The author claims that compromise is justified for the sake of peace, sometimes even at the expense of justice.

Calling attention to the importance of "social forgetting", historian Guy Beiner has argued that "there is an evident need for major historical studies of lieux d’oubli to counterbalance the studies of lieux de mémoire."[11]

As Reverend Bolzius had observed, if slaves were encouraged to“breed like animals,” then poor whites could not reproduce at the same rateand hold on to their land or their freedom.

By 1760, only 5 percent of white Georgians owned even a singleslave, while a handful of families possessed them in the hundreds. JonathanBryan was the perfect embodiment of the “Slave Merchants” whoOglethorpe had warned would dominate the colony.59

In 1750, settlers were formally granted the right toown slaves.58

trustees: “to relieve the distressed.” Instead of offering a sanctuary forhonest laborers, Georgia would become an oppressive regime, promoting“the misery of thousands in Africa” by permitting a “free people” to be“sold into perpetual Slavery.”48

A NorthCarolina proprietor, John Colleton, observed in Barbados that poor whiteswere called “white slaves” by black slaves; it struck him that the samecontempt for white field hands prevailed in the southern colonies in NorthAmerica.47

Many contemporaries connected slavery to English idleness. WilliamByrd weighed in on the ban against slavery in Georgia in a letter to aGeorgia trustee. He saw how slavery had sparked discontent among poorwhites in Virginia, who routinely refused to “dirty their hands with Labourof any kind,” preferring to steal or starve rather than work in the fields.Slavery ruined the “industry of our White People,” he confessed, for theysaw a “Rank of Poor Creatures below them,” and detested the thought ofwork out of a perverse pride, lest they might “look like slaves.”

Slavery, however, could not be kept apart from future projections inGeorgia. After allowing South Carolina to send over slaves to fell trees andclear the land for the town of Savannah, Oglethorpe came to regret thedecision. He made a brief trip to Charles Town, and returned to discoverthat in the interim the white settlers had grown “impatient of Labour andDiscipline.” Some had sold good food for rum punch. With drunkenesscame disease. And so, Oglethorpe wrote, the “Negroes who sawed for us”and encouraged white “Idleness” were sent back.46

He marveled at how the SouthCarolinians deluded themselves in believing they were safe, burdened asthey were with a large slave population—“stupid security,” he called it.

According to Francis Moore, who visited the settlement in its secondyear of operation, two “peculiar” customs stood out: both alcohol and dark-skinned people were prohibited. “No slavery is allowed, nor negroes,”Moore wrote. As a sanctuary for “free white people,” Georgia “would notpermit slaves, for slaves starve the poor laborer.” Free labor encouragedpoor white men in sober cultivation and steeled them in the event they hadto defend the land from outside aggression. It also promised to cure settlersof that most deadly of English diseases, idleness.41

Conservative land policies limited individual settlers to a maximum offive hundred acres, thus discouraging the growth of a large-scale plantationeconomy and slave-based oligarchy such as existed in neighboring SouthCarolina. North Carolina squatters would not be found here either. Poorsettlers coming from England, Scotland, and other parts of Europe weregranted fifty acres of land, free of charge, plus a home and a garden.Distinct from its neighbors to the north, Georgia experimented with a socialorder that neither exploited the lower classes nor favored the rich. Itsfounders deliberately sought to convert the territory into a haven forhardworking families. They aimed to do something completelyunprecedented: to build a “free labor” colony.

By 1700, we should note, slaves comprised half the population of thesouthern portion of the Carolina colony, an imbalance that widened to 72percent by 1740. Beginning in 1714, a series of laws required that for everysix slaves an owner purchased, he had to acquire one white servant.Lamenting that the “white population do not proportionally multiply,”South Carolina lawmakers had one more reason to wish that a corps ofLeet-men and women had actually been formed. Encouraged to marry andmultiply, tied to the land, they might have provided a racial and class barrierbetween the slaves and the landed elites.13

The Fundamental Constitutions did more than endorse slavery. It was amanifesto promoting a semifeudalistic and wholly aristocratic society.

he authoredthe Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), which granted that“every Freeman in Carolina shall have ABSOLUTE POWER ANDAUTHORITY over his Negro Slaves.”

Slavery was thus a logicaloutgrowth of the colonial class system imagined by Hakluyt. It emergedfrom three interrelated phenomena: harsh labor conditions, the treatment ofindentures as commodities, and, most of all, the deliberate choice to breedchildren so that they should become an exploitable pool of workers.

Slavery was thus a logicaloutgrowth of the colonial class system imagined by Hakluyt. It emergedfrom three interrelated phenomena: harsh labor conditions, the treatment ofindentures as commodities, and, most of all, the deliberate choice to breedchildren so that they should become an exploitable pool of workers.

Ogilvie uncovers the story of Anna Thorpe Wetherill, an anti-slavery activist who hid escaped enslaved people in her house in Philadelphia. Mrs Thorpe focused her efforts in the slips she sent to Oxford on recording the language of slavery, submitting definitions for ‘abhorrent’, ‘abolition’, ‘accursed’ and ‘attack’. Like Margaret Murray’s, her work ensured that the language of colonisation appeared in the dictionary not just as the lingua franca of jingoistic imperialism but shaded with the stories and the voices of the colonised.

R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots, drama in three acts by Karel Čapek, published in 1920 and performed in 1921. This cautionary play, for which Čapek invented the word robot (derived from the Czech word for forced labour), involves a scientist named Rossum who discovers the secret of creating humanlike machines. He establishes a factory to produce and distribute these mechanisms worldwide. Another scientist decides to make the robots more human, which he does by gradually adding such traits as the capacity to feel pain. Years later, the robots, who were created to serve humans, have come to dominate them completely.

Undoubtedly the first task of the statesman in such countriesis to raise the standard of living to such a point that thepeople may be freed from economic slavery and given thetime to get the education appropriate to free men.

If leisure and political power requirethis education, everybody in America now requires it, andeverybody where democracy and industrialization penetratewill ultimately require it. If the people are not capable ofacquiring this education, they should be deprived of politicalpower and probably of leisure. Their uneducated politicalpower is dangerous, and their uneducated leisure is degrad-ing and will be dangerous. If the people are incapable ofachieving the education that responsible democratic citizen-ship demands, then democracy is doomed, Aristotle rightlycondemned the mass of mankind to natural slavery, and thesooner we set about reversing the trend toward democracythe better it will be for the world.

Most religions of the world operate on that principle, but not Christianity (or Judaism, rightly understood).

I observe that they take no care of the conversion of their Slaves.

No major Articles were added or deleted. The individual property rights of the slave-owner was prioritized. No law could be passed about emancipation. Individuals could not free their own slaves. Immigration of slaves from other states could not be limited. Enslaved people continued to have the right to jury trials, punished as they would be against a White victim, “except in case of insurrection by such slave.”28 But to this was added: “or rape on a white female.”29 The nature of the changes make clear that the principle concern of the members of the secession Convention was to ensure the preservation of slavery.

The slave trade was nothing new in Madagascar. Arabmerchants had been taking advantage of internal wars to extractcaptives since the Middle Ages.

the deer reminds Chris of the trick-ster tales, that it suggests he must use his wiles to escape

Wright makes the rat an emblemof “black suffering as well as black persistence” because of “its hunger andspirited refusal to be captured.”

Like the trickster tales discussed above, the films we are lookingat here do not make animals the focal point, but use them as a means of“thinking with” humans.

The trickster is an animal low on the peckingorder (like a rabbit) who finds himself in a jam and must use his wits, charms,and other skill sets to outfox his more powerful enemies. He is an animalsurrogate that speaks softly of strategies for resistance

qualities of vermin also make thema ripe symbol for resistance. To be like vermin is to be tenacious and to refusethe spatial exclusions that people like Dean would enforce

Wagner emphasizes thatsuch animal tales often provided coded ways of imparting strategies forresistance and that this story has historical connections not only to the tropeof the speaking animal from African trickster mythologies like the spiderAnansi, but also perhaps, to Aesop’s animal fable

recall the plantation fables that spoke backto power, cloaking human issues under the guise of entertaining tales aboutcrafty creatures. These creatures may also operate as revolutionary symbols,whereby one thing is made to stand in for another so as to seem innoc-uous to outsiders.

As metaphoric operations, plantation animal tales andthe films under discussion here work by pointing out a false equivalency:whereas, under slavery, Black life was set on a par with the animal, whichcould be bought and sold, traded away from family members like chattel, thisequation is rerouted in Black storytellers’ uses of the symbolic animal. Theequivalence of the slave with the animal is reanimated, but now the harm-less animal tale becomes the mechanism for delivering resistive strategies.

Rather than viewing fables as operating with a purely substitutivelogic, where the animal stands in for the human, recent criticism explores thepossibility that the fable can imagine relationality and even allyship amongspecies

Any resistance must be sanitized soas to be tolerable” for the general audience. 5 But resistance also works not bybeing sanitized, but by being hidden in plain sight, coded as symbols legibleto some but not to all. The use of animal fables has a long-standing historydating back to slavery as providing such a coded language of resistance

Wagner notes that theweaker animals use their wits as a means of overcoming the unequal powerdistribution in the world they navigated

he “speaking animal,” which acknowledgesthe dialectic capacity of the symbolic animal of fables to stage a conversationabout subjugation and resistance, but simultaneously, to point beyond itselfto the reality of animal life.

As our younger brothers of the New-England Indians

It is a region marked by historicallylow wages paid to farm laborers and their families.

Healthcare should be a human right.

The ban on a black slave tradetook effect in 1808, but in reality, clandestine trading continued for afew decades (particularly to Brazil).

Sven Beckert’s research on the “cotton empire” has also shown thecrucial importance of slave labor in the extraction of cotton when theBritish and Europeans seized control over worldwide textile pro-duction between 1750 and 1860.

Had their colonies not allowed European countries totranscend their territorial limits, it would have been necessary to findthese sources of supply elsewhere.

Those who are born today are not individu-ally responsible for this burdensome heritage, but we are all respon-sible for the way in which we choose or fail to take it into account inanalyzing the world economic system, its injustices, and the needfor change.

How did Europe and the United States attain such a dominant posi-tion on the global level, at least until recently? Although no single ex-planation exists, we shall see that slavery and colonialism played acentral role in the Western world’s acquisition of wealth.

Our situation will be deplorable indeed: nor can we ever expect to get this government amended, since I have already shown that a very small minority may prevent it, and that small minority interested in the continuance of the oppression.

Professor Carl Bogus: Carl T. Bogus, “Was Slavery a Factor in the SecondAmendment?” e New York Times, May 24, 2018.

General Daniel E. Sickles, the commanding Union officer enforcing Reconstruction in South Carolina, ordered in January 1866 that “the constitutional rights of all loyal and well-disposed inhabitants to bear arms will not be infringed.” When South Carolinians ignored Sickles’s order and others like it, Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of July 1866, which assured ex-slaves the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty … including the constitutional right to bear arms.”

enslaved black women in the U.S. developed abortifacients – drugs that induce abortions – and abortion practices as means to stop pregnancies after rapes by, and coerced sexual encounters with, white male slave owners.

In his illuminated bookJerusalem, Los—Blake’s alter ego—voiced a sentiment that might have servedas the Romantics’ motto. “I must create a system,” Blake’s character declared, orelse “be enslav’d by another man’s.”

As Professor Thuesen explained, the key proponent of naming Archdale Hall for the state’s one-time colonial governor was Johns Hopkins University’s own Francis T. King. King was a business associate to Johns Hopkins and personally chosen by Hopkins to serve as a founding trustee of our university. As librarian and Professor of English Dorothy Lloyd Gilbert reported, students at Guilford advocated naming the new building Phoenix Hall; it was erected literally out of the ashes after a fire destroyed the school’s meeting house. King, who headed the Baltimore Association to Advise and Assist Friends in the Southern States, saw things otherwise and managed to prevail. Named in the 1880s, Archdale Hall still stands today and is the oldest building on the Guilford College campus.2

We headed to the recent meeting of the Universities Studying Slavery (USS) consortium eager to learn about the work of others. We returned with valuable lessons about ourselves. At USS meetings, research teams like Hard Histories compare notes with colleagues across the country engaged in similar projects. In late March, Guilford College and Wake Forest University hosted a two-day-long deep dive into research underway in North Carolina and beyond.

insidious declamations should have no effect upon the wise legislators who have decreed liberty to humanity. The attacks the colonists propose against this liberty must be feared all the more insofar as they hide their detestable projects under the veil of patriotism. We know that illusory and specious descriptions have been made to you of the renewal of terrible violence. Already, perfidious emissaries have crept among us to foment destruction at the hands ofliberticides. They will not succeed, this 1 swear by all that is most sacred in liberty. My attachment to France, the gratitude that all the blacks conserve for her, make it my duty to hide from you neither the plans being fomented nor the oath that we renew to bury ourselves beneath the ruins of a country revived by liberty rather than suffer the return of slavery.

the telling of oppressive history can make people uncomfortable. One common argument against incorporating the history of enslaved people, she says, is that, due to the scarcity of primary sources, the history is difficult to tell meaningfully and accurately. But, Rose explains, "resistance to interpreting slavery is not about scarcity of documentation." Rather, using the supposed scarcity of documentation to excuse engagement is a form of resistance, as are denial, sarcasm, and apathy.

When I did, I tried to see beyond the museum’s opulence to appreciate the nearly invisible hands of the Black laborers who made the Carroll family’s comfort and prosperity possible.

Explore the Origins and Forced Relocations of Enslaved Africans Across the Atlantic World The SlaveVoyages website is a collaborative digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history. Search these records to learn about the broad origins and forced relocations of more than 12 million African people who were sent across the Atlantic in slave ships, and hundreds of thousands more who were trafficked within the Americas. Explore where they were taken, the numerous rebellions that occurred, the horrific loss of life during the voyages, the identities and nationalities of the perpetrators, and much more.

When I think back to the creation of that infographic, I wonder whether we had shown the care demanded of the data. Whether we had, in creating this abstraction, re-enacted — however inadvertently — some of the objectification of the slave trade.

Consider, as well, the extent to which the tools of abstraction are themselves tied up in the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. As the historian Jennifer L. Morgan notes in “Reckoning With Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic,” the fathers of modern demography, the 17th-century English writers and mathematicians William Petty and John Graunt, were “thinking through problems of population and mobility at precisely the moment when England had solidified its commitment to the slave trade.”Their questions were ones of statecraft: How could England increase its wealth? How could it handle its surplus population? And what would it do with “excessive populations that did not consume” in the formal market? Petty was concerned with Ireland — Britain’s first colony, of sorts — and the Irish. He thought that if they could be forcibly transferred to England, then they could, in Morgan’s words, become “something valuable because of their ability to augment the population and labor power of the English.”This conceptual breakthrough, Morgan told me in an interview, cannot be disentangled from the slave trade. The English, she said, “are learning to think about people as ‘abstractable.’

And there are, again, ethical questions that must be asked and answered when dealing with the quantitative study of human atrocity, which is what we’re ultimately doing when we bring statistical and mathematical methods to the study of slavery.

From 1787 to 1788, Americans would write and ratify a new Constitution that, in a concession to Lower South planters who demanded access to the trans-Atlantic trade, forbade a ban on the foreign slave trade for at least the next 20 years. But Congress could — and, in 1794, did — prohibit American ships from participating. In 1807, right on schedule, Congress passed — and President Thomas Jefferson, a slave-owning Virginian, signed — a measure to abolish the importation of enslaved Africans to the United States, effective Jan. 1, 1808.

It is thanks to decades of painstaking, difficult work that we know a great deal about the scale of human trafficking across the Atlantic Ocean and about the people aboard each ship. Much of that research is available to the public in the form of the SlaveVoyages database. A detailed repository of information on individual ships, individual voyages and even individual people, it is a groundbreaking tool for scholars of slavery, the slave trade and the Atlantic world. And it continues to grow. Last year, the team behind SlaveVoyages introduced a new data set with information on the domestic slave trade within the United States, titled “Oceans of Kinfolk.”

we found this extraordinary paper from 1951 I think by Goldschmidt Walter Goldschmidt which nobody's read it has 00:29:14 got a very strange title something like a contribution to ethical and philosophical sociology or something which tells you very little about its content but it's about these Californian foragers who live next door to the 00:29:27 highly aristocratic slave keeping fishermen of the northwest coast and what Goldschmidt who was a student of Alfred Kroeber I believe the great sort of Dayan of 00:29:40 California anthropology what he argues there point four point is that these Californian hunter-gatherers actually had a kind of work ethic which is remarkably similar to what Max Weber 00:29:54 classically described as the Protestant work ethic of central and northern Europe

most people trained in our subjects are aware of is the 00:28:22 phenomenon of slavery among non farming populations and actually the classic example is precisely that of the the indigenous societies of the Northwest Coast who are known to have kept slaves 00:28:36 who were actually hereditary slaves in their households which were organized on these highly stratified aristocratic sort of lines what nobody seems to have 00:28:48 been interested up to now is why this practice of keeping slaves seems to sort of fizzle out and stop as you head south into what is now broadly speaking the 00:29:00 area of coastal California

Would conscripted workers produce as strong an economy as those who could act of their own free will?

We see now a complex web of historical threads to ensnare blacks forslavery in America: the desperation of starving settlers, the specialhelplessness of the displaced African, the powerful incentive of profit forslave trader and planter, the temptation of superior status for poor whites, the

As Morgan says, masters, “initially at least, perceived slaves in much the sameway they had always perceived servants . . . shiftless, irresponsible, unfaithful,ungrateful, dishonest. . . .”

terrifyingothers from the like practices. . .

At the University of Virginia — founded and designed by Thomas Jefferson — slaves cooked and cleaned for the sons of the Southern gentry.

in 1637 the first American slave ship, the Desire, sailed fromMarblehead

Under these conditions, perhaps one of every three blacks transportedoverseas died, but the huge profits (often double the investment on one trip)made it worthwhile for the slave trader, and so the blacks were packed into theholds like fish

On one occasion, hearing a great noise from belowdecks where the blackswere chained together, the sailors opened the hatches and found the slaves indifferent stages of suffocation, many dead, some having killed others indesperate attempts to breathe. Slaves often jumped overboard to drown ratherthan continue their suffering. To one observer a slave-deck was “so coveredwith blood and mucus that it resembled a slaughter house.”

Documents of the time

Slavery existed in the African states, and it was sometimes used byEuropeans to justify their own slave trade. But, as Davidson points out, the“slaves” of Africa were more like the serfs of Europe—in other words, likemost of the population of Europe. It was a harsh servitude, but they had rightswhich slaves brought to America did not have, and they were “altogetherdifferent from the human cattle of the slave ships and the Americanplantations.”

The Virginians needed labor, to grow corn for subsistence, to grow tobaccofor export. They had just figured out how to grow tobacco, and in 1617 theysent off the first cargo to England. Finding that, like all pleasurable drugstainted with moral disapproval, it brought a high price, the planters, despitetheir high religious talk, were not going to ask questions about something soprofitable.

Like William Blake said, you either create your own system or get enslaved by another’s.

I allow nothing for losses by death, but on the contrary shall presently take credit 4. pr. cent pr. annum for their increase over & above keepg. up their own numbers.

Researchers do the actual work: they invent the hypothesis, do the experiments and write the articles describing the results of these experiments. Then they publish this article in an academic journal. They cannot simply put this article online on their blog: to be recognised as research work, it must be published in a respectable peer-reviewed journal. So they send their articles to publishers like Elsevier, Wiley or Springer. Publishers send articles they have received to other scientists for peer-review. Reviewers give their opinion on whether the work should be accepted in a journal or not, or if some additional work must be done. Based on these reviews, the article is published or rejected. Both reviewers and scientists work for free. They do not earn any compensation from the academic publisher. Here, academic publishers work as organisers of the academic community, but not as creators. The work of the academic publisher is organisational and not creative.

Slavery

In adjudicating the status ofAfricans and their descendants, such as Fernando, the English colonistscould follow the lead of the Iberians and conclude that slavery was apermanent condition, and apply the principle ofpartus sequitur ventrem,according to which slave status passed from mother to child.

Anthony Johnson may have arrived in Virginia in thefirstshipment of“negars”in 1620, but by midcentury he owned propertyand slaves in Northampton County, on the Eastern Shore in Virginia.He appears frequently in court records, trading cattle, mares, land, andtobacco with other free people of color and white men.

Militias of free men of color never took hold inVirginia and they died out in Louisiana by 1834. Communities of freepeople of color were also key to the expansion of freedom, as theycould provide resources and legal knowledge to enslaved people.Perhaps most important, their members made claims on citizenshipthat made it difficult to argue that only white people could be citizens.

rbecame increasingly anomalous, and even dangerous, to the polity. Tomany, slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike, the extension of citizen-ship rights to all white men required the removal of free black peoplefrom their midst. That is why colonization efforts that sought to removefree blacks to a distant location in Africa prospered in Virginia andLouisiana but not in Cuba. And that is also why Virginia and Louisianaacted in the nineteenth century, especially in the 1850s, to end thepossibility of manumission, self-purchase, or freedom suits.

The key to these divergent trajectories of racial differentiation was thelaw of freedom. It began with legal traditions: in Cuba, the right tomanumission wasfirmly entrenched in the Iberian law of slavery andwas not tied to race, a key difference from the law in both Louisiana andVirginia.

rough the lawsuits they brought when sucharrangements fell through. Enslaved people who found their way to anotary’soffice or a courtroom to claim freedom were exceptional incertain ways. The majority of men and women born in bondage remainedenslaved their entire lives. Yet those who became free were key to theconstruction of race in the Americas.

Ariela had written a book about the history of theeveryday law of slavery in the U.S. Deep South that emphasized localculture and law,

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said there were "phrases that serve as an excuse for not thinking." One of these phrases that substitute for thought today is one that depicts the current problems of blacks in America as "a legacy of slavery."

I n 1790, Haiti’s enslavers saw the Declaration of t he Rights of Man (Article 1: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights”) as a green light f or t heir i ndependence drive and for t heir demands for new trade relations t o increase their wealth. F ree and affluent bira-cial activists numbering almost 3 0,000 (slightly less t han the White population) started driving for t heir civil r ights. Close to half a mil-lion enslaved Africans, who were producing about half t he world’s sugar and coffee i n the most profitable European colony in the world, heard these curious cries f or r ights and liberty among the i sland’s f ree people. On August 22, 1791, enslaved Africans revolted, i nspired in more ways t han one by Vodou priest Dutty Boukman. They emerged as t he fourth faction in the civil war between White royalists, White independence seekers, and free biracial a ctivist

I n South Carolina, t here emerged a three-sided conflict, with as many as 20,000 Africans a sserting t heir o wn i nterests. An e stimated t wo-thirds o f enslaved Africans i n Georgia ran away. According to Jefferson’s own calculations, Virginia l ost a s many as 30,000 enslaved Africans i n a sin-gle year.

Cotton—more than anyone or anything else—economically freed American enslavers from England and tightened the chains of African people in American slavery.

Beginning in the last quarter of the 20th century, historians like Gary Nash, Ira Berlin and Alfred Young built on the earlier work of Carter G. Woodson, Benjamin Quarles, John Hope Franklin and others, writing histories of the Colonial and Revolutionary eras that included African Americans, slavery and race. A standout from this time is Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, which addresses explicitly how the intertwined histories of Native American, African American and English residents of Virginia are foundational to understanding the ideas of freedom we still struggle with today.

I was struck, for example, by his extensive discussion of the evolution of slavery and serfdom, which made no mention of the classic work of Evsey Domar of M.I.T., who argued that the more or less simultaneous rise of serfdom in Russia and slavery in the New World were driven by the opening of new land, which made labor scarce and would have led to rising wages in the absence of coercion.

James Tallmadge Jr. t acked an amendment onto a bill a dmitting Missouri t o the Union that would have barred the admission of enslaved Africans into the new state.

Until 1 822—until Denmark Vesey—northerners h ad p roduced most of the racist books and tracts defending slavery. Writers l ike Charles Jared Ingersoll, J ames Kirke Paulding, and Robert Walsh—all f rom the North—defended slavery from British onslaughts i n the 1810s.

“ I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable t han the best man on the f arm,” J efferson once explained to a friend.

By September 17, 1787, delegates i n Philadelphia had extracted “slave” and “slavery” f rom the signed US Constitution to hide their racist e nslavement policies. These policies hardly fit with securing “the Blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Antislavery discussions were disallowed in drawing up what t he writers were pegging as humankind’s ultimate constitution of freedom.

Rhode I sland pastor Samuel Hopkins, an antislavery Puritan, would have found Jefferson’s passage laughable. He had just sent t he con-gress A Dialogue c oncerning t he Slavery of t he Africans. Americans’ s o-called enslavement t o the British was “lighter than a feather” compared to Africans’ e nslavement t o Americans, Hopkins argued.

Thomas Jefferson disagreed. At t he beginning of t he Declaration of Independence, he paraphrased the Virginia constitution, i ndelibly penning: “ all Men are created equal.”It is impossible to know for s ure whether J efferson meant t o include his enslaved laborers ( or women) in his “all Men.” Was he merely emphasizing the equality of White Americans and the English? Later i n the document, he did scold the British for “ exciting those very people to rise in arms among us”—those “people” being resisting Afri-cans. Did Jefferson insert “created equal” a s a nod to the swirling debate between monogenesis and polygenesis? Even if J efferson believed all groups to be “created equal,” he never believed the antiracist creed that all human groups are e qual. But his “ all Men are created equal” was revolutionary n onetheless; i t even propelled Vermont and Mas-sachusetts to abolish slavery.

prevails

Pay for each job is still set through a black-box algorithm

claim the gratitude of his child so completely

seized and made a slave by the Turks

Greece had not been enslaved

it becomes our duty, by legislation, whenever such legislation is necessary, to maintain this provision of the Constitution against all attempts to violate it; and we deny the authority of Congress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to givelegal existence to slavery in any territory of the United States.

and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.

As Prince told Rolling Stone in 1996, “People think I’m a crazy fool for writing ‘slave’ on my face. But if I can’t do what I want to do, what am I? When you stop a man from dreaming, he becomes a slave.”

Largely from this fact, have arisen their cultural gifts to America

That nothing in this act contained shall be construed to inhibit the government of the United States from dividing said Territory into two or more Territories, in such manner and at such times as Congress shall deem convenient and proper, or from attaching any portion of said Territory to any other State or Territory of the United State

enslaved

(Of course, there were plenty of other things happening between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries that changed the shape of the world we live in. I've skipped changes in agricultural productivity due to energy economics, which finally broke the Malthusian trap our predecessors lived in. This in turn broke the long term cap on economic growth of around 0.1% per year in the absence of famine, plagues, and wars depopulating territories and making way for colonial invaders. I've skipped the germ theory of diseases, and the development of trade empires in the age of sail and gunpowder that were made possible by advances in accurate time-measurement. I've skipped the rise and—hopefully—decline of the pernicious theory of scientific racism that underpinned western colonialism and the slave trade. I've skipped the rise of feminism, the ideological position that women are human beings rather than property, and the decline of patriarchy. I've skipped the whole of the Enlightenment and the age of revolutions! But this is a technocentric congress, so I want to frame this talk in terms of AI, which we all like to think we understand.)

Also the whole of his Slaves amounting to 57 in number.

And, in general, to observe with intelligence & faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed.

To develope the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds cultivate their morals, & instil into them the precepts of virtue & order.

Also the whole of his Slaves amounting to 57 in number.

Also the whole of his Slaves amounting to 57 in number.