This is the only FREE lecture that Im going to give... Have you heard of Willie Lynch and his famous letter? Well forget it..... And this is why... According to the speechs preface, Master Lynch was concerned enough with the fortunes of his slave-holding brethren in the American colonies to present a lecture on the bank of the James River, explaining how to keep unruly servants disunited. The old, he argued, should be pitted against the young, the dark against the light, the male against the female and so on. Such disunifying tactics will control the slaves for at least 300 years, he guaranteed. And that, it seems, is why black people cant get ahead now. As a historian, I am generally skeptical of smoking guns. Historical work, like forensic science, isnt some flashy field - it depends on the painstaking aggregation of facts that lead researchers to the most likely explanation, but rarely the only one. Slavery was an incredibly complex set of social, economic and legal relations that literally boiled down to black and white. But given the variation in size of farms, number of enslaved workers, region, crops grown, law, gender-ratios, religion and local economy, it is unlikely that a single letter could explain slave policy for at least 151 years of the institution and its ramifications down to the present day. Considering the limited number of extant sources from 18th century, if this speech had been discovered, it wouldve been the subject of incessant historical panels, scholarly articles and debates. It would literally be a career-making find. But the letter was never discovered. Rather, it simply appeared on the Internet - bypassing the official historical circuits and making its way directly into the canon of American racial conspiratoria. On a more practical level, the speech is filled with references that are questionable if not completely inaccurate. Lynch makes reference to an invitation reaching him on his modest plantation in the West Indies. While this is theoretically possible - the plantation system was well established in the Caribbean by 1712 - most plantation owners were absentees who chose to remain in the colonizing country while the day-to-day affairs of their holdings were run by hired managers and overseers. But even assuming that Mr. Lynch was an exception to this practice, much of the text of his speech remains anachronistic. Lynch makes consistent reference to slaves - which again is possible, though it is far more likely people during this era would refer to persons in bondage simply as Negroes. In the first paragraph, he promises that Ancient Rome would envy us if my program is implemented, but the word program did not enter the English language with this connotation until 1837 - at the time of this speech it was used only to reference a written notice for theater events. Two paragraphs later he says that he will give an outline of action, for slave-holders; the word out-line had appeared only 50 years earlier and at that time was only used as an artistic term meaning a sketch - it didnt convey its present meaning until 1759. Even more damning is his use of the terms indoctrination and self-refueling in the next sentence. The first word didnt carry its current connotation until 1832; the second didnt even enter the language until 1811 - a century after the purported date of Lynchs speech. More obviously, Lynch uses the word Black, with an upper-case B, to describe African Americans more than two centuries before the word came to be applied as a common ethnic identifier. In some popular citations, Lynch has also been - inexplicably - credited with the term lynching, which would be odd since the speech promises to provide slave-holders with non-violent techniques that will save them the expense of killing valuable, if unruly, property. This inaccuracy points to a more basic problem in understanding American history: the violence directed at black people in America was exceptional in the regard that it was racialized and used to reinforce political and social subordination, but it was not unique. Early America was incredibly violent in general - stemming in part from the endemic violence in British society and partly from the violence that tends to be associated with frontier societies. For most of its history, lynching was a non-racial phenomenon - in fact, it most often directed at white people. The term Lynch law was derived from the mob violence directed at Tories, or British loyalists, just after the American Revolution. While there is disagreement about the precise origins of the term - some associate it with Charles Lynch, a Revolution-era Justice-of-the-Peace who imprisoned Tories, others see it as the legacy of an armed militia founded near the Lynche River or the militia captain named Lynch who created judicial tribunals in Virginia in 1776 - there is no reference to the term earlier than 1768, more than half a century after the date given for the speech.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 02:35:58 +0000
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