Quote of the Week

Students of the early American republic will probably remember the highly-conditional emancipationist sentiments Thomas Jefferson expressed in Notes on the State of Virginia (1782). The state should abolish slavery, TJ wrote, but African-American freedmen should not be permitted to remain in the Commonwealth, lest they try to take vengeance on their former masters or - perhaps worse, in Jefferson's eyes - marry them.* This was a common enough sentiment among whites in the contemporary upper South, one which would help inspire the colonization movement of the early nineteenth century.

Lest we think that only Virginia slaveholders held such views, however, let us attend to the words of Governor James Sullivan (1744-1808) of Massachusetts, who expressed Jefferson's idea in more allegorical (and more memorable) language:

"We have in history but one picture of a similar enterprise [colonization], and there we see it was necessary not only to open the sea by a miracle for them** to pass, but more necessary to close it again to prevent their return." (Quoted in Eva Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation [LSU Press, 2006], 128.) 

Nothing like a little anti-semitism to help wash down the racism, I guess.




* TJ did not extend his opposition to interracial liaisons to himself and his own human property. Rules are for other people.

** For those unsure about the identity of "them," see Exodus 14: 21-29.

Cardboard Shoes

In my childhood I wrote several small books - handmade, stick-figure-illustrated - as gifts for family members. My parents didn’t think much of these, but my grandmother Eleanor (1918-2004) wrote me a nice thank-you letter for one of them, “Marvin Mouse on the Orient Express.”* She particularly liked that I mapped and followed the route of the actual Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul, but

“I wish you had given more description of Yugoslavia, a beautiful country. But the people there are very poor, they work very hard and when I was there I was appalled to see that their shoes were made of cardboard. I was only in two cities: Beograd the capital and Dubrovnik on the Sea. In Beograd where the Sava River and the Danube River join together I saw the ladies (in their paper shoes and poor clothing) doing street cleaning and hard construction work.”

I think she was more shocked by women doing construction work than anything else. She continues:

“I remember when our train from Vienna crossed from beautiful, prosperous Austria into poor Yugoslavia - poorly painted houses, horse-drawn carts, poorly dressed people plodding along the muddy roads, lugging cardboard boxes of their possessions.” (January 10, 1980)

My grandparents’ visit to Yugoslavia probably occurred around 1970, and took them through some of the more prosperous parts of that former republic: Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia. I do not think she would find it recognizable today: living standards have risen, the cardboard shoes have (I suspect) largely vanished, and the blight of poverty has become less noticeable. On the other hand, the Yugoslav successor republics still bear the scars, psychological if not physical, of the civil war that eliminated the old federation. Historical change isn’t a vector quantity: people’s collective levels of happiness and misery can move in multiple directions at once.

* I’m afraid no-one was murdered in my version. I didn’t read the original until I was in my forties, and all I knew of the movie was that the ‘75 version was on TV a lot. 


 Images: Yugoslav 50-dinar note (1968) via Alnumis.com. The Yugoslav flag is in the public domain.