Somerset and the Slave Trade

Lately a number of historians have been arguing that the American Revolution was fought in order to preserve slavery.  According to this theory, slave holders in the American colonies became worried about a growing anti-slavery movement in England, so they declared independence in order to preserve their peculiar institution.  This idea has been around for a couple decades, but it gained some attention when it was put forward in the book Slave Nation by Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen and by Simon Schama in Rough Crossings, both published in 2006.  Since then it’s been accepted rather uncritically by any number of journals, web sites and lesser publications.

It’s the kind of theory that catches on quickly.  It seems to overturn the old notion that the Revolution was fought over high ideals, while it reassures the modern audience that they are more socially enlightened than earlier generations.  However, the theory has a number of flaws.  It exaggerates the strength of the English abolitionist movement; it ignores the emerging abolitionist movement in the colonies, and it underestimates the importance of the slave trade in the English economy.  In particular, it’s partly based on a misunderstanding of the Somerset case of 1772. 

James Somerset was a slave held by an British official named Charles Stewart who was living in Boston.  When Stewart brought Somerset to England, Somerset escaped.  During this time he met some prominent abolitionists, including the lawyer Granville Sharp.  Eventually Stewart located Somerset and had him seized and put on a ship bound for Jamaica, but Somerset’s new friends had a writ of habeas corpus issued before he could be sent back into slavery.

Granville Sharp was hoping to use this case to overturn the York-Talbot decision from 1729 that said, in part, “a slave by coming from the West Indies into Great Britain or Ireland, either with or without his master, does not become free, and … the master may legally compel him to return again to the plantations.”  However, with roughly 15,000 slaves in England at the time the judge, Lord Mansfield, was reluctant to suddenly set them all free.  Instead, he ruled that there was no legal basis for holding Somerset prisoner on board the ship. 

Many people misinterpreted the ruling as having ended slavery in England, and there’s evidence of slaves in the colonies trying to escape to England for this reason.  In fact, it only meant that once in England masters could not compel their slaves to return to the colonies against their will—and even this may not have been enforced.  London newspapers continued to advertise the sale of slaves and post rewards for the capture of runaways.

The British slave ship Brookes

By the 18^th century sugar, cotton and other plantation crops had become a major part of England’s economy.  As a Parliamentary Act stated in 1749, “the trade to and from Africa is very advantageous to Great Britain and necessary for supplying the plantations and colonies thereunto belonging, with a sufficient number of negroes at reasonable rates.”  The abolitionist movement had been growing for some time, but it was no match for powerful financial interests.

At the same time, abolitionism was gaining strength in the colonies as well, and several attempts were made to limit or abolish slavery.  In 1767 the Massachusetts legislature debated a bill to end slavery in the colony, but eventually it was rewritten as a tax on the sale of importation of slaves.  Then in 1771 another bill was proposed to end the importation of slaves entirely, and a similar bill was raised in the Virginia legislature the next year.  Finally in 1773 a group of slaves petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to end the slave trade, release all slaves in the commonwealth and give them land to build village of their own.  

Unfortunately all four bills met the same fate.  They passed the legislatures only to be rejected by the royal governors.  There’s no evidence that Parliament took an active part in vetoing these bills, but the Massachusetts Governor Hutchinson sent a copy of the 1771 bill to England to get the king’s advice.

Neither Massachusetts nor Virginia made any immediate effort to end slavery once they had their independence.  However, the southern states thought the risk great enough that they inserted a clause into the Constitution preventing the federal government from abolishing the slave trade before the year 1808.  This did not prevent Congress from prohibiting U.S. ship from transporting slaves in 1794, and as soon as 1808 came around Congress banned the importation of slaves.

This last act may have been moot as England had already abolished the slave trade in 1807, and British ships were actively enforcing this ban throughout the Atlantic.  A bill to end the slave trade had failed in Parliament in 1805, but the economic importance of slavery had waned as a greater part of England’s wealth was coming from Asia.  The relative influence of wealth and morality could be seen a quarter century later in 1833 when slavery was abolished throughout the English Empire 1833 except in areas controlled by the East India Company.

Of course all this was more than 50 years in the future when the American colonies signed the Declaration of Independence.  At that time the slave trade and colonial plantation wealth were the foundation of the English economy.  Some people may have misinterpreted the Somerset decision as evidence that England was turning against slavery, but no body selling his cotton in English ships would have made that mistake.  With abolitionist sentiments coming out of the northern colonies and even Virginia, no southern slave holder would have thought the best way to preserve slavery lay in severing ties with England.

How Empires Fall

Globalization is not new, and neither is its repercussions.

A little over a hundred years ago England stood at the center of the first truly globalized economy.  The British navy and the East India Company had conquered nearly a fifth of the world’s land mass, and Queen Victoria ruled over roughly a quarter of the world’s population.  Raw materials and raw wealth flowed into England from all over the world, and at any time somewhere in the world backs were bent in sweatshops and fields laboring in England’s behalf.  It was truly said that “The sun never set of the British Empire.”  

Such great empires require complex organizations, and it wasn’t enough to send out agents from England.  Local bureaucrats and managers had to be trained to read and write in English.  As the bureaucratic infrastructure became increasingly complex new center of power emerged in the colonies.  A new middle class appeared, raised to think of themselves as citizens of the English Empire.  In time, they began to wonder why they should not also share in the rights of Englishmen.  Pressures for self-rule became protests for independence as local leaders began to emerge in the colonies.

At the same time similar questions were arising at home.  Increasingly the wealth of the empire was flowing into the pockets of investors, insurers and merchants while nearly a quarter of the English population lived at or below the poverty line.  With the industrial revolution many workers lost their jobs to mechanization, and major industries like mining and ship building saw periodic cycles of unemployment.  While nineteenth century reforms gave householders and farmers the right to vote many of the poor were still excluded, as were all women, and an arcane electoral system resulted in unequal representation.

Through the end of the 19th century the two main political parties traded the government back and forth with relatively little disagreement over foreign policy or free trade.  Then in 1901 disagreements over the Boer War brought the conservatives back into power on a wave of nationalist sentiment, but the war proved expensive.  It soon became clear that Britain could no longer act unilaterally, but long decades as the world’s only superpower had left British politicians ill prepared to negotiate with allies.  As news spread of Boer women and children dying in unsanitary “concentration camps” the public turned against the war.  The conservative defended their actions as military necessities, but the elections in 1905 saw a liberal victory.

The start of the twentieth century saw the rise of progressive issues.  Women demanded the right to vote, and working parents demanded better education for their children.  The poor demanded better living conditions, prison reform and reform of the poor laws, and the public demanded higher taxes on the rich and tariffs on imports.  The liberal party introduced national insurance and unemployment support, but the party began to fracture over its embrace of free trade and its willingness to compromise with conservatives.  Radical progressives formed a socialist “labor” party, and by the 1920s they had replaced the old liberals.  

Faced with declining influence overseas and an insurgent working class at home, those in power struggled to maintain their hold.  Politics became increasingly volatile as old answers no longer met the new realities.  This is how empires fall—not because those at the top become soft and weak but because those who have labored to build the foundations become lean and hungry.  To resist their demands, or to capitalize on them, only widens the cracks in the social infrastructure.

From the Bay to the Corner

Before the Pilgrims arrived, the people living along the shores of Massachusetts Bay were semi-nomadic.  They moved with the season from place to place where food was most abundant.  In the summer they might pick berries and in the autumn hunt for deer or game bird.  Whole families would travel together along the same circuit every year.  Every autumn they would meet the same neighbors at the hunting grounds, and in the winter each family would go their separate way.  Then they would join the same neighbors they had known the previous winter fishing along the rivers or bays.

In this way families would maintain networks of friends who they could turn to in times of need.  If one autumn the hunting was poor, then they could send word to the families they fished with in the winter.  Each family had incentive to help one another because they knew that next year they might need help in return.  The best defense against a precarious food supply was a reputation as a reliable neighbor—a good person to know when you need a friend.

This was something the English colonists never understood.  They also built strong communities, but centuries of agriculture had taught them a different relationship with the land.  They built farms, homes and cottage industries—all of which meant staying in one place, which in turn meant they could store food for the winter and accumulate material goods.  They saw that their lifestyle meant physical comfort and a reliable food supply, and they couldn’t understand why the native people wouldn’t just settle down.

The English couldn’t understand that the native people were dependent on a network of alliances that could only be maintained through constant movement—that they were asking the natives to abandon the only security they had known.  If one farmer is struck by a bad harvest, then the farmer’s neighbors will likely be struck as well.  Who could they turn to then?  The English had more material comforts, but they couldn’t see the assumptions implicit in their own way of life.  Their emphasis on self-reliance and independence stood in contrast to the native people’s interdependence.  They thought the natives were just lazy and lacked ambition.  

Roughly three hundred years later this same misunderstanding arose again as the descendants of the English colonists encountered new waves of immigrants from Europe.  At the end of the Great Depression, William Whyte described the difference between “college boys” and “corner boys” in Boston’s North End:

“The college boys fit in with an economy of saving and investment.  The corner boys fit in with a spending economy.”  A college boy must save his money to pay for education; “In order to participate in group activities, the corner boy must share his money with others.  If he has money and his friend does not, he is expected to do the pending for both of them.”

Like the colonist storing food for the winter, the college boy saves his money to achieve independence.  The corner boy spends his money to build a network that he can rely on in times of need.  This distinction can affect all aspects of their social lives.  For example, the corner boys were criticized for gambling what little money they had despite the low chance of winning.  However, there’s little incentive to save money if one is expected to share it, but a sudden windfall, however small, creates an opportunity for public displays of generosity.

Of course, this does not mean that Depression-era Italian immigrants were a hunter-gatherer culture.  The strategy of interdependence has been used throughout history and around the world to deal with periods of unreliable resources.  Rather, the feature that has remained consistent over all this time has been the mutual misunderstanding.  The corner boys saw the college boys as selfish and unreliable while the corner boys were seen as lazy and impractical.  Neither group fully recognized their own assumptions, so they couldn’t understand each other’s way of life.

Public Good and Private Gain

The idea that property is best protected through private ownership is one of the central pillars of capitalism.  As Adam Smith explained: 

"The proprietor of land is interested, for the sake of his own revenue, to keep his estate in as good condition as he can, by building and repairing his tenants’ houses, by making and maintaining the necessary drains and enclosures, and all those other expensive improvements which it belongs to the land-lord to make and maintain."

                 The same logic applies to the owner of a ship, a factory or any other property that can be used to make money.  The property owner will only be motivated to make repairs if he or she has a financial interest in maintaining the property in working order.  According to this notion, no one would invest in maintaining communal property unless they could expect some sort of return.  Rather each individual would try to extract as much benefit as possible from a communal resource with the minimum investment—thus depleting the resource.

Even if we accept this rather bleak view of human nature, this notion fails to consider a number of factors.  For example, it may have worked well in the late eighteenth century when most business owners managed their properties themselves and often passed their businesses down in the same families for generations.  However, most major companies today are owned by investors who may not be aware of what corporations they own.  Since shares of stock can be bought and sold in a single day, they have no long-term commitment to the corporations.  Their only interest is in obtaining the maximum short-term profit possible even at the expense of the long-term health of the company.

This was the fate of the Pacific Lumber Company.  In 1931, Pacific Lumber adopted a policy of selectively cutting trees in order to maintain a sustainable yield based on a hundred year plan.  It was exactly the sort of enlightened maintenance of a profit-making property that would have had Adam Smith grinning from ear to ear.  However, it didn’t last.

Source: CA Dept. of Forestry & Fire

Protection; Pacific Lumber Co.

In 1985 Pacific Lumber was taken over by Maxxam, Inc. in a highly leveraged buyout that left Maxxam heavily in debt.  In order to pay its investor, Maxxam began to clear cut the forest while reducing costs by laying off workers and shipping more raw materials rather than finished goods.  Ironically, in defiance of Adam Smith’s prediction, 60,000 acres of the forest were saved by environmentalist and the Bureau of Land Management who purchased the land and converted it into a national park, thereby removing it from commercial use.  The land was preserved by converting it to communal property.

As Pacific Lumber continued to practice clear cutting, regulations were enacted to limit its destruction of the forest.  People with no financial interest in the forest saw more value in preserving the property than its owners did.  Pacific Lumber was prevented from consuming all of its resources, but it was too late.  In 2007 the company filed for bankruptcy.

The town of Scotia, California was a company town, wholly owned by Pacific Lumber Company, and all of the residents were company employees or their dependents.  A town that had survived an earthquake, a fire and the Great Depression was reduced to half its former size, and the workers who were laid off were forced to leave the area in order to find new jobs.  They lost their homes along with their incomes.

A company that could have lasted a century was brought down in fewer than twenty-five years, families were left unemployed and homeless and thousands of acres of redwood forest were reduced to barren fields of shrubs and stumps.

Columbus and the Pinzón Brothers

You may remember reading in your high school history book that when Christopher Columbus and his fleet of three ships, the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, had passed beyond the sight of land, his crew threatened to mutiny. The were afraid that the ships would fall off the edge of the world or drift forever lost on the vast ocean, and they wanted to turn back toward the safety of familiar shores – but Columbus stood firm and declared that they would continue westward, ever westward.

It is a good story, and it has been repeated in endless variations. In some versions the mutiny is started because of a problem with the compass or a disagreement over how far the ships had traveled, but it always ends with Columbus staying on course despite a storm of doubts and fears. It is a powerful image, and it has served as a popular model for leadership.

Unfortunately, the story is not true.  At least there is no mention of it in Columbus’s logs or in the ships’ logs kept by Martín and Vicente Pinzón, who were captains aboard the Nina and the Pinta. Instead, all three captains tell us that when the ships were about half way across the ocean, the Pinzón brothers came on board the Santa Maria and convinced Columbus that they could make better use of the wind and travel faster if the three ships turned a few degrees to the south.

Columbus took the brothers’ advice, and saved the fleet from disaster. The journey turned out to be much longer than he had expected, and by the time they first sighted land, the fleet was almost out of food. The men were not near mutiny, but they were close to starvation.  If Columbus had not changed course, if he had continued "westward, ever westward" as the story tells us, then they would have reached land farther to the north and several days later, and Columbus and his crew would have been dead or dying.

The obvious lesson to the story is that a good captain does not stand firm when everybody else is telling him that the ship is off course. Rather, the first lesson of leadership is to hire good people – then listen to them.

The Offering and the Voice

In 1842 Charles Dickens visited the factories at Lowell, Massachusetts and wrote glowing praise for the progressive conditions that he found.  As a child, Dickens had labored in a London factory, and he compared the Lowell factories to the memories of his youth as the difference between “living light and deepest shadow.”  He found the factory workers healthy, clean and well dressed and the factory rooms had “as much fresh air, cleanliness, and comfort, as the nature of the occupation would admit.”  In particular, Dickens was impressed with The Lowell Offering, a collection of stories, articles and poems written and published by the factory workers.

It’s difficult to understand the impact that The Offering had on a nineteenth century audience.  Many people in England and Europe didn’t believe that factory workers could have the intellectual or emotional capacity to appreciate the literary arts, much less to produce their own work.  What’s more, The Offering was the first publication written and edited entirely by women.  Some denied that it was even possible while others celebrated it as proof of progressive ideals.

Unlike the factories in England, the factory system at Lowell had not been built to employ a permanent class of workers.  Roughly two-thirds of the employees were young women from New England farms who would work a few years before returning home or getting married.  So, in order to attract a continual supply of new employees the factories offered religious services, a lending library and lectures in science and the arts.  Many of these young women were well educated, and they enjoyed literature and poetry.  They often shared their own work with each other, and the best of these attempts were collected into a booklet, which became the first edition of The Lowell Offering.

Then in 1845 another magazine appeared in Lowell, and it painted a very different picture of factory life.  The Voice of Industry had been started in Fitchburg Massachusetts by the New England Workingmen’s Association, but it soon moved to Lowell where it was taken over by the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association.  It described life in the factories as twelve-and-a-half hours a day of monotonous, exhausting work that left the workers unable to take advantage of the educational opportunities that had impressed Dickens a few years earlier.  The factory rooms were dark, noisy and poorly ventilated, and the boarding houses were overcrowded and poorly maintained. 

Could conditions have deteriorated so much in only three years, or was Dickens simply wrong?

Anyone who has worked for a large company knows that not all work is equal and not all workers are treated equally.  Many of the early contributors to The Lowell Offering worked in the spinning rooms.  They held highly skilled jobs that paid an average daily wage of 56 cents.  Other jobs in the factories, such as dressing and carding, paid as little as 37.5 cents per day, and working conditions could vary as well.  So The Offering reflected the experiences of the best paid, most skilled workers.

On the other hand, Sarah Bagley, the president of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, was a weaver.  Weavers were initially paid 67 cents per day, but that wage had been set high to attract skilled workers.  By 1840 wages for weavers had gone down to only 50 cents per day, and in 1842 they were told they would have to tend two looms instead of one.  So by the time Bagley took over The Voice of Industry she had seen her wages cut by 25% and her and her workload doubled. 

In 1842 The Lowell Offering published an article by Bagley that was critical of factory conditions, but that same year The Offering was purchased by William Schouler, a friend of the factory owners and an opponent of labor reform.  Under Schouler’s ownership The Offering would no longer publish “controversial” material.  By 1845 in the first issue of The Voice Bagley denounced The Offering as a “mouthpiece of the corporations.”  The Offering ceased publication later that year

Dickens arrived in Lowell at a time of change.  The high wages and progressive conditions that had attracted workers twenty years earlier still defined the experiences of some highly skilled workers, but for others conditions had worsened.  The first protests over wage cuts had taken place almost ten years earlier, but the factory owners had become conscious of their own reputation.  From that time forward they would try to control which voices were heard and, presumably, what visiting dignitaries would get to see.

Environmental Justice

In 1994, President Clinton signed the "Federal Action to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations” requiring all federal agencies to engage local communities in developing environmental policies that affected the health of their neighborhoods.  The goal was to ensure that poor and minority communities enjoyed equal protection from environmental hazards—at least that was the plan.  

It should surprise no one that the poor have often been relegated to the least desirable places to live, but in the 1980s minority communities began complaining that they bore a disproportionate share of the environmental hazards resulting from infrastructure projects.  Historically these projects had been developed by teams of experts who conducted impact studies and analyzed the potential long-term effects of environmental changes, but these experts seemed too often willing to sacrifice the welfare of the few for the enrichment of the majority.

In response, the environmental justice movement arose to give poor and minority communities a voice in civil planning.  Reformers argued that the people living in low income neighborhoods would be better able to identify the needs of their communities and to advocate on their own behalf.  However, the reformers often failed to provide these communities with the resources needed to research the health effects and environmental impacts of proposed projects.

For example, environmental action has traditionally focused on large, single point polluters like factories of waste treatment facilities, which are the primary sources of pollution in rural and suburban areas.  However, most air-borne pollution in urban areas comes from car exhaust and diesel burning engines used in construction and shipping, and low income communities are often located near commuter roads and transportation hubs.  Numerous studies have documented the health risks associated with high density traffic, but these studies are often found in academic and professional journals that are not readily available to the general public. 

A study in southern New England found that pregnant women in areas of high density traffic are more likely to give birth to underweight babies than mothers in neighboring suburban communities.  Several studies have shown that rates of childhood asthma increase significantly when schools are located near major commuter roads.  Minority communities are particularly hard hit: studies in New York and Chicago found that residents of poor black communities were four to five times more likely to die from asthma than the average for those cities and three times more likely to be at high risk of cancer from vehicle exhausts.  

A Department of Transportation "success" story that put a

community center, a playground and an athletic field within

500 feet of a major highway

Steps can be taken to address the harmful effects of high density traffic.  Emission standards have reduced pollution from car exhaust—especially in the case or air-borne lead.  High volume traffic can be routed away from residential areas, and schools and playgrounds can be located away from major commuter roads.  Traffic lights can be sequenced to reduce idling at intersections.  However, nothing will be done unless the people involved are aware of the problem.

As a result, community involvement in transportation projects has generally focused on access to public transportation, jobs and community services.  Public transportation facilities have been designed with culturally sensitive artwork and architecture, but these facilities are still served by diesel burning buses—while wealthier suburbs are accessed by electric rail.