Monday, February 12, 2018

"Slavery And The Origins of American Capitalism"- A Guest Commentary

"Slavery And The Origins of American Capitalism"- A Guest Commentary




Click on title to link to pre- World War I German Social Democrat and German Spartacist founder Franz Mehring's article,"On Race As A Social Construct", that puts the guest commentary below in proper perspective.

Markin comment:

The relationship between the rise of American capitalism and slavery is an intricate and intimate one as the guest commentary points out. There are many good points made here that can help focus our work, especially on the question of race that is the trigger-point of much of has occurred in American history, including now in the 'post-racial' Obamaian world.


February Is Black History Month


Slavery and the Origins of American Capitalism

Part One


We print below, in slightly edited form, a presentation by Jacob Zorn to a Spartacist League educational in New York on 30 March 2008, the first of several classes on black history and the development of the American labor movement.

This is not going to be a history class of everything that happened from 1492 to 1860; the material is too immense. I want to focus on the salient political points for this period, and also to try to set up the next class, on the Civil War. We are historical materialists, and as such we say that black oppression—and we say this often in WV—is not just a bunch of bad ideas but has a material, that is to say, a historical and class, basis. What I want to do in the class is explain the origins of this material basis. In the second class and in subsequent classes, this will be developed further. These are the three things I specifically want to drive home:

1. How slavery in the Americas was central to the development of capitalism, both on an international level and also here in the United States.

2. How elements of the contemporary black question, including the very concept of race, have their roots in the system of slavery.

3. How throughout every step of the development of the United States up through 1860 slavery was integral, from the colonial period, through the American war of independence, to the Constitution, and then culminating in the struggle that led up to the Civil War.

Marx and Primitive Capitalist Accumulation

I want to begin with what Marx calls the primitive accumulation of capital, which was discussed in one of the readings for this class, in the first volume of Capital. Marx has a very powerful quote in there: “In actual history, it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part.” And that’s kind of a summary of what I’m going to be talking about: enslavement, robbery and murder.

I’m not going to go over much of the European background, although it’s worth reviewing our pamphlet, Enlightenment Rationalism and the Origins of Marxism (1998), and also some of the articles we’ve written on the English Civil War, in addition to the Capital reading. Marx talks about the bloody origins of capitalism, and one of the key events was the enclosure acts that threw the peasantry off the land in England and Scotland in order to kind of kick-start capitalism. As Marx describes, in Europe this resulted both in a class that owned the means of production (because land became necessary as a means of production, for wool and other things) and also a class that owned nothing but its labor power. One result, necessary for the British colonization of North America, is that it created a large surplus of people in England who were subject to incredibly harsh punishment for very small crimes and for whom even colonial Virginia looked like a good escape.

Marx also talks about how the conquest of America, both North and South America and the Caribbean, was also key in the development of world capitalism. A key element of this was the dispossession of the indigenous population, a dispossession that was extremely violent and genocidal. If you want a taste of what this was like, you should read the writings of a Spanish priest by the name of Bartolomé de las Casas, which go into a lot of the gratuitous violence: about 95 percent of the pre-Colombian indigenous population was killed, perhaps 90 million people. But this early Spanish colonization, which was largely based on extracting gold and silver, fueled the development not only of Spanish but also of Dutch and English capitalism.

In North America, primitive capitalist accumulation meant not only dispossessing the indigenous population of the land, but also finding somebody to do the work, since in North America the English really didn’t use the Indians as a labor force. A comrade brought to my attention a really good article in WV No. 581 (30 July 1993), “Genocide ‘Made in USA’,” that shows how the destruction of millions of people was key in the building of the American nation and the laying of the basis for the development of North American capitalism, and how it left a birthmark of racism on American capitalism from the get-go. But fundamentally the colonists in North America had the opposite problem from what the ruling class in Britain had: that is, there was an abundance of land but a shortage of people to work on it.

I want to make the point that a lot of the history of the Americas, especially here in the United States, tends to be focused on North America. But in the early years of colonization, the most desired area of the Americas was really the Caribbean, and it was much later that North America was colonized—and not only by the English: there were Spanish outposts (for example, St. Augustine, Florida, is the longest continuously settled city founded by Europeans in the current U.S.); there was French fur trading in Quebec and plantation agriculture in Louisiana; and also obviously the Dutch in New Jersey and New York, as well as the British in Virginia. There was a lot of competition among these different European powers, and we’ll look especially at the rivalry of the Dutch and the English in terms of mercantilism.

Capitalism and Slavery

The readings talk about “chattel slavery.” So what exactly is a chattel slave? It’s not a concept that is used much today. “Chattel” means personal property. It’s related to the word “cattle.” And that is what slaves were: they were legally property that was sold and sometimes killed.

In the abstract, capitalism and slavery are fundamentally counterposed systems. One is based on free labor, and the other, on slave labor. Many of the advocates of capitalism opposed chattel slavery not only because they thought it was morally wrong, but also because they thought it was retrogressive. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith wrote: “From the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves” and “Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.”

Likewise, Alexander Hamilton, about whom we will be talking in a bit, said that slavery “relaxes the sinews of industry, clips the wings of commerce, and introduces misery and indigence in every shape” (quoted in James Oliver Horton, “Alexander Hamilton: Slavery and Race in a Revolutionary Generation,” New-York Journal of American History [Spring 2004]). The piece that comrades read from Eugene Genovese, “The Slave South: An Interpretation,” in The Political Economy of Slavery (1965) shows how, as a system, slavery was not capitalist; the slavocracy in the American South had its own productive system, its own values—or, to use Genovese’s phrase, its own “civilization”—that derived from this non-bourgeois system. Slavery was fundamentally different from capitalism.

However, capitalism did not evolve in the abstract, but in the concrete, and slavery was fundamental to this development. Even though the slave system itself was not capitalist, slavery was central to the development of capitalism, both in the U.S. and internationally. Slavery was also a very profitable “industry”—for lack of a better term—in its own right, and international and American capitalists are indelibly stained with slavery.

Slavery, of course, is not only a precapitalist, but also a prefeudal system of production. There is a brilliant book by Karl Kautsky called the Foundations of Christianity (1908) that, among other things, analyzes the importance of slavery in ancient Rome. Many of the elements of slavery in America are actually discussed by Kautsky in his treatment of plantation or mining slavery in Rome. He distinguishes, for example, between slavery for domestic use and slavery for profit, or commodity slavery. Obviously, commodity production in ancient Rome did not reach the level that it does under capitalism, but he made the point that when slaves make commodities that are then sold for the profit of their masters, the masters increase the exploitation of the slaves, which can only be done through immense oppression and brutality. Kautsky describes in detail a lot of the very brutal nature of Roman slavery, and he traces the decline of Rome to the contradictions in its slave system. For our purposes, one of the key elements, however, that is missing in Kautsky’s piece is race. This is not an accident, because, as we’ll see, Roman slavery was not a racial form of slavery.

With the destruction of the centralized Roman state in West Europe and the development of feudalism, slavery largely died out in medieval Europe. In 1086, for example, about 10 percent of the English population were slaves, but slavery was not central to medieval society. It was still practiced in the Mediterranean and parts of the Arab world, but in West Europe, feudalism was the dominant system, with serfdom the main productive form of labor.

The development of the English colonies in the Americas was concurrent with the development of capitalism in Britain—it was going on at the same time as the English Civil War, and there were various political intrigues over whom the colonies would support; there are cities in the United States named after both King Charles I and Cromwell, for example. Yet, the contradiction is that the rise of capitalism was accompanied with a new rise of slavery. Particularly in the English case, this was accompanied by the creation of the world sugar market. Eating sugar is not based on slavery, but the creation of the sugar market was.

I want to make some points about the development of slavery in the Americas. The first is that there is a prehistory: before the Spanish arrived in America, the Portuguese had begun using slave labor on plantations in their island colonies off Africa, such as Madeira and the Azores. By 1452, the Pope had given the Portuguese the right to trade slaves, and in 1479 the Spanish crown gave Portugal a monopoly over the slave trade. By 1502, there is evidence of black slaves in the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo
—that is to say 130 years before the English planters really began using slaves in the Caribbean and almost 200 years before slavery became entrenched in what would become the United States, in Virginia.

Slavery was crucial in almost every European colony throughout the Americas, and from the 16th century through the mid 19th century between 10 and 12 million Africans were “traded” as slaves. And it was extremely violent: depending on what century you’re looking at, between 10 and 40 percent of the slaves died in transit. Ninety-five percent of these African slaves ended up in either the Caribbean or Latin America. North America received a relatively small fraction of all the African slaves, and this would have important ramifications on how slavery developed here.

Although the first slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619, for most of the 17th century the dominant labor system in Virginia was indentured servitude, which was a really nasty and brutal system. If it weren’t for the slave system that came after, we would probably label indentured servitude one of the most brutal systems known. Indentured servants agreed to work for a period of years, usually between five and seven, in exchange for transportation to America. They might be promised land at the end of their terms.

But to begin with, many indentured servants did not live to the end of their terms of service. While they were servants, they were subjected to extremely harsh discipline and punishment. They could be whipped, they could be beaten, they could be sold for the duration of their terms of service. They worked a lot harder than English peasants worked, and a lot of what we think of as unique to slavery was also present in various ways in indentured servitude. Many servants ran away.

By the mid-to-late 1600s, from the point of view of the planters, there developed several problems with indentured servitude. Servants were living longer. (Incidentally, one of the reasons that they began to live longer is that they began to drink more alcohol and not drink polluted water.) This meant that there began to develop a layer of unruly and dissatisfied ex-indentured servants, making Virginia more and more unstable. The danger of this was highlighted in 1676 with Bacon’s Rebellion, when poor whites, mostly former indentured servants, and blacks united against the colonial government—in this case, to demand that the colonial government, among other things, drive out the Indians. But at the same time, fewer and fewer Europeans were willing to come to America as servants, partly because England was developing economically and partly because news got around England of what servitude was like, and it did not seem so attractive as it might have before.

So the fact that servants were living longer at the end of the 17th century made slavery (which was for life) more attractive, from the point of view of the planters, than servitude (which was usually for less than a decade). The planters in Virginia began to import slaves in larger and larger numbers. By the first decade of the 18th century, Virginia had been transformed from a society in which slaves were present into a society in which slavery was the central productive relationship, a slave society. This was not the only slave society in the Americas, but it was quite different from the slave societies in the Caribbean or Brazil.

When I was preparing this class, comrade Foster raised the interesting question: why did it take a revolution—the Civil War—to get rid of slavery in the United States, whereas in many other countries (not all of them, Haiti also obviously had a revolution) it did not take a revolution to get rid of slavery. There are various reasons, but one is that in the American South there were more slaveowners, many owning relatively few slaves, so that slavery was much more entrenched in colonial society and in later U.S. society. But importantly, from the point of view of the planters, slavery not only offered a source of labor, but also it offered a source of social stability, because with slavery came what veteran American Trotskyist Richard S. Fraser calls the concept of race.

The Race Concept

I’m not going to talk a lot about it because comrades are familiar, but there is no scientific basis for this concept of race. At the same time, various academics like to talk about race being “socially constructed.” But even though race is not scientifically real, it is very, very real. It affects almost every aspect of one’s life in this country, as we are reminded when we look at the newspaper every day. Marx, dealing with religion, wrote in The German Ideology (1846) that religion has no history—that is to say, no history independent of the social conditions that created it. So as Marxists, we understand that race is not just a bad idea, but one that developed out of a social system of production, a system of social relations, chattel slavery. This is explained very well in Fraser’s “The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution” [in Prometheus Research Series No. 3, August 1990, “In Memoriam: Richard S. Fraser”]. And for comrades who are interested in a more in-depth look at it, there is also a very good book on the creation of the idea of race in America by Winthrop Jordan, called White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968), that goes back to the 16th century.

Chattel slavery is an inherently inhuman system. It involves degrading an entire group of people, putting them by definition outside the realm of both legal and moral protection. Chattel slaves are not legally human. As John Locke said in Two Treatises of Government, in 1690, slaves “are by the Right of Nature subjected to the Absolute Dominion and Arbitrary Power of their masters. These Men cannot in that state be considered as any part of Civil Society….” This would later be paraphrased in the Dred Scott decision that the black man had no rights that the white man was bound to respect. The concept of race served as a justification for slavery, conflating class status—slavery—with physical features: skin color. While there were some free blacks, even in the South, being black became equated with being a slave, that is, outside of the norms of human society. It’s also useful to keep in mind that, of course, Africans at the time of slavery were not all of the same “race,” either: there were very different societies in Africa, and if we could borrow a term, we could talk about “how Africans became black.” Frederick Douglass has an important statement from when slavery was still in existence:

“We are then a persecuted people, not because we are colored, but simply because that color has for a series of years been coupled in the public mind with the degradation of slavery and servitude.”

—“Prejudice Against Color” (1850), in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 2,
ed. Philip S. Foner (1950)

This is the beginning of the material basis for the creation of a race-color caste in North America. And it’s not an accident that laws banning interracial sex and marriage were passed in Virginia and Maryland at the same time that slavery became consolidated in the late 1600s and early 1700s.

The idea of race was defended using the so-called “Curse of Ham” from the Bible, which is the idea that blackness was a curse from God, going back to Noah. And there was in fact slavery in biblical times, and you can find lots of passages in the Bible about slavery, and these were used to justify American slavery. I don’t want to defend the honor of the Old Testament, but nowhere is racial slavery mentioned in the Bible because it did not exist. Comrade Don pointed out a very interesting article by George Breitman that was published in the Spring 1954 issue of Fourth International, called “When Anti-Negro Prejudice Began,” that looks at the development of racism. And he shows that in the ancient world, there was no one group of people that was by definition enslaved, nor was slavery confined to one particular group. This idea of race did not make sense—it didn’t exist. So, racial slavery did not exist.

I also want to make an aside that race in the U.S. is different than race in other places, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, which had different types of slavery. There’s a myth in Brazil called “racial democracy,” which is that there’s really no such thing as race in Brazil; everybody’s Brazilian. This is obviously untrue, but it does reflect the fact that there was a different expression of slavery there. A lot of the difference has to do with how slavery developed in North America and the nature of British mercantilism. At the time the Virginian planters began to use slaves, the Dutch had already taken over the slave trade from the Portuguese, and because of Dutch-English rivalries, in 1651 Navigation Acts were passed, making it illegal for British colonists to buy products from other countries. Slaves were included as “products,” obviously. This had an important ramification on the importation of slaves. In fact, many of the early slaves in Virginia were not actually from Africa, but from Barbados. It’s also important to keep in mind that from the British perspective, the center of the slave trade was not in North America but in the Caribbean.

Therefore, the slave population in North America became a lot more stable, tended to live a lot longer and have more children. The details, for example, of slavery in Jamaica are horrid. The average slave tended to die within seven years of arriving in Jamaica. Therefore, although the slave trade provided only half a million African slaves to North America, by the time of the Civil War, the slave population in the United States had grown to four million people. A lot of this has to do with the demographics. In the British Caribbean, many plantations were left in the hands of overseers, while their absentee owners were content to stay in Britain. Eric Williams talks about this in his book, Capitalism and Slavery (1944). In North America, the planters became more Americanized, and they tended to stay in North America. For example, the Lee family of Virginia arrived around 1639; the Washingtons arrived around the same time.

In the Caribbean, the plantations were much larger, and slaveowners there had more slaves than in North America. One result of this is that African culture was destroyed through the experience of slavery to a much larger degree in North America than in the Caribbean or Brazil. As Fraser put it in “The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution,” in the United States “the Negro people are among the oldest of all the immigrant groups. They are essentially American.” And this is also shown in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in which Douglass pointedly calls himself An American Slave in the title. He illustrates that slaves in the U.S. spoke English, were largely Christian (he’s very powerful on the role of Christianity in supporting slavery), and were an organic part of American society. This is different than in Haiti, for example, where at the time of the Haitian Revolution, two-thirds of the black population were born in Africa. Or in Cuba. There’s a book by Miguel Barnet, The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (1966), based on interviews with a former slave who was born 50 years after Douglass, Esteban Montejo, that talks about how even in the late 19th century there were lots of aspects of African culture that survived in Cuba.

So that’s an important part of understanding the integral and unique nature of slavery in the U.S., which has programmatic implications today: there’s no separate black nation, and our program is one of revolutionary integrationism.

Slavery and the Development of Capitalism

One of the strengths of the Williams book is that he shows how the development of British industrial capitalism was to a large degree based upon slavery. The bourgeoisie in Liverpool, Manchester and the City of London became rich through the slave trade, later through sugar trading, and then with textile production that used slave-produced cotton. Of course slavery was not what provided the labor in England in the development of English capitalism or the industrial revolution. But after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and then slavery itself in the British Caribbean in the 1830s, British capitalism still depended on slavery because the textile mills of Manchester, for example, needed cotton. In 1860, about 75 percent of all British cotton came from the American South. This is part of the reason, as Marx wrote at the time, that a section of the British bourgeoisie supported the South during the American Civil War.

Also, throughout the late 18th century, there was slavery in much of the North (comrades might remember the very good “Slavery in New York” exhibit at the New York Historical Society), even though it was not the central method of production. By the early 19th century, slavery as a social relationship had mostly disappeared from the North (the last Northern state to free its slaves was New Jersey, in 1846). But the main connection between the nascent bourgeoisie and slavery was not that they owned slaves.

There is a very interesting book called Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (2005), written by three reporters for the Hartford Courant. It shows how the Northern bourgeoisie was connected to the slave system by a million threads: they bought molasses, which was made with slave labor, and sold rum as part of the Triangle Trade; they lent money to Southern planters; and most of the cotton that was sold to Britain was shipped through Northern ports, including here in New York City. They financed the slave trade, and even after it became illegal, there were still ships leaving from New York that were involved in slave trading. And they sold manufactured goods to the South. This is the background to the relationship between Northern capitalism and slavery. Capitalism is very different from slavery, but at the same time they are very historically connected.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Workers Vanguard No. 943
25 September 2009

Slavery and the Origins of American Capitalism

Part Two


We print below, in slightly edited form, Part Two of a presentation by Jacob Zorn to a Spartacist League educational in New York on 30 March 2008. Part One of this talk, published in WV No. 942 (11 September), focused on the centrality of black chattel slavery to the early development of capitalism.

I want to talk about the American Revolution, which we don’t write about all that much. I think there are two essential pitfalls in dealing with the American Revolution. One was shown most fully by Earl Browder, the head of the Communist Party (CP) during its popular-front phase in the mid 1930s. In What Is Communism?—the same book in which he tried to show that “Communism is the Americanism of the twentieth century”—Browder argued that the American Revolution of 1776 was essentially the model of the popular front. (There’s a novel by Howard Fast called Citizen Tom Paine, written during World War II, where he also makes this argument, that Tom Paine came up with the idea of a popular front against British colonialism.) The second pitfall is to pretend that the American Revolution isn’t really important at all.

There’s a WV article that was part of the readings, called “Why We Don’t Celebrate July 4” [WV No. 116, 2 July 1976], which is very useful. But just because we don’t celebrate the Fourth of July doesn’t mean that we think the revolution was unimportant. The revolution was, so far as it went, both important and progressive—the main thing is that it didn’t go all that far. The American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution in the sense that it laid the basis for the development of American capitalism, but keep in mind that Britain in 1776 was not a feudal society—the English Civil War had happened more than 100 years earlier. Socially, the revolution was an alliance between the planter elites of the Southern colonies, which obviously were based on slavery, and the merchants of the Northern colonies because both of them wanted to break away from the constraints of British mercantilism. Thus, the revolution spurred not only the development of American capitalism, but also the development of the slave system in the South. The revolution itself cemented the alliance between capitalism and slavery, an alliance that would later—to borrow a phrase from the Communist Manifesto—have to be burst asunder. But one of the interesting points about the American Revolution is that this relationship was almost not burst asunder. The revolution did not solve the question of which of these two systems would dominate; and in that sense, the Civil War really was the Second American Revolution. This is another part of the answer to comrade Foster’s question: Why did there need to be a Civil War? I think the American Revolution kind of set it up, in that sense.

I want to talk about the political significance of the revolution, however. Many of the ideals of the revolution, which drew upon the Parliamentary side of the English Civil War, are, in and of themselves, important. The right to bear arms, the separation of church and state, representative democracy, republicanism and colonial independence are good things. It’s worth reading Common Sense by Thomas Paine. Some of these ideas were quite radical for the time—and I would just remind comrades that in Britain there is still both a crown and an established church. Plus, the founding fathers were by and large secular. I don’t think that if George Washington had said that God had told him to fight England that people would have taken him seriously. That’s another point that our article on the Fourth of July makes—that even by bourgeois standards, the leaders of the American Revolution stand several heads and shoulders above the current leaders.

The Nature of the American Revolution

The American Revolution, however, was not a social revolution, unlike either the French or the Haitian revolutions that immediately followed it. The question of the revolution was not whether the goal of the colonies was to be capitalist, or to make money, but for whom the colonies would be making money. It is important to keep in mind that of all the British colonies in America, the West Indies—the so-called “sugar colonies”—were much more important than the mainland North American colonies. The Northern colonies, as Eric Williams describes, essentially existed to provide food and other supplies to the Caribbean colonies. They preferred importing food, even at very high prices, from North America to wasting land that could otherwise be used for sugar. And in an earlier book, The Negro in the Caribbean (1942), Williams described how even then, most of the fish eaten in the Caribbean was imported from elsewhere, even though obviously the Caribbean is made up of islands. And the West Indian planters were a powerful section of the British ruling class, including many representatives in Parliament. So Parliament was not going to do anything that would harm the interests of these planters.

Under British mercantilism, there were basically two ways that the North American colonies were important to Britain. Under the Navigation Act of 1651, and later the Molasses Act of 1733, they were supposed to trade only with other British colonies. For the North, these acts were largely dead letters; they traded with whomever they wanted to trade. Northern merchants regularly bought molasses from French colonies, which tended to be more productive and sold cheaper, and they sold rum and other products—made directly or indirectly from slave labor—to non-British colonies. The planters in the South were expected to sell tobacco only to the British, but they found ways to get around this. The other important role of the North American colonies was to pay taxes. And tobacco was taxed at this time, in much of the 18th century, not by its value (i.e., by the price), but by how much was actually grown, so that as the planters’ profits declined, their taxes often still increased. So, in much of the 18th century, even though the sugar colonies were much more profitable, they paid much less in taxes than did Virginia. And Virginia, in fact, paid more taxes to the royal treasury than any other colony. Nonetheless, for most of this period, the British government had a policy that was called salutary—or benign—neglect, allowing the colonies to ignore much of the mercantile laws while the colonies ran themselves.

This all changed at the end of the Seven Years (or the French and Indian) War, in 1763, which, in America at least, was fought in part over control of the Caribbean and French Canada. It was very complicated, and in some ways perhaps the first world war, drawing in every European power. But two trends merged at the end of this war. Britain ended the war with immense holdings in North America, with a large empire, and the newly crowned George III wanted to reassert a vigorous role for the British Crown. But the British were broke after the war and looked to America as a way of paying for this. As the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, the British “felt that the colonies were ungrateful children, ready to profit from the security our arms had gained for them, but unwilling to pay the price.”

So Parliament and George III, in a rather ham-handed way, passed a series of laws regarding the colonies (if you remember ninth grade, you probably went through them). But the bottom line is that these laws convinced both the American planters in the South and the merchants in the North that as long as they continued to remain a part of the British system, they would not be able to develop in the way that they wanted. And slavery was central to all of this, both because the main product that was being sent from Virginia—tobacco—was made with slave labor, but also because sugar and other things that were being traded in the North were an integral part of the Triangle Trade between Europe, the American colonies and Africa.

Slavery and the American Revolution

There is a great article that deals with the American Revolution in WV No. 764, called “The Haitian Revolution and the American Slavocracy.” Many comrades don’t remember it because it was published on September 14, 2001, but it explains how the American Revolution did not involve a social revolutionary component that was equivalent, for example, to the sans-culottes in France. It did not fundamentally change the class structure of the United States. But in order to mobilize the mass of the white populace—small farmers, artisans, shopkeepers—to risk their lives and livelihoods against Britain, the wealthy colonial elites had to tell them that all men, having been created equal, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

One of the key ways they were able to do this was through the institution of slavery, and the American rulers could give political rights to whites because the central labor force in the American South was slaves, who were excluded from all this. This is one of the reasons that there was no regime of plebeian terror in the American Revolution as there was in France; there was no Robespierre or, as in the English Civil War, Cromwell. Famously, in writing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, himself a slaveholder (he owned about 200 slaves), had put in some mild anti-slavery language, blaming George III for supporting the slave trade. This was taken out at the insistence of the slaveholders. That is to say, slavery couldn’t be touched.

From the revolution until the Constitution was adopted, the law of the land was what is called the Articles of Confederation. They allowed each state to regulate its own affairs, including whether to have slavery or not—this is the concept which later is called “states’ rights.” Earl Browder, in the same piece I referenced earlier, wrote that the Constitution was a “counter-revolution engineered by Alexander Hamilton.” (Given that this was about the same time that Browder was defending the Stalinist Moscow Trials in the USSR, his idea of a political counterrevolution might be somewhat suspect.) The CP fundamentally preferred the side of Jefferson—their school here in New York City, for example, was called the Jefferson School of Social Science. Jefferson liked to talk of individual liberties, and in some ways he is one of the more eloquent spokesmen for the American Revolution. But the system that was set up was really a cover, to a large degree, for slavery. Jefferson’s traditional enemy is considered to be Alexander Hamilton, and there are a lot of bad things about Alexander Hamilton, I suppose—he was willing to sacrifice political liberty upon the altar of bourgeois development, and he feared the people having too much power. But one of the key things was that he opposed slavery. If any of the founding fathers were vindicated by the Civil War, I think it was really Alexander Hamilton, who was in favor of a strong central government to develop capitalism, was opposed to slavery, and who also proposed arming blacks in the American Revolution, something that, again, the slaveholders opposed. Part of this is probably his own background, because he came from the British Caribbean and was intimately familiar with slavery.

Although the Constitution did represent a move away from the more egalitarian goals, or at least the rhetoric, of the revolution, it was carried out largely by the same men who made the revolution—as our piece in 1976 put it, they died of old age. It was not really a political counterrevolution in the same way that you can talk about Thermidor in the French Revolution, because there was not really a Robespierre in the American Revolution. The closest you would have, I guess, would be Daniel Shays, who in late 1786 in western Massachusetts rebelled against high taxes. It was fundamentally a different type of revolution.

The Constitution of 1787 was pushed by Alexander Hamilton in order to create a centralized government that would have the power to help create a unified, capitalist country. It was not very democratic, even if we exclude the question of slavery. In this context, I recommend section three in the July 2003 amici curiae (friends of the court) brief by the Partisan Defense Committee on Jose Padilla, which is called, “It Took a Civil War to Establish the Rights and Privileges of United States Citizenship.” It makes the point that federalism—the so-called separation of powers, including between the states and the national government—really allowed slavery to exist until the Civil War. Therefore, the Constitution of 1787 codified the coexistence of two battling social systems, with the South given extra power.

I’m sure comrades have listened to, or at least read, Barack Obama’s recent “A More Perfect Union” speech, where he argues that:

“The answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution—a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.”

Well, no, the Constitution actually made resolving this question short of a Civil War largely impossible. Also—it’s interesting—when he lists all the bad things about the Constitution, he leaves out the most important part, which is the three-fifths compromise, which not only said that blacks are 60 percent human beings, but essentially gave the slave South control of the federal government. As Frederick Douglass put it in an article titled “The Constitution and Slavery” (1849): “Under it, the slave system has enjoyed a large and domineering representation in Congress, which has given laws to the whole Union in regard to slavery, ever since the formation of the government.” Out of the three-fifths clause we also have the amazing contraption of the electoral college, which basically was designed to, and did, give the South the presidency, by giving more power to states that owned slaves. Some nine out of the first 15 presidents were Southerners, most from Virginia. So slavery was not, as Obama put it—and it’s not just Obama, it’s a common liberal myth—a “stain” on early American politics and society, but an essential thread woven throughout the development of American capitalism. It’s a fundamental aspect, not extraneous or peripheral.

The Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791 in order to get the states to support the adoption of the Constitution, and this is what the Padilla brief calls the “Second Constitution.” And these recognized important rights, but they still did not define any sense of national citizenship, something that would not come until the Civil War. In fact, one of the reasons that the framers didn’t put these rights in the original Constitution is that they didn’t want to start off saying that “all men are equal” again. That is to say, they didn’t want to have anything that could be seen as challenging slavery. Of course, a point that is made in the Padilla brief and that we have often made since the “war on terror” began is that rights are not just granted by a piece of paper but also reflect what type of social struggle is going on in society.

[TO BE CONTINUED]


Workers Vanguard No. 944
9 October 2009


Slavery and the Origins of American Capitalism

Part Three


We print below, in slightly edited form, the third and final part of a presentation by Jacob Zorn to a Spartacist League educational in New York on 30 March 2008. The first two parts were published in WV Nos. 942 and 943 (11 September and 25 September).

One way of contrasting the American Revolution to the French Revolution is to look at the case of Tom Paine. In the American Revolution, he was the far-left wing. But when he went to France, while he supported the French Revolution, he ended up essentially on the right wing of the revolution. It wasn’t his ideas that changed so much as the context. And when the Haitian Revolution erupted in 1791, even the elements of the American Revolution that supported the French Revolution, such as Jefferson, hated the Haitian Revolution and wanted to drown it in blood, because they saw in it a spectre that would threaten slavery in the South. Interestingly, Hamilton was one of the more open to recognizing Haiti as an independent country, partly because he hated France. Also, it’s interesting that the leaders of the American Revolution who were the most anti-slavery—Alexander Hamilton and Tom Paine—were not really American in the traditional sense. Tom Paine had just come over from Britain, and Hamilton was from the West Indies.

I do not want to suggest that the American Revolution was nothing more than a pro-slavery rebellion. As the article on Haiti points out, “To be sure, some radical elements in the American Revolution, including Thomas Paine, denounced slavery as a moral evil and called for its abolition. And Jefferson himself was well aware—and was constantly reminded by his liberal and radical English and French friends—that black chattel slavery was blatantly incompatible with the democratic principles he so eloquently proclaimed” (WV No. 764, 14 September 2001).

The common way liberals and idealists deal with this problem, especially with Jefferson, is to say that the ideals of Jefferson transcended the reality of Jefferson (and other founders)—that this was their own personal weakness. But in reality, whatever his personal weaknesses, Jefferson’s beliefs reflected the interests of his class, which was the slavocracy, and it was social struggle that expanded bourgeois-democratic rights to black people, including through the Civil War, and not a closer reading of the Declaration of Independence.

Incidentally, abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison rejected the entire Constitution—they called it a “covenant with death”—because it was pro-slavery, but in some ways they drew the wrong conclusion. That is to say, they avoided political struggle in favor of “moral suasion.” But their analysis of the Constitution as pro-slavery was correct. When Frederick Douglass broke with Garrison, he also changed his views of the Constitution.

The Early U.S. and Slavery

To many, the pro-slavery nature of the Constitution at the time may have appeared justified because many people thought that slavery would die a slow but natural death: the international slave trade was going to be abolished, the fertility of the soil in tobacco country was declining, and tobacco prices were in decline. But two things gave the Southern slavocracy a renewed lease on life, and Jefferson was at least indirectly involved in both. One was the invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s that made slave-produced cotton profitable. Jefferson as secretary of state approved the patent by Eli Whitney, and he also bought one of the earliest models. The second was the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, in which Jefferson as president basically illegally doubled the size of the United States. There is a whole debate in the history books over whether Napoleon or Jefferson was the one most responsible for the Louisiana Purchase. But in reality I think it was Toussaint L’Ouverture—by having defeated the French in Haiti, he made it so that Napoleon wanted to wash his hands of any colonies in America as quickly as possible.

Taken together, these developments increased the power of the Southern slavocracy and propelled them into conflict with the North. As we all know, this conflict between the capitalist North and the slave South eventually led to the Civil War, the second bourgeois revolution in the United States. However, the Northern capitalists were not engaged in one unceasing revolutionary struggle. Key elements of the Northern bourgeoisie were all too eager to cohabit with slavery because it was profitable. However, by the mid 19th century, the development of capitalism as a whole increasingly came into conflict with the domination of the Southern system in national politics. Marx in 1861 sarcastically described what he called the Northern bourgeoisie’s “long hesitations, and an exhibition of forbearance unknown in the annals of European history,” in describing their willingness to compromise with the South.

And in fact, Marx was one of the greatest observers of the class dynamics of American politics. Here’s a rather long quote from the same article by Marx:

“The progressive abuse of the Union by the slave power, working through its alliance with the Northern Democratic party, is, so to say, the general formula of the United States history since the beginning of this century. The successive compromise measures mark the successive degrees of the encroachment by which the Union became more and more transformed into the slave of the slave-owner. Each of these compromises denotes a new encroachment of the South, a new concession of the North. At the same time none of the successive victories of the South was carried but after a hot contest with an antagonistic force in the North, appearing under different party names with different watchwords and under different colors. If the positive and final result of each single contest told in favor of the South, the attentive observer of history could not but see that every new advance of the slave power was a step forward to its ultimate defeat. Even at the times of the Missouri Compromise the contending forces were so evenly balanced that Jefferson, as we see from his memoirs, apprehended the Union to be in danger of splitting on that deadly antagonism. The encroachments of the slaveholding power reached their maximum point, when, by the Kansas-Nebraska bill, for the first time in the history of the United States, as Mr. [Stephen] Douglas himself confessed, every legal barrier to the diffusion of Slavery within the United States territories was broken down, when, afterward, a Northern candidate bought his Presidential nomination by pledging the Union to conquer or purchase in Cuba a new field of dominion for the slaveholder; when, later on, by the Dred Scott decision, diffusion of Slavery by the Federal power was proclaimed as the law of the American Constitution, and lastly, when the African slave-trade was de facto reopened on a larger scale than during the times of its legal existence. But, concurrently with this climax of Southern encroachments, carried by the connivance of the Northern Democratic party, there were unmistakable signs of Northern antagonistic agencies having gathered such strength as must soon turn the balance of power.”

—“The American Question in England” (1861)

So the point is that there was what New York Senator William Henry Seward called an “irrepressible conflict” between slavery and freedom. I’m going to give somewhat short shrift to the 1850s, not because it’s an unimportant period, but because it’s so important that comrades are probably more familiar with it than with the earlier stuff. I also think that the first volume of James McPherson’s Ordeal by Fire (1982) covers this ground very well. But I want to draw comrades’ attention to several factors. One is the role of the political parties, and the second is the role of expansion.

As Marx illustrates, the Democratic Party—including in the North—was a pro-slavery party. The contemporary political system that we have today is relatively new. For much of the antebellum period, there were two parties, the Whigs and the Democrats. The Democratic Party, formed by Jefferson in 1792 and reformed by President Andrew Jackson in the 1830s, was a populist party. They were in favor of what is often called “Jacksonian Democracy,” which goes down in various history books as the expansion of democracy in the United States. They were for the rule of the “little man”; they were against banks and entrenched economic power. They opposed the creation of a national bank. They were a white man’s party, viciously anti-Indian—Jackson carried out one of the brutal series of attacks that pushed the Indians out of the Southeast and further west—and also viciously pro-slavery and anti-black. This was also the time of increasing Irish immigration, and the Democratic Party, especially in big Northern cities like here in New York, based themselves on immigration.

In the South, the Democrats were an openly pro-slavery party. Although he had his differences with Jackson, one key Democratic leader was John C. Calhoun, who was in many ways the intellectual grandfather of the Confederacy. He developed the idea—“nullification”—that a state could refuse to abide by the federal government if it disagreed. He also believed, unlike Jefferson, that slavery was not only necessary, but was positively good. And this is really the history of the Democratic Party. There is a new book that is very interesting, by Bruce Bartlett, who writes for the Wall Street Journal, called Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past (2008). He is pro-Republican and so has an ax to grind, but it goes through the history of the Democratic Party on the question of slavery and then later on Reconstruction, up through the Dixiecrats.

The other political party was called the Whigs. They opposed what they saw as increased presidential power. They wanted the government to intervene into the economy to help spur capitalist development, such as through a national bank, protective tariffs to develop industry, and government spending on what were called “internal improvements,” or infrastructure. Both these parties had supporters in the North and the South, but as slavery became a more important issue, they were increasingly torn apart.

The other party that developed, as the slave question basically corroded the Whigs in the 1850s, was the Republican Party. The Republicans were not an abolitionist party, but they were perhaps the most radical mainstream party that the country has ever seen. They were dedicated not to eliminating slavery, but to rolling back the power of the slave South—the so-called Slave Power. There is a good book by Eric Foner that sums up the goal of the early Republicans, called Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1970). The Republican Party became the party of the American bourgeoisie in its struggle against the slavocracy—it was a class-based party, something that we are told doesn’t exist in the United States.

And then there were the abolitionists, who were seen as a radical fringe, but who played a very important role in pushing the question of slavery forward. I said that there is really no radical Cromwell or Robespierre figure in the American Revolution, but it’s the abolitionists who are the real radical bourgeois revolutionaries in the history of the United States. It is to them that we look, not Thomas Jefferson.

Why did the two systems keep butting heads? It was not about the morality of slavery or about broader philosophical issues. It was because both slavery and capitalism had built-in tendencies to expand, and the expansion of one came at the expense of the other. So, as Marx wrote, one had to vanquish the other. There are three reasons why the Southern slavocracy needed to expand:

1. Exhausted soil. Just as in Roman times, the slavery system used up the soil rapidly. The emphasis was on getting the most crops possible now, and not on preserving the soil. In the North, they were able to invest capital in order to fertilize farm land, but in the South they didn’t do that. So there was an endless need for more land. According to Eugene Genovese’s The Political Economy of Slavery (1967), by 1858 some 40 percent of the South’s cotton land was already exhausted.

2. Political. The three-fifths compromise was designed to give the South more power than its population warranted, but it still could not allow the North to obtain more free states. Every free state needed to be offset by a slave state, to prevent the North from getting the upper hand.

3. Domestic slave trade. Less important, but still real, was that the slaveholders in the older states, like Virginia and Maryland, raised money by selling slaves to the Lower South, so they had an interest in keeping slavery expanding.

So the whole politics of the South was one of expanding slavery, and they saw any interference with the growth and expansion of slavery as a dagger aimed at the heart of the entire slave system.

But the free North also needed to expand. The key reason was, as we all know, that capitalism has to have expanding markets as its productivity increases. Capitalism depends on growing markets, and although a fair number of capitalists made a profit on selling to the South, slaves were not very big consumers, and there was a limit to the planters’ demand for goods. So from the point of view of the North, the South was really a stagnant economy, compared to the West, which the Northeastern and Northern capitalists saw as a vast potential market. They were increasingly selling to the West, but this depended on the expansion of free labor and not slavery to the West.

The second reason was political. The North did not want to be dominated by the South more than it already was, so it needed to offset the growth of slave states. Both the North and the South had agreed in theory that expansion was good. This was the period of so-called “Manifest Destiny”—the idea that God had uniquely blessed the United States with the job of civilizing the American continent. This idea was popular in the North and in the South, but the devil was in the details, and the question was what to do about the land that became part of the United States.

The first real crisis came with the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Missouri was the second state admitted from the Louisiana Purchase, and essentially what was agreed on in 1820 was the temporary measure of drawing a line, anything north of which would become free, and anything south of which would become slave. But the problem was broached again every several years.

A key thing, to which I’m going to give a lot less attention than it deserves, was Texas. In the 1830s, slaveholders had moved to Texas, and they basically engineered a split from Mexico. The South supported this because they wanted Texas to join the country as a slave state. The so-called Texas Revolution of 1835-36 was basically a rebellion against Mexico in order to protect slavery. The North did not want Texas to join as a slave state or, God forbid, several slave states.

So, a lot of the roots of the immediate struggle over slavery in the 1840s and ’50s go back to how to deal with the question of Texas. Mexico, for obvious reasons, did not want its former territory to be annexed by the United States, and when in 1845 the Southern states essentially were able to annex Texas, that act provoked a war with Mexico. And so, in 1846 the United States invaded Mexico and ended up occupying Mexico City and important cities like Veracruz and Monterrey. As a result of the 1846-48 war, the U.S. took over half of Mexico’s territory, and the acquisition of these new territories gave rise to disputes between the North and South that helped lead to the Civil War (see “Mexican-American War: Prelude to American Civil War,” WV Nos. 933 and 934, 27 March and 10 April).

The situation created compromise after compromise. Many Northerners preferred to compromise with the South, and so there were a series of compromises, but the crisis over Texas and the invasion of Mexico basically made continued compromises impossible. Northerners, including Democrats, had been less willing to support the invasion of Mexico because it was seen as a war to expand slavery. Not just the abolitionists—although the abolitionists were the most fervent—but many people in the North were against the invasion of Mexico because they thought it was a pro-slavery conspiracy, which to a large degree it was.

The U.S. obviously won the war against Mexico, which had important effects on the development of both U.S. and Mexican capitalism. Yet the immediate result of the victory was to bring the United States even closer to civil war. The first sign of this was the Wilmot Proviso, in which Northern states refused to finance the war against Mexico so long as it was seen as increasing the number of slave states. The Wilmot Proviso declared that the war would only be funded if the states that were gained from it did not become slave. This cut across party lines—Wilmot was a Democrat from Pennsylvania—and it heralded the realignment of American politics along sectional lines.

Soon after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which finalized the taking over of half of Mexico, there was the Compromise of 1850, and by this time the split of the country was already posed; it was already talked about. And in fact Calhoun, who would die shortly afterward, all but advocated a division of the country, that is, the secession of the South. The Compromise of 1850 allowed California to become a free state, but it put off deciding on the rest of the former Mexican territories, and this was seen as allowing the possibility of slavery there. More grotesquely, it also created the Fugitive Slave Act, which made Northern states complicit in “returning” slaves who had run away from the South to the North. When they attempted to capture Anthony Burns, a runaway slave, in Boston and provoked angry mass protests, it really posed the question of the relationship between the North and the South. Frederick Douglass spelled this out when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed:

“By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. By that act, Mason and Dixon’s line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women and children, as slaves, remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States. The power is co-extensive with the star-spangled banner, and American Christianity.”

—“The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” (1852)

From the 1850 Compromise on—there were still more compromises—the Southern states were increasingly pushing the envelope. There was the Dred Scott decision, where the Supreme Court ruled, as we mention in our Mumia articles, that slavery was not only the law of the land in the South, but was the law of the land anyplace. It ruled that slave property must be protected, including in free states and that, in its famous statement, blacks had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” This really gave rise to what would be a final showdown between the capitalist system in the North and the slavocracy in the South.

I want to make the point, however, that it was not something that even at the time was obvious, or that even many of the bourgeoisie accepted. When John Brown carried out his raid in 1859, he was roundly denounced by many, including by Abraham Lincoln. But it posed the question: How was the United States going to be ruled? Was it going to develop as a capitalist country or as a slave society? This is something that the Civil War, which is the subject of the next class, would decide, in what we call the Second American Revolution.

In Boston February 15th -Vets standout for peace in Korea

The Olympic Truce Continues                                  
NO WAR      Negotiation Not Confrontation
STANDOUT AGAINST WAR WITH NORTH KOREA! 
Date: Thursday, February 15th
Place:  In Front of South Station Main Entrance
700 Atlantic Avenue, Boston, MA 02110
Time:  4:30 to 5:30 PM

Calling all peace Activists              Please Join us!
Contact:
  Dan Luker        danluker@yahoo.com
  Paul Atwood   Paul.Atwood@umb.edu

In Honor Of Abraham Lincoln's Birthday-"We Are Coming Father Abraham"- A Song Of The American Civil War





This is an example of an American Civil War song that I gleaned from reading the book, "Civil War Curiosities" by Webb Garrison.

In the event, although the United States Congress authorized and budgeted for those 300,000 soldiers, I do not believe that the quota was met.


WE ARE COMING, FATHER ABRAHAM
Words by James Sloan Gibbons
Music L.O. Emerson


We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more,
From Mississippi's winding stream and from New England's shore.
We leave our plows and workshops, our wives and children dear,
With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear.
We dare not look behind us but steadfastly before.
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!

CHORUS: We are coming, we are coming our Union to restore,
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!

If you look across the hilltops that meet the northern sky,
Long moving lines of rising dust your vision may descry;
And now the wind, an instant, tears the cloudy veil aside,
And floats aloft our spangled flag in glory and in pride;
And bayonets in the sunlight gleam, and bands brave music pour,
We are coming, father Abr'am, three hundred thousand more!

CHORUS

If you look up all our valleys where the growing harvests shine,
You may see our sturdy farmer boys fast forming into line;
And children from their mother's knees are pulling at the weeds ,
And learning how to reap and sow against their country's needs;
And a farewell group stands weeping at every cottage door,
We are coming, Father Abr'am, three hundred thousand more!

CHORUS

You have called us, and we're coming by Richmond's bloody tide,
To lay us down for freedom's sake, our brothers' bones beside;
Or from foul treason's savage group, to wrench the murderous blade;
And in the face of foreign foes its fragments to parade.
Six hundred thousand loyal men and true have gone before,
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!

CHORUS

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Blues Ain’t Nothing But A Good Woman On Your Mind- With Howlin’ Wolf’s Little Red Rooster In Mind


The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Blues Ain’t Nothing But A Good Woman On Your Mind- With Howlin’ Wolf’s Little Red Rooster In Mind  




Little Red Rooster

I am the little red rooster
Too lazy to crow for day
I am the little red rooster
Too lazy to crow for day
Keep everything in the farm yard upset in every way
The dogs begin to bark and hounds begin to howl
Dogs begin to bark and hounds begin to howl
Watch out strange cat people
Little red rooster's on the prowl
If you see my little red rooster
Please drive him home
If you see my little red rooster
Please drive him home
Ain't had no peace in the farm yard
Since my little red rooster's been gone

Johnny Prescott daydreamed his way through the music that he was listening to just then on the little transistor that Ma Prescott, Martha to adults, had given him for Christmas after he has taken a fit when she quite reasonable suggested that a new set of ties to go with his white long-sleeved shirts might be a better gift, a better Christmas gift and a bit more practical too when he played with his band at outings, for a sixteen-year old boy. No, he had screamed he wanted a radio, a transistor radio, batteries included, of his own so that he could listen to whatever he liked up in his room, or wherever he was, and didn’t have, understand, didn’t have to listen to some Vaughn Monroe singing about some unknown place over there, or Harry James’ Sentimental Journey or Tommy Dorsey or his brother Jimmy doing the inevitable Tangerine 1940s war drum thing. Or worse, the Inkspots, Jesus, he was tired of that spoken verse they include in every freaking song doing I’ll Get By or If I Didn’t Care which he had had to listen to on the huge immobile radio compliments of RCA Victor downstairs in the Prescott living room in the place of honor.

Hearing shades of that stuff all day every day when Ma Prescott got dreamy while dusting the furniture, doing the daily laundry, or washing the floors had finally gotten to him. Even more disturbing than that, if such a thing was possible, was passing through the downstairs from his room on Saturday night after dinner, maybe out for some elusive infrequent date with somebody’s lame sister, or maybe one of the easily picked up girls from the weekly sock hop dances held at various locations but mainly in the North Adamsville gym (easily picked up and escorted home but hard, hard as hell to get to first base with, or even a kiss after all was said and done), or just hanging with the guys in front of Doc’s Drugstore looking at the girls passing by or stepping inside every now and again to hear what one of those passing girls who stepped into his door was playing on Doc’s super-jack jukebox, and seeing his mother and father gearing up for a full night, seven until eleven of that stuff presented by Bill Marlowe on his Stagedoor Johnny show on WJDA. Strictly squaresville, cubed.

[Hey, for a minute I forgot who my audience might be. Sure those of you from the generation of ’68, those who for a minute in the 1960s thought along with me that we might turn the world upside down, might change things for little guys and gals for the better, turn things around so that they might look like something we might just want to pass on to the next generation know what a transistor radio was. Lived and died by that neat invention invented by some guy who knew what the hell he was doing, knew we who came of age in the cold war red scare 1950s needed our own way of getting privacy and created a radio that was small enough to conceal, put in our pockets if need be, and let us at the flick of a wrist listen to whatever radio station was providing that be-bop music that we craved. Those of you not from that generation of ’68 should know that this gizmo was like a primitive iPod or MP3 player except, well, except you could not download whatever songs you were interested in. Yeah, I know primitive now but a breath of fresh age back then when we needed to break-out from our parents’ music just like you and every generation needs to do.] 

So Johnny glad that he had won one battle although he knew he was behind, seriously behind in the war, that inevitable generational war (although he did not, and probably his parents did not either if they had forgotten their own battles against intransigent parents, know enough then to call the tussle of wills a battle) was primed to go nightly to his room to hear all those songs that he first heard on that Doc’s jukebox, or maybe got featured by the DJ Rockin’ Rich at the weekly dances since he was in tune with all the latest. But here was Johnny’s dilemma, here is what he could not make heads or tails out of at first. One night as he listened to this new drippy record Shangra-la by The Four Coins that just finished up a few seconds before and as this Banana Boat song by The Tarriers was starting its dreary trip through his ears was not sure that those ties his mother had suggested wouldn’t have been a better deal, and more practical too.

Yeah, this so-called rock station, WAPX out of North Adamsville, the closest station that Johnny could receive at night without some static in the air had sold out to, well, sold out to somebody, because except for late at night, midnight late at night, one could not hear the likes of Jerry Lee, Carl, Little Richard, Fats, and the new, now that Elvis was gone, killer rocker, Chuck Berry who proclaimed loud and clear that Mr. Beethoven had better move along, and said Mr. Beethoven best tell one and all of his confederates, including Mr. Tchaikovsky that rock ‘n’ roll was the new sheriff in town. As he turned the volume down a little lower (that tells the tale right there, friends) as Rainbow (where the hell do they get these creepy songs from he thought, rainbows for chrissakes) by Russ Hamilton he was ready to throw in the towel though.

Johnny could not quite figure how that magic that first got him moving, first got him swaying his hips, first got him feeling funny thoughts about girls and how they had changed one year from being kind of just plain nuisances (and they had been, no question in Johnny’s mind about that whatever subsequent charms they possessed) to kind of nice to have around changed and why. Changed from every guy around town (young guys anyway, the guys who counted) wearing long sideburns, wearing a built-in slightly suggestive sexy swagger, and wearing a sneer that they hoped some foxy girl, maybe any girl would wipe off their faces (and the girls, those not totally and fantastically addicted to the “king” himself, and forever, were hoping that they could wipe off). Changed from running home, yes, running home, after school each and every week day afternoon to watch on television for the latest dances and tunes on American Bandstand  (and the latest foxy chicks too don’t forget that Johnny) ever since Bill Haley and the Comets rocked the joint, or beloved Eddie Cochran went summertime blues crazy. Changed from sexually-charged lyrics by Chuck Berry and what he would do, or not do, to his sweet little sixteen. Changed from the high energy explosion of Jerry Lee working off the back of some hokey flatbed truck, piano keys flailing away, hair bouncing with the beat, on High School Confidential  in the movie by the same name when he put his name forward as the new king of the rock hill (although the movie itself was kind of dippy). Yeah, changed to soft soap, nicely dressed, nicely mannered, not a hair out of place  and no sideburn  guys like Fabian, Bobby Vee, and Neil  Sedeka who you would not dream of hanging around with, would not allow on your corner boy corner but who all the girls, well, most all of the girls flipped out over. Worse, worse than anything else these guys and their music was stuff that parents actually went for, would get the Ma and Pa high recommendation of “wasn’t that a young man singing” just like Frank [Sinatra for those not in the bobby-soxer 1940s know] in the old days, saw too as innocent and nice. Jesus.      

Desperate Johnny fingered the dial looking for some other station when he heard this crazy piano riff starting to breeze through the night air, the heated night air, and all of a sudden Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 which he had not heard for a long time blasted the airwaves. But funny it didn’t sound like the whinny Ike’s voice so he listened for a little longer, and as he later found out from the DJ (Be-Bop Benny by name) it was actually a James Cotton Blues Band cover. After that performance was finished fish-tailing right after that one was a huge harmonica intro and what as it turned out had was none other than mad-hatter Junior Wells doing When My Baby Left Me splashed through (that “none other” part learned later when he got deeper into the electric blues night). No need to turn the dial further then because what Johnny Prescott had found in the crazy night air, radio beams bouncing every which way, was direct from Chicago, and maybe right off those hard-hearted Maxwell streets was Be-Bop Benny’s Chicago Blues Radio Hour. Be-Bop Benny who started Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino on their careers, or helped.

Now Johnny, like every young high-schooler, every "with it" high school-er in the USA, had heard of this show, because even though everybody was crazy for rock and roll, just now the airwaves sounded like, well, sounded like music your parents would dance to, no, sit down to at a dance, some kids still craved high rock. So this show was known mainly through the teenage grapevine but Johnny had never heard it before because, no way, no way in hell was his punk little Radio Shack transistor radio with two dinky batteries going to ever have the strength to pick Be-Bop Benny’s live show out in Chicago. So Johnny, and maybe rightly so, took this turn of events for a sign. When he heard that distinctive tinkle of the Otis Spann piano warming up to Spann’s Stomp and right after with his Someday added in he was hooked. And you know he started to see what Billie, Billie Bradley from over in Adamsville, meant when at a school dance where he had been performing with his band, Billie and the Jets, he mentioned that if you wanted to get rock and roll back you had better listen to blues, and if you wanted to listen to blues, blues that rocked then you had very definitely had better get in touch with the Chicago blues as they came north from Mississippi and places like that.

And Johnny thought, Johnny who have never been too much south of Gloversville, or west of Albany, and didn’t know too many people who had been much further either, couldn’t understand at first why that beat, that da, da, da, Chicago beat sounded like something out of the womb in his head, sometime out of Mother Africa (although again what did he know of old African instruments and that sound, that beat that seemed like eternity beating on his brain). How on some bars he could hear that rock ‘n’ roll ready to explode if only they could speed it up a shade, how the beat in his head was now making the transition, maybe not smooth but making it. That beat just then turning his own very personal teen-age blues (some sociologists were making big money or at least making a splash by frightening every red scare cold war parent with the idea of their Jimmy or Susie being in the grip of teen angst and alienation and ready to try anything to get to the bottom of it) to something else for the duration of the song anyway. But when he heard Big Walter Horton wailing on that harmonica on Rockin’ My Boogie he knew those be-bop beats had to be in his genes.

***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes – On Lincoln’s Birthday Lincoln Memorial: Washington

***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes – On Lincoln’s Birthday Lincoln Memorial: Washington











From The Pen Of Frank Jackman



February is Black History Month





Lincoln Memorial: Washington



Let's go see Old Abe
Sitting in the marble and the moonlight,
Sitting lonely in the marble and the moonlight,
Quiet for ten thousand centuries, old Abe.
Quiet for a million, million years.

Quiet-

And yet a voice forever
Against the
Timeless walls
Of time-
Old Abe.




…he, Father Abraham he, pug-ugly he that no midnight moonless night or early morning darkest hour before the dawn monument chiseled stone could render beautiful (damn, that age of tin-type sepia photography, that Mathew Brady and his merry band hunched inside those clothed lightless, airless boxes, that damn warts and all pre-digital photography, when a painterly touch, say rough-hewn campsite wise and bloody wounded battle weary Winslow Homer’s, might have made him, well, just plain). Yes, warts and all, sitting arched in lighted stone in judgment, eternity self-judgment (did he do this or that action right to further that furrowed brow first of all, overall, preliminary assessment right on union and slow on the inevitable abolition call that old Frederick Douglass and the ever-hovering ghost of Captain John Brown late of Kansas and Harper’s Ferry fight had urged upon a blood-stained land).



He, furrowed in youth and pug-ugly, in youth, thus no catch for gentile Kentucky bourbon belle daughters sitting astride Stephen Foster’s old black Joe, the old darkies are gay, or so it seemed, waiting for Mister Brett Butler to come a-calling, all Kentuck born and Illini-bred (where the best they could do was say nigra when talking about the slave problem. And later, much later the sons and grandsons of poor as dirt Kentuck hills and hollows mountain boys, Harlan County roughs, picked that up nigra expression too, and went to their graves with that on their lips, Jesus.). He meant to keep all the races split, let them, the blacks, (nigras, remember) go back to Canaan land, go back to Africa, go to some not American union place but keep them out of Chi town (sounds familiar) had a conversion, maybe not a conversion so much as a lining up of his beliefs with his “walk the walk” talk. Get this reasoning: if he could save the union by NOT freeing slave one he would do so, if he could save the union by freeing some rebel-held slaves he would do so, if he could save the union by freeing every goddam slave in every stinking corner of every stinking cotton plantation he would do. By 1862 the vagaries of war, the skimpy logic of his position, would lead him kicking and screaming to the latter. But despite being a man of his time on the “colored” question he did what he had to and hence that righteous small marble tribute at the river end of the National Mall.    



He ran for president, President of the United States, not as a son of William Lloyd Garrison, all Newburyport prissy and hell- bent on damning the Constitution for that third-fifth of a man error and for Taney’s Dred Scott decision, his Abe well-thumbed, well-read constitution, or some reformed wild boy Liberty man barely contained in the Fremont Republican dust but a busted out Whig when whiggery went to ground, (hell, no, he would not go down with the ship on that tack, otherwise he would still be stuck in Springfield or maybe practicing law in bell-weather Podunk Peoria, although he would note what that burg had to say and move slowly). Nor was he some righteous son, Thoreau or Emerson-etched son, of fiery-maned Calvinist sword-in-hand black avenging angel Captain John Brown, late of Kansas blood wars and Harper’s Ferry liberation fight (he had no desire to share the Captain’s blood-soaked fate, mocked his bloody efforts in fact, as if only immense bloods would render the national hurts harmless when later the hills, hollows and blue-green valleys reeked of blood and other stenches).

His goal, simple goal (in the abstract), was to hold the union together, and to curb that damn land hunger slavery, that national abyss. And since they ran politics differently in those days (no women, latinos, nigras to fuss over) and were able to touch up a picture or two even if inexpertly by digital standards (and stretch his biographic facts a bit when the “wide awakes” awoke) he won, barely won but won, was a minority president no question, his writ ran only so far and no further.  And then all hell broke loose, and from day one, from some stormy March day one, he had to bend that big long boney pug-ugly body to the winds, his winds.

And he did, not unequivocally, not John Brown prophet proud, fearlessly facing his gallows and his maker, to erase the dripping blood and canker sore from his homeland, but in a revolutionary way nevertheless, broke down slavery’s house divided, broke it down, no quarter given when the deal went down, when he found Grant to steel his troops and no quarter (and let hell and brimstone Billy Sherman and his “bummers” light up the Southern sky). So more like some latter day Oliver Cromwell (another warts and all man) pushing providence forward with a little kick. More like old Robespierre flaming the masses with the new dispensation, the new words slave freedom. Kept freeing slaves as he went along, kept pushing that freedom envelope, kept pushing his generals south and west and east and tightening , anaconda tightening, the noose on the old ways until Johnny Reb cried “uncle,” cried his fill when righteous Sherman and his cutthroat bummers got to work too. Yes, old Father Abraham, the last of the revolutionary democrats, the last of the serious ones, who couldn’t say black better than nigra, and never could, but knew the old enlightenment freedom word, knew it good.

…and now he belongs to the ages, and rightfully so, warts and all.

***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes – On Lincoln’s Birthday Lincoln Memorial: Washington











From The Pen Of Frank Jackman



February is Black History Month





Lincoln Memorial: Washington



Let's go see Old Abe
Sitting in the marble and the moonlight,
Sitting lonely in the marble and the moonlight,
Quiet for ten thousand centuries, old Abe.
Quiet for a million, million years.

Quiet-

And yet a voice forever
Against the
Timeless walls
Of time-
Old Abe.




…he, Father Abraham he, pug-ugly he that no midnight moonless night or early morning darkest hour before the dawn monument chiseled stone could render beautiful (damn, that age of tin-type sepia photography, that Mathew Brady and his merry band hunched inside those clothed lightless, airless boxes, that damn warts and all pre-digital photography, when a painterly touch, say rough-hewn campsite wise and bloody wounded battle weary Winslow Homer’s, might have made him, well, just plain). Yes, warts and all, sitting arched in lighted stone in judgment, eternity self-judgment (did he do this or that action right to further that furrowed brow first of all, overall, preliminary assessment right on union and slow on the inevitable abolition call that old Frederick Douglass and the ever-hovering ghost of Captain John Brown late of Kansas and Harper’s Ferry fight had urged upon a blood-stained land).



He, furrowed in youth and pug-ugly, in youth, thus no catch for gentile Kentucky bourbon belle daughters sitting astride Stephen Foster’s old black Joe, the old darkies are gay, or so it seemed, waiting for Mister Brett Butler to come a-calling, all Kentuck born and Illini-bred (where the best they could do was say nigra when talking about the slave problem. And later, much later the sons and grandsons of poor as dirt Kentuck hills and hollows mountain boys, Harlan County roughs, picked that up nigra expression too, and went to their graves with that on their lips, Jesus.). He meant to keep all the races split, let them, the blacks, (nigras, remember) go back to Canaan land, go back to Africa, go to some not American union place but keep them out of Chi town (sounds familiar) had a conversion, maybe not a conversion so much as a lining up of his beliefs with his “walk the walk” talk. Get this reasoning: if he could save the union by NOT freeing slave one he would do so, if he could save the union by freeing some rebel-held slaves he would do so, if he could save the union by freeing every goddam slave in every stinking corner of every stinking cotton plantation he would do. By 1862 the vagaries of war, the skimpy logic of his position, would lead him kicking and screaming to the latter. But despite being a man of his time on the “colored” question he did what he had to and hence that righteous small marble tribute at the river end of the National Mall.    



He ran for president, President of the United States, not as a son of William Lloyd Garrison, all Newburyport prissy and hell- bent on damning the Constitution for that third-fifth of a man error and for Taney’s Dred Scott decision, his Abe well-thumbed, well-read constitution, or some reformed wild boy Liberty man barely contained in the Fremont Republican dust but a busted out Whig when whiggery went to ground, (hell, no, he would not go down with the ship on that tack, otherwise he would still be stuck in Springfield or maybe practicing law in bell-weather Podunk Peoria, although he would note what that burg had to say and move slowly). Nor was he some righteous son, Thoreau or Emerson-etched son, of fiery-maned Calvinist sword-in-hand black avenging angel Captain John Brown, late of Kansas blood wars and Harper’s Ferry liberation fight (he had no desire to share the Captain’s blood-soaked fate, mocked his bloody efforts in fact, as if only immense bloods would render the national hurts harmless when later the hills, hollows and blue-green valleys reeked of blood and other stenches).

His goal, simple goal (in the abstract), was to hold the union together, and to curb that damn land hunger slavery, that national abyss. And since they ran politics differently in those days (no women, latinos, nigras to fuss over) and were able to touch up a picture or two even if inexpertly by digital standards (and stretch his biographic facts a bit when the “wide awakes” awoke) he won, barely won but won, was a minority president no question, his writ ran only so far and no further.  And then all hell broke loose, and from day one, from some stormy March day one, he had to bend that big long boney pug-ugly body to the winds, his winds.

And he did, not unequivocally, not John Brown prophet proud, fearlessly facing his gallows and his maker, to erase the dripping blood and canker sore from his homeland, but in a revolutionary way nevertheless, broke down slavery’s house divided, broke it down, no quarter given when the deal went down, when he found Grant to steel his troops and no quarter (and let hell and brimstone Billy Sherman and his “bummers” light up the Southern sky). So more like some latter day Oliver Cromwell (another warts and all man) pushing providence forward with a little kick. More like old Robespierre flaming the masses with the new dispensation, the new words slave freedom. Kept freeing slaves as he went along, kept pushing that freedom envelope, kept pushing his generals south and west and east and tightening , anaconda tightening, the noose on the old ways until Johnny Reb cried “uncle,” cried his fill when righteous Sherman and his cutthroat bummers got to work too. Yes, old Father Abraham, the last of the revolutionary democrats, the last of the serious ones, who couldn’t say black better that nigra, and never could, but knew the old enlightenment freedom word, knew it good.

…and now he belongs to the ages, and rightfully so, warts and all.