<...> tyranny is a central theme of American history, that racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture.
<...> slaves became the major form of Southern wealth (aside from land), and slaveholding became the means to prosperity. <...> The later impoverishment of the South nourished the myth that the slave economy had always been historically “backward,” stagnating, and unproductive. We now know that investment in slaves brought a considerable profit and that the Southern economy grew rapidly throughout the pre–Civil War decades. It is true, however, that the system depended largely on the international demand for cotton as the world entered the age of industrialization, led by the British textile industry. There was an increasing demand for clothing that was cheaper than linen and not as hot and heavy as wool.
<...> black slavery was basic and integral to the entire phenomenon we call “America.” This often hidden or disguised truth ultimately involves the profound contradiction of a free society that was made possible by black slave labor.
It is of inestimable importance that the classical and biblical traditions linked slavery with original sin, punishment <...>, the later abolition of slavery became tied with personal and collective freedom, with the redemption from sin, with the romanticizing of many form of labor, and with the ultimate salvation of humankind.
Come in the evening, or come in the morning; Come when you 're looked for, or come without warning.
For Southerners, a white skin was the distinguishing badge of mind and intellect. Black skin was the sign that a given people had been providentially designed to serve as menial laborers, as what Hammond called the “mudsill” class necessary to support every society.
What matters is that Southern slaves, at least on the larger plantations, created their own African American culture, which helped to preserve some of the more crucial areas of life and thought from white control or domination without significantly reducing the productivity and profitability of slave labor. Living within this African American culture, sustained by strong community ties, many slaves were able to maintain a certain sense of apartness, of pride, and of independent identity.
Although we can think logically, it doesn’t mean we always do (Shermer, 1997).
Much as slavery in the United States was part of a larger Atlantic Slave System, so America’s War of Independence was an outgrowth of Europe’s Seven Years’ War — from 1756 to 1763 — and also a precursor or harbinger of the French and Haitian revolutions and of the subsequent Latin American wars for independence from Spain.
All we ask is to be let alone.
It was the mission of the Confederacy, ordinary whites were told, to carry out God’s design for an inferior and dependent race. Slaveholders claimed that owning slaves always entailed a duty and a burden — a duty and burden that defined the moral superiority of the South. And this duty and burden was respected by millions of nonslaveholding whites, who were prepared to defend it with their lives. That, perhaps, was the ultimate meaning of a “slave society.
When a man gives his opinion, he's a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she's a bitch.
Act like the person you want to be and you just might become that person.
A final word should be said concerning the status of free blacks. Before the American Revolution this status had been ambiguous, and the number of free blacks was insignificant. <...> A rash of new laws, similar to the later Black Codes of Reconstruction, reduced free blacks almost to the status of slaves without masters. The new laws regulated their freedom of movement, forbade them to associate with slaves, subjected them to surveillance and discipline by whites, denied them the legal right to testify in court against whites, required them to work at approved jobs, and threatened them with penal labor if not actual reenslavement.
Wedlock, indeed, hath oft compared been / To publick feasts, where meet a publick rout: / When they that are without would fain go in, / And they that are within would fain go out.
Study the best and highest things that are, / But of thyself an humble thought retain.
Don’t be afraid of the space between your dreams and reality. If you can dream it, you can make it so. ― Belva Davis</b>
<...> many national leaders including Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, John Adams, John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and Rufus King saw American slavery as an immense problem, a curse, a blight, or a national disease. If the degree of their revulsion varied, they agreed that the nation would be much safer, purer, happier, and better off without the racial slavery that they had inherited from previous generations and, some of them would emphasize, from England. Most of them also believed that America would be an infinitely better and less complicated place without the African American population, which most white leaders associated with all the defects, mistakes, sins, shortcomings, and animality of an otherwise almost perfect nation.
Thus the word "inhuman", in this book's title, refers to the unconscionable and unsuccessful goal of bestializing (in the form of pets as well as beasts of burden) a class of human beings.
Some Southerners effectively applied slave labor to the cultivation of corn, grain, and hemp (for making rope and twine), to mining and lumbering, to building canals and railroads, and even to the manufacture of textiles, iron, and other industrial products. Nevertheless, no other American region contained so many white farmers who merely subsisted on their own produce. The “typical” white Southerner was not a slaveholding planter but a small farmer who tried, often without success, to achieve both relative self-sufficiency and a steady income from marketable cash crops.
<...> this Revolutionary ideology, epitomized by the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, showed that the very idea of slavery is a fiction or fraud, since liberty and equality are fundamental rights that no one can legitimately lose.
Despite widespread attemps to equate human captives with domestic animals and even to market them and price them the same way <...> slaves were fortunately never held long enough in a distinctive group to undergo genetic neoteny <...>. Yet a kind of neoteny was clearly the goal of many slaveholders, even if they lacked a scientific understanding of how domestication changed the nature and behavior of animals. Aristotle's ideal of the "natural slave" was very close to what a human being would be like if subjected to a genetic change similar to that of domesticated plants and animals.
There goes the good time that was had by all. -- Bette Davis, remarking on a passing starlet
Someday we'll look back on this moment and plow into a parked car. -- Evan Davis</p>
Brandy Davis, an outfielder and teammate of mine with the Pittsburgh Pirates, is my choice for team captain. Cincinnati was beating us 3-1, and I led off the bottom of the eighth with a walk. The next hitter banged a hard single to right field. Feeling the wind at my back, I rounded second and kept going, sliding safely into third base. With runners at first and third, and home-run hitter Ralph Kiner at bat, our manager put in the fast Brandy Davis to run for the player at first. Even with Kiner hitting and a change to win the game with a home run, Brandy took off for second and made it. Now we had runners at second and third. I'm standing at third, knowing I'm not going anywhere, and see Brandy start to take a lead. All of a sudden, here he comes. He makes a great slide into third, and I scream, "Brandy, where are you going?" He looks up, and shouts, "Back to second if I can make it." -- Joe Garagiola, "It's Anybody's Ball Game"
Nice guys finish last, but we get to sleep in. -- Evan Davis</p>
While he was in New York on location for _Bronco Billy_ (1980), Clint Eastwood agreed to a television interview. His host, somewhat hostile, began by defining a Clint Eastwood picture as a violent, ruthless, lawless, and bloody piece of mayhem, and then asked Eastwood himself to define a Clint Eastwood picture. "To me," said Eastwood calmly, "what a Clint Eastwood picture is, is one that I'm in." -- Boller and Davis, "Hollywood Anecdotes"
"Deep" is a word like "theory" or "semantic" -- it implies all sorts of marvelous things. It's one thing to be able to say "I've got a theory", quite another to say "I've got a semantic theory", but, ah, those who can claim "I've got a deep semantic theory", they are truly blessed. -- Randy Davis</p>
If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent. -- Bette Davis</p>
Alan E. Davis: Some files at llug.sep.bnl.gov/pub/debian/Incoming are stamped on 10 January 1998. As I write, nowhere on Earth is it now 10 January. Craig Sanders: That just proves how advanced debian is, doesn't it :-) -- debian-devel
I'd love to kiss you, but I just washed my hair. -- Bette Davis, "Cabin in the Cotton"
The density of rush-hour traffic is directly proportional to
1.5 times the amount of extra time you allow to arrive on time.
Problems that go away by themselves, come back by themselves.
Lionel, it seems, was on his way to "John Ferdinando," as he calls the modern Juan Fernandes. "In our way thither," he says, "about four o'clock in the morning, when we were about one hundred and fifty leagues from the Main of America, our ship felt a terrible shock, which put our men in such consternation that they could hardly tell where they were or what to think; but every one began to prepare for death. And, indeed, the shock was so sudden and violent, that we took it for granted the ship had struck against a rock; but when the amazement was a little over, we cast the lead, and sounded, but found no ground..... The suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their carriages, and several of the men were shaken out of their hammocks. Captain Davis, who lay with his head on a gun, was thrown out of his cabin!" Lionel then goes on to impute the shock to an earthquake, and seems to substantiate the imputation by stating that a great earthquake, somewhere about that time, did actually do great mischief along the Spanish land. But I should not much wonder if, in the darkness of that early hour of the morning, the shock was after all caused by an unseen whale vertically bumping the hull from beneath.
Now, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that, during the term of his prefecture at Constantinople, a great sea-monster was captured in the neighboring Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, after having destroyed vessels at intervals in those waters for a period of more than fifty years. A fact thus set down in substantial history cannot easily be gainsaid. Nor is there any reason it should be. Of what precise species this sea-monster was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed ships, as well as for other reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am strongly inclined to think a sperm whale. And I will tell you why. For a long time I fancied that the sperm whale had been always unknown in the Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with it. Even now I am certain that those seas are not, and perhaps never can be, in the present constitution of things, a place for his habitual gregarious resort. But further investigations have recently proved to me, that in modern times there have been isolated instances of the presence of the sperm whale in the Mediterranean. I am told, on good authority, that on the Barbary coast, a Commodore Davis of the British navy found the skeleton of a sperm whale. Now, as a vessel of war readily passes through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could, by the same route, pass out of the Mediterranean into the Propontis.
HARRIS, THOMAS LAKE (1823-1906), American spiritualistic "prophet," was born at Fenny Stratford in Buckinghamshire, England, on the 15th of May 1823. His parents were Calvinistic Baptists, and very poor. They settled at Utica, New York, when Harris was five years old. When he was about twenty Harris became a Universalist preacher, and then a Swedenborgian. He became associated about 1847 with a spiritualist of indifferent character named Davis. After Davis had been publicly exposed, Harris established a congregation in New York. About 1850 he professed to receive inspirations, and published some long poems. He had the gift of improvisation in a very high degree. About 1859 he preached in London, and is described as a man "with low, black eyebrows, black beard, and sallow countenance." He was an effective speaker, and his poetry was admired by many; Alfred Austin in his book _The Poetry of the Period_ even devoted a chapter to Harris. He founded in 1861 a community at Wassaic, New York, and opened a bank and a mill, which he superintended. There he was joined by about sixty converts, including five orthodox clergymen, some Japanese people, some American ladies of position, and especially by Laurence Oliphant (q.v.) with his wife and mother. The community--the Brotherhood of the New Life--decided to settle at the village of Brocton on the shore of Lake Erie. Harris established there a wine-making industry. In reply to the objections of teetotallers he said that the wine prepared by himself was filled with the divine breath so that all noxious influences were neutralized. Harris also built a tavern and strongly advocated the use of tobacco. He exacted complete surrender from his disciples--even the surrender of moral judgment. He taught that God was bi-sexual, and apparently, though not in reality, that the rule of society should be one of married celibacy. He professed to teach his community a change in the mode of respiration which was to be the visible sign of possession by Christ and the seal of immortality. The Oliphants broke away from the restraint about 1881, charging him with robbery and succeeding in getting back from him many thousands of pounds by legal proceedings. But while losing faith in Harris himself, they did not abandon his main teaching. In Laurence Oliphant's novel _Masollam_ his view of Harris will be found. Briefly, he held that Harris was originally honest, greatly gifted, and possessed of certain psychical powers. But in the end he came to practise unbridled licence under the loftiest pretensions, made the profession of extreme disinterestedness a cloak to conceal his avarice, and demanded from his followers a blind and supple obedience. Harris in 1876 discontinued for a time public activities, but issued to a secret circle books of verse dwelling mainly on sexual questions. On these his mind ran from the first. In 1891 he announced that his body had been renewed, and that he had discovered the secret of the resuscitation of humanity. He published a book, _Lyra triumphalis_, dedicated to A. C. Swinburne. He also made a third marriage, and visited England intending to remain there. He was called back by a fire which destroyed large stocks of his wine, and remained in New York till 1903, when he visited Glasgow. His followers believed that he had attained the secret of immortal life on earth, and after his death on the 23rd of March 1906 declared that he was only sleeping. It was three months before it was acknowledged publicly that he was really dead. There can be little or no doubt as to the real character of Harris. His teaching was esoteric in form, but is a thinly veiled attempt to alter the ordering of sexual relations. Entry: HARRIS
On the 25th of January 1861 Davis was commissioned major-general of the forces Mississippi was raising in view of the threatened conflict. On the 9th of February he received the unanimous vote of the Provisional Congress of the seceded states as president of the "Confederate States of America." He was inaugurated on the 18th of February, was subsequently, after the adoption of the permanent constitution, regularly elected by popular vote, for a term of six years, and on the 22nd of February 1862 was again inaugurated. He had not sought the office, preferring service in the field. His brilliant career, both as a civilian and as a soldier, drew all eyes to him as best fitted to guide the fortunes of the new Confederacy, and with a deep sense of the responsibility he obeyed the call. He heartily approved of the peace conference, which attempted to draw up a plan of reconciliation between the two sections, but whose failure made war inevitable. Montgomery, in Alabama, was the first Confederate capital, but after Virginia joined her sister states, the seat of government was removed to Richmond, on the 29th of May 1861. How Davis--of whom W. E. Gladstone, in the early days of English sympathy with the South, said that he had "made a nation"--bore himself in his most responsible position during the gigantic conflict which ensued, cannot here be related in detail. (See CONFEDERATE STATES; and AMERICAN CIVIL WAR.) In the shortest time he organized and put into the field one of the finest bodies of soldiers of which history has record. Factories sprang up in the South in a few months, supplying the army with arms and munitions of war, and the energy of the president was everywhere apparent. That he committed serious errors, his warmest admirers will hardly deny. Unfortunately his firmness developed into obstinacy, and exhibited itself in continued confidence in officers who had proved to be failures, and in dislike of some of his ablest generals. He committed the great mistake, too, of directing the movements of distant armies from the seat of government, though those armies were under able generals. This naturally caused great dissatisfaction, and more than once resulted in irreparable disaster. Moreover, he was not, like Lincoln, a great manager of men; he often acted without tact; he was charged with being domineering and autocratic, and at various times he was seriously hampered by the meddling of the Confederate Congress and the opposition of such men as the vice-president, A. H. Stephens, Governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia, and Governor Zebulon Vance of North Carolina. Entry: DAVIS</b>
In the hope of finding a passage Cabot proceeded northward along the coast. As he advanced, the cold became more intense and the icebergs thicker and larger. It was also noticed that the land trended eastward. As a result on the 11th of June in latitude 67° 30' the crews mutinied and refused to proceed farther in that direction. Cabot had no alternative but to put his ships about and look for a passage towards the south. Rounding Cape Farewell he explored the southern coast of Greenland and then made his way a certain distance up the west coast. Here again his progress was checked by icebergs, whereupon a course was set towards the west. Crossing Davis Strait Cabot reached our modern Baffin Land in 66°. Judging this to be the Asiatic mainland, he set off southward in search of Cipangu. South of Hudson Strait a little bartering was done with the Indians, but these could offer nothing in exchange but furs. Our strait of Belle Isle was mistaken for an ordinary bay, and Newfoundland was regarded by Cabot as the main shore itself. Rounding Cape Race he visited once more the region explored in the previous summer, and then proceeded to follow the coast of our Nova Scotia and New England in search of Cipangu. He made his way as far south as the thirty-eighth parallel, when the absence of all signs of eastern civilization and the low state of his stores forced him to abandon all hope of reaching Cipangu on this voyage. Accordingly the ships were put about and a course set for England, where they arrived safely late in the autumn of 1498. Not long after his return John Cabot died. Entry: CABOT
The Spanish settlements experienced many vicissitudes. The Indians were hostile and the missionary efforts among them failed. In 1586 St Augustine was almost destroyed by Sir Francis Drake and it also suffered severely by an attack of Captain John Davis in 1665. Not until the last decade of the 17th century did the Spanish authorities attempt to extend the settlements beyond the east coast. Then, jealous of the French explorations along the Gulf of Mexico, they turned their attention to the west coast, and in 1696 founded Pensacola. When the English colonies of the Carolinas and Georgia were founded, there was constant friction with Florida. The Spanish were accused of inciting the Indians to make depredations on the English settlements and of interfering with English commerce and the Spanish were in constant fear of the encroachments of the British. In 1702, when Great Britain and Spain were contending in Europe, on opposite sides, in the war of the Spanish Succession, a force from South Carolina captured St Augustine and laid siege to the fort, but being unable to reduce it for lack of necessary artillery, burned the town and withdrew at the approach of Spanish reinforcements. In 1706 a Spanish and French expedition against Charleston, South Carolina, failed, and the Carolinians retaliated by invading middle Florida in 1708 and again in 1722. In 1740 General James Edward Oglethorpe, governor of Georgia, supported by a naval force, made an unsuccessful attack upon St Augustine; two years later a Spanish expedition against Savannah by way of St Simon's Island failed, and in 1745 Oglethorpe again appeared before the walls of St Augustine, but the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 prevented further hostilities. Pensacola, the other centre of Spanish settlement, though captured and occupied (1719-1723) by the French from Louisiana, had a more peaceful history. Entry: A
HEREWARD, usually but erroneously styled "the Wake" (an addition of later days), an Englishman famous for his resistance to William the Conqueror. It is now established that he was a tenant of Peterborough Abbey, from which he held lands at Witham-on-the-Hill and Barholme with Stow in the south-western corner of Lincolnshire, and of Crowland Abbey at Rippingale in the neighbouring fenland. His first authentic act is the storm and sacking of Peterborough in 1070, in company with outlaws and Danish invaders. The next year he took part in the desperate stand against the Conqueror's rule made in the isle of Ely, and, on its capture by the Normans, escaped with his followers through the fens. That his exploits made an exceptional impression on the popular mind is certain from the mass of legendary history that clustered round his name; he became, says Mr Davis, "in popular eyes the champion of the English national cause." The Hereward legend has been fully dealt with by him and by Professor Freeman, who observed that "with no name has fiction been more busy." Entry: HEREWARD
Benjamin was thick-set and stout, with an expression of great shrewdness. An early portrait of him is to be found in Jefferson Davis's _Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government_. His political history may be traced in that work, and in John W. Draper's _American Civil War_ and von Holst's _Constitutional History of the United States_. Many allusions to his English career will be found in works describing English lawyers of his period, and there are some interesting reminiscences of him by Baron Pollock in the _Fortnightly Review_ for March 1898. His _Treatise on the Law of Sale of Personal Property with References to the American Decisions and to the French Code and Civil Law_--a bulky volume known to practitioners as _Benjamin on Sales_--is the principal text-book on its subject, and a fitting monument of the author's career at the English bar, of his industry and learning. Many of his American speeches have been published. Entry: BENJAMIN