In his review of books about the Denmark Vesey conspiracy in Charleston in 1822, Michael Johnson was critical of scholars who failed their craft by relying on secondary, rather than primary, sources.
Scholars are dependent on the work of others. Each individual does original work in some area, but is expected to lecture and write on subjects beyond that research specialty. He or she has no choice but to trust the work of others that’s been vetted by peer review. To read some work lacks due diligence is as distressing as hearing bank auditors don’t question account entries.
Johnson notes the five man special tribunal appointed to investigate a potential slave uprising issued an Official Report in 1822 which is used by most historians. He notes there are also two
manuscript versions of its interviews that look "similar, suggesting that they were written by the same clerk. The unambiguously legible and perfectly horizontal handwriting stretching line after line indicates that neither manuscript represents rough notes scribbled hurriedly during court sessions. Both must have been written later, at least one of them presumably based on notes that no longer survive. Neither document, then, preserves the court transcript as we think of such things today: verbatim records of what witnesses said."
Internal evidence of the kind every historian is supposed to be trained to evaluate suggests that one "is the earliest extant record of the court proceedings," and the other a later copy. Johnson examined the three documents to detect differences between them to argue that the Official Report created a narrative that was not supported by its own work.
As I read his critique, I thought about the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. They bear some similarities with both the investigation in Charleston and the work of the Holy Inquisition in Friuli described by Carlo Ginzburg. All three sets of interrogators used torture or its threat to elicit cooperation. The hysteria in Salem stopped when Giles Corey chose to be crushed to death rather than stand trial.
Second, all follow the pattern of early diversity in reports that’s replaced by uniformity as witnesses learn what their questioners expect to hear. Indeed, Mary Beth Norton observed that 14-year-old Abigail Hobbs, one of the first to confess in Salem, described the witches the way she would the Wampanoag and Abenaki who were menacing the area. Later witnesses gave ritualized descriptions of pinching, pricking, choking fits and signing books.
The thing that’s different is the cultural response to the events. It’s this response that has hindered the work of historians, and made some what Johnson calls "unwitting co-conspirators."
People in Massachusetts were shocked by Corey’s death, and since have treated the trials as an embarrassment, but a very public one. If one wants to learn more, the University of Virginia has a web site where it’s publishing transcriptions of every document related to the trial. One does not need to take Norton’s word for what Hobbs said. One can read it for oneself.
In contrast, Charleston believed at the time, and still believes, that its secret methods saved it from a catastrophe. As Johnson notes, others who want to believe slaves were not passive victims have made Vesey into the heroic reverse of the Charleston ogre, "a bold insurrectionist determined to free his people or die trying."
In the age of the internet, when amateurs everywhere can verify the accuracy of scholarship by discovering obscure original documents, some university or research center needs to make all the Charleston documents available and leave it to the public domain to evaluate what was once secret evidence. Some no doubt will still conclude the plot was very real, while others will still see proof that slaves weren’t passive. The rest of us can ponder the environment that created the need for the secret tribunal in the place, and consider the best ways to meet threats that are sensed but not overt.
Notes: All quotes from Johnson.
Ginzburg, Carlo. I Bendandatti, 1966, translated as The Night Battles by John and Anne Tedeschi, 1983.
Johnson, Michael P. "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001.
Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil's Snare, 2002, reviewed by Jill Lepore in The New York Times Book Review, 3 November 2002.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
South Carolina - Interrogation
Michael Johnson began his study of Denmark Vesey when The William and Mary Quarterly asked him to review three books. As he read them he came to believe "almost all historians have failed to exercise due caution in reading the testimony of witnesses recorded by the conspiracy court" that took its evidence from "intimidated witnesses."
His concerns about the handling of information obtained by torture are contentious, not simply because of their political implications. Historians are taught to respect their sources, and not to substitute their interpretations for reality. For a scholar to claim the text cannot be trusted undermines the foundation of good craftsmanship.
Carlo Ginzburg explored the problem of identifying facts in coerced confessions when he reviewed the transcripts of interviews made by the Holy Inquisition with peasants from Friuli.between 1575 and 1644.
Ginzburg believes that in the area where "German, Italian and Slav customs met," the peasants were practicing pagan fertility rites there were beyond the experience of their interviewers. In the first interrogations, both the questions and the answers were widely variable. However, once the examiners begin to systematically ask questions that assumed they were practicing traditional witchcraft, the answers they heard eventually came to match their expectations.
More surprising, in time a new set of beliefs derived from the interrogations spread through the region. The peasants came to believe they, in fact, were witches. The Inquisition not only had heard what it expected, but had brought it into existence.
Johnson knows that many of the witnesses interviewed by the special tribunal in Charleston in 1822 were incarcerated in the workhouse where they expected to be beaten. Even so, the first slaves they interviewed seemed to be genuinely baffled by the questions. After the first men were hung on July 2, witnesses not only had reason to fear for their lives and but also had some idea, derived from rumors, what the court wanted to hear.
Johnson’s hampered from making the doing the same kind of analysis as Ginzburg, because the manuscript transcriptions of the interviews only recorded the answers, not the questions. He can only deduce what must have been asked, and suggests the five men concentrated on verifying the timing of the planned insurrection, identifying the leaders, examining the plans to use guns, and exploring their hopes to involve slaves from rural plantations.
He also found two political events concerned the judges: the Missouri compromise and events in Haiti. He noted the judges consistently confused references by slaves to discussions in the state assembly in 1821 about allowing slave owners some freedom to grant manumission with the compromise of 1820 which placed limits on slave holding in the Louisiana Territory. Wherever the manuscript recorded the word "legislature," the published report substituted "Congress."
Slaves had revolted in Saint Domingue in the 1790's and achieved some independence in 1804. The Spanish area controlled by the Dominicans rebelled in 1821, and the Haitian president, Jean-Pierre Boyer, had invaded in February of 1822. Johnson found a lengthy article on conditions on the island in the Charleston Courier from April.
He deduces from the answers the slaves gave that they were asked specific questions about any possible links between their planned insurrection and Boyer. One slave, Robert Harth, noted Peter Poyas had "some knowledge of an army from St. Domingo" and another, Monday Gell said Vesey, who was born on the island, had "brought a letter to me which was directed to President Boyer."
Johnson quotes another article by Ginzburg where he says "’texts have leaks’ that can reveal insights unintended by their creators." As Johnson makes clear, the work of the special tribunal could not establish, beyond reasonable doubt, that there were or were not slaves planning a revolt, and if those men, if they existed, were the ones it executed. It could, however, reveal a great deal about the fears that haunted slave holders in Charleston who lived among people they owned, but only partly understood.
Notes:
Ginzburg, Carlo. I Bendandatti, 1966, translated as The Night Battles by John and Anne Tedeschi, 1983.
Johnson, Michael P. "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001.
His concerns about the handling of information obtained by torture are contentious, not simply because of their political implications. Historians are taught to respect their sources, and not to substitute their interpretations for reality. For a scholar to claim the text cannot be trusted undermines the foundation of good craftsmanship.
Carlo Ginzburg explored the problem of identifying facts in coerced confessions when he reviewed the transcripts of interviews made by the Holy Inquisition with peasants from Friuli.between 1575 and 1644.
Ginzburg believes that in the area where "German, Italian and Slav customs met," the peasants were practicing pagan fertility rites there were beyond the experience of their interviewers. In the first interrogations, both the questions and the answers were widely variable. However, once the examiners begin to systematically ask questions that assumed they were practicing traditional witchcraft, the answers they heard eventually came to match their expectations.
More surprising, in time a new set of beliefs derived from the interrogations spread through the region. The peasants came to believe they, in fact, were witches. The Inquisition not only had heard what it expected, but had brought it into existence.
Johnson knows that many of the witnesses interviewed by the special tribunal in Charleston in 1822 were incarcerated in the workhouse where they expected to be beaten. Even so, the first slaves they interviewed seemed to be genuinely baffled by the questions. After the first men were hung on July 2, witnesses not only had reason to fear for their lives and but also had some idea, derived from rumors, what the court wanted to hear.
Johnson’s hampered from making the doing the same kind of analysis as Ginzburg, because the manuscript transcriptions of the interviews only recorded the answers, not the questions. He can only deduce what must have been asked, and suggests the five men concentrated on verifying the timing of the planned insurrection, identifying the leaders, examining the plans to use guns, and exploring their hopes to involve slaves from rural plantations.
He also found two political events concerned the judges: the Missouri compromise and events in Haiti. He noted the judges consistently confused references by slaves to discussions in the state assembly in 1821 about allowing slave owners some freedom to grant manumission with the compromise of 1820 which placed limits on slave holding in the Louisiana Territory. Wherever the manuscript recorded the word "legislature," the published report substituted "Congress."
Slaves had revolted in Saint Domingue in the 1790's and achieved some independence in 1804. The Spanish area controlled by the Dominicans rebelled in 1821, and the Haitian president, Jean-Pierre Boyer, had invaded in February of 1822. Johnson found a lengthy article on conditions on the island in the Charleston Courier from April.
He deduces from the answers the slaves gave that they were asked specific questions about any possible links between their planned insurrection and Boyer. One slave, Robert Harth, noted Peter Poyas had "some knowledge of an army from St. Domingo" and another, Monday Gell said Vesey, who was born on the island, had "brought a letter to me which was directed to President Boyer."
Johnson quotes another article by Ginzburg where he says "’texts have leaks’ that can reveal insights unintended by their creators." As Johnson makes clear, the work of the special tribunal could not establish, beyond reasonable doubt, that there were or were not slaves planning a revolt, and if those men, if they existed, were the ones it executed. It could, however, reveal a great deal about the fears that haunted slave holders in Charleston who lived among people they owned, but only partly understood.
Notes:
Ginzburg, Carlo. I Bendandatti, 1966, translated as The Night Battles by John and Anne Tedeschi, 1983.
Johnson, Michael P. "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
South Carolina - V. O. Key
When V. O. Key was writing about South Carolina politics in 1949, he described it as a one party state with no continuing sense of interest group and no obvious center of power. Concepts like region or class simply didn’t survive serious scrutiny. Each election began with at least four candidates and the winner was the one with the most friends and neighbors. Only the realization that a second party would necessarily need to appeal to a new group of voters like Negroes kept the Democrats unified.
While Key attributes the personal style, importance of race baiting and legislative government to post-Reconstruction institutional features, the Denmark Vesey controversy suggests the political contours of the state are much older. In 1822 Charleston, party differences were beginning to emerge, but the nascent political identifications would not have predicted who would be allies.
Most were shades of republicans. William Johnson, Jr., was appointed to the Supreme Court by Thomas Jefferson while John Lyde Wilson was closely connected to Aaron Burr, who’d been defeated for president by Jefferson in 1800, but then supported him against Alexander Hamilton. Wilson’s wife’s great uncle, Samuel Ashe, was an anti-federalist governor of North Carolina during John Adams administration who supported Jefferson.
Only James Hamilton, Jr, was raised in a federalist environment, that of slave transporting Newport, Rhode Island. However, by the time he was intendant of Charleston he was a Republican poised to became a supporter of Andrew Jackson. The tariffs and Missouri compromise made them realize a central government was a potential threat to their control over their slaves.
As Key suggested, kinship connections, and the cultures they signify, would have been a better indicator of alliances. Johnson and Bennett were related through Bennett’s sister Sarah. Wilson and Hamilton shared ties with the Alston family through William Allston and Esther LaBrosse De Marlbeouf. Hamilton’s mother’s father’s first wife, Elizabeth, was their daughter, while Wilson’s wife, Charlotte, was their granddaughter.
More important than either party or personal networks may have been the underlying attitudes towards the importance of a centralized government that separated the federalists from the Jeffersonians, and the rule of law that separated some Carolinians from both. Indeed, these differences may be no more than a continuation of attitudes towards the emerging nation state that had separated men into three groups under the Stuarts. [See posting for 27 December 2009]
Duels and lynchings are perhaps the greatest symbolic acts that place individual definitions of justice above those of the state and the law. When Wilson was elected to the state senate in 1826, Thomas Grimké wanted him impeached for fiscal impropriety as governor. Wilson’s response was to challenge him to a duel. In 1838 he wrote The Code of Honor to establish standards for such confrontations.
When John Bowman, the uncle of James Hamilton, accused his sister-in-law’s husband of fathering an illegitimate child in the north, the senior Hamilton lost the lower part of a leg when Bowman bested him in a duel that left the younger Hamilton to devise an explanation for his father’s accident.
Walter Edgar indicates Hamilton’s reputation was greatly enhanced by stories he fought 14 duels, although Robert Tinkler believes the only time he actually took up a pistol was against a young man in New York, William Gracie, who, he believed, threatened his intended marriage to an heiress, Elizabeth Heyward.
The execution of Denmark Vesey and five other slaves was a very public lynching preceded by a cart taking the six men through King Street to vacant land north of the city. The activated militia gave a sense of legitimacy to what, in fact, was the administration of a sentence arrived at in secret by a group of men using procedures the governor, Thomas Bennett, claimed "violated the ‘rules which universally obtain among civilized nations, in the judicial investigation of crime.’"
Key comments on the recurring pattern that men from the up country parts of South Carolina who ran of populist platforms like Ben Tillman, Cole Blease and Olin Johnston gradually moderated their views to expand their support beyond their regions and substituted persecution of Negroes for their former class appeals. He believed they not only had to build political coalitions in the conventional sense, but gain support through politicians committed to decentralized institutions.
He predicted Strom Thurmond would abandon his moderation to oppose civil rights. If Key had looked to the pre-Civil War years, he would have noted John Calhoun had forsworn his neutrality on nullification; if he were alive today, he would see pressures to conform being exerted on Lindsey Graham and Mark Sanford by the General Assembly.
Such hegemony is not accidental. Slaves and freedmen who watched the execution of a carpenter who purchased his freedom with a lottery prize, a slave free to hire himself out, and a ship’s carpenter understood the rituals of supremacy that were usually diffused and veiled. The state had already taken away the rights of owners like Joseph Vesey to free their slaves, and soon would stop men like Thomas Blackwood from allowing their chattel the freedom to work for themselves. The state was ready to defy international law by imprisoning any freedmen who appeared as sailors in the port, lest they mingle with slaves like Peter Poyas on the wharves.
Whites like Thomas Bennett were reminded of the power of secret groups to punish those who rebuff their hints when the other three hanged men were the governor’s property.
Notes:
Bennett, Thomas. Quoted by Michael P. Johnson, "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001.
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998.
Egerton, Douglas R. He Shall Go out Free: the Lives of Denmark Vesey, 2004, for description of execution. This is one of the books criticized by Johnson.
Key, V. O., Junior. Southern Politics in State and Nation, 1949.
While Key attributes the personal style, importance of race baiting and legislative government to post-Reconstruction institutional features, the Denmark Vesey controversy suggests the political contours of the state are much older. In 1822 Charleston, party differences were beginning to emerge, but the nascent political identifications would not have predicted who would be allies.
Most were shades of republicans. William Johnson, Jr., was appointed to the Supreme Court by Thomas Jefferson while John Lyde Wilson was closely connected to Aaron Burr, who’d been defeated for president by Jefferson in 1800, but then supported him against Alexander Hamilton. Wilson’s wife’s great uncle, Samuel Ashe, was an anti-federalist governor of North Carolina during John Adams administration who supported Jefferson.
Only James Hamilton, Jr, was raised in a federalist environment, that of slave transporting Newport, Rhode Island. However, by the time he was intendant of Charleston he was a Republican poised to became a supporter of Andrew Jackson. The tariffs and Missouri compromise made them realize a central government was a potential threat to their control over their slaves.
As Key suggested, kinship connections, and the cultures they signify, would have been a better indicator of alliances. Johnson and Bennett were related through Bennett’s sister Sarah. Wilson and Hamilton shared ties with the Alston family through William Allston and Esther LaBrosse De Marlbeouf. Hamilton’s mother’s father’s first wife, Elizabeth, was their daughter, while Wilson’s wife, Charlotte, was their granddaughter.
More important than either party or personal networks may have been the underlying attitudes towards the importance of a centralized government that separated the federalists from the Jeffersonians, and the rule of law that separated some Carolinians from both. Indeed, these differences may be no more than a continuation of attitudes towards the emerging nation state that had separated men into three groups under the Stuarts. [See posting for 27 December 2009]
Duels and lynchings are perhaps the greatest symbolic acts that place individual definitions of justice above those of the state and the law. When Wilson was elected to the state senate in 1826, Thomas Grimké wanted him impeached for fiscal impropriety as governor. Wilson’s response was to challenge him to a duel. In 1838 he wrote The Code of Honor to establish standards for such confrontations.
When John Bowman, the uncle of James Hamilton, accused his sister-in-law’s husband of fathering an illegitimate child in the north, the senior Hamilton lost the lower part of a leg when Bowman bested him in a duel that left the younger Hamilton to devise an explanation for his father’s accident.
Walter Edgar indicates Hamilton’s reputation was greatly enhanced by stories he fought 14 duels, although Robert Tinkler believes the only time he actually took up a pistol was against a young man in New York, William Gracie, who, he believed, threatened his intended marriage to an heiress, Elizabeth Heyward.
The execution of Denmark Vesey and five other slaves was a very public lynching preceded by a cart taking the six men through King Street to vacant land north of the city. The activated militia gave a sense of legitimacy to what, in fact, was the administration of a sentence arrived at in secret by a group of men using procedures the governor, Thomas Bennett, claimed "violated the ‘rules which universally obtain among civilized nations, in the judicial investigation of crime.’"
Key comments on the recurring pattern that men from the up country parts of South Carolina who ran of populist platforms like Ben Tillman, Cole Blease and Olin Johnston gradually moderated their views to expand their support beyond their regions and substituted persecution of Negroes for their former class appeals. He believed they not only had to build political coalitions in the conventional sense, but gain support through politicians committed to decentralized institutions.
He predicted Strom Thurmond would abandon his moderation to oppose civil rights. If Key had looked to the pre-Civil War years, he would have noted John Calhoun had forsworn his neutrality on nullification; if he were alive today, he would see pressures to conform being exerted on Lindsey Graham and Mark Sanford by the General Assembly.
Such hegemony is not accidental. Slaves and freedmen who watched the execution of a carpenter who purchased his freedom with a lottery prize, a slave free to hire himself out, and a ship’s carpenter understood the rituals of supremacy that were usually diffused and veiled. The state had already taken away the rights of owners like Joseph Vesey to free their slaves, and soon would stop men like Thomas Blackwood from allowing their chattel the freedom to work for themselves. The state was ready to defy international law by imprisoning any freedmen who appeared as sailors in the port, lest they mingle with slaves like Peter Poyas on the wharves.
Whites like Thomas Bennett were reminded of the power of secret groups to punish those who rebuff their hints when the other three hanged men were the governor’s property.
Notes:
Bennett, Thomas. Quoted by Michael P. Johnson, "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001.
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998.
Egerton, Douglas R. He Shall Go out Free: the Lives of Denmark Vesey, 2004, for description of execution. This is one of the books criticized by Johnson.
Key, V. O., Junior. Southern Politics in State and Nation, 1949.
Sunday, February 07, 2010
South Carolina - James Hamilton’s Culture
James Hamilton’s reliance on comrades for his success may be one of the South Carolina cultural values inherited from Barbados where early deaths and institutional anarchy forced men to rely on one another.
Alison Games found in the early years of Barbados both planters and liberated indentured servants created "extended networks of friends and endowed these networks with familial significance." She found one important relationship was that of godfather, and that men who had had no opportunity to marry often named their godchildren and the children of friends as heirs.
By the time Hamilton was born, families were very much a part of Charleston life. However, the persistence of diseases like yellow fever perpetuated the concern of men for the children of their friends. Hamilton himself became the guardian of the orphans of his cousin through his maternal grandmother, John Middleton, while one of his rivals in Charleston, Thomas Bennett, adopted Christopher Gustavus Memminger, after his widowed mother died of yellow fever, and raised two orphans from Santa Domingo.
The fear of early death haunted both Barbados and Charleston, but the responses of the two places were different. Richard Dunn found absentee owners rarely prospered in Barbados, and so people who wanted to succeed stayed on their land, despite the dangers. Nineteenth century wealthy families from the Carolina low country fled to places like Newport, leaving their plantations in the hands of underlings. While it kept people alive, such trips did little to prepare men like Hamilton for overseeing their plantations or gangs of slaves.
Games also found that individuals in Barbados, who did not have enough collateral to borrow money from an English or Dutch merchant to start a plantation, entered partnerships with their peers, and might, indeed, be members of more than one partnership. Many large Carolina landowners were perpetually in debt to their factors, and so, if they needed money, had no choice but to ask friends to sign their notes.
Hamilton knew from the bankruptcies of his father, his maternal step-grandfather, William Moultrie, and his step-father-in-law, Nicholas Cruger, the dangers of such agreements, but he and his friends also knew their necessity. It was this willingness to work with friends that enabled him to get so deeply in debt, and forced him to take more desperate measures to raise money to maintain those ties.
Much like Richard Lignon who bought a share of a plantation in Barbados with Thomas Modyford, Hamilton bought a plantation in Alabama with lawyer James Petigru and others through the Oswichee Company and bought land in Texas with Albert Burnley. He and Albert Jackson had owned land in South Carolina before developing the Retrieve plantation in Texas with Henry R. W. Hill, a New Orleans factor.
When Edward Banfield observed a poor south Italian town, he realized many of its problems arose from a distrust of outsiders that led people to only work with those they trusted, and that nothing would change their economic condition so long as those affiliation values reigned. For many reasons, men in Barbados developed a similar reliance on comrades and aversions to institutions that once formed, were perpetuated when men migrated to the Carolinas.
In the beginning, similar conditions between Barbados and frontier Carolina encouraged a transfer of a culture based on social networks. Once in place, the culture perpetuated itself like it did in Italy, and influenced the ability of men like Hamilton, exposed to no other values as youth, to respond to changing possibilities. In the end, he was its victim, as much as Denmark Vesey and everyone who was willing to be charmed by him in the hopes of personal gain.
Notes:
Banfield, Edward C. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, 1958.
Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves, 1972.
Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 1999.
Tinkler, Robert. James Hamilton of South Carolina, 2004.
Alison Games found in the early years of Barbados both planters and liberated indentured servants created "extended networks of friends and endowed these networks with familial significance." She found one important relationship was that of godfather, and that men who had had no opportunity to marry often named their godchildren and the children of friends as heirs.
By the time Hamilton was born, families were very much a part of Charleston life. However, the persistence of diseases like yellow fever perpetuated the concern of men for the children of their friends. Hamilton himself became the guardian of the orphans of his cousin through his maternal grandmother, John Middleton, while one of his rivals in Charleston, Thomas Bennett, adopted Christopher Gustavus Memminger, after his widowed mother died of yellow fever, and raised two orphans from Santa Domingo.
The fear of early death haunted both Barbados and Charleston, but the responses of the two places were different. Richard Dunn found absentee owners rarely prospered in Barbados, and so people who wanted to succeed stayed on their land, despite the dangers. Nineteenth century wealthy families from the Carolina low country fled to places like Newport, leaving their plantations in the hands of underlings. While it kept people alive, such trips did little to prepare men like Hamilton for overseeing their plantations or gangs of slaves.
Games also found that individuals in Barbados, who did not have enough collateral to borrow money from an English or Dutch merchant to start a plantation, entered partnerships with their peers, and might, indeed, be members of more than one partnership. Many large Carolina landowners were perpetually in debt to their factors, and so, if they needed money, had no choice but to ask friends to sign their notes.
Hamilton knew from the bankruptcies of his father, his maternal step-grandfather, William Moultrie, and his step-father-in-law, Nicholas Cruger, the dangers of such agreements, but he and his friends also knew their necessity. It was this willingness to work with friends that enabled him to get so deeply in debt, and forced him to take more desperate measures to raise money to maintain those ties.
Much like Richard Lignon who bought a share of a plantation in Barbados with Thomas Modyford, Hamilton bought a plantation in Alabama with lawyer James Petigru and others through the Oswichee Company and bought land in Texas with Albert Burnley. He and Albert Jackson had owned land in South Carolina before developing the Retrieve plantation in Texas with Henry R. W. Hill, a New Orleans factor.
When Edward Banfield observed a poor south Italian town, he realized many of its problems arose from a distrust of outsiders that led people to only work with those they trusted, and that nothing would change their economic condition so long as those affiliation values reigned. For many reasons, men in Barbados developed a similar reliance on comrades and aversions to institutions that once formed, were perpetuated when men migrated to the Carolinas.
In the beginning, similar conditions between Barbados and frontier Carolina encouraged a transfer of a culture based on social networks. Once in place, the culture perpetuated itself like it did in Italy, and influenced the ability of men like Hamilton, exposed to no other values as youth, to respond to changing possibilities. In the end, he was its victim, as much as Denmark Vesey and everyone who was willing to be charmed by him in the hopes of personal gain.
Notes:
Banfield, Edward C. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, 1958.
Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves, 1972.
Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 1999.
Tinkler, Robert. James Hamilton of South Carolina, 2004.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
Polish Puzzle
I recently decided perhaps I should work on a jigsaw puzzle when I wake in the night. In the past I would have read some mystery novel, but the publishing industry no longer satisfies my needs and has left me in a vacuum filled by nibbling and cruising the net at three in the morning.
I’ve discovered solving puzzles is really not much different from reading a novel by a new author. When I take the pieces out of the sealed plastic bag, an innovation since I was a child, I get a sense of the manufacturer. Are the pieces too thin or too thick, are they too small or too large, are they regular or irregular? Are the colors clear or blurred, are they cut to obscure or reveal the more obvious features?
My mother taught me to always begin by doing the border. When I separate out the pieces with flat sides I learn to trust or distrust the puzzle maker. As I try to create the border, I learn if the picture on the box is reliable. If pieces are interchangeable or too many cannot be identified, I take a dislike to the puzzle. Some may enjoy puzzles that emulate the randomness of daily life, much as readers like hard boiled detectives. In this recreation, I prefer some boundaries, perhaps for the same reason I prefer Agatha Christie.
A puzzle made in Poland was the oddest experience. The pieces were square cut, with no curves, except the tabs. The only variation was within those tabs, some of which were diagonally cut. They brought to mind life in a totalitarian regime where everything must conform externally, and you learn to differentiate individuality within that straitened context.
Luckily, the picture of the Iguazu Falls in Argentina had enough variations, so it was easy to separate the pieces into three piles - the sky, the plants, the rest. Within the color groups, each essentially a different puzzle, the process became mechanical. There was only one puzzle shape, the standard two end tabs and two center cuts. So I separated the pieces again into those that were obviously horizontal and those that were vertical.
Then, it was often a process of trying every possible piece in a location to build the identity of the next piece which again could only be identified by trial and error. Strangely, this was not as boring as it sounds, because it was possible to use the picture on the box to narrow the choices for particular sections.
But still when all was done, there was one more Soviet surprise waiting. There were two pieces missing, one from the center, and one from near the center.
Notes: Castorland puzzle #B-51380.
I’ve discovered solving puzzles is really not much different from reading a novel by a new author. When I take the pieces out of the sealed plastic bag, an innovation since I was a child, I get a sense of the manufacturer. Are the pieces too thin or too thick, are they too small or too large, are they regular or irregular? Are the colors clear or blurred, are they cut to obscure or reveal the more obvious features?
My mother taught me to always begin by doing the border. When I separate out the pieces with flat sides I learn to trust or distrust the puzzle maker. As I try to create the border, I learn if the picture on the box is reliable. If pieces are interchangeable or too many cannot be identified, I take a dislike to the puzzle. Some may enjoy puzzles that emulate the randomness of daily life, much as readers like hard boiled detectives. In this recreation, I prefer some boundaries, perhaps for the same reason I prefer Agatha Christie.
A puzzle made in Poland was the oddest experience. The pieces were square cut, with no curves, except the tabs. The only variation was within those tabs, some of which were diagonally cut. They brought to mind life in a totalitarian regime where everything must conform externally, and you learn to differentiate individuality within that straitened context.
Luckily, the picture of the Iguazu Falls in Argentina had enough variations, so it was easy to separate the pieces into three piles - the sky, the plants, the rest. Within the color groups, each essentially a different puzzle, the process became mechanical. There was only one puzzle shape, the standard two end tabs and two center cuts. So I separated the pieces again into those that were obviously horizontal and those that were vertical.
Then, it was often a process of trying every possible piece in a location to build the identity of the next piece which again could only be identified by trial and error. Strangely, this was not as boring as it sounds, because it was possible to use the picture on the box to narrow the choices for particular sections.
But still when all was done, there was one more Soviet surprise waiting. There were two pieces missing, one from the center, and one from near the center.
Notes: Castorland puzzle #B-51380.
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