Word: slaving
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Exactly 200 years ago, the western hemisphere's second republic was created. However, there were no congratulatory salutes from the first, the United States of America. The new republic, Haiti, had gained its independence through a bloody 12-year slave uprising--the only time in the history of the world in which bond servants successfully overthrew their masters and formed their own state...
...staying out of the political battle and biding his time, Jefferson ensured that when the hour struck for his own project, he could call on a fleet that Adams had built for him. In 1794, partly moved by the letters from American sailors held in Barbary dungeons and slave pens, Congress authorized the building of six frigates, three of which--the Constitution, the United States and the Constellation--were already completed. In July 1798 funds were approved for a Marine Corps as well...
Haiti's very existence highlighted the deepest contradictions of the American revolutionary experiment. Though the U.S. Declaration of Independence stated that all men were created equal, Haitian slaves and free men and women of color battled what was then one of the world's most powerful armies to prove it. Yet how could the man who wrote about freedom in such transcendent terms have not seen echoes of his struggle in the Haitians' urgent desire for self-rule? Possibly because as a slave owner and the leader of slaveholders, he could never reconcile dealing with one group of Africans...
...race loomed largest. In the roles of slaveholder, public official and family man, the relationship between blacks and whites was something he thought about, wrote about and grappled with from his cradle to his grave. Jefferson's first memory was of being carried on a pillow by a slave when he was two years old; on his deathbed, the last face he saw was that of the slave who attended him in his final hour. The interest in Jefferson's racial views, long the subject of scrutiny, has reached a crescendo in our time. As Americans attempt to build...
...extraordinary coincidence, during Jefferson's first term as President, Callender also exposed Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings. Callender claimed that "Dusky Sally," a.k.a. the "African Venus," was the President's slave concubine, who had borne him five children. "There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story," Callender wrote, "and not a few who know it." Jefferson never confirmed or denied Callender's story. But the likely truth of the Hemings affair was dramatically bolstered by DNA tests published in 1998, which indicated that a Jefferson male had sired at least...