The final exam will consist of three parts:
In the first part, you will have to identify ONE out of TWO of the paintings that we analyze at the beginning of lecture (look at each powerpoint uploaded in the “Lectures” tab). Describe what you know about the painting and how it relates to the subject of the course in 5 to 6 lines (five points).
In the second part, you will have to identify NINE terms out of SIXTEEN terms. Each identification should be between 5 and 6 lines. All IDs (terms) are located under the tab “Lectures” in this website. (forty-five points)
In the third, you will be given FOUR fragments or quotations from the primary and secondary sources we have worked in-class. All of the quotations will be below. You will be asked to identify TWO of the quotations (author, type of document, all to the best of your ability); and discuss the significance of the quotation, that is, how does the quotation tells us something about the larger historical context or subject. Write approximately one single-spaced page. You will have to choose one fragment from a series of two, and another series from another series of two. (Fifty points, 25 points each essay).
All quotations will be posted below.
Race, Class, and Slavery
“…if slavery made race, its larger purpose was to make class, and the fact that the two were made simultaneously by the same process, has mystified both.”
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone (1998), 5.
“Outrage at the treatment of Africans was rarely expressed at any level of society before the late eighteenth century. The moral economy of the English crowd, like various Christian churches, was preoccupied with other issues. […] If the elite could kill Irish, Hugenots, Jews, prisoners or war, convicts, and many other marginalized groups, why could they not enslave them? […] For elite and non-elite alike enslavement remained a fate for which only non-Europeans were qualified.”
David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, (2000), 84.
Gender and Slavery
“In the last will I made I left to you … Sally Johnson the mother of Louisa & all the children of both. Sally says Henderson is my child. It is possible, but I do not believe it. Yet act on her’s rather than my opinion. Louisa’s first child may be mine. I think not. Her second I believe is mine. Take care of her & her children who are both or your blood if not of mine & of Henderson. The services of the rest will I think compensate of indulgence to these. I cannot free these people & send them North. It would be cruelty to them. Nor would I like that any but my own blood should own as slaves my own blood or Louisa. I leave them to your charge, believing that you will best appreciate & most independently carry out my wishes in regard to them. Do not let Louisa or any of my children or possible children be the Slaves of Strangers. Slavery in the family will be their happiest earthly condition.”
Letter of James Henry Hammond (1807-1864) to his son Harry Hammond, Feb. 19, 1856. South Carolina.
Shipmate experience
“Very soon after breakfast, we were divided into several of the vessels around. This was now cause of new fears, not knowing where our misery would end. Being now, as it were, one family, we began to take leave of those who were first transshipped, not knowing what would become of them and ourselves.”
Samuel Ajayi Crowther, 1837 (on events of 1821)
From Captives to Shipmates
“Meanwhile, the captives communicated among themselves and fought back, individually and collectively, which meant that each ship contained within it a process of culture stripping from above and an oppositional process of culture creation from below.”
Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship, 265.
Slave Culture
“On 6 January, the Day of Kings, strange ceremonies attracted our attention. All the blacks born on the coast of Africa gathered together in tribes, each one electing a king a queen. Costumed in the most original manner, with the most brilliant outfits they could find, preceded by the subjects of their respective tribes, these monarchs for a day went first to mass and then paraded through the city; and gathered at last in a small plaza near the Market, everyone performed, each one in his own way, a dance characteristic of their nation. I saw a rapid succession of war dances, representations of agricultural labor, and steps of the most lascivious type. There, more than six hundred blacks appeared to have regained for a moment their nationality, in the heart of that imaginary country, whose memory alone … in the midst of that noisy saturnalia of another world, made them forget, for one single day of pleasure, the pains and sufferings of long years of slavery.”
Description of the Day of Kings in Montevideo, Uruguay, 1827
Oral Traditions in the Americas
“From the Kongo [people I am], From the Loango [people I am], From the Loangos of Angola [I am]…”
Excerpt of a time honored Palenquero funeral dirge, from a funeral ritual of Palenque populations near Cartagena, Colombia
Paternalism, Slave Family, and Folk Culture
“Sunday was a great day around the plantation. The fields was forgotten, the light cores was hurried through, and everybody got ready for church meeting. It was out of the door, in the yard fronting the big lot where the Browns all lived. Master John’s wife would start the meeting with a prayer and then would come the singing –the old time songs. But white folks on the next plantation would not [like] their slaves for trying to do like we did. No praying there, and no singing.”
John Brown, an ex-slave from Alabama in: Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll, 1972, 55.
“Once upon a time they was a wolf and a rabbit…they was friends all right, but the wolf was more friend to the rabbit more so because he wanted to get a chance to eat the rabbit up, but the rabbit was watchable, and the rabbit thought that that was what he wanted, but he always watched Mr. Wolf and Mr. Wolf he jest tried every way he could to make friends with Mr. Rabbit so Mr. Rabbit would trust him, you know, but Mr. Rabbit never would trust him ‘cause he jest always felt that that was what Mr. Wolf wanted to do him.”
On Bret Rabbit and the Wolf, testimony of Richard Smith (1953): in Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, (1971), 371.
Cotton is King
“If no cotton was furnished for three years… England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her.”
Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina, 1858
The Chattel Principle
“The being of slavery, its soul and its body, lives and moves in the chattel principle, the property principle, the bill of sale principle; the cart-whip, starvation, and nakedness are its inevitable consequences…You cannot constitute slavery without the chattel principle –and with the chattel principle you cannot save it from the results. Talk not about kind and Christian masters. They are not masters of the system. The system is master of them.”
James W. C. Pennington, 1849. A fugitive slave.
Civil War
Advance, Lincoln, Advance. You are our hope
Refrain of a song, reported to have been sung in the fields of Cuba
War and Abolition in Cuba
“The blacks are the same as the whites. The whites are not slaves nor do they work for the blacks. Neither should the blacks be slaves nor should they work for the whites. The Cubans want the blacks to be free. The Spaniards want the blacks to continue being slaves. The Cubans are fighting against the Spaniards. The blacks who have any honor should go fight together with the Cubans. The Spaniards want to kill Cubans so that the blacks can never be free. The blacks are not dumb, they have a big heart and they fight together with the Cubans…The time to fight has come. It is better to be in the woods fighting together with the Cubans so that all men, black as well as whites, be free, than to be working as slaves. Long Live Liberty.”
Rebel handbill directed to slaves, Cuba, 1869
War and Equality, Cuba
“I witnessed one of the great events of the war, although in peacetime its significance has been ignored. Colonel Dantin was shot in the leg, so his assistance, Ciriaco, a large, very strong black man, carried him on his shoulders from the center of the town until they got to the opening of the fort that faced the Armonía sugar plantation. As they were crossing the barbed wire there, the heroic Ciriaco was shot and wounded more severely than his commanding officer, whom he was trying to save. When that courageous Cuban fell in that supreme effort to rescue his commander, Colonel Dantin threw his devoted and heroic savior on his shoulders. […] Isn´t true, reader, that this scene inspires us to believe that humanity was perfected in such a display of democracy?” [1896]
Ricardo Batrell, A Black Solder’s Story, [First published 1912]