While staying at my sister and brother-in-law’s house near Dulles Airport, I encountered a few things of interest. The first is an arrival lunch at Willard’s BBQ near Dulles, and it was crowded, understandable in view of how good the BBQ was, especially for this area. Here’s my lunch of “burnt beef ends” (hard to find, a mixture of crunchy and juicy parts from brisket), along with two “vegetables” (mac and cheese and a fantastic potato salad), BBQ sauce (not needed) cornbread and, of course, sweet iced tea. I’d recommend this place if you are in the area.
And I had a look at the Virginia History textbook that my brother-in-law had when he was about 13. He remembered it as having grossly distorted the horrors of slavery, which it did in a big way.
My sister found a copy of the book online, and I was appalled to see how slavery was described: as a great benefit to slaves, who got vocational education and had kindly masters and good working conditions. It was disgusting. Have a look at how, as kids, we were taught about slavery in Virginia.
The book:
An arriving enslaved person with his family, all decked out in fancy clothes and greeting his new “master” with glee. The family, too, is all happy and spiffy. The reality, of course, was far different, with slave families packed into the holds of the ships, with those who survived sold off soon after being kidnapped from Africa to the U.S., and families often being separated.
Part of the propaganda; read it!
I have a very good friend (whose 60th birthday is today), who grew up in rural Virginia. We went to UC together. She used to tell me about Virginia History, which was a course in school, and the thing that stands out in my memory is that they were taught about the Civil War as “The War of Northern Aggression.”
I remember Jim Batterson showed that book! Yeah, the whitewashing of the slavery of Africans is undeniable… and then “It cannot be denied that some slaves were treated badly, ..” … the brainwashing is so strong here, yet also not denying – totally messed up.
Now the foodstuffs :
Gonna try brisket in the oven – been meaning to test it – the time is soon.
Having another read – how a kid’s thoughts can be clear on this when mine are mushed all over is beyond me – they write … I mean, they say everyone frowned upon harsh masters, most relations were good, .. and yet one master sets his slaves free to Liberia ..
If slavery was so great, why set them “free”? If slavery was so great, why not develop the industry with laws and such? Such a vortex of deliberate confusion.
They even wrote “free” – so, what gives?!
Demoralization, comes to mind.
Thanks Bryan. Glad you remember that. I appreciate the independent validation from sister Susan and her husband….I wasn’t making this stuff up, folks! That was exactly the book I had in our fully racially segregated elementary school in Virginia in the mid to late 1950’s.
Maryland wasn’t much better than VA at the turn of the 20th century. While participating in a Boy Scout paper drive in Frederick, MD, where I grew up (we collected anything paper and recycled it to help support the troop – this was in the 1960s), I found a public school history textbook in the paper pile. It was part of history series written for each state, and this one was for Maryland, dated 1902. The part about Africa showed large portions of the middle of the continent labeled “unexplored” and it referred to all the inhabitants there as “savages”. I can’t recall what it said about slavery in MD, if anything at all.
Some post-notes: Frederick is the home of Roger Brooke Taney, who wrote the dreadful Dred Scott decision. Francis Scott Key’s sister married Taney. Key was born near Frederick, and he and his wife are buried there. The statue of Taney that resided outside the old courthouse in the center of town was taken down a few years ago.
In the 1950s, the great baritone William Warfield, who sang Old Man River in the 1951 movie Show Boat, came to Frederick to give a concert, but couldn’t stay at the Francis Scott Key hotel because he was black. Instead, he stayed at the home of a prominent black doctor in town.
And finally, one of Key’s direct descendants, and this will be of interest to readers of this blog, was Thomas Hunt Morgan, the great geneticist.
+1
The book is cringeworthy. I suppose the anecdotes were invented. Were the slaves kidnapped “from” Africa or were they kidnapped “in” Africa (by Africans) and then sold down the river where white traders got involved, anchored safely offshore out of range of mosquitoes? Most slaves weren’t actually kidnapped as war prizes. They were selected and given up by their own chieftains when a more powerful tribe demanded tribute as the price of preventing war.
I do wish the British North Americans had known better than to get involved in it.
At least the sailor shown in the foreground doing something with a rope is detected accurately with tattoos, (anachronistically?)
The slaves were kidnapped in Africa and were usually the victims of their leaders’ political machinations, including wars. I’m not sure that “chieftain” is necessarily accurate because that implies tribes but many African societies could be described as kingdoms or empires.
Anyway, slavery in Africa was a fact of life long before the ships started to arrive to take them to the Americas. That was simply a new market. That’s not to point a finger at Africa – slavery was a fact of life almost everywhere humans have settled.
The picture of the well dressed slaves arriving is almost comic in its wrongness. It was even worse than Jerry’s description. The slave ships would arrive off the coast of West Africa and start taking on slaves, but what a lot of people don’t realise is that you didn’t go down, load up and then immediately sail to the New World. It might take several months to fill the ship with enough slaves to make the trip profitable. Those loaded first would have to endure the tropical heat on board ship for months on end before they even started the trip across the Atlantic.
“anachronistically?”
Oh, you mean the Popeye-style anchor tattoo? I’m not sure when the anchor tattoo appeared. I thought I looked that up once.
The Black Dog Smoke & Ale House in Urbana-Champaign (they have one restaurant in each) has fine burnt ends. You need to go around 11am or 5pm to have the best chance of getting it.
Lovely history book!
The book is appalling. What is the publication year? I grew up in Savannah, Georgia in the 1960s and 70s, and I don’t remember what we were taught about slavery in school. But there were certainly plenty of people around who would have had no problem with the representation of slavery as in this book. It’s astounding that there are people out there now who claim the country hasn’t advanced in racial matters since the civil rights era.
It was 1957 or 58. I can still recall the new book smell when I got it from our public library children’s section in the summer before receiving a similarly factory fresh copy in fourth(?) grade class in the Fall.
There is a summary of the Virginia History Textbook Commission and Virginia Legislative sponsorship to counter Civil Rights activities in the 50’s at url
https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/the-virginia-history-and-textbook-commission/
Even as late as the 1990’s, some people in Virginia spoke of the “War of Northern Aggression.” It was at a university, and they of course didn’t think that way themselves (or maybe they did but were just virtue signaling), but they did use that phrase when talking about how many Virginians viewed the Civil War. I also had a professor colleague who insisted that the Civil War was an economic war, and not primarily about slavery.
On a bike trip in southern France I discovered that there is still an undercurrent of resentment of their “war of northern aggression” — the Albigensian Crusade 800 years ago! Grudges can last a long time.
That book still calls it “The War of Northern Aggression”!
Over the years here in Virginia, I have also heard the Civil War period referred to as “that unpleasantness” from time to time.
As bad as this book is, it’s probably a better option than a book which refused to whitewash slavery and instead took the view that slaves deserved everything they got.
“Slave cargo was often packed in ships to be as efficient as possible, and when the sailors landed good businessmen would ensure that the merchandise was distributed to masters who could extract a great deal of useful work from the filthy savages. Because slaves don’t feel things the way white people do, all sorts of possibilities for good animal husbandry emerged!”
Certainly not an improvement.
Yes, but I know of no such book!
It does show that the moral acceptance of slavery in its full reality and implications had long since eroded even in the South. By then, the slave trade with Africa depicted here so laughably unrealistically was ancient history, and almost all eyewitnesses who could have protested were gone. I say almost all, as there was some illegal slave trade after it had been banned (there is this highly interesting oral account by one of the victims collected by Zora Neale Hurston; by then, the conditions had changed somewhat from the 17th and 18th century horrors).
By the way, one of the reasons that Zora Neale Hurston couldn’t find a publisher for that text was that the truth told by Cudjo Kazoole Lewis did not fit progressive sensibilities of the time: Nobody wanted to hear about slavery in Africa. The first US “source” on slavery that I personally consumed was “Roots”. The way Kunta Kinte is caught and enslaved in that series (the scene that I most vividly remember from all of the episodes) was just as wrong as the depiction of the arrival of the well dressed family greeting their friendly master in the pre-civil rights Virginia textbook.
Yes, the abduction of Kunta Kinte was clearly a fanciful invention and much of Roots is either fabricated or plagiarized, for which latter Alex Haley had to pay damages. And we now know that in his interview of Martin Luther King for Playboy Jan. 1965 he misrepresented what King said about his disagreements with Malcolm X.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/05/10/mlk-malcolm-x-playboy-alex-haley/
An interesting journalistic note is that the interview with King did not appear under Haley’s byline and Haley is nowhere mentioned in the published preamble that describes how “we” (actually Haley) set up the interview.*. King’s interlocutor is referred to as “Playboy:” throughout. It was “The Playboy Interview” and I believe that was the magazine’s practice, granted this was before my time. (I’ll have you all know I was not reading Playboy in 1965!). I’m not sure when it became generally acknowledged that Haley had done the interview, possibly after the success of Roots? All modern references to it cite Haley.
—————————
* I found an Instagram post that includes a photograph of the first page of the original print article.
Sorry for the italics. I must have mistyped an HTML tag and I can’t edit.
Your sis and my brother may be neighbors, since my brother and his wife live about 25 minutes away from Dulles (in Loudonville VA). I just visited them for the first time recently and was blown away by the beauty of the countryside and the amount of naked wealth in the area.
Anyway, that textbook is horrifying. Do you think you could get the link to the online copy?
It was not so wonderful in the North, where we learned that the war was about an honest disagreement about states’ rights, and the rebeis were honorable people who simply had a different opinion. “Dixie” was sung in school when I was in grade school or maybe junior high. I do not remember about slavery as such, but I recall a textbook of my sister’s, around 1962, that described sharecropping as a mutually beneficial arrangement.
I’ve mentioned this before: my 5th-grade American history text book stated that Robert E. Lee was a “hero” who not only did not own slaves but was opposed to slavery. Even at that age (10 or 11), I thought “How can he be a hero? He fought against his country.” This was in Connecticut in 1970.
I didn’t learn until years later that Lee did own slaves, and saw slavery as God’s way of introducing Blacks to civilization. When Blacks were sufficiently civilized, God would allow slavery to end. Until then, Whites had a duty to fulfill their God-given role and be good masters to the Blacks. He spelled this out in a letter to his son.
To say that he opposed slavery was a gross distortion of the facts.
Afaik he also felt that since the Bible never opposed slavery, neither could he?
The Uncivil war was indeed a war of northern aggression which was for the most part fought on southern soil. The southern states voluntarily joined the Union, and would have remained in the Union had militant christian abolitionists not forced the Federal government to threaten their sovereignty. At the time slavery was in terminal decline, and would have inevitably ended due to the introduction of mechanical harvesters. No one in their right mind would keep a slave if the alternative was just to oil a machine.
Throughout human history intractable moralists have fomented wars. In the past it was usually christians, moslems, and other such fanatics seeking to impose their religious beliefs on others, but now we have the sorry spectacle of extreme leftists seeking to impose artificial equality on every human being everywhere on earth.
Many people blame Marx, but I think we should look further back to that dreadful day when Jesus was purported to have said that, “The meek shall inherit the earth”. It was a dire prophesy that is coming true as the numerically superior global underclass seeks to dismantle civilization itself.
I agree with Pinker that Leviathan must prevail, but would it not be best to avoid another civil war?
Please explain how slavery was in “terminal decline” when the 1860 census (the last one prior to the war) shows the slave population as over 3.9 million–more than at any previous time in US history. If you google “Slave Population in the US by decade,” you will see that the slave population steadily increased from 1790 until 1860; there was no decade when the population decreased.
Also, the Fugitive Slave Law and the Dred Scott Decision strengthened slavery in the decades prior to the war. Northerners felt that these acts threatened the sovereignty of Northern states.
Defenders of the South always say that slavery would have eventually ended anyway. But when? The nineteenth century? The twentieth? The twenty-first? Slavery is still a fact of life around the world today, despite the Industrial Revolution.
1+
+2
When I was a boy growing up in north central Oregon, one of our neighbor ladies had a series of books about the Elsie Dinsmore family in the south about the time of the civil war. I borrowed and read several of those books, which painted a rosy picture of relations between the Dinsmore family and their slaves, who, it was said, did not want to leave the family after emancipation. I was surprised, recently, to see that these books were currently available in a religious book store.