It's possible to know a lot about a topic, and still not be aware of an obvious thing.
Until yesterday, I didn't know that the phrase "sold down the river" and its variations come from the practice of selling enslaved people from other parts of the U.S., like Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, into the deeper South, like Mississippi.
Though I wasn't taught it in school, over the past few decades, I've learned that this internal slave trade was a common practice, both as a way to suppress resistance among the enslaved and to provide workers in the grueling cotton fields of the hotter parts of the country, where disease was even more endemic and people didn't survive as long. I just didn't know that was where this common phrase came from.
I also learned, also somewhat recently, that New Orleans became the largest slave market in the U.S. after legal importation of people was stopped in 1808.
I found out about the phrase, sold down the river, from this beautifully illustrated article in the Guardian, called Slavery and the Ties that Bind Us. It focuses on something its author, University of Manchester historian and filmmaker David Olusoga, didn't know about the founders of the Guardian newspaper: that their wealth came from owning cotton mills and manufacturies in northern England, and that raw material came from the American Deep South, picked by enslaved people before the Civil War.
One of the questions Olusoga asks is this: "...if we can inherit wealth and benefit over centuries from compound interest, do we not also equally inherit responsibility?"
From the day the "1619 Project" appeared in the New York Times to the present, I have never understood the fierce backlash against it, the denial that wealth built upon enslaving people and stealing their labor in large part created this country, combined with all the land that was taken in various ways from the people who were here before Europeans arrived.
Of course, I do understand it, sadly, in a sense: it's just denial that serves a political and economic purpose. If these obvious, verifiable facts are denied, that means there's no responsibility, let alone any acknowledgment that some people have a leg up in society.
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I read recently about Alvin Coffey, an enslaved man who was brought out to California during the Gold Rush. I'm forgetting the other guy's name right now. Anyway, Alvin did most of the mining, cared for his 'owner' who spent most of the time sick, and in the evenings did work for himself, having been promised that he could do so to buy his freedom. He earned over $600 that way, plus the couple of thousand from mining. As they prepared to go home, the owner swept up Alvin's pile of money (this would have been gold dust) into his own. Alvin had to keep hold of his temper, knowing that if he protested or tried to escape, he'd be sold down the river and never see his wife and children again. Upon arriving home, I think the owner guy died? Anyway Alvin promised his wife's owner, now his as well, that if he was allowed to head back to California, he would be able to earn the money to buy his own freedom and that of his family. Which he did, and they all did very well in Northern California.
(While California's constitution outlawed slavery, there was a secondary law to keep Southerners happy; as long as a resident was only 'sojourning,' not staying permanently, he could keep anybody he'd brought with him as a slave. And also people routinely enslaved Natives.)
I haven't heard about Alvin Coffey's story and life before now. I'm glad they eventually got free.
The exceptions that "free" states made for enslavers while they were visiting is one of the areas that people in the North generally don't know about. How George Washington used to rotate his enslaved servants through their time in Philadelphia to avoid the time limit there, for instance. And that the Dred Scott decision was based on an upside-down interpretation of Minnesota's version of that type of law, since Scott and his wife Harriet lived in Minnesota for years at Fort Snelling because their "owners" were stationed there in the Army. (In the early days of statehood before the Civil War, Minnesota was also trying to position itself as a cool summer vacation haven for Southerners, so after the Dred Scott decision they felt free to come here and bring their property with them. Ugh.)
The threat of being sold to a slave trader and taken down to New Orleans is what makes Jim flee in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (I’m not sure if the phrase “sold down the river” appears in the novel.) One of the many grim ironies of that very grim book is that Jim (and Huck) end up moving further and further down the Mississippi.
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