inferior for generations to come. After Emancipation, the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments freed the slaves, granted citizenship and voting rights, but the portion of Kantrowitz' book that deals with these years is appropriately titled "The Disappointments of Citizenship." The disappointment is that the fight for equality was only beginning and was perhaps, more heated and protectionist than before Emancipation. In that light, abolition was a "necessary but insufficient" stepping stone of citizenship, and Kantowitz is careful to delineate the abolitionist battles that ceased in 1864 from the activist battles that are perpetual.

Is this book a history of the path to citizenship for blacks in America? Or of the path to citizenship for black Bostonians? To a large extent, it is the latter, as Boston's geography, status as the crucible of American independence, and early establishment made it a petri dish for revolution and revolutionary ideas. In that sense, it's a community history of local characters with a shared goal. But to what extent did the revolutionary ideas of Black Boston resonates and reflect those of Blacks elsewhere? Did all blacks desire inclusion over segregation? There was likely division among Blacks in other states and territories over this point as as there was in Boston when the setting for change was the classroom. So in that sense, Kantrowitz' periodization and characterization of Black Boston can be extended more generally to the masses of enslaved and free Blacks of the time across the nation.

When Economics met History

As previously noted, I am enrolled in a graduate history seminar covering the U.S. in the 19th century. Since I'm an economist, I'm sometimes able to tackle topics specific to my passion, economic history, but I'm not always so  lucky. Since the start of the year, I have been using this blog space to review and respond to several books I've read in the class. This will continue over the next six weeks, and as the class comes to a close, I will be be blogging about my term paper over the black markets that slaves created as the nation marched ever closer to Emancipation. From an economic perspective, the risk profiles of blacks were changing and thus many chose to use the uncertainty to their own economic advantage.

THANK YOU FOR TAKING THE TIME TO READ MY BLOG and please continue to peruse and comment as you always have! All posts pertaining to the History 588 seminar and related readings are tagged 'PhD.'


Economics continues to be personal and practical, even in graduate school!



dls

Humanity Held Captive: Slavery and the Numbers Game by Stanley Gutman (1975)

As an economist, my discipline routinely asks that I quantify human decisions. Often that takes the form of buying and selling "goods," but what of buying and selling "bads?" There's a host of data driven media that examines "black market" activities. Weighing the benefits and costs of buying and selling drugs, guns or women is debated in absolute or relative figures, graphed, converted into rates and logarithms, imputed, and very often stratified by demographic such as gender, race, age and education level. By convention, economists do not personify this data as a historian would; the numbers tell the story. It goes without saying that these are sensitive subjects, as many people have been affected by street, drug or sexual violence, but the economic analysis of these modern taboo markets is designed to make assumptions to homogenize the persons demanding and supplying these goods. This makes data more tractable for econometric methods to state conclusions about the value of legalization or, of a life.

An economist who examines the past with such quantitative methods has a different set of challenges, however. In America, black markets in the antebellum period were likely black people. And while black Americans are no longer enslaved, there persists a communal memory of the years of acute social struggle as evidenced through public commemorations of Black History Month and Juneteenth, and private conversations between the generations. There also exists a desire to quantify the cost of slavery so as to hold the federal government accountable to allocate reparations in the form of cash or in-kind services to descendants of slaves, such as education or asset building opportunities. Today, the agency and humanity of a black American is uncontested by the definition, evidence and interpretation of the "black experience," the three levels proposed by Micheal Trotti with which to confront challenging trends in racial literature (375). But the agency and humanity of a slave is in the past, and modern writers might struggle with analyses on the lived experience of a human commodity.

In the 1960s, a group of American economic historians began generating research called cliometrics, a sub-discipline of economics meant to (re?)integrate history and the quantitative side of economics. For about 15 years, cliometrics was popular, and then it wasn't; a scholarly fad in the cycle of academic inquiry, subject to reinvention in the future. The marriage of mathematical statistics to other disciplines has happened before: anthropology, psychology, and ecology among others. Cliometrics was near its peak with the 1974 publication of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman's Time On the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. The release of the book was heavily critiqued, both for its analytic errors and perceived historic insensitivity. One such response was Herbert Gutman's Slavery and the Numbers Game (1975).

Gutman's main arguments focus on Fogel and Engerman's treatment of the slave work ethic, family life and sexual proclivities. Time on the Cross boldly states it aims to "strike down the view that Black Americans were without culture, without achievement and without development for their first two hundred and fifty years on American soil (258)."  In the authors' view slaves were hard-working, moralistic, and well-adapted to their station, centered solidly around the nucleus of the black family unit.  On the whole, the conclusion was that slaves were more efficient than their free laboring counterparts. Gutman allows that the authors describe a "transformation" of the slave to his new home, but fail in that they only fully describe the transformation and not the slave.

Other errors are repeatedly attacked in Gutman's text. Scant evidence and isolated examples are overused to make broad statements on slave mentality and lifestyle; ubiquitous and imprecise language pepper technical paragraphs; assumptions are presented as evidence; "slaves" and "blacks" are synonymous categories; the Sambo archetype is morphed into a black Horatio Alger to fit the explicit goal of the book (Gutman 16).  Gutman spends a large amount of space contesting Fogel and Engerman's "whipping" calculation as being too low an estimate and based on faulty methods. It is true that the math was not robust, but the (in)humanity of the event - however common it was - was completely ignored. What was the frequency of slave whippings? Where this a negative labor incentive? What was the effect of slave whippings on productivity and efficiency? These questions are attempted and answered by Fogel and Engerman. If a correct answer is found, is it the best answer to such a question?

Critiques on writing about lynching have similar demands. Historians such as Micheal Pfeifer urge researchers to keep the victim experience present when presenting metadata on mob violence, as there are lingering effects of that painful era still in the minds of many Americans. Those who sought "ritualized and racialized retribution" (The State of the Field of Lynching Scholarship, Pfeifer 835) incurred the cost of slavery as well, in terms of spiraling moral turpitude masked as "rough justice," and the descendants of the lynch mob just as the descendants of the slave therefore have a right to the counter-narrative.

The voice of the slave is still coming to light. Also in the 1960s, the scholarship of abuse literature took shape and since, we have been able to use that discipline as a lens to inspect past abuses. Nell Irvin Painter writes in Soul Murder & Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting (2002) that violence and "soul murder" are inseparable from slavery, where soul murder is defined as physical, sexual and/or mental abuse. To Painter, the social costs of slavery were absorbed by all races and parties (32) and evidence of this is abundant.

Slave agency in the face of racist capitalism will continue to be a poignant topic for economics, history and other subjects. One hopes that the scholarship will become increasingly more rigorous and representative as it gains validity and provides new insights to a the next generation of researchers further removed from a topic of significance to all Americans.


dls

The Changing Face of Race : The Blood of Government by Paul Kramer (2006)

In a February 2003 publication of The American Historical Review, Martha Hodes delves into what she describes as a "capricious exercise of racial categorization in everyday life" (Hodes 85).  Using correspondence, interviews with living descendants, and government- as well as privately-owned documents, she traces the lives of Mr and Mrs William Smiley Connolly in the 1870s. Hodes chooses this couple because they are two different races and together, lived in two different racially stratified economies: American and the Cayman Islands. The outcome was not entirely expected.

Hodes' thesis is the title of her work: "The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race." While racial distinctions were present in both nations, the marriage of a white New England woman to an African Caribbean man takes on different meanings based on where you are, what the class structure is, and the relative level of socioeconomic improvement gains from relocating. Hodes asserts that "the power lies within the ability of legal, economic and social authorities to assign and reassign racial categories to oppressive ends" (85). In the case of the Connollys, Eunice was a widowed mother who worked alongside Irish and possibly, black women during a time when white women in New Hampshire were typically married and tucked away at home. This protected status of white womanhood was a very different reality of Eunice's life and she suffered social slights for her impoverished, unmarried state. "Smiley" Connolly was a well-off sea captain from privilege on an island that recognized not just dual races, but a spectrum of color too, and mysteriously, where race and color intersected with class. Smiley was of a complexion and an economic status that enabled having a white American wife be a benefit to both Connollys in the Caymans while a burden in New Hampshire.

Stuart Hall, cultural theorist

How is it that two contemporary societies, can respond to race so differently? In both, white is superior to black. Both are former slave societies. Both are capitalist in nature. But there is a historical component that blurs the lines in the Caymans. The way that race evolved there was structurally different in that economic status could transcend color and a hierarchy of colors were recognized and intertwined with wealth. Famed cultural theorist Stuart Hall similarly loquaciously refers to the "laws of motion" of capitalism in his paper "Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance" (331, 1980) to describe how derivations of Marxist capitalism forms in different places. In his effort to delineate the different types of capitalism we see, he urges that we recognize what he terms a 'historical premise" and a 'materialist premise" with which to examine race in post-slave societies. The former provides the range of lived racial experiences, while the latter is a pedantic analysis of the ideological structures that create race in a particular place. Hall stresses that 'articulation' of race by the dominant class is dissipated to the dominated class(es), conveying the ideology of the oppressor to the oppressed (335). It is through the arguments that Hodes and Hall propose that allow for a discussion on the changing face of race.

Such discussion can arise from reading The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (2006) by Paul Kramer. The book traces the racial birth of the "Filipino" as a result of U.S. colonial intervention in the Philippines following Spanish rule. The result was an exporting of American racist ideologies through businessmen, military and policymakers. They would represent the "dominant" class in the Philippines, while the people of the nation were divided "racially" into those who were Catholic versus those who were non-Christian ("savages"); the elite versus rural populations; those who had been "Hispanicized" by the Spaniards versus those who had not. This spectrum is the historical premise that Hall wrote of and indicates that the Filipino race evolved in a vacuum that while similar to other race creations, is by no means identical. Many pages of Kramer's book is devoted to the idea that at the beginning of the twentieth century, "Filipino became the new black." The name and concept of a  "Filipino" was imagined by the dominant class who indiscriminately hurled slurs pedestrian ("nigger!") and novel ("gu gu!). Another theme is that of the 'White Man's Burden' from the title of an 1899 ode to Anglo imperialism by Rudyard Kipling. American colonists considered it a self-sacrifice to supervise populations like blacks and Filipinos and guide them to self-sufficiency, if ever; a situation Kramer calls "calibrated colonialism." This mentality coupled with the behavior and expectations of Americans in the Philippians served to further articulate U.S. sovereignty among the colonized.

Or at least that was the idea. In the course of the book, we learn that in this time and place, Filipino nation-building efforts frustrate those of the Americans', further making this a deviant case of race evolution. Could the result have been predicted? Should it be viewed solely under a historical premise? While 'Filipinization' grew among the dominated classes, American efforts to protect their borders from cheap Filipino goods and labor without naturalizing the population could not be sustained. The Filipino had transcended nation, much like the Connollys, and with limited immigration status, could position herself for a different racial experience in the United States. Over less than one hundred years, the world saw the birth, classification and reclassification of the "Filipino," the fluid face of race.

To underscore the fluidity of race, consider that both Hall and Hodes understood it's properties and wrote their papers 23 years apart over events that are more than 100 years and many tens of thousands of miles apart. That race cannot be contained or defined but is constantly being redefined is both its strength and its weakness.


dls

What's in a Word? - The Many Panics of 1837 by Jessica Lepler (2013)

In this week's read, the author of The Many Panics of 1837 exposes the interconnected financial system of the TransAtlantic world. Focusing on the political economies of New Orleans, New York City and London, Lepler examines a range of primary sources to determine if people today experience the economy differently than people in the past? If so, is this measurable, or even comparable? Her argument that "the Panic of 1837" was actually the aggregation of "the many panics of 1837" becomes manifest in her evidence of acute financial uncertainty on both sides of the Atlantic.

Lepler pulls from a range of sources for her text. Much of her research is made up of archival data, such as that of national banks or private collections run by an institution or the state. Other information from the time period comes from personal correspondence, art, sermons, music, satire (the rise of the dichotomous melodrama makes its first cameo during this age) and of course, that ubiquitous spreader of (interesting) information: rumors.

The main vehicle the author identifies as responsible for these panics is information. During the early 19th-century, financial information between metropolitan areas arrived by letter on ships. So there was a value put on paper and verbal confirmations and contracts, arguably more so than present day. The book returns again and again to a concept of "confidence" which takes its importance directly from trusting another party in a credit market arrangement (9). When "confidence" is lacking, there is less hope in the credit markets and thus a reaction by all stakeholders: the southern planter class, financiers, and antebellum market makers called 'cotton factors.' Strangely absent is a reaction by the real underlying asset: the slave. More on that later.

Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, but Words...?
Other terms and phrases display the lexicon and theories of an age past. 19th-century contemporary newspapers and textbooks relate the word 'panic' to a physical condition, according to the scientists and "the times" according to preachers and moralists alike. Phrenologists attributed a panic to "over stimulated Acquisitiveness;" a type of "cerebral disease of a mercantile country," (9) a reference from George Combe's Principles of Physiology (1845). There's also repeated use of the "Anglo-American economy" to describe the geographical credit markets that are the book's subject. Credit markets which do not exist without slave labor.

Lepler is strangely silent on this aspect of Jacksonian credit. Much attention is given to the creation and structure of high-yield securities, those (still) infamous paper promises of cash-poor Americans sought by Europe. Strangely, because historian Seth Rockman notes in "What Makes Capitalism Newsworthy?" (Journal of the Early Republic, Fall 2014) that the "financing of slavery" is that "which scholars attribute such macroeconomic crises at the South Sea Bubble and the Panic of 1837" (452). Rockman proves this with evidence of 1828 networks of finance featuring American brokerage houses marketing state-chartered bonds to European investors. The money these houses raised was used to make loans to local slaveholders (456). The bonds were simultaneously backed by taxpayers, many of whom were paying taxes on the slaves they owned as private property. Lepler's historiography chooses to focus on a Swiss-born financier in America who takes his own life as the panics of 1837 begin to close in on him: plummeting cotton prices, tightening credit markets, failing businesses, lost fortunes. Her monograph might be described as a case of disassociation of the commodity (black people) from its inherent role in an economy, a classic characteristic of capitalism studies. An interesting question might then be how slave agency encouraged or exacerbated the decline in cotton prices and thus the panics of 1837, if at all?

Capitalism for $1000, Alex...
This leads to a discussion on capitalism, infinite in its multivalence. Capitalism is perhaps best inspected inductively, taking an interdisciplinary approach to its meaning across time and space. When examining what capitalism is to America, slavery must be included, as it has provided the collateral for subsequent securitization. That the shifting chronological boundaries of capitalism be considered is paramount. One interesting take away are the partisan Free Labor ideologies of this era which were wholly incompatible with slave regimes. That is, the idea of working for wage (proletarianism) was seen as an offense during this era, akin to that of being a slave (see Eric Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republic Party Before the Civil War, 1970). In the same vein, what is an economy? Substantial work has been done on the origins of an economy (see Margaret Shabas, Timothy Marshall, David Grewal and Tim Shenk for more on this) and how this definition is rubbery too. So "what capitalism is" is gray and fuzzy, definitely not black and white, and by nature, dynamic.

Homo Economicus
Economic thought in Lepler's book was perhaps then, neoclassical, but in hindsight, nowhere close. Neoclassical economics borrows from Adam Smith's early "capitalist" notions of self-interested, rent-seeking, profit-(or utility-) maximizing rational actors pressing toward some optimum outcome called equilibrium. Homo economicus was easily conjured in theory but seldom seen in real life. What is rational behavior in the face of a never before seen financial catastrophe? Agency is the power of an individual to make the choice to act. Lepler seems to suggest that agency was suspended in the face of these panics, resulting in physical and physiological manifestations of anxiety. It became a "sign of the times" or "providence," or more commonly, partisan politics as the harbinger of the pronounced uncertainty in the financial markets. Less than 20 years old, the two-party political squabbles were an easy scapegoat for the crisis. Whigs blamed Democrats who blamed businesses who blamed paper currency. Like slaves, affected parties in New Orleans, New York and London claimed they had no agency, no power in the commencement or current of what was occurring around them. An interesting contrary to this is the concept of 'clerk agency,' those cogs of capitalism who not only process market behaviors, but take an active role in spreading information - insider and otherwise. Perhaps the most (in)famous clerk and Free Laborer was John D. Rockefeller, a bastion of American capitalism.

The book's legacy to modern economic thought are early musings on business cycles, government interventions, central bank policy, monetarism, bailouts and constricted credit markets following prolonged periods of prosperity and even longer periods of scarcity. To say the panics of 1837 is like that of 1929 or 2008 is too easy. The more difficult question is why these three eras are so similar to the economist and the historian?


- dls

What's in a name? Coolies and Cane by Moon-Ho Jung (2006)

My first stop down a research wormhole into economic history was Moon-Ho Jung's 275-page manifesto, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (2006, Johns Hopkins University Press). I'll be completely honest and admit I had no idea what a "coolie" was until this book was in my hands. Spoiler alert: no one during this era knew what a "coolie" was.

That's probably the major theme of the book: defining who's a coolie for purposes of legal and racial accounting. 

A Little Background

Set in the Gulf Coast region during the Civil War era, the impetus for the text was the burgeoning global sugar trade of the 19th century. Sugar has its origins of use in the far East, and through trade and pilfering via the Crusades, made its way to Europe, where over the course of a few hundred years, saw the construction of refineries in Italy in the 1400s. When Columbus sails to the New World on the eve of the 16th century, he takes a few sugar cane plants with him and [Sweet &] lo and behold, the agriculture blossoms in the Caribbean's ecosystem (pun intended). Mix this with the rise in European sea power and transnational imperialism and you get sweet tea. Joking. What resulted is large tracts of land in South America, the Greater Antilles and what became known as Louisiana being seized and colonized for this cash crop. And wherever there's profit to be made and natural resources to be fleeced in the era of big ships and empire-hungry nation-states, you have free labor.

One thing I learned is that "free labor" is not what it sounds like during the 19th century. Free labor to me has always been synonymous with slave "wages," i.e., nothing. Just working for free. However, from reading this book I was informed of Free Labor ideology of this time which was a direct contrast to slave labor. It espoused a Horatio Alger ideal of "pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps." An egalitarian vision of self-reliance that afforded anyone willing to work hard the keys to prosperity. Slaves on the other hand, weren't self-reliant. And in the early days of the United States, weren't completely human (see the Three-Fifths Compromise). So there's that.

In the 1800s the Gulf Coast was a melting pot of slaves and colonists and indigenous people all with different ideas on the "best" use of the land. The colonists got the jump on the other two, and specifically, the Spanish colony of Cuba proved particularly competitive, what with its tropical environment and lack of mountains. The terrain proved the best place to grow and export sugarcane. But the Portuguese, English and French were not to be outdone: the wealth from producing valuable sugar to export from the backs of slave labor was staggering. These massive fortunes funded even more massive estates back home. But let's not forget the slaves, who actually were human and therefore hated their involuntary and inhumane commoditization. So they rose and and rebelled. The revolution in France (1789-1799) strongly influenced another in its own colony of Saint-Domigue, (1791-1804), which resulted in the elimination of slavery and the commencement of the Republic of Haiti.

This very idea that slaves could be free, human and free laborers was perhaps even more potent that the act of emancipation itself. Across the Gulf Coast, black slaves began to push back with more concentrated frequency. If not by revolting, than by simply not caring. They refused to work, broke tools, ran off and otherwise resisted, making the use of black slave labor very worrisome for plantation owners.

Scientific Race Theory
Jung's text picks up here, with a demand for alternative plantation labor to produce and export sugar in the age of emancipation. "Africans" who were frustrated with slavery were broadly categorized as "indolent," "violent", "untutored" and disloyal in that they were the race "most easily influenced by a bribe" (Jung, 65). So who would work the fields? The infamous - and incorrect - theories of race and vocational hierarchies at the time were expressed in a widely circulated agricultural magazine out of New Orleans called De Bow's Review. In an article printed during the Civil War the periodical published the following: "We fight against nature's laws in seeking to impose tropical field labor on the white and olive races, and to release the black race from it....and we, moreover, violate true liberty in so doing" (Jung 66).

One answer to this was coolie labor. Importing laborers from the birthplace of sugar itself, Asia.

Scientific race theorists and other political opportunists could not classify Asian workers as black or white, and as such, sidestepped the messy ordeal of perpetuating slavery. But if the coolies were slaves, then could they be imported as factors of production? In the United States, the growing power war between Northern industrialists and Southern planters was centered around who could control Congress. The planters were numerous and rich, but their wealth and livelihoods were threatened by emancipation. Knowledge of this meant abolition spread quickly in the North, but to protect white, male political rights, rather than black human rights. Importing coolies helped to undermine the uncertainty of emancipation. However, importing anyone undermined emancipation. Still, American legislators shied away from allowing these workers to immigrate, as that would put them on the path towards naturalization, and that was reserved for whites. Noting the racial traits of the Asian workers, author Augustin Cochin wrote in his book The Results of Emancipation (1863) that the "East Indian" was comparatively "sober, more intelligent than the black, but less robust," while the Chinese were "generally robust and laborious" and acclimated to sugar cane production (Jung 66)"

So Chinese workers, who were not racially black or white, who were neither imports nor immigrants, but definitely not citizens, were acquired from "crimps" (Chinese body brokers), and transported by "clippers" (their American counterparts) to work the sugar cane plantations when blacks would no longer be forced to were "coolies."  Wow. That's a lot of work and words to describe slavery by another name.

Race and the Ideal Plantation Labor Force
Yeah, so the ideal plantation labor force is just that: an idea. It doesn't exist. And paradoxically, neither do coolies. Both were propaganda cooked up by overzealous imperialists obsessed with race to justify their own rent-seeking classist ambitions. First, the coolie proved to be just as human and conscious as the black, and by the end of Jung's book, are just as resistant to exploitation.  In his study on British Guiana, historian Walter Rodney argued that "to rely solely on planter propaganda would be to miss a hidden history of shared responses to common circumstances, regardless of race," (Jung 205). Second, efforts to deny the Chinese citizenship while demanding his labor (women were not transported to the U.S.) under strict, and often violently enforced contracts, left the door open for some form of emancipation for the coolie, that is, legal status as immigrants, a title reserved only for selective Europeans, again on a sliding scale, as all Europeans weren't created equal in the eyes of Americans either.

Jung's book is littered with legal precedents that were necessarily challenged by all parties. As the legal and illegal coolie trade grew alongside growing racial tensions, the influx of laborers led to our nation's first broadly restrictive immigration law, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Jung concludes his history of coolie labor there amidst a dynamic landscape of people, ideas, and goods in the years following Reconstruction. By this time the coolie had began to redefine himself away from the oppressive sugar plantations and into cities were "Chinatowns" were autonomous and thriving and even more foreign to white America. It would be another 61 years before the Chinese Exclusion Act would be repealed, and then only in the interest of boosting morale between the U.S. and China as allies against the Axis powers during World War II.

  

What to Expect in 2015

This isn't a blog on economic indicators. I have no insider knowledge on when gas prices will rise again (or fall precipitously) or of the effect of immigration reform on national economic growth (great question), or if you should buy or sell bonds (I've been selling...poor choice).

Rather, for the purposes of my goals as an economist, I've got to jump back on the blogging horse.

I've submitted myself to the suicidal idea of getting a PhD in economics. Again. However, this time I am privileged to get a start of some cool research early on in my program at Rice University.

If you know me or my work, then you know I'm motivated by studying the economic decisions of black and brown folks both at home and abroad. You also know I'm a teacher. You probably don't know that I'm fascinated with economic history.

So in 2015, look for more posts, more regularly, and more regular posts with the economic history label, as I am pushing through a graduate seminar in 19th Century America, alongside Macroeconomics 2, Game Theory and Econometrics 2.

The latter 3 will never be personal or practical. Just theoretical. But this history class should prove to be both and much more.



Personal, practical economics. For everyone. In 2015 and beyond.

dls