April 2014 – Page 4 – American History to 1877

April 14, 2014

Irish Catholic Support of the Confederacy

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In their previous blog posts, my classmates referenced the Ask A Slave web series to address the common misconceptions and general lack of knowledge surrounding slavery in this day and age. The author of Ask A Slave’s Critique of the American Education System goes so far as to suggest the ignorant inquiries presented in the series reveals a fundamental flaw in the way American history is taught. He even claims that these uninformed assumptions need to be corrected. However, the institution of slavery is not the only subject in American history where greater understanding needs to be achieved. As Dee Dee Joyce publicizes in Charleston’s Irish Labourers and Their Move into the Confederacy, a significant (yet far less important) misconception also surrounds the considerable percentage of Irish Catholics that constituted the Confederate forces during the American Civil War. According to Joyce, Irish workers “were not hapless pawns of slave owners” they are often portrayed to be. “Nor did they incorporate pro-slavery ideologies as fashioned by the Southern elite.” Instead, Joyce claims that “Irish labourers were self-motivated actors who took constrained actions to place themselves in positions of best advantage within existing social networks.”

Joyce explains that the Irish support of the Confederacy is puzzling because it presents an important paradox: many Irish Catholics – most of whom were property-less – willingly joined a fight that seemingly did not concern them. However, Joyce asserts that the Civil War did concern them. Her first argument revolves around the Nativist Know-Nothing party’s racial attack on the Irish as inferior beings. Noting that the Nativist party received little support in the South, Joyce claims the Irish made a calculated decision in supporting the South because they “knew that social inclusion mattered as much in America as it had in Ireland.” Another argument Joyce makes concerns religion. The Southern Catholic Church’s validation of slavery alleviated suspicions of Irish Catholic involvement with abolitionism and combatted Nativist party attacks. Finally, Joyce claims Irish immigrants had a direct influence on the South Carolina legislature’s attempts to restrict slaves and free blacks from working jobs that Irish laborers desired. Ultimately, Irish Catholics supported the Confederacy in order to gain a better social position than African Americans.

Overall, Joyce does a great job of explaining the motives behind the Irish Catholic support of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. However, it is still important to note the work of James R. Barrett and David Roediger. They claim that many immigrants “conceived Americanization in racial terms: becoming American meant becoming white.” It was more important to the Irish Catholics to embrace their “white heritage” and turning against African Americans than fighting for their individual rights. In doing so, they gained an important social advantage; one that explains their support of the Confederacy.

April 14, 2014

Ignorance in America

The Ask a Slave web series does an incredible job at portraying the ignorance of so many Americans when it comes to distinguishing fact from fiction regarding history. I myself am guilty of thinking I know something but in reality am just basing my knowledge on a secondhand account full of embellishment or opinion. As Alex mentions in his post, Azie Dungey who uses the moniker Lizzie Mae, effectively captures likely sentiments of slaves at the time with sarcasm and witty responses. I find this to be a necessary critique of Americans’ perceptions of history and more specifically of slavery in the early first century of the United States.

I thought it was interesting and effective to include the “hometowns” of the different people asking questions to emphasize that these people are Americans. It may seem hard for us to imagine that these questions are from real people. I think the fact that the videos maintain the appearance of reality with the question and answer style, albeit coming from different time periods, the hometown aspect further grounds this ignorance in our country as a huge problem. One of the best portions of the series was in Episode 3 when Peter Mencken from St. Louis, MO claimed that “slavery isn’t that bad” saying that it is industrious work where you can get room and board. This is seriously concerning that Americans have not come to the realization that slavery was an absolutely gruesome atrocity waged against people of color.

Aside from the obvious disregard for realities of slavery in early history of the United States, this series demonstrates the overall lack of awareness that many Americans possess when thinking about history. One woman asked how many bathrooms Mount Vernon had and another. The general method of researching/thinking about history has become much more apparent for us this semester but we forget that many Americans are simply unaware of this process to think of the certain events and institutions in a historical context free from an interpretation in contemporary terms. I totally agree with Max when he says that our school system does a disservice to our children and teens when hiding our blemishes and focusing solely on the successes and positive aspects of American history. Furthermore, I think as a whole we laud our forefathers as being heroic men of honor and oftentimes overlook their pitfalls and their position as mere humans that are capable of error. The Ask a Slave series is a concise, comical approach to illuminating the aforementioned ignorance and false perceptions of slavery and American history.

April 14, 2014

The Power of Ask a Slave

Azie Dungey’s webseries Ask a Slave exemplifies the power of satire in addressing reprehensible history. She even incorporates critical voices—in the second episode of the second season—that tell her she cannot joke about something as immoral as slavery. This inclusion of criticism, and the series as a whole, reminds me of two Quentin Tarantino movies: Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. In the former, Tarantino examines a special American force that fights Nazi forces in France; in the latter, he displays the vengeful rampage of a former slave. Both movies, respectively, confront perhaps the two greatest travesties in recent history: the holocaust and slavery. However, Tarantino approaches these events from the perspective of satire. In Inglourious Basterds, he shows that the Americans successfully kill Hitler in a movie theater; in Django Unchained, he incorporates several items that would not have been invented for decades. Tarantino intentionally makes his movies partially false and absurd because it allows the audience to digest a very flawed and equally absurd history. Indeed, it may be the only way to discuss these issues without losing the audience.

Likewise, Dungey bases her show on a preposterous notion—a slave of George Washington who can talk with modern Americans. She furthers the absurdity with her introductory banjo music and animation, which is complete with a wink from her smiling face. Dungey incorporates these aspects into her show because it is easier to reach her audience through this medium. She then proceeds to discuss several deplorable aspects of slavery, but presents them in a humorous manner. A guest jokes that Jefferson’s slaves are treated well because he has sex with them; Lizzie Mae spits out an (admittedly funny) flurry of expletives in response to the notion that “slavery isn’t that bad” after all; and she even flips a guest off. The character of Lizzie Mae confronts ridiculous assumptions of slavery with clever, humorous retorts that never fail to make me laugh. While these represent but a few of her jokes, they collectively indicate the severity and sensitivity of the subject matter at hand. Moreover, she addresses the treatment of Indians when her guest “Red Jacket” visits the show. He discloses that he enjoys burnt corn soup because it commemorates the burning of Indian people and cornfields. He furthers that he got an enormous medal in exchange for his people’s land. Dungey’s decision to address Indian suffrage furthers the idea that she is indeed trying to educate people, but in a different way than a documentary or textbook would.

By discussing these issues in a satirical manner, Dungey effectively reaches her audience. Instead of portraying the serious and very real travesties that slaves endured, she jokes about them in a talk-show forum. As “Ask A Slave’s Critique of the American Education System” pointed out, we lack accurate understandings of slavery because of our decision to not educate all children about the dark side of our history. Dungey very much recognizes this problem. In one episode, she talks to children and even changes her introductory text from “protect the guilty” to “protect the innocent.” In this way, she acknowledges that these kids are victims of the system, and that the only way to reform education might be through the power of satire.

April 14, 2014

The Fight for Social Inclusion: Irish Immigrants in the South

Irish immigrants were poor and used to subjugation by class status when they immigrated to the United States. The ones who ended up in the south and, specifically in this case, in Charleston seemed to rally around the battle-cry of the confederacy for reasons that had nothing to do with slavery or slave owners. This article by Joyce clearly states that these poor Irish could not own slaves, but they were above influence of powerful slave owners or other social powers which some have suggested pushed the Irish into confederate battalions. They were not socially inept or pushed around; they had institutions such as the theater, the church, social clubs (Hibernian), as well as nationalist newspapers as social outlets. They regularly critiqued the wealthy upper class of Charleston through these outlets and strengthened their nationalist identity as well as their connection to their new found home.

Instead, they became “dutiful sons” of their new country willingly and united, Joyce claims. But the question still remains why, as the elite classes bullying them into joining was shown to be invalid. It seems as if the Irish-American Immigrants were fighting for the south to secure autonomy, assert their place in society and their right to be contributing members of the southern way of life. This is a narrative that is told in many ways in many times, where a subjugated group of people rise up to fight a war in order to justify their place in society. Of course this happens with African Americans in American History as well, both in the civil war and onwards. This idea can even be extended to slavery at the time, as Ela pointed out in her last blog that we can see slave resistance through Lizzie Mae as a form of assertion to their humanity and independence.

The poor Irish-American Immigrants joining the confederacy is an extremely crucial point for civil war history. Slave owners could not have fought the war or even fielded an army. The persons who plantation owners and mass slave traders could not have realistically fought union powers. This I think may foreshadow a growing narrative of poorer, subjugated and socially devalued men joining the ranks of the confederacy not necessarily to make money off of slavery but to assert their ability to belong, their strength and their independence to the elite of the time, something which seems to be an unfortunate motif in wartime history.

April 14, 2014

The Role of Resistance in the Slave Narrative

In her blog post, “Lizzie Mae” Emma addresses the level of ignorance in today’s society regarding slavery and some of the prevalent misconceptions. Given how much we have learned about slavery this semester in HIS 141, I wish I were surprised by how uninformed some of the questions were. Its sad and disappointing, yes, but I’m not really surprised. Prior to my junior year of high school, most of what I knew about slavery in the United States and Canada came from books, TV and talking with my parents. I understood what the definition of slavery was and the general conditions of slavery, but I would consider it a “common sense” level of understanding. No, I wouldn’t have asked the question “So why don’t you take the underground railroad,” but this was the basis of my formal education on slavery. The only time I remember learning about slavery in school before junior year was in primary school, when we talked about the Underground Railroad and individuals like Harriet Tubman. I am glad that I learned about resistance strategies, but if you don’t have the background to understand the conditions of slavery, then you cannot understand the extent to which resistance was necessary and in fact integral to the slave experience.

Resistance and combating ignorance were two of the key themes of the first season of “Ask a slave”. The attitude and sarcasm with which Lizzie Mae answers the various questions would likely mirror the attitude with which a slave might have interacted with white society. Clearly a slave would not have had the same opportunities (if any opportunities) to directly address society and slaveholders on the injustices they were subject to, however the manor in which Lizzie Mae takes the opportunities to assert her identity and agency would have translated between the contexts. In this way, Lizzie Mae’s sarcasm can be seen as a passive form of resistance. It also reveals just how brutal the conditions of slavery were. In the first episode we learn that Lizzie Mae is 28 years old or, as she tells us cheerfully, 116 in slave years. The phrasing of this simple statement mirrors the idea of “dog years”, critiquing through sarcasm the dehumanization of slaves and the extent to which their life expectancies were reduced.

Lizzie Mae also addresses more active forms of resistance in episode four, when she gets a question from Emma the Runaway. At the end of the interaction, Emma asks that Lizzie Mae, to “Put a little hemlock in her tea for me will ya? Just enough to make her sick,” and Lizzie adds, “But not enough to kill her.” With this Lizzie Mae reminds us that even if slaves had few other options than to serve the wishes of their masters, they were not content in this position and took every opportunity to assert their independence and their humanity.

Works Cited:
Black, Jordan. “Ask A Slave Ep.1: Meet Lizzie Mae.” YouTube video, 4:05. Posted by “Ask A Slave: The Web Series,” Sept 1, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1IYH_MbJqA#t=106.

Black, Jordan. “Ask A Slave Ep.4: New Leaf, Same Page.” YouTube video, 4:08. Posted by “Ask A Slave: The Web Series,” Sept 15, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik-fXNjxw58.

April 14, 2014

Ask a Slave

While watching the web series “Ask a Slave,” I was pleasantly surprised by Lizzie Mae’s witty comebacks and the humor she used to educate others. The short videos are based on an actress’s experience posing as a slave at Mt. Vernon, the home of George Washington. In the series, Lizzie Mae answers questions people ask her. Often time these questions are offensive and almost, if not all, are based on ignorance. I was particularly struck by a homosexual couple who compared their own marriage to the marriage Lizzie Mae faced as a slave.

While there may have been some similarities, like the illegality of their marriage, there are also vast differences. For instance, slave families lived with the constant fear of being permanently separated because of their master’s desires and had to obey their masters or risk death. They were controlled by another human being who thought of them as nothing more than property. The lack of thought or knowledge behind the questions asked to Lizzie Mae, although not entirely surprising, shocked me all the same.

As others have mentioned in their posts, the humor Lizzie Mae used to answer the questions asked of her was enjoyable but should not hide the message behind her videos. These videos point out the general lack of knowledge others possess about history and present a need to show others what helped create the land they now live in. A knowledge about dates is not necessary, rather people need to know of the lifestyle others had and consider the emotions behind the predicaments they faced. Thinking about how others may have felt can greatly change one’s perspectives on an issue.

April 13, 2014

Commentary on Ask a Slave

First, I really enjoyed the “Ask a Slave” web series. The woman who played Lizzie Mae did a fantastic job of making sure things were in the correct time period. The questions she was asked were if not hysterical, but sad. If those had been actual questions that she was asked while acting as a slave, then the level of knowledge that people have of American history is astounding. Too many people know too little of the nation’s early years.

There were several instances in the webisodes where Lizzie Mae and/or another character would discuss and/or criticize the real life figures they were discussing. They brought to like several myths about the presidents and about slave life that were not true.

It seems as though many people today have trouble understanding the way slaves lived and the severity of the meaning of the word slavery. It seems as though many people are either not learning the history or choosing to not acknowledge the brutality of it. This could lead to be dangerous, because people not caring about something as cruel as slavery could lead them to be impartial to other things in the present.

April 13, 2014

Ask A Slave: A Commentary

In the YouTube web series Ask a Slave, the creator Azie Dungey comically portrays a slave living on George Washington’s plantation in the late 18^th century. Using her historical knowledge of the time period, and an extremely dry wit, she sarcastically answers real questions posed to her by individuals she encountered while working as an historical reenactor at Mt. Vernon. Azie, under the alias of the slave Lizzie Mae, admirably illustrates with humor the shocking lack of knowledge that many Americans possess about early American history.

Dungey’s video really highlights a collective ignorance in America about slavery in the United States. Many of the questions posed to Azie where simply shocking to me. Some of the more outrageous questions and statements included the following: “Slavery wasn’t that bad!,” “Do you have any white friends?,” and “What does George Washington think about Abraham Lincoln freeing all of his slaves?” In my opinion, the questions posed to Azie are just absurd. Moreover, It’s disconcerting to me that people would still think that “slavery isn’t that bad,” particularly because it still exists as an underground institution in today’s society. I found myself wishing that the person who made this statement could face the conditions that early slaves did, if only for a couple of days. Perhaps this would allow them to see what a deplorable, degrading, and dehumanizing practice slavery is.

I feel as if the author of the post Ask a Slave’s Critique of the American Education System made an extremely important point when stating that we cannot let Azie’s message get lost in her humor. Azie’s comedic influence in her work is certainly valuable. It makes her videos more accessible and interesting to her audience, and I feel it is a major factor in why they have achieved such recognition and success. However, it’s all too easy to allow ourselves to just take that humor at face value, instead of looking past it and trying to understand why Azie actually made these videos. I don’t think Azie is just making her videos because these questions are ridiculous or funny. She’s purposely illustrating a rather shocking and sad ignorance about our nation’s history among the general populace

Overall, I feel as if Ask a Slave is an important web series. Dungey’s videos are witty, sarcastic, and supremely funny. More important, however, is the fact that they highlight a real lack of knowledge about the early history of the United States. I feel that we as Americans have a responsibility to learn about the history of our country. While this country is certainly one of the greatest on this earth, many mistakes were made along the way to reach the point where we are now. It’s important to learn about them. We don’t want them to happen again.

April 13, 2014

The Impact of Ethnicity

Barrett and Roediger bring to light the extensiveness of race’s impacts on life in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The interwoven nature of economic, social and political segregation created an intricate social system. Work and social status were dictated more by race or nationality than merit. I found it interesting that the authors discuss that this was not simply a matter of social issues or political motivations. The system of segregation was encouraged in the workplace as well in order to stimulate productivity and competition between different ethnicities, as well as to protect native-born citizens from having to take on hard labor. This strategy depressed wages, disrupted the possibility of a cohesive laboring-class voice in politics or the workplace, and allowed for greater profit margins for businesses owners.

The hierarchy that formed from this system placed people in working conditions deemed appropriate for their ethnicity. Though slavery was outlawed, the powerful men in economics still exploited race differences. Today it seems that Americans have a difficult time conceptualizing how deep the racial divides were and how brutal the system was. Max points out in his blog post “Ask A Slave’s Critique of the American Education System,” that there was a misconception among modern Americans that slavery was comparable to modern jobs. Recently freed people of color and the working class “not-yet-white ethnics” experienced exploitation in their theoretically “free” jobs in a way far more akin to slavery than almost any modern American occupation (8). These not-fully white ethnicities and immigrants were even referred to as “our temporary negroes” (8).

I found this differentiation between “white” and foreign European very interesting because a few days ago I registered to vote and was asked to check my race. There was no separate race for Italian, Slavic, English or Irish. There was only “white.” The melting pot in this country has become so thoroughly stirred that it is extremely difficult to determine heritage except by skin color. The other interesting part of my voter registration form was “ethnicity.” The form had two options for this section: “Latino or Hispanic” or “non-Latino or Hispanic.” The comparison to such a form in late 19th century would have been stark. The importance of heritage and denomination has faded because differentiating between groups has become more and more difficult. It is impossible, however, to say that ethnicity no longer plays a role in economics, social life, or politics. The fact that ethnicity/race are still on a voter registration form means that people are still paying attention to the role that it plays in our society.

April 12, 2014

Ask A Slave’s Critique of the American Education System

The Ask A Slave web series offers a humorous yet eye-opening look into how present day Americans view the institution of slavery. In addition to highlighting the ignorance of those asking questions, the series suggests that their completely misconstrued assumptions and queries also reflect poorly on the way slavery is taught. Furthermore, the equally uninformed people asking these questions demonstrate how myths about slavery have lasted over time and that more attention is needed in correcting these problematic misconceptions.

As Rebecca alluded to in her post, one misconstruction that a character had was that Lizzie Mae’s position as a slave was one that she applied for and that it had its own Human Resources department. While this character’s question shows a lack of general historical knowledge as well, it ultimately undermines the hardships that slaves had to face by equating their struggles to a job in present-day corporate America. A similar connection between slavery and employment is wrongfully made towards the end of Episode five in Season one as a young woman asks if slavery is as hard as her job at Forever 21, which she claims is “like slavery.” This comparison is completely inappropriate as it collates the brutal treatment of slaves to a job, which gives monetary compensation and other benefits in exchange for an employee’s work. Both of these examples exhibit primarily how misguided some Americans are regarding the history of slavery. Additionally, these examples indicate a flaw in the manner in which people are educated relating to slavery in this country.

While Ask A Slave is an inherently funny web series due Azie Dungey’s acting prowess and the absurdity of the questions asked, it is important that the work’s overall message does not get lost in that humor. The piece displays the Americans’ generally misinformed position on slavery, but it also begs the viewer to ask how people would ever conjure up such ridiculous questions. While I believe that Americans certainly do have a responsibility to be informed about their country’s history, part of the blame should be put on the nation’s primary, and in some cases secondary, schooling that tends to hide our blemishes and promote our successes. Ask A Slave is therefore an example of the consequences that can arise as a result of Americans being misinformed on an important historical issue.