U.S. History

I was reading the New York Times this weekend, and in the books section, there's a mention of a book called "The First Emancipator: Slavery, Religion, and the Quiet Revolution of Robert Carter." It's about Robert Carter III, a wealthy Virginia plantation owner who freed hundreds of his slaves, starting in 1791. Here's an NPR interview with the author of the book, Andrew Levy, an English professor at Butler University in Indiana.

(I don't have a link to the article I read because I read a paper copy of the New York Times Book Review)

I looked up the book on Amazon.com, and listed in the "Customers who bought this item also bought..." section of the page, I learned about a case that connects with Dred Scott -- a case of a slave from America who went with his master to England and successfully sued for his freedom, on the basis that slavery was illegal in Britain, and here he was in Britain, so he should be free. Here's a review of that book, titled Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery:

In England, near the end of the eighteenth century [in 1772], a legal ruling that came to be known as the Mansfield Judgment set the precedent for outlawing slavery in the modern Western world. Somerset, a black American slave, accompanied his master on a journey to England, where slavery had been outlawed. Somerset legally petitioned Lord Mansfield, the premier jurist of the period, to let him remain in England as a free man. Granville Sharpe, England's leading abolitionist, took up the cause. Wise offers a multilayered examination of the characters--the modest Sharpe and the high-born Mansfield--and legal confluences between British tradition and common law behind this case. He also explores the conflict between the ideals of human rights and the commercial interests of slave traders, insurers, and bankers, and the underlying threat to the social order of oppressive apprenticeships as the institution of slavery was challenged. This is a complex and absorbing look at the legal and social forces that eventually led to the outcry against slavery throughout the Western world.

Now that I have read this material, I have a few questions:

1. What did other countries do about outlawing or permitting slavery? I think Great Britain ended slavery in the 1820s in all of its colonies, but I'd need to check on that one... Wow -- I found this timeline about the struggle to end slavery that basically answers my question. I found it by searching on Google for great britain ends slavery.

2. Did any female slaves sue for their freedom? We've heard about Dred Scott, and now this British slave named Somerset, but were there any female slaves? I've heard of Harriet Tubman -- but she was working outside the system with her underground railroad. Were there any female counterparts to Dred Scott?

3. We learned in class that Dred Scott was following the precedent set by other slaves who had pursued a route similar to Somerset's, meaning that they got to a free state and sued successfully for their freedom. What were some of those precedent cases?

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This is probably a bit longer than your first entries will be, but I'm trying to give you the idea of what you should be doing. Over the next several months, you will each be keeping a current event journal. In it, please record your experience with reading current events articles (at least two articles per week). Ideally, there will be times when you connect what you read to the past. In this case, I'm connecting a book that just came out in paperback to the Dred Scott case, which we have studied. In some cases, the connection may to the past may not be so apparent, and may not exist at all -- but as long as you are reading about the news and thinking about the issues, that seems like a good thing.

For instance, I have heard some people talking in the halls of Camelot about how the BBC and other news sources outside the US cover the world very differently than US-based sources such as CNN. Finding an example of that difference in coverage would definitely count as a current events entry (actually, it would count as two entries, because to make a comparison, you must read at least two articles).

We'll talk more in class this week (Feb 12-14) about what should be in your current events journal. You should start by making at least one current events journal entry by Monday night. To be specific, your homework for Tuesday, February 20 (the day after President's Day) is to Email Steve by 6 p.m. Monday with about half a page of YOUR writing, as well as a link to the current events article you wrote about (unless you read it in paper form -- in that case, please bring the article to class). As usual, you should end your entry with at least three questions (historia!) you have, now that you have started to learn a little about the topic.