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Title: “Each Crueler Than the Last” Author: CrimethInc. Date: September 10, 2018 Language: en Topics: Christopher Columbus, history, colonialism Source: Retrieved on 17th June 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2018/09/10/each-crueler-than-the-last-on-statues-of-christopher-columbus-and-the-men-who-raised-them
Last month, a crowd tore down a Confederate monument in Chapel Hill,
North Carolina, continuing a tradition of iconoclasm initiated in nearby
Durham a year ago after the clashes in Charlottesville. Now, as we
approach Columbus Day 2018, a panel of experts is debating the fate of
the Columbus statue in St. Louis, where several other recent struggles
have taken place against police and white supremacy. It’s a good time to
revisit the colonization of the so-called New World and Native, African,
and underclass resistance against it.
This story extends from the islands of the Caribbean to the settlement
that became St. Louis, charting the origins of the statue that stands in
Tower Grove Park today. The following text contains many descriptions of
graphic violence—the violence that was necessary to impose European
colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and ultimately the sovereignty
of the United States on this land. Christopher Columbus set this
violence in motion; Henry Shaw, the commissioner of the statue in St.
Louis and the founder of the Missouri Botanical Garden, perpetuated
it—as do those who venerate their legacy today.
This text is adapted from the forthcoming historical work, “Many
Mischeifes of Very Dangerous Consequence”: Missouri Slavery and
Resistance by Leopold Trebitch.
---
In October 1492, Columbus landed on Guanahani, an island in the
Caribbean populated by the TaĂno people. According to him, the TaĂno
“brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other
things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They
willingly traded everything they owned… They do not bear arms, and do
not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and
cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are
made of cane… They would make fine servants… With fifty men we could
subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” Christening the
island San Salvador, Columbus began the enslavement and genocide of
Native Americans—though it didn’t go as easily as he had anticipated.
In December, Columbus came upon the island of Ayiti, home to somewhere
between 100,000 and 3,000,000 TaĂno. Knowing the power of names, the
Spaniards renamed the TaĂnos’ home “Hispaniola.” On Christmas Day, one
of Columbus’s ships, the Santa Maria, sank while docked along the
island, and he ordered the remnants of it used to build La Navidad, the
first[1] European colonial settlement in the Americas. He then set sail
to return to Spain with gold, parrots, and six TaĂno slaves.
Columbus returned a year later with 17 ships, 1300 men, 20 cavalry, and
sugarcane for cultivation. No longer interested in finding Asia,
Columbus now fantasized about colonizing Hispaniola for Spain and
getting “as much gold as [the King and Queen require]… and as many
slaves as they ask.” But when he arrived at Hispaniola, he found the
fort burned to the ground and the Spaniards he had stationed there
killed by the TaĂno, Ciguayo, and Macorix tribes. While Columbus was
away, his men had abducted and raped Native people, which the locals
would not tolerate.
This was hardly the misconduct of unsupervised underlings. Columbus was
well aware of the conquistadors’ desire for sex slaves; on his return
trip to Hispaniola, he was already awarding concubines to his officers.
In 1500, Columbus wrote a friend that in the Caribbean, “A hundred
castellanoes[2] are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it
is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for
girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand.”
Over the course of Columbus’s second voyage, he established a number of
forts and villages along the south of the island and in the interior to
find gold. Among these early settlements was Santo Domingo, a hub of
European colonialism for the next few hundred years. Any inhabitants
that the Spaniards found were treated as serfs and forced to bring their
lord a quota of gold. Those who were unable or unwilling to meet the
quota were beaten, tortured, whipped, maimed, and killed. By the end of
1494, 7000 TaĂnos were in open revolt.
With difficulty, Spain crushed the uprising, and in its aftermath began
to understand that they could make better use of Hispaniola as a sugar
plantation laid out in the semi-feudal encomienda model. They saw now
that the TaĂno would make better slaves than serfs. Over the course of
1495–1496, the TaĂno were forced to give up traditional foods for
Spanish crops, though many refused to plant or harvest the colonizers’
fuel and chose fasting and starvation instead.
Of the first 500 Native slaves Columbus sent back to Spain, 250 died en
route. Hundreds of thousands more slaves would die over the next few
decades working in the gold mines and sugar plantations of Hispaniola
and resisting Spanish domination. By 1508, not even a full generation
after their first contact with Europeans, Hispaniola’s Indigenous
population had dropped to 60,000. According to one witness who arrived
in the Caribbean in 1502, “The longer [the Spanish] spent in the region,
the more ingenious were the torments, each crueler than the last, that
they inflicted on their victims.”
The Spanish had known about Borikén, which they renamed Puerto Rico,
since 1493, but it wasn’t until the discovery of gold in the early 1500s
that they wanted to settle it. By now, Columbus was dead, but other
vicious colonizers, including his son Diego ColĂłn,[3] had taken his
place.
In 1508, Juan Ponce de LeĂłn and a slew of conquistadors were sent to the
island to build a fortified settlement, Caparra, and enslave the local
TaĂnos. Life under the Spanish was cruel; after three years of slavery
in the gold mines, enduring the habitual rape of Native slaves, the
TaĂno had had enough. In a daring act of heresy, a group of slaves
cornered a conquistador along a river and tried to drown him—they wished
to know whether or not the Spanish were truly gods. Once dead, the
illusion of Spanish superiority was gone. Shortly after, the TaĂno
sacked the town of Sotomayor, killing eighty and severely wounding
General CristĂłbal de Sotomayor.
Ponce de LeĂłn responded by engaging the TaĂno in a series of battles. To
punish them and teach others a lesson, Ponce de LeĂłn ordered 6000
executions, but many escaped from the island or killed themselves before
the Spanish could kill them. The following year, some of Governor Diego
Colón’s slaves ran away and waged war on the Spanish for a few months.
Try as they might, on both the small and large scale, the Spanish had
great difficulty subduing the Native Caribbean population.
At the time of first contact with Europeans, there were between 600,000
and one million people living on Puerto Rico and the nearby Jamaica.
After forty years of work, disease, and torture, only 200 Native people
remained. The Spaniards, according to Bartolomé de las Casas,
“perpetrated the same outrages and committed the same crimes as before,
devising yet further refinements of cruelty, murdering the native
people, burning and roasting them alive, throwing them to wild dogs and
then oppressing, tormenting, and plaguing them with toil down the mines
and elsewhere.”
By the 1540s, African slaves had begun to fill the TaĂnos’ miserable
vacancies. Somewhere between 11,000,000 and 100,000,000 Africans were
kidnapped from their homelands to supply the labor demanded by Europe’s
ruling class throughout the Americas. Between 9,000,000 and 20,000,000
people are believed to have died in the course of being enslaved by the
rich and powerful of western Africa and while being transported by
European merchants heartless enough to trade in slaves.
In August 1511, Diego Velázquez set off from Hispaniola to capture
Caobana, which he christened Cuba. To his dismay, four hundred TaĂnos
beat him there to warn the local Guanahatabey, Ciboney, and TaĂno about
the Spanish. According to folklore, HatĂĽey, a TaĂno from Hispaniola and
an influential figure in Native resistance to the colonization of Cuba,
showed the inhabitants a basket of gold and warned them:
“Here is the God the Spaniards worship. For these they fight and kill;
for these they persecute us and that is why we have to throw them into
the sea… They tell us, these tyrants, that they adore a God of peace and
equality, and yet they usurp our land and make us their slaves. They
speak to us of an immortal soul and of their eternal rewards and
punishments, and yet they rob our belongings, take our women, violate
our daughters.”
Few of the listeners believed that anyone could be so cruel and most
decided, at first, not to join him.
For months, HatĂĽey and other guerillas kept the Spanish confined to
their fort, Baracoa, through a campaign of harassment, intimidation, and
sniping. Eventually, however, HatĂĽey was captured and condemned to be
burned at the stake. Before his execution on February 2, 1512, a
Dominican priest asked HatĂĽey if he would like to be baptized so he
could go to Heaven and be spared damnation in Hell. “Are there Spaniards
in Heaven?” he asked.
“Yes,” replied the priest.
“Then I prefer Hell.”
As Spain began to establish footholds in the Caribbean, King Ferdinando
II and Queen Isabella I issued a decree justifying Indigenous slavery.
It was to be read to all Native people upon first contact with
Europeans. The decree declared that all humanity, including Indians,
were equals, and that God had left certain people—popes and kings—in
charge on earth to do his bidding. The Pope had given Spain free reign
of the Americas. Would the Indians submit to God’s representatives and
do his will—that is, would they subjugate themselves and become obedient
Spanish subjects? If not, then,
“With the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country, and
shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and
shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their
highnesses; we shall take you, and your wives, and your children, and
shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as
their highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods, and
shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who
do not obey, and refuse to receive their lord, and resist and contradict
him: and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from
this are your fault, and not that of their highnesses, or ours, nor of
these cavaliers who come with us.”
Around this time, Spain became interested in colonizing Florida. With
three ships full of two hundred men, Juan Ponce de LeĂłn landed on the
west coast of Florida in Escampaba and was greeted by the Calusa.[4]
Though the Spanish had never heard of the Calusa, the Calusa had heard
plenty about them—refugees had been arriving from Cuba for two years. On
the tenth day of the Spanish visit, the Calusa attacked them, killing a
few and driving the rest back to their ships. The next day, eighty
canoes attacked the Spanish and forced them to retreat to Puerto Rico.
Arriving home, the Spanish found their barely five-year-old capitol,
Caparra, in disarray. In Ponce de LeĂłn’s absence, the TaĂno had risen up
along with Kalinagos[5] from a nearby island. They attacked the town and
burned much of it to the ground, including Ponce de León’s house, the
seat of colonial power.
Four years later, on his return from the Yucatán, Francisco Hernández de
Córdoba stopped in southwest Florida—but the Calusa quickly drove him
out. Ponce de LeĂłn returned to Florida in 1521 with two hundred men,
priests, farmers, artisans, fifty horses and other domestic animals, and
farming implements. Yet once again, the Calusa drove them out as well,
mortally wounding Ponce de LeĂłn himself with a poison-tipped arrow.
Several more attempts were made over the years—but other than Christian
missions, which altered and destroyed Native life in their own way,
Florida remained unsubjugated for generations more.
---
Before the scene shifts to Missouri, let’s consider two more examples of
enslavement and resistance in that era, beginning with the Bahoruco
Maroons of Hispaniola, a colony of escapees founded by MencĂa and
Enriquillo.
Enriquillo was born in the mid-1490s, a TaĂno subject of the Spanish. As
a child, he witnessed the near destruction of his people. While
attending peace talks in 1503, his father and eighty other TaĂno
delegates were locked in a building which the Spanish set fire to. The
conquistadors killed anyone who managed to escape the flames. Enriquillo
was taken and raised by Dominicans, among them Bartolomé de las Casas.
In 1519, MencĂa was raped by her slave master. When her husband
Enriquillo tried to have the Spaniard prosecuted, which was
theoretically a right of the TaĂno, he was publicly whipped for
asserting himself. MencĂa and Enriquillo assessed their situation. The
new world Columbus had imposed on them was characterized by rape,
Spanish impunity, and other cruelties of slave life, the genocide of
their people, and the acute pain of losing loved ones. The Church, the
supposed moral compass of Spanish colonization, had sided with their
master. No, this new world is no place to live, MencĂa and Enriquillo
decided. They took off for the Bahoruco Mountains.
In the highlands, their camp slowly grew into a maroon community of
Native and African runaways of all ages, who together fought the
Spanish. After fourteen years and the slaves’ guerilla war bringing the
commerce of Hispaniola to a grinding halt, the Spanish offered the
maroons a truce. Sadly, Enriquillo passed away a year after it was
signed, and four years later the Spanish reneged on the deal. Trust no
contract promising freedom.
At the same time that the Bahoruco Maroon camp was getting off the
ground, on Christmas Day 1521, between 20 and 40 of Diego Colón’s slaves
rose up. Together, they killed their overseers, Colón’s livestock, and
burned fields of sugarcane. The group made its way to at least one other
plantation before being stopped; the revolt left nine Spaniards dead.
The majority of the insurgents were imported African slaves, making this
one of the first known African slave revolts in the Americas.
Retaliation was fast and severe—most participants were likely captured,
tortured, and executed.
Before the revolt, most Spanish slave owners preferred African-born
slaves, assuming that they would be more disoriented and dependent on
their masters, unable to communicate with each other or fend for
themselves in the wilderness. Despite these obstacles, the rebels had
been effective, and spilled Spanish blood was making the colonizers
rethink their strategy. Within two weeks, Governor ColĂłn passed the
Caribbean’s first ordinances concerning African slaves.
Colón decreed that slaves could not leave their master’s property
without their master’s permission, and even then their mobility would be
restricted. What slaves were allowed to buy and sell was also curtailed,
and no slaves, not even loyal ones, were allowed to bear arms.
These laws, alongside others introduced by the Spanish in the Caribbean
and supplemented by the white supremacist customs of France and Britain,
eventually formed the foundation for colonial and state law elsewhere in
the so-called New World—for example, in Missouri. But just as repressive
traditions found their way to the Show Me State, so did customs of
resistance, spread by subversive storytellers and the insurgents
themselves as they were pressed, indentured, enslaved, and transported
throughout the increasingly globalized world of the following centuries.
Our story now moves two thousand miles northwest and two and a half
centuries forward in history.
In 1763, at the end of the Seven Years War, the Treaty of Paris shifted
Europe’s colonies: Illinois became part of Britain’s colony of Virginia,
which now stretched from the Atlantic Ocean all the way to the
Mississippi. The lands west of the Mississippi came under Spanish rule
and (to confuse things further for the modern audience) Missouri and
northern Arkansas were known as Spanish Yllinois. The name was a
corruption of the Inoka people, who, along with the land, were misnamed
the Illinois. In reality, although monarchs and merchants from thousands
of miles away claimed to own what we call Missouri and Illinois, Native
Americans were still the vast majority of the region’s inhabitants. The
few European settlers throughout the area were living in Native
Americans’ homes—and knew it, unlike many of their heirs today. They
depended on the region’s tribes for survival and profit.
As British law took effect in Illinois, many French slave owners,
fearing repercussions that could harm their financial interests, moved
across the river to Missouri. During this colonial period spanning the
1700s, some merchants brought slaves to work in their mines in central
Illinois and southern Missouri, but many French settlers weren’t
interested in manufacturing a product, preferring to trade for Native
furs. Especially in trading towns like St. Louis, some slaves worked in
the fields or shipping, but most served as domestic help or performed
other forms of household labor. Most slaves were Native Americans; a few
were African.
Naturally, slaves who rebelled made use of the same tools they were
forced to use every day. The colonial era of slave resistance saw
constant petty theft and many large-scale burglaries carried out by
slaves in the shipping and service industries, not to mention cooks
burning down their masters’ barns and homes or poisoning them and their
families.
In late summer of 1785, a series of fires ripped through the village of
St. Louis, likely set by disgruntled slaves. Two months later, three
more barns were set ablaze as cover for eleven Native and African slaves
to escape. They marooned together for a month, living off of the
wilderness and what they could pillage from the few European settlements
of eastern Missouri. Sadly, four of the runaways were caught while
trying to free others in St. Charles and St. Louis. The fate of the
other seven remains unknown—perhaps they were adopted by one of the
region’s tribes or joined the interracial Mississippi River pirates of
southern Missouri.
The enslaved population of St. Louis struck another major blow against
the ruling class in the early 1800s, when the slaves of Pierre and
Auguste Chouteau tried to light their masters’ mansions on fire. The two
brothers, known as the River Barons, controlled the fur trade coming out
of the Missouri River—the longest river in the United States. As the
wealthiest men in town, they held considerable political and legal
power.
Many of their slaves were Native American, and according to Spanish law,
their enslavement had been illegal for over a decade. But the crown was
based in New Orleans, a three- or four-month trip upstream to Ste.
Genevieve or St. Louis and a 12 to 20 day return trip downstream—so the
powerful merchants conducted themselves as they pleased.
Before the fires were set, a number of the Chouteaus’ slaves had run
away or sued for their freedom. To punish them, Auguste Chouteau had
three of his most assertive slaves tied to stakes and beaten. The first
arson attempt took place in the wake of these whippings, but the fire
was extinguished before it did much damage.
Pierre Chouteau was not so lucky. Three years later, he stood outside in
the freezing night air and watched “in the space of one hour… the flames
devour the fruits of 25 years of unremitting work.” He was largely
speaking about others’ work, of course.
By the time Missouri became a territory of the United States in 1804,
Anglo-American settlers had been trickling into the area from the Upland
South for at least a generation, bringing with them their slaves and
racial customs of land settlement. More often than not, wealthy
Southerners from the plantation class went west across the Missouri
River with their slaves, settling the middle of the state to form Little
Dixie. Poorer Southerners with fewer or no slaves tended towards the
Ozarks in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. By the time Missouri
gained statehood in 1821, Native American slavery had transitioned into
African-American bondage. Population, culture, and law also shifted from
French and Spanish to British and American. This transition was hardly
smooth.
Settlers from Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee skirmished with and
eventually fought wars against Native Americans. Some of these groups
had been driven to Missouri a few generations before; others had been
living in the region since the beginning of time. Wishing to transform
the free wilderness into privatized farmland, the settlers aimed to
drive Native peoples from their hunting grounds and homes.
By the time Missouri was recognized as a state in 1821, hundreds if not
thousands of settlers were streaming into and through the state
annually. Most of these Anglo-American immigrants had been abusing
people of color for generations. Many had been raised by parents and
grandparents who owned slaves or fought wars of removal against Native
Americans to the east. By the early 1800s, even those who had not
previously played an active role in the establishment of white supremacy
were plugging into two hundred years of British settler traditions.
As westward expansion accelerated in the mid-1800s, Missouri merchants
grew rich off the thousands of immigrants and traders going up and down
its rivers. Money continued to pour in as overland routes like the Santa
Fe and Oregon Trails were established in the territory. Black steamboat
workers, barmaids, field hands, cooks, servants, stevedores, and
washwomen—both slave and free—played an integral role in supplying and
serving this mass migration, though historians have largely rendered
them invisible.
Young Henry Shaw traveled from Britain to the United States, arriving in
this boom town at the heart of 1820s westward expansion. Back home, his
family owned cutlery factories, and Shaw hoped to unload their product
on westward settlers.[6] Eventually, Shaw became wealthy beyond his
wildest dreams, tapping into the overwhelming tide of settlers and
obtaining military contracts with all nine US forts west of the
Mississippi. As settlers displaced Native Americans further west, US
soldiers did the actual killing—using Shaw’s hardware, tools, and
cutlery throughout their day-to-day lives.
But merchants work two ways, and while Shaw imported goods, he was
exporting cotton, tobacco, lead, and sugar—all made with slave labor. By
the 1840s, he had become a billionaire by today’s standards, able to
retire and tour the royal gardens of Europe. It’s not surprising that
Shaw, who made his wealth off the backs of slaves and the blood of
Native Americans, chose to honor Christopher Columbus. We should view
the statue he commissioned in light of the context in which it was
erected.
For those who consider trading and business removed from the blood and
gore of capitalist production, let’s conclude with a few anecdotes that
highlight what sort of person Henry Shaw was.
From the 1820s to 1850s, Shaw owned at least eleven people. By the
1850s, they were proving unruly. In May 1854, 20-year-old Sarah ran away
from Shaw with her four-year-old son. Shaw immediately placed an ad
describing Sarah as “medium height, slender, consumptive make, and bad
teeth, some of which have been gold plugged in front” and her son as “a
strong, hearty looking child, with curly hair.” He instructed anyone who
could find them to take them to Bernard Lynch’s slave pen downtown,
colloquially known as his “n—– pen,” promising to pay $300 for Sarah and
$100 for the boy. Their fate remains unknown—let’s hope they made it
out!
The following summer, Esther and two of her children ran away from Shaw.
They likely disappeared into one of the many networks set up by free and
enslaved black people in the densely populated St. Louis area.
Eventually, they made contact with Mary Meachum, an abolitionist from
the local black upper class.
On the night of May 21, Mary Meachum and a free black man named Isaac
helped Esther, her two kids, and six other runaways cross the
Mississippi just north of downtown. They may have been heading towards
the maroon town of Brooklyn, Illinois, a major destination on the
Underground Railroad just south of their point of departure.
Unfortunately, when they reached Illinois, they were immediately
intercepted by a group of slave catchers; in the resulting chaos, only
four of the runaways were able to escape. Esther, her children, Mary,
and Isaac were all arrested. Mary and Isaac were charged with slave
stealing, while Esther and her children were returned to Henry Shaw.
Shaw had Esther whipped, beaten, and, in an act of unimaginable cruelty,
sold south away from her children. No one should ever have this right—to
separate loving parents from their children.[7] Shaw not only had it,
but wielded it.
Esther’s escape may have been the final straw for Shaw, however. Within
a couple of years, he had rid himself of all his slaves. Keeping them
was simply too much trouble. Historians like to say he did this for
humanitarian reasons, but it was clearly because his slaves had made
owning them more trouble than it was worth.
Nowadays, of course, people prefer to remember Shaw for the flowers in
the Missouri Botanical Garden. This is easier than reckoning with the
sea of blood that fills the centuries behind us.
Statues, streets, and institutions are typically used to honor people
from the same terrible class as Henry Shaw and Christopher Columbus. We
often ignore the stories behind these names on account of the banality
and obscurity of the past. Perhaps we also do so because of the monotony
of life associated with the buildings and streets themselves—or else, at
best, because we’ve infused them with our own meaning.
The Columbus statue is one of countless marks upon the scarred landscape
of St. Louis. But we should not remove the statue simply in order to
have him out of our minds. Perhaps Columbus should stay, covered in a
new coat of red every October, with a new plaque reading, simply,
“MURDERER. RAPIST. COLONIZER.”
As we enter an era of exposing these men, let us do more than simply
rename institutions that are still exclusive concentrations of wealth,
knowledge, and power. If a street we’re forced to traverse as commuters
on our way to exploitative jobs or boring classes is renamed after
someone we like, it will still be a part of our boring commute. If
neighborhoods are renamed after better people, but we’re still policed
and excluded or only allowed to exist as consumers, we will have failed
once more. Indeed, what’s the use of renaming Shaw Boulevard if young
men like VonDerrit Myers, Jr. are still gunned down there by police with
impunity?[8] Our task is not simply to change the names that sanctify an
alienating and oppressive society, but to fundamentally transform this
society.
Likewise, we should take care not to elevate the individuals that we
ourselves gain inspiration to positions of glory in place of the heroes
of white supremacy. Better there be none above us, and none below. Let’s
not just topple the monuments, but uproot the pedestals as well.
For a great leveling, both social and material,
Leopold Trebitch, September 2018
Some of the many sources corroborating this narrative:
European film crew trying to tell the story of Christopher Columbus and
Native resistance during the Water Wars of 2000.
Hartman
Burning of Old Montreal, Afua Cooper—While this book focuses mainly on
slavery in Canada in the 1700s, it also contains an excellent section on
the African slave-trade conducted by the Portuguese in the 1400s before
the colonization of the Americas.
Columbus
Casas
George-Kanentiio
Columbus.
interview with Natashia Griffin, who, along with her children, re-enacts
Esther’s attempted escape at the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing
Resistance, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
[1] This “first” does not include visits by Africans, Vikings, Asians,
or Basque fisherman to the Americas.
[2] Spanish currency.
[3] Columbus’s Spanish name, Cristóbal Colón, roughly translates to
“Christ-bearer the Colonizer.”
[4] The Spanish recorded Escampaba as the Calusas’ name for their
kingdom. The name Calusa comes from one of the tribe’s leaders in the
1560s, who the Spanish renamed Carlos. Their name for themselves has
been completely lost.
[5] The Kalinago word for people, karibna, became the European word for
the tribe, Carib, as well as the area in general, the Caribbean, and the
English word cannibal. Though Europeans told many stories of Kalinago
cannibalism, little or no evidence of it actually exists. Suspiciously,
cannibalism was considered an unpardonable sin, grounds for the legal
enslavement of Native people. At this time, European colonial powers
were consuming thousands and thousands of humans annually through
slavery, forced labor in mines, and nascent plantations in order to
produce gold and other products.
[6] The part of England in which Shaw grew up and where his family’s
factories were located was in the heart of the Luddite Triangle. An
adolescent during the Luddite uprising, Shaw may have witnessed the
machine-breaking, as well as his family’s response. It would also be
fascinating to learn his position in the American Civil War (Missourians
were very divided on the war, and supposedly there’s no proof of which
side Shaw supported) and the General Strike of 1877, which was known
locally as the St. Louis Commune. It is easy to imagine his country
estate, now known as the Botanical Garden and Tower Grove Park, serving
as a refuge for the besieged owning class of St. Louis.
[7] Today, nearly a million mothers are enslaved in the modern American
prison system or else caught up in the courts, parole, and probation—not
to mention the families separated by US Immigration and Customs
Enforcement.
[8] VonDeritt “Droop” Myers, Jr. was killed October 8, 2014, less than a
month after Michael Brown. His death lead to another wave of anti-police
marches, property damage, and burning US flags. The city government and
police defended the officer who murdered him, Jason Flanery, and claimed
to have cleared him of any wrongdoing. Not until Flanery crashed his
police cruiser while drunk and high on cocaine a few years later did the
police department finally judge his conduct unacceptable and fire him.