Aren't we supposed to be celebrating "freedom" today?

July 4, 2006 5:51 PM

" 'How is it,' asked Samuel Johnson, 'that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?' The British author was only one of many Europeans who thought it strange that a nation run by slave owners should be so noisily demanding its own freedom."
posted by j-urb (32 comments total)

The irony never ceases.
posted by mischief at 6:06 PM on July 4, 2006

And how many yhears earlier had it been when Britain was selling slaves as an industry...then, changing its ways, they were now free to belittle America. We always were behind the times, no? And yet we did catch up and free the slaves and, later, help save England from nations that twice (WWI, WWII) would have enslaved her.
posted by Postroad at 6:22 PM on July 4, 2006

Because people operating a colony which is sufficently brutal to use large scale slave labour as a economic tool are also not likely to react well to decisions affecting their businesses being made by people with different interests to theirs without them having a say?

It does get the masses more enthused if you talk about liberty a lot though.
posted by jaduncan at 6:23 PM on July 4, 2006

The British were far, far better at human rights in general and in particular for Indians and Negroes then the colonists.
posted by Paris Hilton at 6:26 PM on July 4, 2006

And how many yhears earlier had it been when Britain was selling slaves as an industry

They were still selling them at the time, but there was vast popular opposition
posted by Paris Hilton at 6:28 PM on July 4, 2006

who thought it strange that a nation run by slave owners should be so noisily demanding its own freedom."

Hey - everyone whats to rule the world - it's no more complicated than that.
posted by scheptech at 6:47 PM on July 4, 2006

The British were far, far better at human rights in general

How amusing. Your homework for today is to look up the following terms: Irish Famine. Boer War Concentration Camps. Opium Wars. The Amritsar Massacre. Bloody Sunday. Need I go on?

I would also remind you that the British had, in their own day, made quite a profit out of slave-trading, and that during and after the civil war the British were shipping Chinese and Indian laborers to various multi-national work sites under conditions that were slavery in all but name. It is also far from surprising that abolition was an easy political sell in England; most slaves were held in massive plantations in the colonies, which had less representation than England itself in Parliament.
posted by unreason at 7:02 PM on July 4, 2006

Postroad: whenever an American trots out the "We saved your asses in WWI/II" fallacy as if it were somehow relevant to an entirely separate issue... well, basically we know they have nothing, the sorry sacks of shit. Try again.
posted by Decani at 7:09 PM on July 4, 2006

Yeah it never ceases to amaze me when Americans bring out that World War bit whenever they need to criticize Britain.
History for the lose!
posted by nightchrome at 7:30 PM on July 4, 2006

could equally say the French saved our asses during the revolutionary war
posted by edgeways at 7:39 PM on July 4, 2006

Blah, that was just an apology for the french-indian war.
posted by IronLizard at 7:47 PM on July 4, 2006

"When it shall be said in any country of the world, my poor are happy, neither ignorance or distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars, the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive, the rational world is my friend because I am a friend of it's happiness. When these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and its government." - Thomas Paine

This is the ideal I celebrate today - and also mourn - since it seems that mankind is again moving further away from it in our elliptical journey toward utopia. It really isn't the point that we ever make it there but we should always be moving in that direction.
posted by any major dude at 7:51 PM on July 4, 2006

Can we stop with the "America/Great Britain is better than Great Britain/America" shit? Look...

GB: The Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Pink Floyd, Radiohead.
US: Elvis, Miles Davis, Otis Redding, the Grateful Dead, Nirvana.

GB: Peter Sellers, Monty Python, Blackadder, Billy Connolly
US: Lenny Bruce, the Simpsons, Richard Pryor, George Carlin

GB: Dr. Who, Red Dwarf, I Claudius, Neighbors
US: Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, Deadwood, Days of Our Lives

GB: The Spinning Jenny, the Electric Motor, the Steam Engine, Holography, Penicillin, the Theory of Elecromagnetivity
US: The Cotton Gin, the Lightbulb, the Airplane, the Atomic Bomb, the Artificial Heart, the Discovery of DNA

GB: Wellesley, Gladstone, Churchill
US: Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt

...let's just call it a wash, OK?
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 8:29 PM on July 4, 2006

How amusing. Your homework for today is to look up the following terms: Irish Famine. Boer War Concentration Camps. Opium Wars. The Amritsar Massacre. Bloody Sunday. Need I go on?

Not that I'm a fan of either, but I'll note that the British Empire was not exclusive in the same way that the colonists made the US. The British came with the intention of profiting from the people already there; the story of US/Indian relations is one of the US aiming to commit a level of genocide that reached Nazi like methods (eg. the Trail of Tears) against the Indians and eradicate them utterly from the workable land. Interestingly, this is almost unique in large colonies of the era. One of the confusing things about the early US colonies is that they imported slaves from Africa rather then merely enslaving the natives in the way that many of the European colonies did. For some reason, they saw them as a barrier rather then a potential resource.
posted by jaduncan at 8:33 PM on July 4, 2006

"the story of US/Indian relations is one of the US aiming to commit a level of genocide that reached Nazi like methods (eg. the Trail of Tears) against the Indians and eradicate them utterly from the workable land."

You are aware that said Indians brought along their own slaves out west during this period of "genocide?"
posted by TetrisKid at 8:55 PM on July 4, 2006

Of course, this post wasn't intended to spark debate about whether or not the British were better than the Americans, but rather to make the claim that the American Revolution wasn't about the freedom we conceive of today. The freedom the American Revolution supported was one of economic interests and not that of people interests (this is a bad thing). Although it is frustrating to see people debating along the lines of British versus American, this almost predicable. The story of social freedom in early America, despite it being so evident, is surprisingly suppressed in American history due to its embarrassing nature and that it doesn't promote the exceptionalism required for American nationalism. After all, who wants to fight for an America which is riddled with contradiction? Sorting out the complexities of America (or The British Empire which America learned a great deal from) appears to require a degree of reflection that's too extensive for most anyway.
posted by j-urb at 8:56 PM on July 4, 2006

GB: John Steed, Emma Peel
US: Napolean Solo, Illya Kuryakin

It's not even close.
posted by SPrintF at 9:11 PM on July 4, 2006

I think you mean...

US: Don Adams, Barbara Feldon

There, now. Much closer.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 10:24 PM on July 4, 2006

Er, Agent 86 and 99, respectively.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 10:26 PM on July 4, 2006

If you believe modern sweatshops are America's creation, you must believe American slavery was Europe's creation.
posted by fleacircus at 1:12 AM on July 5, 2006

GB: [...] Neighbors

Australia

US: [...] the Discovery of DNA

NZ/UK/UK/US, working in the UK (all at Cambridge?)

A belated happy 230th birthday to you all, anyway.

j-urb: Brits have a weird love/hate relationship with the US. I wouldn't expect a sensible debate from this side of the pond.
posted by Leon at 2:54 AM on July 5, 2006

Ok, can you all please stop this?

The Americans WERE the British, and the British WERE the Americans. It was a civil war between two groups who both considered themselves to British (actually, most calle themselves English) and were arguing about how THEIR British empire would be run.

Many American British were more pro-slavery than the British at home, because they were the majority of the slave owners, along with the Carribean estate holders (also called American at the time? I think so - the whole two continents were the Americas). I was just reading Frederick Douglas' 1852 speech, which talks about how the British churches moved into abolitionism, whereas the American churches used theology to justify slavery. That isn't the difference between two peoples - they weren't two peoples until after the Revolution - but the difference between those who didn't directly own slaves (but whose economy certainly benefitted from the produce of slaves) and those who did own the slaves.

That said, this thread could be much more interesting. If you sit down and read the American and British newspapers from the period, the liberty rhetoric (from supporters on both sides of the Atlantic) does include a lot of references to slavery - they are adamant that they won't be slaves. I think that this rang especially strong in the colonies, because they had slavery confronting them there daily (as opposed to being comfortably tucked away out of sight across the ocean). When you read the passages, when they say "We won't be slaves!" (as they do, over and over), it has all the more meaning when you think about how they knew exactly what being a slave was like. Being a slave meant being ruled by someone else's will, having no choice for oneself.

The relationship of the first British Empire (Britain and its North American and Carribean colonies) had always had a ambiguous relationship with slavery. They used slavery, they engaged in the slave trade, and it gave a massive boost to their economy (a critical boost, in my opinion, for the beginning of the industrial revolution), but they also always had internal dissent within. For instance, there was a legal case (some time earlier in the 18th century?) as to whether a slave could be a slave within Britain itself, or was a slave free when they landed. (But I can't remember how that case ended -- Anyone remember more details?) And the internal dissent against slavery existed in both places, though it grew faster in Britain for the obvious reason that fewer people there were slave owners. It's easier to oppose something which doesn't directly benefit you.

That's not to say that the whole slavery thing wasn't used in rhetoric against the rebelling colonists. They were after all, crying out for "liberty" while (in the eyes of Britain based abolishionists) denying the most basic liberty to a large group of people among them. And those slave owners held enough power in the small new country to keep slavery for a generation longer than it was kept in the rest of the first British empire.

As for the British and natives - The British were more racist in North American than the French or Spanish. The British were the colonists, the colonists were the British. They never intended to benefit from the people already in North America, they didn't want subject like Spain, they wanted land. (They also didn't allow gradations of status for black and mixed blood people, as the French and Spanish did, but declared them all to be equally low status/slaves).

That said, the British government at Westminster did do two tolerant things which were considered to be intolerable to the Americans and which were part of the justification for the Revolution (it wasn't all about tax): they tolerated Catholicism in Quebec, and they said that the white colonists were not suposed to move into the land past the Appalachians, because that land was to be kept for the natives.

----

DNA - two worked at Cambridge, the other two worked in London (King's College London?).
posted by jb at 3:31 AM on July 5, 2006

Oh - to add:

If you want to read a good book on slavery and its relationship to liberty in American history - read Edward S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Fredom. It's a masterful piece of research/argumentation.

Also, to add to some of the debate over what happened with slavery, I should note that the Europeans never directly captured any slaves. They couldn't move into the interior of West Africa due to their susceptibility to disease. All of the slaves taken by the slave trade were sold to them by Africans. The best book I've read on this Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World by John Thorton.
posted by jb at 3:44 AM on July 5, 2006

And yet we did catch up and free the slaves and, later, help save England from nations that twice (WWI, WWII) would have enslaved her.

Yeah, you were way behind the times on that one as well...
posted by PeterMcDermott at 3:49 AM on July 5, 2006

Well said jb, and I'll second Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom.
posted by marxchivist at 4:01 AM on July 5, 2006

One of the confusing things about the early US colonies is that they imported slaves from Africa rather then merely enslaving the natives in the way that many of the European colonies did. For some reason, they saw them as a barrier rather then a potential resource.
posted by jaduncan at 8:33 PM PST on July 4 [+fave] [!]

It makes more sense when you think about the situations. In the Aztec territories in Mexico, there was a densely populated agricultural economy. Though many millions died of disease, there were still mny still living there. Whereas in the now United States and Canada, as well as the Carribean, the native population was quite devastated by disease. In Spanish colonies with lower native population densities, like Argentina or Chile, they too became largely settler colonies as opposed to mixed colonies or minority dominate colonies. (As did Canada, Australia and to a slightly lesser extent New Zealand).

The English colonists themselves were also looking for different things. At first, the English (Britain didn't yet exist) were looking for territories with people and riches, as the Spanish had found. (and which they later went for in South Asia). But they found Virginia and New England, with few people (after being decimated by disease) and no riches except land. So they started up some farms. They did bring in some native labour (I think there was a native slave trade), but there wasn't enough labour and disease continued to reduce native population. The native people in some areas, as well, were not agriculturalists and were good fighters - they had little interest in working other people's farms and would fight against it.

Come the 1620s and 30s, and there are groups of English Puritains leaving Laud's Britain and looking for places to set up isolated and religiously pure settlements. They had no interest in living with native people.

In the south, where large commericial farms were being set up (not yet cotton, mostly tobacco and food), they had labour shortages. At first, they used white indentured labour (even as late as Daniel Defoe was writing), but over the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries they used more black slave labour, imported from the agriculturalist societies of West Africa. So now they had labour which was a) resistent to disease (more resistant to disease in the south and Carribean than the white settlers, since many of those diseases came from Africa), and used to agricultural labour (maybe the women more than the men). It is a shameful, but not illogical, part of history.
posted by jb at 4:24 AM on July 5, 2006

If we want to blame anyone, blame the Dutch. They're the ones who first brought slaves for sell to the American colonies. Boo Amsterdam! boo!

As for the Indians as slaves discussion, another problem was that Indians could quite easily vanish into the interior and into nearby tribes if they escaped, something that an African could not accomplish any where near as easily.

Initially, Africans were imported through most of the colonies, but one reason slavery did not do as well in the North was that the Africans were unable to survive well in the environment, as opposed to the South with conditions more appropiate to their homeland.

And personal liberty was an important factor during the Revolution. It wasn't soley about the idea of taxation without representation, but about being treated as an Englishman should be in an English empire. If Parliament had opted to adopt a conciliatory tone with the colonists and agreed to allow them more say over their affairs, its highly likely that England would have held onto its western dominions for centuries longer.
posted by Atreides at 5:00 AM on July 5, 2006

Thanks for rescuing the post, jb. Until you came along, the post and thread were nothing but pure trollishness. I hope people read and assimilate what you said.
posted by languagehat at 5:16 AM on July 5, 2006

JB does the job, mostly. This quote however, sticks out:

(The British were more racist in North American than the French or Spanish....They...didn't allow gradations of status for black and mixed blood people, as the French and Spanish did, but declared them all to be equally low status/slaves)

Is it more, less, or equally racist to judge status by gradation of skin tone or blood mix? I'm undecided as I've never really considered the matter, but would be interested in hearing arguments for either side, kneejerk or otherwise.
posted by IndigoJones at 5:41 AM on July 5, 2006

I probably shouldn't have used the word "racist", loaded as it is - but I couldn't think of a better word to express it. The British policy towards blacks (slave or free) was just more absolute than the Spanish or the French. All were racist, but the Spanish and French recognised mixed blood people as different, whereas the British had a more "one-drop" attitude. It sounds silly to differentiate between, but it made a difference. Mixed blood people could hold more positions of power in Spanish and French colonies; still lower status than whites, but higher than they were in English colonies. Metizos in Mexico and mixed blood people in New Orleans were able to hold positions of power that were denied to them in the English colonies - and I think it's had an effect on race relations since, since the status differences were more graded. I'm just speaking from ignorance (since all I know is what I see on the news), but it seems to me that as divided as New Orleans and Louisiana is racially, it's also a city and state with notable black leaders, and which has been a place where black American culture has flourished. But I'm not sure - I just remember from reading about the colonial period that there were more free blacks and more opportunity for free blacks (especially if they were light skinned - in otherwords, not entirely black) in the French colony.
posted by jb at 6:35 AM on July 5, 2006

jb: I think also that an important aspect in the different treatment of mixed blood people is that their very existence was indicative of some degree of intercourse (ahem) between the races, and of common law or even formal marriages, a concept that, for British and other Northern European/Protestant colonists seemed somehow a lot more abhorrent that to those naughty Latins...
For the northerners, mulattoes were, if anything, even worse than pure Africans, since they had debauched white blood in their veins...
posted by Skeptic at 11:05 AM on July 5, 2006

That makes sense. (More sense than my own comment, based on some history I read too long ago :)
posted by jb at 4:35 PM on July 5, 2006