Here are some excerpts from David Brion Davis’ Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World which reiterate the narrative we have argued here all summer that the Deep South is a cultural branch of the British West Indies.
You won’t find this story taught in a single public school in the United States. Few college graduates are even aware of this. The South is the deviant region in America because it is a cultural extension of the race-based plantation societies of the British Caribbean:
“Given the way history is taught, few educated Americans realize that when the English were beginning to grow tobacco in Jamestown and Pilgrims were imposing order at Plymouth by cutting down a Maypole, other Englishmen were beginning to settle in St. Christopher (St. Kitts) (1624), Barbados (1627), Nevis (1628), and Montserrat and Antigua (1630s). They were closely followed by the French, who actually joined the English on St. Christopher in a surprise night attack on native Indians. The French proved more willing than the English to combat and push back the fierce Carib Indians on Guadeloupe and Martinique, though they took somewhat longer to turn to sugar. By 1655 England was ruled by Oliver Cromwell, who sent a large army to join pirates in seizing Jamaica from the Spaniards. A few years later the French occupied the western third of Santo Domingo, now named Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) Cromwell’s expedition had tried but failed to capture any part of Santo Domingo.”
The story of the Deep South begins in St. Kitts, Barbados, the Leeward Islands, and continues with the conquest of Jamaica in 1655, and the development of these British colonies into slave societies between the 1640s and 1690s:
“Barbados led the way in this economic and dietary revolution, and the first momentous change occurred in only three yesrs, from 1640 to 1643. There is a profound historical irony, or some might say evidence of God’s design, in the fact that the birth of Britain’s slave plantation economy in the West Indies coincided in time with Britain’s domestic civil war of the 1640s, in which radical religious groups challenged all forms of oppression and privilege, including private property, and established the the theological foundation for the much later antislavery movements.”
He’s referring to the Yankee Puritans and the Quakers here and “God’s design” that we ended up chained to these people in the Union:
“The population of Barbardos still included some 20,000 whites, more than any British-American colony except Virginia and Massachusetts. But the small planter elite, in the words of historian Richard S. Dunn, “held the best land, sold the most sugar, and monopolized the best offices. In only one generation the planters had turned their small island into an amazingly effective sugar-production machine and had built a social structure to rival the tradition-encrusted hierarchy of old England.”
Barbados became the cultural hearth of the British West Indies:
“Nevis, St. Christopher, Antigua, and other Leeward Islands to the north followed a similar pattern to that of Barbados, as did Jamaica, somewhat belatedly, a thousand miles to the west. Through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries an increasing number of plantation owners became “absentees,” living and spending in Britain, where a few Barbados planters were knighted or received baronetcies… Still, one should add that despite significant white emigration from Barbados to North America, where Barbadians played a decisive role in founding South Carolina in 1679-80, that island had fewer absentee planters than any of the other British West Indian colonies.”
In a cultural event that was just as significant as the arrival of the Pilgrims and Puritans in Massachusetts, the islanders arrived on the Carolina in South Carolina and in subsequent waves:
“In the third distinct region, the Carolina and Georgia lowcountry, plantations modeled on the Caribbean prospered by producing rice and, for a briefer period, indigo, for the dying of textiles. By the late eighteenth century many planters turned to high grade “Sea Island” cotton along the coast. Then the perfection of the cotton gin gave a tremendous stimulus to the cultivation of short-staple cotton, which revolutionized the British and American textile industries and eventually spread westward from inland Georgia and South Carolina to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas.”
The cotton gin allowed the culture of the South Carolina and Georgia lowcountry to explode westward creating slave societies in the Cotton Kingdom around the Gulf Coast.
“To turn, then, to the history of the colonies north of the Chesapeake should first observe that no British founders of North American colonies, except for South Carolina, intended to create slave societies …
The far more conservative culture of the Deep South centered in South Carolina, which by 1690 had been partly settled by whites and black slaves from Barbados and in that year instituted a slave code adapted from Barbados.”
1690 was late in the game.
The South Carolina colonists transplanted the culture (the Barbados slave code) and economic system of the West Indies (race-based plantation slavery) to the North American mainland.
Note: Virginia would increasingly adopt the Barbados model of African slavery in the Chesapeake during the 1670s and 1680s and it would spread to Georgia in the 1750s and 1760s.
Thank you for another wonderful history lesson.
The sugar planters were culturally different from the rest of the white population on Barbados. The author alludes to this but stops short. It also seems that tobacco planters on the continent were more closely related to the tobacco growers in Barabados than to these sugar kings and their industrial scale operations.
Some of the mystery about these people is demystified when you look at the subcultures and backgrounds of various white or “Dutch” colonists.
40,000 whites even by that time, even with slavery AND then along came sugar.
Excellent information!
Your blog is distinguished from the other racial reality blogs by your history posts.
I had always heard that my fathers side of the family came from Barbados to South Carolina to Fernandina Florida where their considerable land holdings on nearby Cumberland Island were lost to the Yankees after the Civil War. Now I know more about the history of those times.
OPEN WITH CAUTION
Mudshark alert …. but interesting commentary ….
http://atlantablackstar.com/2012/05/06/is-usain-bolt-suffering-from-white-woman-complex/
Is Usain Bolt Suffering From ‘White Woman Complex’?
” But 25-year-old Bolt has come in for criticism from fellow black Jamaicans unhappy that he has chosen a white partner. ”
” One online posting said: ‘Really now Usain! Some successful black men obviously suffer from a white woman complex. You too?’, while another complained: ‘Another one of our men snatched.’ ”
” Further protests included: ‘Out of all the girls on this island you pick a snowbunny’, and: ‘These superstars will always disappoint if we depend on them to raise our racial identity.’ ”
” One reader responded: ‘They make he mingle with white girls. She just divorce him and take aways his money’, while another added: ‘I hope when he’s ready to settle down he chooses a beautiful Jamaican black woman … In the meantime have fun “responsibly”, cause some “pretty girls” just a wait fi “lock u down” for the wrong reasons.’ ”
” Others called Bolt ‘the next Tiger Woods’, referring to the mixed-race golfer and his £60million divorce settlement with Swedish former model Elin Nordegren. “
O/T
But this politically incorrect tweeter behavior is catching on ……
White South African Model’s Racist Tweets Enrage a Nation
“Just, well took on a on arrogant and disrespectful kaffir (i.e. nigger) inside Spar. Should have punched him, should have,” she tweeted. The backlash came immediately, forcing the model to delete the tweet within hours. Dos Santos later claimed that the incident inside Spar, a South African supermarket, came after she was confronted with sexual remarks.”
“Kaffir” is South Africa’s version of the n-word in the United States.
http://atlantablackstar.com/2012/05/06/white-south-african-models-racist-tweets-enrage-a-nation/
Final note. The arrival of Sephardi in Barbados.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbadian_Jews#section_1
same year that they arrived in Stuyvesant’s New Amsterdam and his snippy letter with the trustees of the WIC.
It’s all there in the open if you want to connect these dots. It’s like Exodus West.
Bolt! There was a recent article about Sebastian Coe who organized the London Olympics. He’s got a plantation owner ancestor and a branch of the family in New York. Hyde or something. Oddly enough he’s 1/4 Indian.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2028213/Lord-Coes-horror-finding-descended-philandering-Jamaican-plantation-owner-sex-slaves.html
There’s more to this for me than history and politics, and I appreciate your bringing it to my attention, HW. I’ve been tracing my ancestry for years now and can go back several centuries on one branch while hitting a brick wall on another. That other is of Dutch ancestors arriving in SC without a recorded trace. No, they were not Hebrews. Perhaps they were front men. They lost their wealth in “the depression”.
Anyway, continue on. Please.
Lope eared Dutch were also of dubious provenance as well.
These articles are fascinating. Keep up the good work, HW!
Bit of fun.
Go through those Wiki’s mentioning these wayfaring mysterious Dutchmen and Portugee and see if those references are blanked out. Just who taught a bunch of men from drizzly Wales, windscoured Scotland and freezing damp London how to cultivate sugarcane? Who indeed?
“I’ve been tracing my ancestry for years now and can go back several centuries on one branch”
Why bother? You probably share zero genes in common with ancestors that far back. Hell, you only share about 6.25% of your DNA with any great-great grandparent and only 3.25% with a second cousin. Throw in average amount of genetic drift that occurs with each generation and you probably have absolutely no autosomal DNA at all in common with any of your ancestors from 350 years ago even if there were a goodly amount of cousin marriages in there among the clan. It’s the reason that they can’t prove that Sally Hemmings descendants are actually descended from Thomas Jefferson. There just isn’t enough left to match in a conclusive way.
You do share some of your short Y-chromosome DNA with along your patrilineal line (father to son ad infinitum) and mitochondrial DNA (MTDNA) from the strictly matrilineal one (mothers to children of both sexes ad infinitum.)
And what’s this about only two branches? Your number of branches doubles with each generation (again ameliorated by cousin mating.) I’ll bet you haven’t even considered the MTDNA branch where the maternal surname changes every generation yet it is the one that most likely carries more of your distant ancestors DNA than any other; although that DNA is related to cell enzyme functionality rather than to obvious phenotypical traits like hair, skin, and eye color.
Patronymic surname perhaps?
I tend to find I resemble maternal grandparent ad infinitum.
Honest question Rudel… What is it with you and DNA? I’m not being snarky. You sound like you are technically/professionally involved.
“It’s all there in the open if you want to connect these dots. It’s like Exodus West.”
And you are snidely trying to imply what exactly with all these posts? No one has denied that there were Jews and their black slaves who settled in New Netherland. In fact I was the first one here to point that out. Thanks again for finding that letter complaining about all 23 of them. That Jews were involved in the Transatlantic slave trade is not exactly news.
I would advise you though to stick to primary sources like that letter rather than to Nation of Islam “scholarship.”
Eh?
Did i link to the NOI? No. Instead I appeared to discourage it. I don’t think there’s a thesis the secret history book that outlines the diffusion of the Recife population and their specialization in sugar.
The Stuyvesant letter is much more about the shareholders of the WIC controlling Broader policy than about slavery in New Amerstam anyway. I also think it’s as significant as any other arrival in the area as Stuyvesant was clearly very upset with
their arrival. Complain to him for moaning about the mere 20+ something arrivals. I’m sure he’ll listen Rudel. Those 23 settlers were the northern edge of the Recife refugees.
How was I being snide?
“You sound like you are technically/professionally involved.”
No just recreationally like yourself with ancestry research. I’ve had my genome sampled and it is fascinating to compare it with others who have done so. I’ve already found a bunch of improbable 3rd cousins.
It’s really turned the whole genealogy game on its head though. A lot of folks who have traced their family trees have found unsuspected “niggers in the wood pile” so to speak. Genealogists have hitherto always been trying to trace themselves back to some noble house and are not so happy to have their genes tested and then matched to an previously unknown third cousin from Australia whose great great grandmother was a whore sent to the antipodes for soliciting in London way back when. Australians of course take great perverse pride in their criminal ancestry.
Good genes though:
http://images.zap2it.com/images/celeb-68146/peta-wilson.jpg
“How was I being snide?”
You weren’t? I apologize and stand corrected in that case. I do find it a little too easy to think the worst about many of the people who post here.
Why bother?
Because it’s interesting.
I have discovered that a branch of my family I previously thought were dirt farmers descended from cavalier gentlemen, and a branch I had been told were dignitaries weren’t. I’ve discovered that there is a street in the center of London named for an ancestor and a castle in the south of England that still retains my surname.
Knowing where one comes from influences a man.
Knowing where one comes from influences a man.
Bill Yancey
man what an understatement but in these enlighten times of blank slate theory knowing and being proud of your kin folk is looked down 0n.
Not accusing Rudel of that, just an observation on the world at large
I have a boxer, a mutineer, a cat burglar, a secretary of state, bishops, two artists , soldiers. I’m just a prof. Boring.
All sorts.
“I have … a secretary of state”
Then tell her to stop her meddling in Syria!
Not that one. Someone from the 1930s in Chamberlain’s cabinet.
Hehehe.
On my mother’s side I can trace my ancestry all the way back to Schleswig-Holstein in Germany and Manchester, England: her father’s father was an engineer for the famous Gardner diesel engine company, emigrating after retiring and fathering her father with a much younger woman in California, and her mother’s family came over in the 1870s from Germany as skilled marine engineers.
On my father’s side: nothing. We’ve established my father’s birth certificate was a forgery and this is why he never had a passport or voted in his life. He simply ignored the draft and was never bothered about it. He told my mother that his family were killed in a plane crash in the 30s, but that appears false. He was able to get a Social Security card and worked for almost fifty years for the Bell System.
Every name on his birth certificate is a complete fabrication as far as we can figure. My mother took him for his word and in fact he was known for honesty otherwise. He died at the age of 68, unexpectedly, and I married into the Mormon church the year after, or else never would have known or cared.
I don’t believe a single word of Mormon doctrine or theology, but I went along and do because of the family aspect of the church. We have three kids and I can not think of a better place to raise children than in the LDS church even if it does have cultic aspects.
The Mormons I knew in California were all very decent people and never attempted to convert. Very respectful.
The Mormons are clannish and very devious in their business dealings. It’s like trying to go into partnership with Jews. Splinter sects that practice polygamy and child marriage are still all over the place in rural Utah, Idaho, Nevada, and Arizona.
You can tell when you have wandered into a strange sect’s town in the desert West. There are no storefronts or gas stations. It’s creepy and people stare impassively at you from their doors and windows. It’s like the early scenes in some horror movie. They are weird cultists.