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1954 results in Colonial American history

Page 41 of 98

  • Introduction

  • Carl Plasa, Cardiff University
  • Book:
    Slaves to Sweetness
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    01 March 2009, pp 1-7

  • Summary

    [S]ugar calls up the binary rhythm of law and work, of patriarchal hierarchy, of scientific knowledge, of punishment and discipline, of superego and castration; it is the space … of production and productivity, of rule and measure, of ideology and nationalism, of the computer that speaks and separates; it is, above all, the signifier that offers itself as center, as origin, as fixed destination, for that which signifies the Other.

    – Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island

    [T]hey have no leisure for the cultivation of aught but their estates, – & limit the alphabet to 5 letters, S – U – G – A – R.

    – John Anderson, A Magistrate's Recollections, or St. Vincent, in 1836

    White/Black

    Towards the beginning of her autobiography, Harriet Martineau recalls a mysterious dream occurring in early childhood. Given the nature of its content – a return to the domestic space and to the mother – it might be assumed that the dream would engender a sense of well-being, an expectation increased by the additional oneiric presence of the commodity to which all children are automatically drawn: sugar. In the event, however, the dream has the opposite effect, bringing neither comfort nor pleasure, but a chilling disquiet:

    By the time we were at our own door, it was dusk, and we went up the steps in the dark; but in the kitchen it was bright sunshine. My mother was standing at the dresser, breaking sugar; and she lifted me up, and set me in the sun, and gave me a bit of sugar. Such was the dream which froze me with horror!

  • 4 - ‘Sugared Almonds and Pink Lozenges’: George Eliot's ‘Brother Jacob’ as Literary Confection

  • Carl Plasa, Cardiff University
  • Book:
    Slaves to Sweetness
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    01 March 2009, pp 75-95

  • Summary

    The consumer of sugar neither knows nor asks where the product he uses comes from; he neither selects it nor tries it out. … The person with a sweet tooth just asks for sugar, without article, pronoun, or adjective to give it a local habitation and a name. When, in the process of refining, sugar has achieved a high degree of saccharose and of chemical purity it is impossible to distinguish one from the other even in the best-equipped laboratory. All sugars are alike.

    – Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint

    Victorian Sugar

    As Ligon notes, sugar is not indigenous to the Caribbean, but ‘brought thither as a stranger, from beyond the Line’, and, like every traveller, it has a tale to tell. This is one version of its story:

    Sugar has been happily called ‘the honey of reeds.’ … Our supplies are now obtained from Barbadoes [sic], Jamaica, Mauritius, Ceylon, the East and West Indies generally, and the United States; but the largest supplies come from Cuba. Sugar is divided into the following classes: – Refined sugar, white clayed, brown clayed, brown raw, and molasses. The sugarcane grows to the height of six, twelve, or even sometimes twenty feet. It is propagated from cuttings, requires much hoeing and weeding, giving employment to thousands upon thousands of slaves in the slave countries, and attains maturity in twelve or thirteen months. […]

  • 5 - ‘Cane is a Slaver’: Sugar Men and Sugar Women in Postcolonial Caribbean Poetry

  • Carl Plasa, Cardiff University
  • Book:
    Slaves to Sweetness
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    01 March 2009, pp 96-124

  • Summary

    Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings and mortifications peculiarly their own.

    – Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

    Black Sugar

    At the end of ‘Brother Jacob’, Eliot bids farewell to her duplicitous anti-hero by consigning him to prospects whose exact nature is unclear. Shortly after the unmasking of the imposture at the heart of the text, the narrator notes how ‘the shop in the market-place was again to let, and Mr David Faux, alias Mr Edward Freely, had gone – nobody at Grimworth knew whither’. The obscurity of the future into which the discredited Faux is cast accords Eliot's tale a neat symmetry by balancing out the vagueness of the past from which he emerges into Grimworth in the first place: ‘he had absconded with his mother's guineas’, the narrator continues, adding, ‘who knew what else he had done, in Jamaica or elsewhere, before he came to [the parish]’. Yet Faux's mysterious disappearance has an import which resonates well beyond the parochial limits of Eliot's novella, prefiguring the literary fortunes of the very commodity from which he hopes to profit: while sugar is central to ‘Brother Jacob’ itself, it is not, for some considerable time to come, a subject with which subsequent texts in Eliot's literary tradition are inclined to engage to any great degree.

  • 3 - ‘Conveying away the Trash’: Sweetening Slavery in Matthew Lewis's Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica

  • Carl Plasa, Cardiff University
  • Book:
    Slaves to Sweetness
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    01 March 2009, pp 52-74

  • Summary

    Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still slavery! … still thou art a bitter draught.

    – Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey

    Sugar as Allegory

    In stark contrast to its centrality in both the abolitionists and Grainger, sugar occupies a marginal position in Lewis's Journal. Despite the promise conferred on the text by its Byronic epigraph – ‘I would give many a Sugar Cane / Monk Lewis were alive again!’ – overt allusions to the commodity are fairly lightly sprinkled across what is, generically and thematically, a highly eclectic work. These allusions may even be easily missed in the quick switches between prose and verse and the frequent shifts of tone and focus, as Lewis whirls the reader from playful asides about water-melons and centipedes to serious reflections on the aesthetics of Caribbean landscape and the particularities of slave culture. As Keith A. Sandiford summarizes, Lewis ‘exhibits no compelling narrative interest in sugar either as an object of natural history or for its long tradition of engendering metaphysical and aesthetic ideas’, making ‘references to [it]’ which ‘are by no means continuous or extensive’.

    Yet if Lewis's text says little about sugar, sugar has a lot to say about the text, as can be gleaned from the journal entry for 11 January 1816, written shortly after his arrival at the Cornwall plantation.

  • 2 - ‘Stained with Spots of Human Blood’: Sugar, Abolition and Cannibalism

  • Carl Plasa, Cardiff University
  • Book:
    Slaves to Sweetness
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    01 March 2009, pp 33-51

  • Summary

    I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism [sic], racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho' good eatin'.’

    – Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

    I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea.

    – Stuart Hall, ‘Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities’

    Against the Grain

    Samuel Johnson's uneasy comments on the blasé evocation of the transatlantic slave trade in Book IV of The Sugar-Cane were clearly prescient: within little more than two decades, his remarks were being echoed and expanded in the campaign for the abolition of the trade, which officially began in 1787, but did not finally realize its aims for a further twenty years. This chapter examines some of the writings which emerged in the early phases of the movement, focusing on what might be called the politics of consumption and, in particular, the provocative identification of the sugar-eater as cannibal, a common discursive motif during the period.

    Two texts in which this identification is set in play are William Fox's classic anti-sugar pamphlet, ‘An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum’ (1791), and Andrew Burn's far less familiar response to Fox in ‘A Second Address to the People of Great Britain: Containing a New, and Most Powerful Argument to Abstain from the Use of West India Sugar. By an Eye Witness to the Facts Related’ (1792).

  • 1 - ‘Muse Suppress the Tale’: James Grainger's The Sugar-Cane and the Poetry of Refinement

  • Carl Plasa, Cardiff University
  • Book:
    Slaves to Sweetness
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    01 March 2009, pp 8-32

  • Summary

    It was very common in several of the islands, particularly in St. Kitt's [sic], for the slaves to be branded with the initial letters of their master's name, and a load of heavy iron hooks hung about their necks. Indeed, on the most trifling occasions they were loaded with chains, and often other instruments of torture were added. The iron muzzle, thumb-screws, &c. are so well known, as not to need a description, and were sometimes applied for the slightest faults. I have seen a negro beaten till some of his bones were broken, for only letting a pot boil over. It is not uncommon, after a flogging, to make slaves go on their knees, and thank their owners, and pray, or rather say, God bless them.

    – Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative

    The Muse thinks it disgraceful in a Briton to sing of the Sugar-cane, since to it is owing the Slavery of the Negroes.

    – Anonymous, Argument to Part I of Jamaica, a Poem, In Three Parts

    Muscovado Poetics

    After a sustained period of neglect, James Grainger's The Sugar-Cane has recently begun to attract a good deal of critical attention and is now generally regarded as a work with a major, if controversial part to play in the initial shaping of the Caribbean literary canon.

  • 7 - ‘Somebody Kill Somebody, Then?’: The Sweet Revenge of Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe

  • Carl Plasa, Cardiff University
  • Book:
    Slaves to Sweetness
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    01 March 2009, pp 146-167

  • Summary

    Their different instruments of husbandry, particularly their gleaming hoes, when uplifted to the sun, and which, particularly when they are digging cane-holes, they frequently raise all together, and in as exact time as can be observed, in a well-conducted orchestra, in the bowing of the fiddles, occasion the light to break in momentary flashes around them.

    – William Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica

    The weapon and the tool seem at moments indistinguishable, for they may each reside in a single physical object … and may be quickly transformed back and forth, now into the one, now into the other. At the same time, however, a gulf of meaning, intention, connotation, and tone separates them. If one holds the two side by side in front of the mind … it is then clear that what differentiates them is not the object itself but the surface on which they fall.

    – Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain

    Unearthing the Past

    The first-person narrative of sexual suffering which remains unarticulated in Cambridge emerges, in The Polished Hoe, in the tale told by Mary Gertrude Mathilda Paul, a mixed-race woman with skin ‘the colour of coffee with a lil milk in it’. This tale spans a period from the early 1950s, when the novel is set, to the time of Mary's childhood and recalls her systematic abuse by Mr Bellfeels, manager of the Barbadian sugar plantation on which she is born.

  • II - GENERAL INTRODUCTION

  • Bernard Rosenthal
  • Book:
    Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    26 January 2009, pp 15-43

  • Summary

    In popular and in academic culture, the Salem witch trials have been absorbed into American imagination as few other events have. If assumptions as to what actually happened during that episode vary wildly between rigorous academic scrutiny and a persistently evoked cultural memory of a magic past that never was where witches were persecuted for their beliefs, the most basic beginning point for understanding the event must be the records that survive. Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt includes or references all known extant manuscripts and all known published documents of manuscripts no longer extant. The manuscripts have been transcribed from the original documents using editorial principles described later in the introductory material of this book. The principle of organization has been to present these newly transcribed documents, and previously published ones, in an order reflecting as accurately as possible their chronological occurrence. The goal has been to create a narrative through the documents as to what actually happened, and to identify when possible the people who recorded those documents.

    Of the Salem witch trials, much has been written, and disagreements have inevitably been many. This edition will not settle those differences, but if it succeeds it will give the reader the most comprehensive, most carefully and consistently transcribed record ever produced of the Salem witch trials, as well as a chronological ordering of the documents. With this material before them, people researching these records will be able to do so with greater confidence that they can draw their conclusions from reliable data. Those doing very extensive research will, of course, recheck selected manuscripts themselves, but the edition should significantly ease the task of getting accessible, reliable information. At least that is the hope that the editors bring to this edition. With that goal in mind, exploring some key issues of the Salem witch trials, as well as a consideration of how this subject of witchcraft had been addressed previously in Massachusetts Bay and in England, may offer a useful beginning for visiting, or revisiting, some of the issues, historical and linguistic, that people may want to consider when examining the documents, their order, and the notes seeking to highlight pertinent matters.

  • V - EDITORIAL PRINCIPLES

  • Bernard Rosenthal
  • Book:
    Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    26 January 2009, pp 91-94

  • Summary

    TEXT

    In editing the records of the Salem witch-hunt that survive in manuscripts, the leading principle has been to reproduce the text as it appears in the original documents as faithfully as possible, given the limitations of modern typography. Accordingly, the spelling and punctuation used by the original recorders have been retained, including their use of capital letters and abbreviations. The following exceptions apply to this general rule:

    (A) Spelling

    Prefixes and other elements that are separated from the rest of the word in the original documents have not been kept separate in the edition (e.g., “in structed” > “instructed,” “re ward” > “reward,” “likly hode” > “liklyhode,” “a cording ly” > “acordingly”). Correspondingly, articles and prepositions that are attached to their headword in the original documents have been separated (e.g., “ablack” > “a black,” “ofland”> “of land”). These spellings have not been kept since they have been considered idiosyncratic. Moreover, it is often difficult to determine whether or not the recorder intended the elements to be written together. (See also the Linguistic Introduction, Section 4.)

    (B) Punctuation

    In the following three cases, punctuation marks found in the documents have not been retained in the edited text (see also the Linguistic Introduction, Section 4):

  • (1) dots and colons placed below superscript letters in abbreviations;

  • (2) single or double hyphens in word divisions at line breaks;

  • (3) dashes used as line-fillers.

    • (C) Capitalization

  • (1) Where there is ambiguity in interpreting whether a letter is a capital or a minuscule, capitals have been used in proper names and at the beginning of paragraphs; on all other occasions (including sentence boundaries), minuscules have been used (see also the Linguistic Introduction, Section 4). As regards letters that have the same shape and that seem to vary in size arbitrarily in the handwriting of a given recorder, each problematic instance has not been weighed separately, but all occurrences of the letters have been regularized according to the principles set out above (typically ‘C,’ ‘P,’ ‘S,’ ‘W’).

  • (2) Since capital ‘I’ and ‘J’ were frequently written the same way in the period, their rendering in the edition follows Present-Day English spelling conventions (e.g., “Iustice” > “Justice,” “J” > “I”).

  • III - LEGAL PROCEDURES USED DURING THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS AND A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PUBLISHED VERSIONS OF THE RECORDS

  • Bernard Rosenthal
  • Book:
    Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    26 January 2009, pp 44-63

  • Summary

    The story of the 1692 Salem Village witchcraft outbreak is a fairly minor, though well-recorded, topic in world history. Its popular fascination continues to be out of proportion to its relative historical importance and remains the subject of innumerable scholarly as well as popular books and articles.

    Unlike most of the previous witchcraft cases in old and New England, a significant number of the legal papers of the 1692/93 Massachusetts proceedings have survived. Today, preserved within judicial archives and various manuscript repositories, are around 950 of these legal and court papers representing more than 140 individually named witchcraft cases. Included among these documents are complaints, warrants and returns, mittimuses, depositions, preliminary examinations, indictments, summonses, recognizances, petitions, letters, and confessions. The Salem witchcraft cases have always afforded researchers a fairly extensive accumulation of primary source documents representing a diversity of people, yet combined into a body of knowledge that is manageable enough to be examined by authors and historians in microcosm. In popular culture the topic also possesses both the mysterious quality of the occult and a “Who dunnit?” mystique, factors that have combined to keep Salem witchcraft an active subject of popular history and university presses.

    Many of these researchers into the Salem witchcraft events have, however, relied heavily upon printed transcripts of the original documents replicated in seventeenth-century writings of Cotton Mather, Robert Calef, and John Hale, as well as later transcriptions of the documents produced during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Unfortunately such a reliance upon gathered transcripts, with their various inherent transcription weaknesses, including misread words, deletion of words and lines of text and other similar mistakes creeping into the transcripts, has resulted in minor and even major mistakes becoming accepted as part of the traditional body of facts. It was the realization of this imprecision of previous transcription projects and the complexity of creating a new, more accurate edition that led this new work's editorin-chief Bernard Rosenthal to ask others to join him as Associate Editors to create a new, more accurate and comprehensive edition. The project has required retranscribing all extant manuscripts.

Page 41 of 98