Disturbing finds in old newspapers...

June 22, 2023 11:23 AM

How a Grad Student Uncovered the Largest Known Slave Auction in the U.S. Lauren Davila made a stunning discovery as a graduate student at the College of Charleston: an ad for a slave auction larger than any historian had yet identified. The find yields a new understanding of the enormous harm of such a transaction.
posted by dfm500 (14 comments total)

“They are remembered as these great Christian men of high value.”

Will we ever tire of using religion to justify being total assholes to each other?
posted by tommasz at 1:27 PM on June 22, 2023 [10 favorites]

Doubtful
posted by kensington314 at 1:34 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Though we use philanthropy these days as well
posted by kensington314 at 1:34 PM on June 22, 2023

It's kind of hard to imagine if it'd be possible for a similar find to happen in 150 years about some currently unremarkable thing as our ephemera feels so much more ephemeral.
posted by AirSpencer at 1:56 PM on June 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

Slavery was not an unremarkable thing at the time, it was an every day horror. Just as todays problems ( I mean come on, look around you) are not unremarkable, we just happen to be gaslit by folks with an agenda, that they are not solvable, one example, mass shootings. I know, how horrible of me to politicize this unsolvable problem, but I'm just an asshole that way.
posted by evilDoug at 2:45 PM on June 22, 2023 [11 favorites]

Such a great story. Finding something so huge when you've just gotten into the field has to feel fantastic.
posted by Sphinx at 3:17 PM on June 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

It's kind of hard to imagine if it'd be possible for a similar find to happen in 150 years about some currently unremarkable thing as our ephemera feels so much more ephemeral.

Our current laws and norms around abortion will be shocking to people 150 years from now.

The terrifying thing is not knowing whether they'll be shocked by how women's body autonomy was trampled or by the fact that abortion was allowed at all.
posted by gurple at 4:48 PM on June 22, 2023 [12 favorites]

Absolutely WILD to read about this as being ephemera and not the overwhelming weight of grief and sadness from people being treated this way. As though these human beings are not entire whole beings who never saw freedom from the day they were born to the day they died, suffering the torture and fragmentation of family, life, culture, community. As though the dehumanization of black people today doesn’t flow from then to now like a straight shot. Juneteenth has barely passed this year and we’re here calling these people being sold UNREMARKABLE. Like this story isn’t about it being remarkable and horrific?
posted by Bottlecap at 7:05 PM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

White Americans who are interested in history and/or genealogy can do a huge service by researching if they have any enslaver ancestors and collecting information on enslaved people associated with our families from wills, deeds, newspaper articles, etc. For descendants of those who were enslaved, finding their family history can be like finding a needle in a haystack and we can do our part to dig.

And for people who aren't descended from slaveholders, here are some more research ideas.
posted by muddgirl at 7:08 PM on June 22, 2023 [15 favorites]

600 people is three times as many people who lived in my hometown while I was growing up. The thought of that, of everyone I'd ever known, and everyone they knew, and everyone they knew, on and on, being partitioned and distributed and lost to one another, forever, is chilling.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 1:53 AM on June 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

Mr Atkinson's Rum Contract: The Story of a Tangled Inheritance (2021), by Richard Atkinson is a recent book about digging through obscure archives to uncover a tale about his slave-holding eponymous ancestor. History, as she is taught, is a tired re-churning of the same old sources - many of which are the books of previous historians. Edmund Burke was eloquent, Charles James Fox was fat, William Pitt the Younger was young. Whereas Richard "Rum" Atkinson doesn't even merit an entry in Wikipedia. Battles and Generals fill the pages of Encyclopedia Britannica but nobody knows who ran the commissariat that allowed those generals to win those battles . . . let alone the wretches who made the rum.
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:05 AM on June 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Muddgirl: Thanks for inspiring me to spend part of the afternoon searching Freedman’s Bureau records in Tennessee. I haven’t found anything certain but this is going to be an interesting project.
posted by johngoren at 6:53 AM on June 23, 2023

It's kind of hard to imagine if it'd be possible for a similar find to happen in 150 years about some currently unremarkable thing as our ephemera feels so much more ephemeral.

the article itself comments on this in the last section on Generational Wealth -

Although the men orchestrated auctions to sell thousands of enslaved people, James Jervey is remembered as a prominent attorney and bank president who served on his church vestry, a “generous lover of virtue." A brick mansion in downtown Charleston bears his name.

Waring’s family used enslaved laborers to build a three-and-a-half story house that still stands in the middle of downtown. In 2018, country music star Darius Rucker and entrepreneur John McGrath bought it from the local Catholic diocese for $6.25 million.

which makes me think of, as others have mentioned, all the normalized things we face in a contemporary setting:

• the lasting intergenerational wealth from a massive slave auction, stripping of from enslaved laborers, and the trauma they bore for generations
• existing slave labor inside of prisons and the use of the 4th Amendment to continue having a slave labor system
• climate change (including the logging of vast tracts of our remaining wilderness, heavy pollution into our waterways, the mass slaughter of animals and the contamination of soil therein, etc)
• mass shootings and gun culture in general
• reproductive justice
• environmental racism
• the unregulated supplement industry
• the massive shift of capital to the 1%
• human rights abuses overseas by the US military
• the killing of trans folks and further politicization over who they're allowed to be incels/toxic masculinity/etc
• the normalization of profit incentive/dividends over human lives and their suffering
• the subaltern world into which folks with disabilities are forced to survive in
• homelessness in a time when vacation rentals along could house every unhoused individual
• health insurance denying care and leading to people dying instead of going into debt

in aggregate, I think we have plenty of our own evils to contend with that are unacknolwedged and normalized in very much the same way that slavery is

articles like this one should make you wonder if your actions in this day, against forces that cause needless suffering, would rise to the like of Benjamin Lay, Toussaint Louverture, and others? if not that historic, would yo at least dedicate your life to organizing, planning, acting with these individuals against your contemporary array of evils?

how do you want to be remembered when future texts, similar to this one and others, describe this period of time? is it enough to simply not be a slaver and yet remain complicit and subtly benefiting from this exploitative system?posted by paimapi at 8:54 AM on June 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's truly incredible the discoveries that can be made just by browsing through newspaper archives. One of the things I worry about a lot as an additional harm of the loss of local papers across the country, in addition to the immediate harms, is the loss of that "first draft of history" where a real accounting of the good and bad (even if the bad is recorded only incidentally) can be found by later generations.
posted by N8yskates at 8:56 AM on June 23, 2023 [4 favorites]