Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Part XXXV

I believe I'd stated that I was going to add some more bibliography first but I believe I will save that for later.
 
A great history novelist saw the effects of the ivory trade  while working as a steamboat captain in the Belgium Congo in the 1890s Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, better known as Joseph Conrad.
 
Mr. Conrad invented the theme for his book Heart of Darkness , his classic novella of the search upriver for the doomed ivory trader Kurtz, but he didn't invent what he saw in King Leopold's Etat Independence du Congo.

When he saw the porters (those carrying this huge elephant tusks on their shoulders) he had this to say:

The War Between the States ended slave labor in the United States, but not the idea that black people were inferior and inherently suited to physical labor, that they didn't mind and that they were made for exploitation; but the suffering that accompanied ivory fills more than a half century of eyewitness accounts, from the 1830s to the 1890s, those same decades where the United States at home was moving aggressively against slavery.

The scholar, William C. Fowler, in an address to the New Haven Colony Historical Society in 1875 discussed the status of black people in Connecticut since their introduction into the colony in the seventeenth
century.  Extremely condescending in his tone, Fowler said that blacks

and that the New World slavery was an improvement over the

of their African homeland.  Mr. Fowler's views were not regarded as racism, but as common sense.

A primitive place, an unredeemable backwater, its cultures stagnant: this was Africa, in his opinion.

Although there's no evidence that George Read, Samuel Comstock, and Julius Pratt thought about this at all--they probably just regarded ivory's human victims as necessary components in their complex business.

It is so ironic and also terribly pathetic that the America that these men knew was in the process of freeing itself from the system of slavery, but the system of involuntary labor was a reality that was familiar to them, particularly the involuntary labor of black people.

Human rights were well and good, but nineteenth century business said that successful businesses always rested on somebody's back! Even abolitionists Read and Pratt understood that.  An inferior people, living in untamed wilds on the other side of the globe, were part and parcel of Africa's ivory supply system, but that wasn't the problem.   The problem was maintaining the flow of high-quality ivory.

David Livingstone, living in the middle of the supply system, saw it was another mater.  He said that it was almost impossible to write about the slave trade in East Africa without being accused of exaggeration.  This was because the truth was so horrific.  He'd come to Africa as a medical missionary in 1840.  He was a natural explorer and geographer, and he'd become convinced that Africa's lakes and rivers could be used as highways for commerce and that the slave trade could end!  Livingstone would spend the rest of his life exploring these rivers and documenting what he saw, becoming the slave trade's most famous witness.

In June 1868 he wrote,

Piano keys were once made from rare woods, but by the 1830s, ivory was found to be ideal for the keys' veneer.  The keys within a single keyboard were always cut from the ivory of a single tusk, because the close matching of grain and color was important.  A good-sized tusk in the hands of an expert cutter would give the wafer-thin veneer for 45 keyboards.

Billiard balls were made from female elephants' tusks because they were straighter, and a nerve that ran down the center of the tusk caused a ball, when correctly fashioned, to roll true; a female tusk, average size, yielded 5 billiard balls.  Old sales records sometimes refer to the ivory of female elephants simply as "billiard".  (The harvest also had a hidden cost.  African elephants live in matriarchal herds, and the older females--usually those carrying the most valuable tusks--are also the source of the community knowledge about where to find food and water, so their slaughter had a killing effect on the survival of younger, more vulnerable of the herd.)

The complex technology for cutting perfectly matched keyboards and applying the ivory veneer, much of it, was developed in Connecticut.  When Chickering piano, a Boston company took top prize at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851, the demand for pianos in the United States of American manufacturing was immediate.  That trendsetting piano almost certainly had a keyboard made in Deep River, because Pratt, Read was the major supplier for Jonas Chickering, who combined industrial methods with craftsmanship to make a piano with superior sound.

Through advertising, Chickering's partner, John Mackay, revolutionized the idea that a piano in the parlor symbolized a cultured home.

wrote one Bostonian.

The increasingly industrialized America had the money for luxury goods like pianos, the desire to own them, and the know-how of her Yankee ivory-cutters, who by the 1840s were cutting more than a ton of ivory every week.  Depending on the weight of the tusk--and at that time an 80-pound tusk was a good average--at least a dozen elephants a week were dying to supply Connecticut's factories.  And the real heyday of the industry that would last 80 years---was still to come.

On the other side of the globe, the world market for cloves , a spice grown on islands off the east coast of Africa, exploded.

Those enslaved Africans who managed to survive the trek with ivory all the way to the eastern coast wound up in the slave market in Zanzibar.
There, they were sold into forced labor on clove plantations on Pemba and Zanzibar, and other Indian Ocean islands, or on huge sugar plantations in Brazil, where slavery was still legal until 1888.  And they were also sold into agricultural slavery in Arabia and North Africa.

The US' first consul, Richard Waters, in Zanzibar saw these daily sales in the slave markets of as many as 100 people at a time.  He once reported that Zanzibar's sultan purchased 700 people to work on a sugar plantation he owned.  Waters also described the life onshore, with the constant deal making and politicking  with the sultan, and offshore, where ships from New England and Europe were stacked up like cordwood, waiting to ferry Africa's riches to the outer world.

Slave ships packed with children, mostly between ten to fourteen

, although he didn't feel he could criticize the African slave trade because of America's slave population.

Waters confided his feelings in a journal in 1837; there were, at that time 2 million slaves in America, a figure that would double before the War, but Waters, like the Connecticut ivory men, Julius Pratt and George Read, were active in the antislavery movement.  But he was in Zanzibar to promote trade relations that would make New Englanders rich!

Bibliography:

COMPLICITY: How the North Promoted, Prlonged, and Profited from Slavery, Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, Jenifer Frank of the Hartford Courant, Ballantine Books, New York,a division of Random House, 2006, pp.201-205.

The Craftsmanship as Industrialist: Jonas Chickering and the Transformation of American Piano Making, Business History Review, Autumn 1985.

The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker.  Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.

Livingston's Missionary Correspondence, 1841-1856. Edited by I Schapera.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961