"Emancipation," starring Will Smith, arrives in theaters today. The film was inspired by a story published in Harper's Weekly magazine in 1863, the same year the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. The article featured illustrations (based on photographs) of a man identified as Gordon, who was said to have reached a Union Army encampment in Baton Rouge in March 1863 after escaping the custody of his enslaver in Mississippi and running for days on end. "In order to foil the scent of the bloodhounds who were chasing him he took from his plantation onions, which he carried in his pockets," the article states. "After crossing each creek or swamp he rubbed his body freely with these onions, and thus, no doubt frequently threw the dogs off the scent." The most widely circulated of these images, which shows the scarring on Gordon's back from being whipped, helped illustrate the brutality of slavery to the masses, which historians say fueled a growing public opposition to it. The article goes on to say that Gordon (sometimes referred to as Peter, Smith's character's name in the new film) later joined the Union Army himself. The film follows Peter's journey from his escape to his enlistment. There are many more Civil War-era photos & documents to explore in the Library's Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs (http://go.loc.gov/SPmN50LTQtw) & President Lincoln papers (http://go.loc.gov/1ULz50LTQtx).
On December 10, 1802 , just before settling in the Indiana territory, William Clark, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, filed a document in Jefferson County, Kentucky that released Ben McGee from enslavement. The following day, Clark turned McGee's enslavement into an indenture of thirty years servitude before making the move to Indiana.
The practice of emancipating enslaved persons who had been brought into Indiana Territory, and then forcing them to enter into long-term indentures was commonly practiced to circumvent territorial laws prohibiting slavery. Indentured servitude remained common practice until the Indiana Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1821.
In the image below, the cabin in the foreground is a reconstruction of the cabin in which the Clark brothers lived at the Falls of the Ohio. Behind the main cabin is a reconstruction of the McGee cabin, in which Ben McGee and his wife Venus lived for over 20 years. Photo courtesy of Historic Louisville and the National Park Service.
On this date in 1802, elected representatives of the four counties that made up the Indiana Territory sent a petition to Congress at the behest of Territorial Governor William Henry Harrison. They requested changes to governing ordinances that they hoped would attract more settlers to the territory, setting it on the path to self-government and statehood. However, one of these requested enticements to white settlers was the temporary legalization of slavery.
The representatives requested a ten-year suspension of Article VI of the Ordinance of 1787 that outlawed slavery, arguing that settlers were bypassing the Indiana and Illinois Territories and moving west of the Mississippi because they could not bring the enslaved people they relied on and profited by. The petition went further, requesting that these enslaved people and their children would remain in bondage even after the suspension ended. Congress refused to allow slavery in Indiana Territory, but residents circumvented the restriction through indenture laws, essentially slavery by another name. Learn more about indentured servitude in Indiana: Mary Clark
The image below is courtesy of the Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian, William Henry Harrison and Jacob Piatt Dunn, Slavery Petitions and Papers.
From 1831 to 1865, William Lloyd Garrison, a white social reformer, produced the most widely circulated anti-slavery newspaper of the time titled “The Liberator.” A weekly publication of articles by both white and black abolitionists, male or female. This diversity of authorship and the newspaper’s radical ideas about immediate and uncompensated emancipation earned it very little popularity with white readers, attracting threats on Garrison’s life, as well as, a $5,000 bounty on his head in the state of Georgia. Garrison, who long condemned the U.S. government and constitution for upholding slavery, came to support Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War and published his last issue of The Liberator in 1865 after the war had finished and the Thirteenth Amendment had finally been ratified. In his final issue, Garrison announced to his readers, “…my vocation as an abolitionist is ended.”
A REUTERS SERIES Slavery’s Descendants The ancestral ties to slaveholding of today’s political elite
Slavery's Descendants | part 1 America's Family Secret More than 100 U.S. leaders – lawmakers, presidents, governors and justices – have slaveholding ancestors, a Reuters examination found. Few are willing to talk about their ties to America's “original sin”
