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The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader.
Born into bondage, Robert Smalls rose from slavery to the Halls of Congress. In between, he helped the Union win the Civil War by doing what no black American had ever done before -he commanded a naval vessel.
AT HOME ON THE WATER
Robert Smalls was born a slave on April 5, 1839, in the coastal town of Beaufort, South Carolina. His first taste of a sailor’s life came at 12 years old when his master hired him out to work at a shipyard in Charleston Harbor. Smalls took to it, displaying a natural talent for seamanship. By 19, he had risen to the highest sea rank available to a slave: a ship’s pilot. Although Smalls could neither read nor write, his photographic memory recalled every bar, shoal, and current in Charleston Harbor.
In 1858 Smalls married another slave, Hannah Jones, and two years later they had a son, Robert, Jr. Being a respected sea pilot, Smalls life was better than that of most slaves …but he was still a slave. Longing to be his own master, he set out to buy his family’s freedom. And he almost did it -Smalls had saved $700 of the $800 purchasing price when the Civil War broke out in 1861. Then everybody’s life was put on hold.
STEALING A SHIP
The Confederate army immediately put the 22-year-old Smalls to work doing what he did best: piloting a vessel. He was given the wheel of the CSS Planter (formerly the USS Planter), a 147-foot-long steamboat. With Smalls at the helm taking order from Captain Charles Relyea, the ship hauled ordnance and supplies to the rebel forts guarding Charleston. A few miles offshore lay a fleet of blockading Union ships, and Smalls knew that freedom awaited him in that blockade. He formed a plan.
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Image: Irina Silvestrova/Shutterstock
Intelligent beings captured and forced to live in tiny space, then made to perform daily to entertain the masses. Sounds like slavery? PETA thinks so and they're suing ... on behalf of killer whales against SeaWorld:
LinkIt is reportedly the first time a US court has heard legal arguments over whether animals should enjoy the same constitutional protections as humans.
SeaWorld's legal team said the case was a waste of time and resources.
The marine park's lawyer, Theodore Shaw, told the court in San Diego: "Neither orcas nor any other animal were included in the 'We the people'... when the Constitution was adopted."
He said that if the case were successful, it could have implications not just on how other marine parks or zoos operate, but even on the police use of sniffer dogs to detect bombs and drugs.
Peta says the killer whales are treated like slaves for being forced to live in tanks and perform daily at the SeaWorld parks in California and Florida.
Do you remember the awesome letter attributed to Jourdon Anderson, the freedman who was asked by his ex-master to return to work? Jason Kottke and David Galbraith dug through census and newspaper records to learn more about his life. Anderson may have stayed in Ohio and died in 1905 at the age of 79. Check out Kottke’s post, which he is frequently updating as he finds more information.
By August 1865, the American Civil War was over. Many Southerners wanted to restore some semblance of normality — as they saw it — in their homes and communities. So Col. P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee wrote to one of his former slaves, requesting that he come back and work on the farm for wages. The freedman Jourdan Anderson would have none of that, unless there were serious changes in the way in which the Colonel and his family conducted themselves. He allegedly dictated a letter which was reprinted in many Northern newspapers. Here’s the ending:
In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.
Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson.
Read the rest at Letters of Note.
Link | Somewhat related photo via the National Park Service
Photo: Hugo!/Flickr
No, that's not a photo of a flooded village. Rather, it's of the city of Ganvié in the Republic of Benin, which calls itself "The Venice of Africa." Kuriositas has the details on the history of this curious city:
At the beginning of the seventeenth century the country was called Dahomey and was one of the most powerful states in West Africa. The major ethnic and linguistic group was the Fon and they had made a deal with the Portuguese. Rather than their own people being captured and sold in to slavery they made a contract with the Portuguese to hunt and sell tribes people from smaller ethnic groups.
The Fon warriors were numerous and powerful and there was little other groups of people could do to defend themselves against this onslaught. Then, someone among the Tofinu people came up with an idea. Their name is lost to history but one wise person realized that they could take advantage of the religious practices of their
The Fon were forbidden by their religion to advance upon and water bound settlement. Any groups of people who lived on water were, by the law of the Fon, safe. Lake Nokoué is simply immense. Ganvié was established as a means to escape being sold in to a lifetime’s slavery and shipped across the world in appalling conditions. No wonder its name means the collectivity of those who found peace at last. The alternative translation is the much more to the point We Survived.enemy.
Link - via Look At This
Fifty years after slavery was abolished, the Bronx Zoo had an exhibit in which they displayed a man in a cage. His name was Ota Benga, a member of a pygmy Mbuti tribe from the Belgian Congo.
Ota Benga’s life was tragic from early on. He was a member of the Mbuti people who lived in the area then known as the Belgian Congo. Forces under the control of King Leopold of Belgium killed Benga’s wife and two children during a massacre – part of the drive to control rubber trees in the region. Benga escaped death because he was on a hunting trip when the slaughter occurred.
Benga was later captured by slavers, then sold to missionary Samuel Verner for a bolt of cloth and a pound of salt. Verner had been contracted by the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (otherwise known as Saint Louis World’s Fair) to find some pygmies for the fair. Four other Batwa or pygmy people and five non-pygmies eventually agreed to come on the trip.
After the World’s Fair, Benga was displayed at the Museum of Natural History in New York and the Bronx Zoo. Read his story at Environmental Graffiti. Link
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Earlier this month was National Sisters Day, which got me thinking about famous sibling duos. I thought it would be fun to share a list of the most famous of these sister pairings, but to be fair, there are so many famous pairs of sisters out there that it would be impossible to list them all. That’s why I’ve decided to leave out most of the contemporary examples you’re probably already familiar with, like Paris and Nikki Hilton and Venus and Serena Williams. I’ve also left out all of the popular sister singing groups from the last hundred years because there are so darn many of them between the Pointer Sisters, The Andrews Sisters and the gals from Heart.
That being said, here are some sisters who impacted history.
These not-so-attractive ladies are probably some of the earliest examples of famous sister groups, even if they aren’t exactly real. The Graeae were three ancient goddesses from Greek mythology who shared one eye and one tooth amongst the group. While they were actually archaic goddesses, when they interacted with humans, they usually took the form of old witches.
Perseus stole the eye of the witches when they were passing it amongst themselves and used it to force the Graeae to tell him where the three objects he needed to kill Medusa were hidden. Thus, the Graeae were instrumental in the killing of Medusa, who was one of their sisters. Even if these siblings aren’t real, the story has been so long-lasting that it’s hard to imagine it not having any impact on European history to some extent.
Around the same time that tales of Jesus were starting to be spread through the Middle East, two Vietnamese sisters were kicking butt, leading a revolt against the Chinese oppression of their country.
It all started when Trung Trac fell in love and married a man named Thi Sach. The Chinese rulers of Vietnam were making assimilation into their way of life mandatory and when Thi Sach took a stand against the repression of his culture, he was executed. His death was supposed to be a warning against all those who would consider rebelling, but instead it spurred his wife and sister-in-law, Trung Nhi, to take up his cause and fight against the Chinese.
The two sisters were raised learning martial arts and studying the art of warfare, so when it was time to start a rebellion, they were ready. In 39 AD, the two women repelled a small Chinese unit from their village and started to assemble a large army of rebels –mostly women according to popular legends. Within a few months, they already had taken back over 60 citadels from the Chinese and had liberated the kingdom of Nam Viet. The two were named as queens of their free country and they were able to keep the territory free from the Chinese for over two years.
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To-may-to, to-mah-to … fruit, vegetable – whatever you call it, one thing’s for sure: people love it. But if you have only tasted tomatos bought from the supermarket shelves, you’re missing out on flavor.
Barry Estabrook of Politics of the Plate blog has the inside story of the dirty little secrets of supermarket tomato over at NPR:
… the tomatoes you see in those supermarkets have been bred for high yields and durability, not flavor. "As a farmer once said — an honest farmer — ‘I don’t get paid a cent for flavor,’" Estabrook says.
There’s an even darker side to the modern commercial tomato, too, he says. Up until recently, workers on many of Florida’s vast industrial tomato farms were basically slaves. "People being bought and sold like animals," Estabrook says. "People being shackled in chains. People being beaten for either not working hard enough, fast enough, or being too weak or sick to work. People actually being shot and killed for trying to escape. That sounds like 1850′s slavery to me, and that, in fact, is going on, or has gone on."
Estabrook adds that there have been seven successful slavery prosecutions in Florida in the past 15 years.
Link (Photo: Robert Browman)
Jonathan Dillon was an Irish immigrant watchmaker who worked in a watch repair shop in Washington D.C. He told his children that on the day the news arrived of the attack on Fort Sumter he was repairing Lincoln’s watch.
He told them he had inscribed inside the watch these words: "The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a President who at least will try."
The watch was given to the Smithsonian in 1958. No one has ever checked the truth of the man’s story – until now …
This morning, in a small conference room on the first floor of Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, officials decided to find out. Expert watchmaker George Thomas used a series of delicate instruments — tweezers, tiny pliers — to pull apart Lincoln’s timepiece. He put on a visor with a magnifying lens and talked as he worked. Some of the pins were nearly stuck, he explained. The hands of the watch were original with a case made in America and the workings from Liverpool. The Illinois rail-splitter had splurged: The watch, Thomas said, would be the equivalent to a timepiece costing “$5,000 or more” today.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.
