I cannot help myself from taking some impish pleasure when splashing around in the waters of 19th century economic logic. Why, do you ask, when chattel slavery is so baldly a central pillar of the system?-- Because it is the smokiest of smoking guns for understanding why disparity and caste have persisted in a democracy putatively committed to ideals of liberty and justice. (Anybody still out there interested in a genuine reckoning on this?) The report to Congress after the Civil War calculated property and wealth loss in the South. The entirety of the calculation preserves the chattel principle in property for its calculation, even after the Constitutional illegality of slavery (13th Amendment, 1865), showing the chasm between transformational political event and traditional economic calculations. (Most economists have long taken for granted that laissez faire capitalism was the appropriate vehicle to eventually create the necessary justice for African Americans after slavery.) 

What is lacking here is the ability to conceptualize the economic gain to the South if Black citizens had been marked as wealth creators. Black laborers en masse could have pursued lost wages claims from northern and southern employers alike (even if they started in 1862). The math Black southerners were more interested in investing in was land. That property assessment figure of 1870 and in the decades afterward could have trended upwards if Black citizens could have become active homesteaders "improving" the land through agricultural and industrial expansion. They likewise could have diversified agriculture, pursuing new markets and more sophisticated R&D. 

The impediments to this embracing this economic logic? --Failures of imagination. The potential profit they discarded came from a deeply emotional place, tied to social mistrust and a need to be right--even at a moment when these thinkers should have been deeply humbled by loss. 

This is only a snapshot of a provocation, and I have more text and footnotes that play out the possibilities in messy notebooks that I'll spare you. I just need to take a baseball bat to the empirical confidence of economic figures we swallow down whole without asking "Are the people who produced these figures really that good at math?"  Put another way, what if the logic of good-at-math economics produces a demonstrably bad-at-justice society? 

PROPERTY LOSS ASSESSMENTS OF THE U.S. SOUTH FROM 1860 to 1870

Total Property Assessed in South in 1860 (including slaves): $4.4 billion [$4,363,030,347.05] 

Total Property Assessed in South in 1870: $2.1 billion [$2,141,834,188.02]

Calculated Loss from the Civil War = ~2.2 billion [~$2,221,196,159.03]

Loss in slave property: ~$1.6 billion;  Loss in other property: $5.9 million [$586,990,218]

The total loss in the South by the war, in property, assets and debts, state and Confederate, has been estimated at $5,262,303,554.26.*

* Report to the House of Representatives, 42nd Congress; W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction 605.

Found this today in one of my drafts...

So who were these postmillennial optimists living in industrializing 19th-century America? They believed that Jesus's return that the Bible prophesized would take place would come after the 1,000-year period that the Bible referenced (the millennium).

Basically liberal Protestants had already been starting to say, “Hey, life is getting waaaaaay better, have you noticed?” mostly because sugar was in more of their food and more people could afford to buy mattresses. “So maybe the worst stuff is behind us already? You know how the Bible, which was written thousands of years ago, says that horrific atrocities are going to happen—war and famine and pestilence, etc., etc.? Well, what if that already happened? Think about it—so many wars and famines and pestilences, etc., etc. have already happened—what if the Bubonic Plague and Napoleonic Wars were the Armageddon prophesied in the book of Revelation, and now we’re living in the good times that show that the earth is becoming a more perfect place? Sounds right to me. This is the kind of place Jesus wants to return to. So let’s make it even more perfect for Christ’s return, and let’s feel really good about ourselves while we do it, because hey, things are getting better.” Then this kid named Dwight Moody was born into poverty in Massachusetts, and the Unitarian hippies he went to church with didn’t seem to give much of a shit that he was poor and they also didn’t understand why he was named Dwight instead of Asa or Frederick or Henry like any normal Massachusettsian, so you can see where this is heading. Things weren’t getting better for everyone. Things were uncomfortable for Dwight, and he read the Bible quite differently from reformer-in-Victorian-mansion Horace Bushnell.

What expression best represents the verb "trippin'"?

A. burning the candle at both ends

B. cutting off your nose to spite your face

C. making a mountain out of a mole hill

D. sticking your foot in your mouth

E. believing everyone is out to get you

F. Both C. and E. above.

Updated proposal

The manuscript is finished. Some of its approaches are unorthodox but academically responsible methods for publishing on the subject of slavery in a post-pandemic landscape. I assert that it is no longer possible to publish just as we had before the pandemic and its attendant racial reckoning. The hard data that the pandemic made visible is still being processed, yet it is a dereliction of duty for any scholar who has committed themselves to studying race in America to pretend that they did not see this reality. The dramatic disparity requires a diagnosis that not only investigates the intergenerational social inequalities but also investigates the assimilationist logics of a liberal project that stems directly from abolitionism and neoabolitionism. 

My project on Civil War era refugee camps started as a project of neoabolitionism, one that proposed that 4.25 million Black southerners were abolitionists. The project has had to evolve not only because of the historical evidence I unearthed in the archive but also because of the ingenuity of American descendants of slavery and African immigrant and international students to interpret said archival finds. This is a post-Affirmative Action model that asserts that in seeking out African and African American students to work with me as research interns, I was not considering “race” in my hiring practices but rather knowledge and experience that they demonstrated in classrooms and interviews that improved the quality of my intellectual work. Any lawsuit that could be brought would be answered by showing that the isolated assessment of an individual candidate in admission or job interviews sets up the wrong question. It is the relation between people that matters. It is not just what experiential data an African American student provides but also what experiential trust is fostered within the climate of collaborative work and knowledge exchange. This required that I put in extra work at a PWI (Predominantly White Institution) in order to foster more honest engagements that, at times, paused or slowed the set curriculum in order to expose and ameliorate mutual ignorances. For example, one African student’s voiced frustration that English is too limited in its ability to level creative insults (compared to Chichewa) led to our extended analysis of histories of “playing the dozens” dating back to the language innovations of enslaved Africans in America. The continuity debates around Africanisms in America that occurred primarily in the 1970s suffered from the dearth of African students and scholars in the academic spaces where those debates were happening. It may not be certain that new results will emerge from older debates, but if we fail to attempt to ask the questions when an entirely new confluence of people are part of the conversation, we will cut off the possibility of new knowledge production. Likewise, as a post-pandemic university landscape has undoubtedly invested in STEM disciplines while divesting from social sciences and humanities (note that POSSE students who come from predominantly Black communities at my institution are currently required to major in a STEM discipline in order to comply with the stipulations of their scholarships), the new knowledge production that can happen in the discipline of History is uniquely positioned to provide “aha!” moments to STEM-centered fields. The “aha!” moments will not be in predictable generalizations that “slavery was bad; racism is bad” but rather in specific understandings of what Africans in America contributed while living in “bad” systems.

That is the crux of my intended intervention. I take a deliberately presentist analytical framework to a deliberately empiricist historical endeavor. I rely heavily on the WPA corpus of interviews with formerly enslaved people. My assertion is that reinvigorating this source base will unearth new questions attuned to interdisciplinary investigation. For example, I know a great deal about pennyroot and tansy because I spent a lot of time reading the historical testimony of Black midwives. I made notations of repeated patterns of knowledge in testimonies of formerly enslaved African Americans and their descendants—which I can envision as potentially valuable to medical researchers when they are navigating a post-Roe v. Wade American landscape. 

Fostering trust in systems requires participation from those who feel a level of control within that system as well as those who feel disadvantage within that system. Furthering historical research of the carceral state benefits from the input of students who grew up with an incarcerated parent. My experience was that the window on student disclosure of these realities was opened in the years 2020 to 2023, through the opportunities born of crisis—including remote and hybrid learning. Being on a video call with a white professor is different than sitting across the desk from one. I have already felt the effects of that window being deliberately closed. I cannot move forward without acknowledging this reality and making material moves to challenge it.

These are excerpts from interviews with former slaves as they described their experience of Emancipation. From the Federal Writer's Project interviews under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the New Deal in the 1930s. 

I read the social media comments against Jewish students protesting in support of Palestine. "Suicidal empathy!" was an exclamation that stood out. I felt it deeply. How I feared that I had trained my students and my daughters to internalize trauma too much. When a middle school teacher posed to my daughter: "Had Christopher Columbus not come to America in 1492, you would not be here today," she did not blink--"I would be fine with that," she told him. 

I will never be one to say that some games are not zero-sum. Scarce resources do not get delivered in karma's bow to the best of us. Yet one wonders how a young person in college can find meaning and purpose for their lives if they are taught that the movements of their conscience are suicidal, and by the same logic, homicidal apathy is a pillar of self-protection. 

I am using ChatGPT to fine-tune the process of standardizing older Black American southern dialect. This always brings up big feelings for me. The debates are familiar-- the responsible scholar must balance concerns over erasure with concerns of giving offense. There is an entirely practical issue of presenting material from historical Black testimonies that a 21st-century readership simply does not understand. I have spent years training myself to hear and understand historical Black southern dialect in its original form, not in its minstrelized caricatured version. I read Zora Neale Hurston, Melville and Frances Herskovitz, Lorenzo Dow Turner, Alan Lomax, LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant. I would just listen and mouth along with the recordings of interviews with ex-slaves from the Works Progress Administration in the Library of Congress. I kept the "d" instead of the "th." I kept the apostrophe at the end of "kickin'" instead of putting in the 'g' to make the "ing" sound. Then I circulated my writing with scholars (in the 2020s, it should be said), and the resounding directive was: get rid of any words that could be read as dialect. And I believe that steps toward trust need to be about maintaining bridges. I will do what I need to do to gain the trust of Black readers. There is a painful irony in having worked so hard to NOT erase while according due respect by having a very human labor-intensive, humanistic approach. And now here I am looking to how I best word my directives to robots to engineer the more trusted version of what I can publish. Take note of my asterisk and explanation on the word "pickaninny." The bridge is about imagining that there are those who will go after me who will need to know how to read the archive, how not to fear it as irretrievably racist. “Pequeño niño” is how the Black southern term "pickaninny" came to be.  What kinds of curiosities can blossom when the hate drains from words? How can make sure that the hate spreaders do not render the interracialists mute? 

And some thoughts...

Email me at cooper.abby@gmail.com with "Freedom War" in the subject line if you are curious to know more about the screenshot above. 

And here is how the song from the Hush Harbor went:

When Israel was in Egypt's land— Let my people go.

Oppressed so hard they could not stand—   Let my people go.

Go down, Moses.  Way down in Egypt land, tell old Pharaoh—   Let my people go.

The first white witnesses at Fort Monroe made ample documentation of the signs of the Hush Harbor nation. Before I throw a litany of quotations at you though, I want to give you recipe for deciphering. Hereafter, please substitute in your mind every mention of "superstition" and its variants ("superstitious faith," "superstitious spirit," etc.) with "belief." Then flag "belief" as "groundwork for action," connecting belief to the capacity to act. Let's try it out. "It will be seen that there is evidence in this hymn that the slaves in a considerable part of Virginia, at least, have had a superstitious faith in being freed some time in the future." That line would translate to: "It will be seen that there is evidence in this hymn that the slaves in a considerable part of Virginia, at least, have had a belief in being free some time in the future." The other thing we should notice is the tense of his verbs "have had"—meaning, that the Hush Arbor nation had long been there. It was just now coming out of hiding long enough for white northerners to write down the songs into notes on treble clefs.  

They were envisioning their freedom some time in the future. The obstacle now is to be sure you don't presume the agency of the liberal subject. Enslaved people may have natural human rights but no government purports to ensure them. That is what makes this exciting. This is the historical moment when all this is being hashed out. It has never stopped being an in-process negotiation. This is the place to set up a conversation with encounter. The collision of white worlds with black worlds. The collision of trust and mistrust. The lean push pinch grind slap of an unsteady asymmetrical relationship.

"It will be seen that there is evidence in this hymn that the slaves in a considerable part of Virginia, at least, have had a superstitious faith in being freed some time in the future." To this white man, faith in future freedom was "superstitious" because predicting the future was irrational practice. His blind spot was much like that of many readers now. He saw slavery as so totalizingly brutal that the ability for slaves to create a future was impossible—irrational. He had internalized a presumption those so oppressed had no capacity to exert power over their futures. Therefore, any actions he observed slaves performing to make their future freedom were automatically "superstitious." If only his fervor in despising slavery had not necessitated disregarding slave agency. This presumption is at the heart of the missionary gaze. It is so woven through the records of the moment of emancipation that its logic becomes reflexive, instinctive. Most historians today leave those descriptions of "superstition" alone. Yet without them, the story of how slaves made their freedom cannot be told. The very misunderstanding of this missionary is the point. They were making their freedom right before his eyes, and he saw it, but he observed it yet refused to bear witness to the vision. He let his identity as the one who converts occlude his ability to be converted. He gives us a piece of the evidence of how Black self-emancipation happened, yet the very possibility that it could shape the future was what made it superstitious.  Only white patrons could free or enslave.

[IMAGINE YOU ARE TAKING UP THE MANTLE OF THE MISSIONARY.] It is quite possible to be converted now however. Better late than never. Take up the mantle. Correct the mistakes of the ancestors. But you, dear reader, are almost certainly an inheritor of the brand of rationality this man planted as the accepted standard. You might very well approve of putting "rational" and "superstition" in scare quotes, but however you live your day to day life, you know the importance of secularizing your speech and actions in public places.  

(From 12.31.2020 Day Report) 

And some of my thoughts...

I do not pretend to be a geneticist, but I have been to conferences where experts broach (carefully) the intersections of race and science. 

Since the COVID pandemic, I have shifted the way I teach students to talk about race. I believe that acknowledging race as a social construct insofar as it is not an immutable biological fact is necessary. I also believe that "race is a social construct" has become a ritual acknowledgment that the responsible teacher is supposed to attest to as a trust-building foundation for people of different racial backgrounds to be able to work together without their intelligence being questioned on a biological, neo-eugenicist basis. Amen. Yet medically responsible scholarship will necessarily have to interface with race in its historical social constructions with an eye to understanding epigenetic consequences. Differences need not encode disability but rather a path to better diagnoses.

I was born into a medical family, and we have long discussed how good medicine takes into consideration the whole person. Yet "good medicine" has no script when a virus is novel. The COVID-19 pandemic and the data it reflected and produced should provide an opportunity born of crisis to study racial realities. We inherit a vexed history full of pseudoscience that chronically coded difference in Africans as inferiority. Yet a collective effort to eschew that precedent risks veering into a default setting that problematically sees race as only a social construct with no biological implications. I am beginning to view this "social construct" language as potentially harmful in the same way "colorblindness" has become harmful. Effectively, we have created social taboos around medically necessary questions. There must be a way to acknowledge difference without automatically inscribing deficit, without triggering assumptions of discrimination, without coding insurance denial. 

For my part, I am delving deeper into my research on Black midwives in the 19th century. They know more than historians have given them credit for. 

What I wrote today-- a potential preface:

A Story from Writing Group (taken from Writing Group experience from 2021):

“Find your inner white man, Abby!”

This was the final instruction punctuating our Thursday Black History Writing Group session. She was offering it as a stand-in for confidence. In my head, I was screaming, “No! That is not why I am here. I am here to find my inner Black woman.” But I could not bring myself to say that. I wanted to adhere to the rules of belonging to this group. Admitting that I was there to find my inner Black woman that lived in Abby felt too taboo to utter, like it would shatter what fragile trust we had built. At the same time, I did not know how to tell them that my motivation for writing was quite literally predicated upon their approval as Black women. I did not know how to compute their approval if I thought of them as Black women performing their inner white men as they were playing the game of doing professional history.

In an earlier session, this member’s assertion that I was a “ventriloquist” effectively making Black voices say what I wanted to say had been a death blow to any drive I held for doing the work I was doing. And yet, I knew that her sharing that feedback with me was itself an act of unfiltered trust. She was telling me out loud what she would have said in Black-only spaces. She had ceased to censor herself for my comfort—because that is what I had asked for. Now, I had to process that my writing challenge was far more difficult than I had anticipated. The artisanal tools of historical composition alone would not be sufficient. I knew my argument and my evidence. Delivering that scholarship so that audiences could hear it—and doing so as a witness seeking kinship, belonging, acceptance in defiance of incentivized self-segregation—that was the challenge. This manuscript has been my attempt at figuring out how to get the right ears to hear with. If historical scholarship has traditionally been an act of performing expertise so that readers imbibe the product as objective truth in narrative form (summed up in "find your inner white man!"), then I should play the game if I want to join the guild. Then I can combine it with my attempt to bear witness to Black women’s voices because they were systemically and deliberately marginalized from the narratives of knowledge production. They are there in the archives still. If they can influence and inspire me, they can do so for others, even those whose identities and genealogies do not come from enslaved Africans. Showing due respect for the descendants is part and parcel of reckoning, even as descendants too will voice their capacity to locate inner white patriarchal norms. Norms evolve, and recovering the Hush Harbor is my offering to start a necessary conversation rather than insisting that the historical rendering that I offer be the final word.  

Should I ever find a way to strike the voice that this manuscript deserves and be able to publish it, I will vehemently reject the "ventriloquist" label. It couldn't be possible for me to be that. I would not even know how to begin to think up the words that I have learned from historical Black voices of Emancipation. I came to this book project with a fancy education and a bunch of holes filled with burning curiosity. I found Black testimonies to be the best way to fill those holes up. The real thesis of the project has been the process itself--how it has been changing me and how I can't go back to the empty holes. 

What I wrote today:

What I want for this book: I want white readers to see a model of productive discomfort in engaging the past. I want them to see strategies of contribution and resilience they can respectfully acknowledge and share in—so long as they do so in order to create bridges rather than exploitative profit. I want Black readers to see this as an act of witness. I want to show that I see and hear your ancestors and I see and hear you now.

I also want to reach readers who just read the above passage and thought, “I am neither white nor Black. I am ___, and I feel excluded by your racial binary.” Welcome, and forgive me. Whether you want to acknowledge it or not, you are already participating in a system of historical racial capitalism shaped by chattel slavery that placed white over Black. Take stock of how you have distanced yourself from the appellation “white” but have invested in the socioeconomic markers of predominantly white institutions. This book is a testament to Black gathering as a site not only of protest but also of production. It is possible to acknowledge the brutality and sit with it in suspended nonclosure. At the same time, it is possible to bear witness to a Black past worth conserving, preserving, and investing in as a blueprint for a beloved community. The alternative—drastic racialized wealth and resouce disparity—is not sustainable. In looking to the end of legal slavery in America, we cannot congratulate the U.S. state or the southern plantation economy for what Black communities made possible. Refugee stateless spaces reveal flashes of possibility when people really saw each other. We peek into those flashes to see what might be possible now.  But we sit in mourning that more was not made of them.  We sit in communion to figure how in the encounter, we can find a way.  How we can make rainbow families.  Struggle is the struggle.  And ideology is not going to get you through.  What is going to get you through is love.

There is no other starting point than an apology, backed up by a commitment I can be called on to serve—systematically—again and again and again. Like a ritual. The intention is close communion. To know that it is never too late to say “I’m sorry” and find power in that apology—and joy.

Addendum: I originally posted this as an act of witness to the continued injustice of police brutality against Black Americans. A year later, I want to bring a different emphasis to the fore: a call to consider the co-ownership of trauma. 

Sonya Massey believed that she needed this police man's help, so she called 911. The man responded, presumably with an intent to help according to his professional obligation. She also believed that she needed to perform a religious ritual in rebuke against this man while he was in her home. She flung sprays of hot water toward him while reciting "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus." He reacted to this like it was a violent threat, and he discharged his gun, killing her.

I reflect on something that continues to haunt me-- the officer had a gun with bullets, and this thin woman in a nightgown had a pan of water. Yet he believed that she had some kind of power that was a direct threat to him in that moment. And she believed that the water and her words were a direct rebuke to him. They both believed in her power to affect him. 

She died. He lived. His prosecution for murder moves forward.

I have no deep wisdom or message or way to make sense of the tragedy. What lingers are questions about the role that spiritual power played in this incident. My impulse is to glue religion and mental instability together and walk away. My better angel tells me to consider religion could have been a tool Sonya Massey was using to address mental distress, and the officer's recognition of its potency could one day lead him to authentic penitence.  Oct. 7, 2025

ChatGPT: Thank you for pointing that out! I reviewed the text again, and I see the handwritten descriptor "black" before "slave." I'll make sure to recognize the cursive "black" in future transcriptions. Here is the updated transcription:

CITY OF RICHMOND, TO WIT:

To the keeper of the jail of said City.

WHEREAS Peter Harris, a black slave, belonging to Ann Miller, of the City of Williamsburg, County of James City, hath been apprehended in said City...

I'm reflecting on my own desire to act to undo the damage the War on Drugs wreaked against Black communities, while I actively follow social reforms that are daring and progressive yet have led to unintended consequences with important takeaway lessons. This is today's piece in the Atlantic on drug decriminalization. The headline flattens the more important takeaway-- that the attempt to decriminalize drugs led to necessary lessons that might not have resulted otherwise. The article's conclusion was still hopeful: "The future of successful drug-policy reform is not greater laxity in states that are already quite progressive in their approach to drug use; it is using criminal justice and public health together in a balanced, pragmatic fashion, as Oregon is now poised to do." Here's hoping. 

Why Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization Failed

The sponsors of the law fundamentally misunderstood the nature of addiction.

By Keith Humphreys and Rob Bovett

America’s most radical experiment with drug decriminalization has ended, after more than three years of painful results. Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has pledged to sign legislation repealing the principal elements of the ballot initiative known as Measure 110: Possessing hard drugs is again a crime in Oregon, and courts will return to mandating treatment for offenders. Oregonians had supported Measure 110 with 59 percent of the vote in 2020, but three years later, polling showed that 64 percent wanted some or all of it repealed. Although the measure was touted by advocates as a racial-justice policy, support for its repeal was especially strong among African American and Hispanic Oregonians. ...

Nancy Williams put "done" before her verbs for good reason.  This changes the meaning significantly by encoding perception of time and consciousness of action. In black vernacular English, adding "done" sets bodies in motion and expresses deliberate intention that is more than the act itself. "It is a premeditated objective that is spiritually motivated to precipitate an action," one folklorist explains.[1] "Done" before a verb also encodes a perception of time passing, similar to the past perfect tense "had." Nancy Williams' statement deftly linked an omnipresent, all-seeing God to an intimate, on-the-ground God present in grapevine whispers. 

[1] Beverly J. Robinson, Aunt [ant] Phyllis [edited collection of interviews with Georgia midwife Phyllis Carter] (Berkeley, California: Regent Press, 1989), vi.

An MRB&PA broadside features both Isaiah Dickerson, the general manager, and Callie House, a national promoter and assistant secretary of the association, with the emblem of the United States in the center. (Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs, RG 15, National Archives)

I came upon this today and had to share. The first known reparations litigation on the federal level came in 1915 with Johnson v. McAdoo. Spearheaded by Callie House, the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty & Pension Association filed a class action lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury. They sought $68 million in payment from the cotton tax collected between 1862 and 1868, as they or their ancestors were the laborers who produced that cotton for market. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia denied their claim based on governmental immunity, and the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed the decision on appeal. For more, see Prologue magazine article from National Archives.

"Captain's Log," Student Motivation Analyzing The Outsiders

What was the cause of the American Civil War?

A. slavery

B. states' rights

C. Nikki Haley

- Letter to Martin Luther King, written by Jean Keppler, a white woman from Pleasantville, NY, who wrote him after doctors told him "if he had sneezed, the blade of a would-be assassin would have killed him" in 1958. He quoted her letter in his last speech, the night before he was shot and killed in Memphis in 1968.

"You know a lot of black people in those days could make pretty good history, telling what they had to live through. I had a hard time. To show you when I was just a child, when I went to work, the man I worked for had only 80 acres of land and when I left him he had 160 acres. I made every rail that fenced in that 160 acres. I opened up and cultivated 90 acres of that 160 acres. I had plenty to eat but had no great amount of clothes. Just common clothes and no money. When I was of age and left that man, the farm at that time was in good order and improved and it was counted at that time of being one of the best in Crawford County."

- George Simpson, referring to life after emancipation (Federal Writer's Project interview, 1930s, Rolla, Missouri, Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, University of Missouri

An observation...

This was the first Google result for "wealthiest in the world"-- a quick reference I needed for something I was writing.  At the bottom of this top 10 wealthiest people list is a Vanguard advert-orial on "strategies to help minimize investment taxes." 

Think about that for a second. Tax avoidance has become so socially normalized that no one blinks. No one questions it as unpatriotic or as tragically unconcerned with the good of the commonwealth. Would I have been unsettled had I not just finished reading the records of runaway Black refugees in Civil War camps who were happy--HAPPY!-- when the Union administrators instituted a tax on Black runaways' wages. Why?--Because it signaled trust and exchange cemented into bureaucracy. Because the customary honor-bound paperless system of trusting patriarch masters (that is, the system of Slavery) had resulted in generations of children and parents sold away from each other. The tax that required a deduction from Black wages was more valuable than the minus sign in the ledger. It was an economic recognition of Black productivity. So freedpeople did not see it as taking something away but as making the United States AND Black refugees' future stronger by binding them into a mutual agreement in which they both profited from the joint exchange. This was a blow against slavery. It is not coincidental then that the origins of an enlarged modern centralized state and the end of slavery resulted in virulently racist anti-tax, anti-government rhetoric. It is impossible for me to hear someone rail against taxes and not feel haunted by the unexamined anti-Black racism throbbing underneath. They might not intend it, as Vanguard ad writers likely did not. Yet the language they use automatically presumes that anyone who has the privilege to create wealth should hoard it for themselves rather than giving back to the community underwriting their privilege to invest in the first place. Our neo-gilded age conflates wealth with wisdom and investment with contempt for the state apparatus it takes for granted. If the modern market has made it possible to gain wealth through invisible hands rather than face-to-face contact, the anxiety around who and what taxes sponsor is understandable. Taxes build bigger bombs just as they supplement health care. But normalizing tax avoidance reinforces the disconnect between people and society. It feeds an anti-unity reflex. It makes the disingenuous "it's about economics, not race" axiom legible. Take a look at that top 10 list again and grimace at its painful symmetry with late 19th-century "richest men" lists (John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan). Sigh. Better check my Roth IRA. 

“When I say that I was luckier than the children are today, I am deliberately making a very dangerous statement, a statement that I am willing, even anxious to be called on. A black boy born in New York’s Harlem in 1924 was born of southerners who had but lately been driven from the land, and therefore was born into a southern community. And this was incontestably a community in which every parent was responsible for every child. Any grown-up, seeing me doing something he thought was wrong, could (and did) beat my behind and then carry me home to my Mama and Daddy and tell them why he beat my behind. Mama and Daddy would thank him and then beat my behind again. I learned respect for my elders. And I mean respect. I do not mean fear. In spite of his howling, a child can tell when the hand that strikes him means to help him or to harm him. A child can tell when he is loved. One sees this sense of confidence emerge, slowly, in the conduct of the child—the first fruits of his education. Every human being born begins to be civilized the moment he or she is born. Since we all arrive here absolutely helpless, with no way of getting a decent meal or of moving from one place to another without human help (and human help exacts a human price), there is no way around that. But this is civilization with a small c. Civilization with a large C is something else again. So is education with a small e different from Education with a large E. In the lowercase, education refers to the relations that actually obtain among human beings. In the uppercase, it refers to power. Or, to put it another way, my father, mother, brothers, sisters, lovers, friends, sons, daughters civilize me in quite another way than the state intends.”

— James Baldwin, Dark Days 

A prim white lady with a tape recorder came to octogenarian Jacob Thomas's door in Georgia in 1937.  She worked for the Federal Writer's Project, and she came to gather his life stories as a member of the last generation born in American slavery.  His response would be preserved for posterity by the federal government.  After about an hour of answering various questions with anecdotes from his life, she asked him "What is your opinion of Abraham Lincoln?"  To appreciate Jacob Thomas's answer, you have to understand this.  To give a favorable answer would confirm white northern arguments that Black people universally loved Lincoln because he granted them freedom.  To give an unfavorable answer would confirm white southern arguments that Lincoln was loathsome because Black people were not ready for emancipation.  Jacob Thomas threads the needle with the savviest nonpliment ever.  “I always thought a lot of Lincoln ‘cause he had a heap of faith in the black man to think that he could live on nothing at all.”[1]  Lead with a praise hook, slide seamlessly into indictment. Boom. 

[1] Interview with Jacob Thomas, Federal Writer's Project, WPA (1930s) printed in The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Part 2, Vol. 15: North Carolina Narratives, George Rawick, ed. (1972)

"Beyond keeping one up at night, a haunting can grant an inheritance. My inheritance is that, as a Black person living under relations of conquest, I care about Native people’s survival. And I do not care because I have a Native grandmother or ancestor. I care because the Black radical politics that I have inherited cares about Native people.12 It does not do it in response to political cajoling or guilt. It does not do it in the hope of coalition. It does not do it out of self- hatred. This ethics that eschews and actively resists genocide as an order of modernity and making of the human subject proper is an ethics of Black radical struggle, period. It is a Black radical politics that proceeds and moves toward Black and Indigenous futures." 

- Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals (2019), xiii

In today's Reconstruction archive notes, I hit my 699th time reading a U.S. government agent lecturing formerly enslaved people that if they want land, they must work for it. 

Oh, this job I have. It is killing me slowly. 

I stumbled upon The Texas Freedom Colonies Project website today, and I found this statement requiring participant affirmation to be a helpful ritual. I immediately felt the seriousness of visiting the webpage as a human exchange instead of as a casual websurfing experience. I see this as a model that I want to pass along to students and scholars as we think about responsible and meaningful community engagement. 

At least in some cases the United States recognized its debt to Black allyship and was willing to put forward compensation and investment in Black people and their future heirs. What happened to this investment through the generations? What happened when former Confederates regained political control of the South? 

"Saturday, Feb. 7, 1863

One day this week Tina, an excellent woman from Palawana, came in, and told us a very interesting story about two girls, one about ten the other fifteen, who, having been taken by their master up into the country about the time of [the] "Gun Shoot," determined to try to get back to their parents who had been left on this island. They stole away at night, and travelled through woods and swamps, for two days without eating. Sometimes their strength w'ld fail and they w'ld sink down in the swamps, and think they c'ld [go] no further, but they had brave little hearts, and struggled on, till at last they reached Port Royal Ferry. There they were seen by a boat-load of people who had also made their escape. The boat was too full to take them but the people, as soon as they reached these islands, told the father of the children, who immediately hastened to the Ferry for them. The poor little creatures were almost wild with joy, despite their exhausted state, when they saw

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their father coming to them. When they were brought to their mother she fell down "jus' as if she was dead" as Tina expressed it. She was so overpowered with joy. Both children are living on Dalta now."

-- Grimké, Charlotte Forten L. The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten: Diary of Charlotte L. Forten Grimké, February, 1863. New York, NY: Dryden Press, pp. 291-292. 

"We who no longer know how to believe and are too wise to hope, we who no longer have the Word and are slaves of words, we who are strangers to mystery, we who seek wonder in celluloid and awe in astroturf, we of the large doubts and the small uncertainties, of the test tubes and the plastic and the intricate plumbing, we who know so much more than our fathers and so much less—we can scarcely imagine what it all meant to the men and women who were in it and of it.  For them, and for men and women who stood close to them, it was the turning of worlds, the apocalyptic ending of centuries of bondage, the fulfillment of the exigencies of History and the prophecy of the Lord." 

–Lerone Bennett Jr., "Jubilee," Ebony 1972

- American Missionary (periodical), October 1861

"A slave is a note of hand that may be discounted or pawned. He is a bill of exchange that carries himself to his destination, and pays a debt bodily. He is a tax that walks corporeally into the chieftain's treasury." 

- Theophilus Conneau, Revelations of a Slave Trader (1854), p. 196

"Co-owners of trauma are people who, through their willingness to hear testimonies of violence, partially experience the fear, bewilderment, injury, confusion, dread, and conflict felt by actual victims. Thus, blacks who testified about racial violence hoped that they could make sure other people bore witness to their suffering and that understanding what had happened to them would motivate these people to identify with victims and support reforms to end violence and to punish known perpetrators. In that way, making white citizens and elected officials bear witness to black people’s suffering from racial violence was a critical part of African Americans’ efforts to recruit allies to their campaigns to end violence and advance civil rights reform." - Kidada Williams,They Left Great Marks on Me

Lindy-hopping.  Let's talk about it.  I sat on this book for a long time.  I did not know whether these codes I studied--hoodoo, minkisi, the cosmogram--key to Black communal consciousness in ending slavery--were mine to divulge.  Then I heard this story on lindy-hopping in Sweden on NPR in May 2022.  The all-white lindyhoppers took an African American Harlem Renaissance era phenomenon and revived it.  At first, they said it was apolitical and said that they were uninterested in learning the history that attended it.  Then an African American woman came to dance with them.  She said to her partner—You cannot dance this dance without knowing its history.  And he agreed.  She converted him.  Black woman to white man.  Through them came the conversion of the whole group of Swedish lindyhoppers.  In the moment that he agreed to learn the history, the African American woman said—Okay. What you were doing before, that was cultural appropriation. That was bad. Now that you have learned and are passing on the history, now what you are doing is not cultural appropriation. It’s cultural surrogacy. This is good. Their dance took on new meaning. More than that, it made something new. 

"...understand what it means to live in a country that will never apologize for slavery, but will not stop apologizing for the Civil War." 

- Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic

"At present there is a great revival in the Colored Churches. The whites say the black people sung and prayed until they got their freedom, and they are not satisfied. Now they are singing and praying for judgment."  

- Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Jacobs Papers, Jean Yellin, ed. Vol. 2: 713.

Reflection

My experience has been that deciding what hire a department needs is a loaded question. The junior faculty are often more in tune with recent trends in the profession, but they are still developing a feel for what cements scholarly longevity. They lack the power and rank to assert their vision. The senior faculty have paid their dues and have amassed experience to imprint a meaningful legacy at the institution. But the pace of change stirs a tumult in which the very foundations on which scholars connect and speak the same language of the discipline seems threatened from all sides. The troubles of search committees are akin to the troubles of peer review within academic publications. The legitimizing forces can have an inverse relationship with the innovating forces. 

What I wrote today:

The principle anchoring this work is that people who experienced slavery are the most valuable theorizers for understanding emancipation in America.  In my own transformation to better understand freedom's making, formerly enslaved and slave-descended Black Americans have monumentally recast the terms of traditionally-understood evolutionary paths of nation and modernity.

This 1860s watershed supposedly ushered in the dawn of an enlightened technological modern age.  Yet the suppression of Black genius and creativity stunted possibility.  White supremacist logic won out not only in places that tried to reproduce slave code conditions / a racial caste system of "mudsill" philosophy.  But also white supremacist logic won out in liberal places that sought integration.  In this latter scenario, the terms on which integration could be possible presumed the eradication of African-derived intellectual and cultural contributions.  The foremost weapon was the minstrelization of those Black-created logics that Black communities held dear.  By corrupting valuable contributions of enslaved people by denigrating and lampooning them as creating lowly status instead of combating it, minstrelsy was far more nefarious than mockery and condescension. The sin has been avoidance of recognizing Black ingenuity because it could brush up against cancelled caricatures.  Minstrelsy was the most effective misinformation campaign.  Its effect has been to police scholars to this day—keeping them in line by ensuring that they stay far away from anything that has a minstrelized valence.  No watermelon.  No auntie or uncle.  No ring shout.  No voodoo. 

But take note.

Watermelon.  – the most genius crop for developing the American South.  And it was the sole purview of African Americans.  Where watermelon grew there was a Black community tending it.  Why?  Because every civilization needs water—potable, portable water.  A twenty-first century reader forgets this readily. We are so conditioned to forget what modern life provides as a matter of course.  But none of the riches that came from the raw materials of commercial agriculture would have been possible without watermelon. It was the 19th-century version of the Hydroflask. And Black southern culture made the watermelon into a centerpiece of community and cuisine. Nothing provoked racist ire like Black genius, and so white assholes in blackface rebranded the genius of the watermelon as a shame of the backwards slave.  Take note.  The watermelon symbolized a level of Black independence that galled white supremacists.  Black people had to remain dependent on white patronage through and through, and the watermelon symbolized a threat to that.  Minstrelizing it was effective.  White liberals demanded the renunciation of symbols of African ingenuity. Black Americans seeking social mobility learned to recoil from the produce that had gotten their people through. 

Yet here was what the antislavery newspaper said when introducing the scene. “In this curious hymn,” the paper said, the refugees showed that they “have had a superstitious faith in being freed some time in the future.”  

The "superstitious faith" description we will attend to in a minute. The more mundane part of that narration—“being freed” in the passive voice—is the ubiquitous term of the era's sources as the grammatical formulation the author could not think outside of.  He didn't have "the right ears to hear things with." The way the Proslavery Nation had set it up, there was no other way to say it.  Slave. Enslaved. Free. Freed.  He thought that there was no way to say “a slave had the power to free.”  Error. Does not compute. Try again.   

The newspaper reported this stunning iconic scene at Fort Monroe on September 3, 1861.  It’s not a silence in the archive.  It’s a scene misinterpreted.  And historians cannot help but continue to misinterpret it.  Because they don’t have the language either.  The genealogy of American political development recognizes a "Declaration of Independence" when it is delivered as a text.  "Let My People Go" was a sonic manifesto.  Political history should be able to recognize the language of change in the vernacular of the people.

For music history, this scene is a milestone.  It begat sheet music mass production that launched a thousand slave song collectors into Black spaces.  "Little man, little man with the notebook, sitting on a fence, wasting his time, wasting his time" they sang.  (If we want to be charitable, we could say that those white folk culture collectors saw something beautiful and magnetic and had to connect to it because they were humans drawn to other humans' power and creativity.  They had to say that it wasn't political so they could get close.  If we want to be critical, we could say that they marginalized as they stole. Pathos without politics was a misrepresentation of what those songs were about, and they profited by selling them as minstrel ditties.)  

My evidence for understanding the political import comes of Civil War refugees singing "Let My People Go" comes in knowing about the Hush Arbor before and after the war.  And it comes in knowing the way in which white newspapers used "superstition" when describing Black action.  National newspapers called Black "superstition" simultaneously dangerous and ridiculous.  Unenlightened and ineffectual.  A set of beliefs unworthy of a responsible citizen.  Grounds for excluding someone until proper education drummed out the superstition.  Witchcraft.  Trouble.  To be pitied.  To raise alarm.

The reasons the abolitionists called Black singing "superstitious" had everything to do with their robust faith in the nation that had enslaved generations of African descended people, that it would be the job of and actions of that nation that would do the action of freeing slaves.  (They looked for Moses among officers and office holders. Lincoln was Moses, Butler was Moses, Fremont was Moses, Andrew Johnson! was Moses. Cast a Charleton Heston with mutton chops, and there you go.)  

The abolitionist teachers were the inheritors of a sinning nation, but they believed in its perfectibility.  But they—the white people—had to be the perfecters.  (Their place in Heaven depended upon it.)  They could not claim to redeem it from its original sin of slavery if they could not claim responsibility for the act of freeing.  So they had to toe the line.  The acts that they witnessed in which Black people were organizing to free themselves they had to narrate as fueled by “superstition.”  Any act that a Black person imagined as having efficacy did not compute with the standing order based on white supremacist legal logic.  Ergo—superstition.

Enslaved refugees could do something on the ground, but to those who believed so fervently in the continuation of the Union, legal sanction of social action made it real, sustainable, something to build upon.   My critique may sometimes sound damning to white abolitionists (and if I am being honest Black abolitionists were similarly discriminatory against Hush Arbor practices).   Please do not misunderstand me. I believe that they knew their moment, their audience, their activism and tools of advocacy better than I ever could.  If they were worth their salt, they were caring far more about how they could end slavery and save the republic more than they were worries about how they would appear to historians centuries later. My aim is to address my present moment.  To retell major American history narratives with Black action at the center, researchers have to mark "superstition" as missionary mislabeling.  And they have to recognize it as tagging a likely largely consequential and efficacious Black practice toward political unity and mobilization.

Once you notice all the evidence that has been marginalized because of discomfort with African diasporic ritual practice, the archive is shocking.  Generations of Marxist social historians recovering usable histories for a long Black freedom struggle missed the best evidence.  So trained they were to see religion as the opiate of the people.  So afraid were the white historians to say out loud the original quotations that proved their points because in those quotes—yes, there were the demonstrations of Black action—but so too was the radioactive material that described such power as unenlightened. The more powerful the acts, the more they did not fit with what white witnesses presumed reflexively.  A slave could not free.    

Whether or not the white missionaries could see it, the Fort Monroe refugees knew what they were doing.  They were recreating the logic of the hush arbor.  They were building from the tools of the Hush Arbor Nation.  

There was no such thing as getting the words wrong in a freedom song. They made the words up. And when you sang, and a new voice joined with new words, that was the song. The tragedy of literacy was how in capturing the beauty and pathos of that experience by writing it down, it made it possible to believe there were "the right words" and that someone singing something different than what was on the page was "getting the words wrong."

        There was such an earnest rush to get Black people ready for citizenship that few stopped to contemplate the tragedy of what would be lost when rights became the thing they were supposed to be fighting for.

        But peering into the contraband camps finds it.  Because it wasn't exactly lost. It just went away from the white people who were testing black people for their worthiness of rights. And that is what I want to find. To show. Because it is this little tucked away Civil War story that explains a lot about why our statistics on Black disparity are so out of whack in the twenty-first century. Systems meant to solve racism have paradoxically reinscribed inequality. (*Ahem* Why are so many standardized tests racist?) An answer can be derived from the premise that in one social universe it was possible to get the words of a song wrong while in another universe it was the point of singing.

"An important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea."

It takes no effort for me to convince my reader that United States treasury bonds had a significance in influencing the Civil War and American political economic development. Yet the treasury bonds would have had no significance if they had failed. They only succeeded because 1.1 million people spent their personal savings to fund the war because at least 1.1 million people believed that the United States was going to continue to exist as a nation and was going to make good on the 7.3% interest promised. This was pretty darn superstitious of them really because the United States actually could not make good on the 7.3% promised in three years and had to extend the payback period to twenty years. And then on top of that they had to pay not in gold specie but by greenback printed money that was just paper unbacked by precious metals and subject to high inflation rates because the treasury was printing what the war department needed at an unprecedented rate. It was all pretend. It only worked to finance the war because enough people believed in it enough. Or they believed it would hurt them if they stopped believing. They did not have to be full-on patriotic. They just had to feel like they could not afford to be cynical about the fate of the nation. "Government runs on make-believe. Make believe the king is divine or make believe he is not. Make believe that all men are free or make believe they are not."[1] The point is not that belief is arbitrary but that shared beliefs have meaning. More than that, they have influence.

[1] Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People.

(This what I call "Meta-Text"--writing on historical interpretation and methodology that I pen along the way, as I construct my narrative. I shared this with my Black History Writing Group on April 14, 2021. It did not receive as encouraging a reception as I was hoping for. To their point, they want me to just write the narrative, rather than writing about writing the narrative. So out you go, "Currency of Charms" section! 😢)

This piece probably tilts a little too strongly toward technophilia, but his call to "Care about supply, Lefties!" is well-taken. Klein calls on progressives to care more about the supply of goods and services and wants to see a movement to harness technology to make affordability more realizable. He warns, "if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing. You can see the poisoned fruit of those mistakes in higher education and housing." This is exactly at the root of my frustration with Boston, which is much like other growing cities with liberal politics but housing shortages-- the lack of affordability exacerbates inequalities and renders the liberal voice of the region stunningly hypocritical. 

One particular idea in this piece he punctuates with enthusiasm: "the world we should want requires more than redistribution. It requires inventions and advances that render old problems obsolete and new possibilities manifold." He then goes into some nascent ideas and possibilities. The zing of an op-ed is meant to turn heads more than create blueprints, so I'll give him a nod for zing. I too would please like to tilt conversations into what technology-meets-social reform paradigms might be. 

Still, from my vantage point, he brushes over "redistribution" too quickly. The generational history and acceleration of disparities, steeped in the racialization of the American economy, weren't laissez faire accidents but deliberate designs. If democratic government is going to make meaningful headway into addressing collective societal problems, it can't harness technology without justice. 

The tech market and pharma--they are engineered toward profit. It is not just a problem of: Well, sometimes the market dovetails with innovation and sometimes not. It's a problem of: More often than not, the market rewards predatory interests that profit by making society sicker, worsening disparities and environmental impact with little sense of responsibility to a greater commonwealth. 

I can make that observation-indictment though, and still recognize that there is no opting out of my own participation and culpability within the system. If he's positing rather than preaching, then I'll open up to hearing more about poking at those affordability possibilities. 

But please, Ezra Klein, considering your recent excellent convos with Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates, don't you think you could give at least one hardy reference to race in this piece? I know that you don't want to trigger a particular sub-section of your audience, but if it becomes too easy to talk about "collective" problems like climate change as a means to shift our dialogue on government, people will continue to think that it is possible to have a discussion on politics and economics without having to engage race. And that's an economic mistake the left cannot afford to not confront.

"I don't enjoy being a victim, but I enjoy identifying the process by which one is victimized in order to point the finger at exits. Not as escape hatches based on fantasy...Ones in which the knowledge of the past...makes it possible for one to go forward honestly, carefully."