Slavery: Not Just Something For The South
Part XXXVI
Deep River had ship building and quarrying among its other ventures, but it wasn't a company town like Sam Comstock's Ivoryton.
The street across from the redbrick Pratt, Read factory built in 1882 is the road where ivory tusks were brought up from the river landing in horse-drawn wagons.
The major employer was Pratt Read and the center of the town's life. In 1881 a fire destroyed the factory, along with 15 tons of ivory, and everything but the company safe. Approximately 150 men were on the payroll and at a meeting a few days later, townspeople voted to offer the company a major abatement to rebuild in Deep River.
Accounts of Pratt, Read and competitor Comstock, Cheney praised company leaders for the rigor of their work ethic and for their "native Yankee shrewdness". Taking a raw material imported from halfway around the world, the ivory workers applied artisan-level craftsmanship and precision machine work. This was the new American style of industry. The result: a high-volume, high-quality product that brought two company contracts from throughout the country.
Early summer of 1876 saw letters showing Comstock, Cheney supplying ivory keys to more than a dozen piano and organ manufacturers. The old letters also show a brisk business in billiard balls, combs, & many other objects made of ivory, the plastic of its age.
For more than a century Connecticut was a center of ivory knowledge, the center of ivory manufacturing in America, and a world leader in the business. It's known that 75 percent of the total of the thousands of tons of ivory that passed through Zanzibar during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to Connecticut.
David Shayt, Smithsonian curator, who's extensively researched Connecticut's ivory industry, has estimated that between 1884 and 1911, nearly 10 million pounds of unworked ivory were brought into the United States. On the New York market the per-pound price ranged from $1.80 to $4.00. That's a minimum figure of nearly $18million, or about $310 million in today's currency.
A lot of money, a lot of elephants, and a lot of black people carrying ivory to a port called Bagamoyo, which, in Swahili, means:
"LAY DOWN YOUR HEART."
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Bibliography
Smithsonian curator....today's currency: Shayt, "Elephant under Glass," p. 40.
Malcarne, "Ivoryton, Connecticut", p. 286
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery: COMPLICITY, Farrow, Lang, and Frank, Ballantine Books, New York, pp. 205-206
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A booklet written by a
A booklet written by a German Ivory Company for the much publicized 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia notes that most of the ivory harvested from Africa was just lying on the ground. In truth, early in that century great caches of available ivory had been assembled through trade with individual villages. Although Africa may have been the only place ivory tusks served purely utilitarian purposes, tusks were used for animal stockades and for doorposts and pestles. Tusks were used for doorposts and roof beams, and were carved into the tools of daily life, such as mortars and pestles. Henry Stanley saw tusks erected palisade-style around the graves of chieftains. Not only was the elephant a source of food, and for some tribal people it had a spiritual dimension and was represented in their art. In his journal in 1858 Livingstone described the hunting and death of a female elephant in which the African hunters sang and play instruments to the elephant before killing her: "Oh Chief, O chief! We have come to kill you."
By 1876 the notion of piles of elephanty meat and used ivory tusks to support their door frames looked like ignorance to the West. The natives clearly didn't understand the value of the tusks. But it was NOT the Africans who decimated the elephant. The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History contains a horrifying collection of correspondence from McLean, Morris & Company, the London broker from which Comstock and Cheney bought huge quantities of tusks during the 1870s. The handwritten letters, each still hearing its small circle of red sealing wax, detail with brutal detail the amounts and varieties of ivory coming to market: "Zanzibar Prime" was the very best--as well as news of sales trends and anticipated shipments. The broker's cheerful communiques to Ivoryton, sometimes several a week, and the printed circulars show annual sales of hundreds of tons of ivory. The German firm of Heinrich Adolf Meyer, a competitor of the Connecticut ivory companies, estimated that 2 million pounds of ivory were consumed each year world-wide.
At mid-century, English explorers had seen great herds of elephants. Livingstone once counted a group of 800. But by the 1870s,the devastating effect of all those pianos was apparent. Bibliography: Livingstone: Last Journal, p. 245 ("Six men were singing").The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press,1955. Slavery and Population Growth in Colonial New England. Engines of Enterprise: An Economic History of New England, edited by Peter Temin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
PIE
Slavery:Not just for the South
As elephant populations in East Africa dwindled and ivory had to be harvested from elephants in Central and West Central Africa, the journey itself to the coast got longer and harder for ivory's human porters. Some of the trade routes went all the way to the Belgian Congo halfway across the continent. Explorers like Stanley looked upon a devastated landscape of burned and empty villages. An entire frontier of ivory taking and human enslavement was moving west. Under the weight of the tusks that men were forced to carry, both men and women taken from their villages by force walked hundreds of miles to the coaast from inland trading centers on the Congo River and Lake Tanganyika, where Stanley had first met Livingstone. This was 700 miles from the coast, but the trek was often much longer.The ivory trade and it's horrors were not the temporary ravages of civil strife or war, but part of an ongoing system, one that lasted for at least 80 years and used black human beings as commercial currency.The most sustained and harrowing descriptions of the business come from a Connecticut man who was an ivory trader himself, and also a very successful one.Ernest D. Moore was 23 when his uncle brought him into the family ivory business. From 1907 to 1911Moore was based primarily in Zanzibar, buying elephant tusks in the market and traveling to the interior of Africa, where he bought directly from the great hunters for Arnold Cheney & Company, which supplied both Pratt, Read, and Comstock, Cheney.Bibliography:"Six men were singing...." Livingstone, Last Journals, 245."the bifurcated mind": Anne Farrow, Interview with Jennifer Baszile, assistant professor of history, YaleUniversity, June 2002.Smithsonian curator....today's currency: Shayt, "Elephants under Glass," p. 40
PIE
Slavery: Not just Something for the South
Oops, sorry, I forgot to add another portion of bibliography.
COMPLICITY How the North, Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of the Hartford Courant,2006 Ballantine Trade Edition Copyright 2005 The Hartford Courtant Company
PIE
Nice
Hi PIE
you have don a great work with this post Slavery: Not just Something for the South.
Have you much left to publish i like to read this
Ann
Slavery: Not just Something for the South
Thank you very much for the compliment, Ann, but this is a complilation of books and research. I cannot take credit for a book. This was an undertaking after I stumbled across something about slave-running. It was the most fascinating, yet horrid story I had seen of slavery.
To speak of slavery in the South and then think your whole life that it has stopped, doesn't speak well for any amateur historian. Always dig deeper. What I found was an unspeakable horror that continued by the same Abolitionists who had helped in destroying the South in their zeal to rid it of Slavery. Yet, all the while, they were making a profit by continuing "slave-running" in their ships throughout the world, the worst probably in Brazil.
But the thought of their fancy pianos sitting in their parlors in the North (they certainly weren't in the South, for the South existed no more.) and watching their lovely daughters play for soirees, teas, etc. and to know how the ivory keys got there is something. One would think it would make them nauseated, but apparently not.
I hope that everyone who read this thread learned something. I have given many biblographies on this subject. There are many more.
PIE