What do everyday items from the 19th century reveal about American slavery?

You can take a fairly mundane material artifact like this shoe and connect it to the larger political project of enslaved people's quest for liberation. The shoe is crucial in this regard. For example, no one is able to run away to the north without shoes. People who in fact come across the Mason-Dixon line and escape to freedom often say, "I couldn't have done it without footwear. No one is on the record of having made it without shoes." >> [applause] >> Hi everyone. Thanks for coming out to the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation. My name is Steve Guerrero and I'm the director of education here. So I'm in charge of everything you learn from now on. Um I'm really pleased to see a good crowd out here even on a rainy night. It's really important especially now to support our local cultural institutions like museums. We are places where we can build community, we can learn, we can um be faithful to an accurate telling of history and so this is an important um part of the story that we're going to hear tonight. I also um am just really interested and excited to have uh Seth Rockman here tonight because we are at the site of the Boston Manufacturing Company. Uh that was the first modern factory. It was started by Francis Cabot Lowell in 18 It was opened in 1814 and it produced cotton textiles at scale. Uh this is the first place where mill girls were a workforce and everything you know about the cities of like Lawrence and Lowell especially and Holyoke, Manchester, New Hampshire. The systems that they used of manufacturing started right here on this site. It was the first large successful private company in America and it essentially fulfilled Hamilton's warning to us that it wasn't enough to be politically independent. We want to be commercially and economically independent and of course what we're going to hear tonight is how that came at some cost that we should reckon with as historians. Um I'll leave it at that, but I'm very excited and um, proud to welcome uh, Professor Seth Rockman. Seth's a professor at Brown University and his book Plantation Goods was a Pulitzer finalist, um, rightly. And uh, we're proud to welcome him here without further ado, Seth. >> [applause] >> Thank you, Steve, for the introduction and for organizing this entire event. Thanks to all of you for coming out this evening. It's really nice to see so many of you here. I also want to thank you for bearing with my voice, which hopefully will make it through the course of the evening, uh, but a uh, history department uh, holiday party last night has left me a little gravelly. My goal tonight is to talk to you about my book Plantation Goods, a material history of American slavery, which uh, just celebrated its year birthday. And over the last 12 months, it's been a pleasure for me to get to share this book, uh, with audiences, uh, here in New England, in the American South, Midwest, the West, uh, and it seems time after time people are genuinely surprised by the stories that I'm able to tell here because they often run against many of the standard versions of American history, uh, that one learns in elementary school and that are part of our national mythology. So, I'll start by telling you a little bit about how the book came into being and it's very much in conversation with with something that was happening at my university, Brown University, when I first arrived there more than 20 years ago. About 20 years ago, um, reparations activists, uh, particularly people like Charles Ogletree at Harvard University, were looking for a defendant to name in a reparations lawsuit. Some kind of uh, ongoing concern that was, you know, uh, around in the time of the transatlantic slave trade and where it could plausibly be argued that the wealth that was sustaining that institution today was built on that dirty money. So, our president, Ruth Simmons, the first black president of an Ivy League university, uh initiated what she called the Slavery and Justice Initiative and put us to work trying to figure out what exactly had happened. She was very clear that it would not be a very good thing if this all came out in a court discovery phase and that rather as a university we should do what universities do best, which is try to tell the truth, try to figure out actually the accurate history. So, digging into the archives of the Brown family and looking at the commercial world that these four brothers built during the last years of the British Empire and the first years of the United States, one of the things we found is that they were profoundly unsuccessful slave traders. They did not make money by sending voyages to West Africa. In fact, those voyages lost the money. But, we did not think this was particularly exculpatory. They tried to get dirty money, they just weren't very good at it. But, what we did find is that they made almost all of their money as the provisioners of the British Empire's Caribbean sugar empire. That is to say, the part of the British Empire that actually was valuable, the place where the most crucial commodity of the 18th century was being produced. Places like Jamaica, Barbados, places that enslaved laborers were being fed [clears throat] by the hard work of New England families. Uh places where the barrels were being made out of hardwoods from New England forests. Places where the horses that were turning the gears of the sugar engines were being raised on Rhode Island farms. And so, this provisioning trade very much uh sort of clued me into the ways in which locations that are not directly involved in the buying, selling, beating of other human beings, nonetheless are profoundly tied to a broader slave economy. One that could be national in scale, one that could be hemispheric in scale, one that it could even be global in scale. And so, it clued me into some kind of story that might be told around New England's role as a provisioner. But the slavery and justice report that Brown University uh then published in 2006 told a very tidy story. The relationship of New England and Rhode Island in particular to slavery seemed to come to an end at the moment in 1807, 1808 when the United States left the transatlantic slave trade. Uh the law said now no longer uh could American boats participate in carrying enslaved captives from West Africa to the Americas, and thus supposedly everyone had clean hands. And you think to yourself, well, I'm not quite sure about that because having uh you know, being uh a stone's throw from Pawtucket, a place that might make a comparable claim, Steve, to the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution. Uh in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, they would tell you that yes, this was where uh the spinning of cotton really got going at the end of the 1780s and the beginning of the 1790s thanks to Samuel Slater, and there was no source of this cotton other than through the exploited labor of enslaved men and women, first in the Caribbean and eventually in the American South. So, how do you tell a story of a New England Industrial Revolution that somehow seems to be a departure from slavery rather than uh a deepening of a set of relationships to slavery? And that's something I tried to explore in this book, asking how did New England's Industrial Revolution continue to be in conversation with a massive expansion of slavery as really the driving engine of the American economy. And one way to think about this is with a map. Uh this is a historical map. You may not be able to recognize that because it just looks like a Google map, but you'll notice at the very bottom Gulf of Mexico. We're sticking with this, people. Um And you'll notice two parts of the United States that are circled. The part that of course we're in in New England, uh a place that as museums like this will tell us, uh innovation, uh enterprise, created a new way of being in the world. Uh opportunities for people through hard work to uh receive rewards for their innovation, the transformation of a good deal of non-market labor into wage labor, and the massive increase in industrial output that ex- that it significantly improved the material standard of living for countless families, including working class families, over the first and middle decades of the 19th century. But then you'll also see the other part of the map, the the the ovular circle or the oval running from uh the Carolinas all the way through Alabama and Mississippi to Louisiana, uh places that at the beginning of the United States did not belong to the United States, but were a number of indigenous uh sovereign lands of of groups like the the Cherokee and the Creeks, but over the course of uh of several decades as the United States expropriated these lands, they became the heart of the American cotton industry. Uh and this expansion of the cotton frontier went hand in hand with the rise of the Industrial Revolution in New England. Now, these are stories that [clears throat] are typically told separately in American history for good reason. And and for those of you who are in your Civil War class, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about, right? We tell a story of how New England underwent this transformation to become a free labor society, how New England made a set of commitments to the dignity of labor and the idea that people should get to earn uh their their bread and to keep those earnings, uh and this was in fact what would come to define freedom. So New England is on a trajectory going this way. On the other hand, the cotton South becomes ever more invested in the production of agricultural commodities for global markets, ever more committed to the lifetime bondage and hereditary bondage of enslaved African descended men, women, and children. And it has a whole other set of commandments, and it seems to be going that way. So, if you have one part of the country going this way, one part of the country going that way, excuse me, the center cannot hold, and voila, 1861, it falls apart, and you get the Civil War. That is the typical story. The story that I try to tell in my book is somewhat different. It suggests that for most of the period, the 1810s, 20s, 30s, 40s, even through much of the 1850s, these regions were not antagonistic so much as synergistic, and that their economies had a great deal to do with one another, and that we can't, in fact, understand New England's industrial transformation without putting it in the same conversation as the transformation of of Creek hunting grounds into uh Alabama slave plantations. At the same time, we can't understand the experience of those places, we can't understand the experiences of enslaved men and women and children working in those spaces without having some sense of the tools that they were using, the shoes that they were wearing, uh and their other sort of uh material lives, which tied directly to the kind of work that was taking place in numerous small communities across New England. So, if you think synergy rather than antagonism, you can put these two regions together. And to do so in the book, I use two concepts that are fairly anachronistic, two terms that people don't generally think about as 19th century terms because they are so consistent with our more recent economic history. So, one term that I use is outsourcing, right? And I talk about the ways in which southern slaveholders who moved from the eastern seaboard, from places like Virginia and Maryland, to be build new plantation societies uh in what was then called the Southwest, they made a crucial decision to outsource the production of some of their key infrastructure. If we were to look at the lives of of plantations in places like Maryland or Virginia at the beginning of the 19th century, places like Monticello for example, a good deal of enslaved labor was devoted to making textiles and making tools. But the enslaved blacksmith who might have been responsible for making shovels and hoes and the enslaved weaver who might have been responsible for turning out the yards and yards of cloth that would dress her fellow enslaved men and women on a plantation like Monticello, when that woman or that man is is forcibly removed to a brand new plantation in Mississippi by a slaveholder whose investment is in growing as much cotton as possible as quickly as possible because that is where the greatest return on investment is because cotton is the most valuable commodity in the global economy at this moment, the decision to reallocate labor follows very quickly. And so that rather than having some enslaved workers doing things like weaving or blacksmithing, having every single person in the fields for as much time as possible becomes the economic imperative that drives these slaveholders. And so they look for new sources of the kinds of basic things you need to run a slave plantation. And so they outsource this production to New England. New England becomes the key provider of their plantation goods. The title of the book in fact refers to this term that would have been known to Americans north, south, black, white, enslaved, free as that constellation of very boring things, axes and shovels and shoes and hats and boots and coats and dresses that were part of the material basis of plantation labor. So these plantation goods are outsourced. Meanwhile, if we tell the story from New England, I can use another fairly inaccurate anachronistic term. And that's offshoring. New England functionally offshores its slavery. You know the term offshoring, right? Today, when people look to park their money in regimes across the world with different kinds of tax laws that allowed them to hide their wealth, or when people try to move factories to places that have lower labor standards so that they're not responsible for uh for for meeting uh unionized workers in the marketplace, or for meeting government standards for the work day, this kind of offshoring is also a way we might think about New England's relationship to slavery. At the moment when they are engaging in gradual emancipation, at a moment when the practice of legal bondages is ending in places like Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, these places nonetheless remain very much invested in enslavement. People who are living in New England come to have as much of an interest in the price of cotton as does any slaveholder, because it is indeed by the price of that cotton that they may be repaid for the axes that they have produced, or the shoes that they have made, or the textiles uh that have come off their looms. So, again, if we're thinking about a broader framework that is about the synergy of these regional economies over the first decades of the 19th century, it is by thinking about outsourcing and offshoring that we can see the ways that north and south function together. The book starts uh in New England, and it is very attentive to a number of small communities where virtually every family is involved somehow in making things for slave plantations over the first decades of the 19th century. I'm about to show you a map identifying some of those small communities, but before I do, I simply want to acknowledge the disappointment that is inevitably going to fall over this room. Which is to say, this small community is not on that map. And you might say, but we came here to find out about our small community. And I'm sorry about that. It does not figure in this book. But there's a very specific reason for that, and it's one I'll simply tell you at the outset. As I was surveying plantation goods, I was very interested in New England entrepreneurs who were looking develop to develop specific products for enslaved people to wear and use. They did field testing. They did what I call in the book plantation R&D. They traveled through the South. They gathered a great deal of information trying to produce products that could then market to slaveholders as crucial to increasing productivity or crucial to protecting the health of enslaved workers whose bodies were highly capitalized in the slave market. In this sense, the textile industry that is so crucial to the plantation goods sort of project is the woolens industry, and it is manufacturers of woolens both along the Blackstone River between Pawtucket and Worcester, but also in the southern part of Rhode Island running from from North Kingstown to Stonington and Mystic, Connecticut really where the woolens industry is most robust. Now, places like this produced a vast amount of cotton cloth made with slave-grown cotton, and much of that cloth returned to be part of the world of enslaved people's clothing and bedding and all of this kind of stuff. But very few, if any, of the entrepreneurs who were involved in the cotton industry tried to develop specific weaves of cotton or specific weights of cotton or specific varieties of cotton cloth that they could then turn around and sell as made explicitly and designed explicitly to increase production on the plantation. This is really only true in the woolens industry, and that is why the woolens industry occupies the heart of the book. But if you take a look at this map of a region that I'm sure is all familiar to you, we can identify a constellation of locales that in the 19th century would have been known as, for example, Collinsville, Connecticut, about 15 miles to the west of Hartford, as the leading site for the manufacture of the axes and machetes that enslaved workers would use to clear the lands of the Southwest and ultimately then to cultivate sugar in places like western Louisiana. Or we could look about 20 miles to the west of Worcester in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, acknowledged to be at the time the slave shoe capital of the United States, a place where virtually every family, families that own their own land, families that are engaged in subsistence agriculture, nonetheless devote significant amount of their time in the evenings and in the winters to producing shoes that will end up on the feet of enslaved people. We can talk about Haddam, Connecticut, down the Connecticut River, where the Scoville Hoe Company comes to develop what they call the planters hoe, and they go to the they go to Alabama and they do tests and they bring information back and they roll out hoe 2.0 and they send it to their slave-holding friends there and say, "Try this out and if this is not the greatest hoe that your slaves have ever used, we'll give you your money back." Right? Aggressive marketing, aggressive design. We can look in Stonington, Connecticut, a place where numerous local families had household looms in which they produced plaid cloth that slaveholders in places like Tennessee might recognize simply by sight as coming directly from Stonington. And a place like South Kingstown, Rhode Island, in the southern part of my state, where two entrepreneurs who are really at the heart of my book, a man named Rowland Gibson Hazard and Isaac Peace Hazard, pretty much transformed the southern Rhode Island countryside into the workshop of the plantate plantation clothing industry, activating numerous farming families to devote women's labor, daughters labor, mothers labor into the production of clothing that enslaved people will wear and use. So, let me show you a little bit about what that looks like from the perspective of the archive and give you a sense of what that research is. And as I explain this to you, then we can come back to uh the broader picture and the broader takeaway from this integrated national economy of slavery. So, much of my research in this looks like the kind of research that any ordinary social historian would do, or frankly any genealogist would do. So, many of this much of this may be familiar to you. So, for example, you might end up with a book from the payroll of the Hazards who are paying families in Southern Rhode Island for the manufacturing here in 1838 of ready-made clothing for enslaved people to wear. Enslaved people become some of the first Americans, in fact, who will wear clothing that has been manufactured in standardized sizes by people who live hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. It's really a remarkable transformation in the larger history of the American clothing industry. But here, in June of 1838, we see people like Daniel Gould's wife and William Davis's wife and James Wilson's wife and Hannah Rodman being paid for making uh in that week six pairs of pants and six shirts, or for Hannah Rodman, 12 pairs of pants and 12 shirts. And with these kinds of account books, what's fascinating is the way in which they connect to what these families do with the money that they earn. Because almost all of these women who are doing this piecework sewing are paid in store credits. Which means that we can then open up those registers and see what it is that the Davis family bought with Mrs. Davis's work, or that the Gould family bought with Mrs. Gould's labor. Uh the fact that the women are largely not named on this is a testament to the legal practice of coverture, still robust in the 19th century, that hides most women married women's labor and earnings under the name of their husband. But once we go in the other books we into the other kinds of books, we see some remarkable things. We might see, for example, a record for Abby Rodman here in 1821, recognizing, if you look at the bottom of this, that for 27 weeks of labor she's been paid $54. But, much of that $54 has been spent on all sorts of things. A pair of gloves, a handkerchief, a pair of shoes, sundries, 2 lb of soap, 6 yd of cloth, 6 yd of flannel, a comb, calico, gloves. And by putting these kinds of records together, it becomes very, very clear that the material standard of living for impoverished New England families was, in fact, transformed by access to this opportunity. That families that were really making sort of eking out the most hardscrabble existence, by being able to allocate additional labor within the context of subsistence farming, were able to acquire that second pair of shoes, that third pair of shoes. They were able to acquire kinds of fabrics that were far more uh or of of a far higher quality than the very fabrics that they were producing. And this becomes a really crucial story for understanding what this industry does for small uh farming families uh throughout New England. I spend a lot of time in the book talking about someone named Penelope Rodman, and this is her tombstone that you might be able to make out on the left side uh of this image. Born in 1807, died in 1857. She's married to a man named Daniel Gould, and may remember Daniel Gould's wife on the previous uh payroll, that's Penelope Rodman. And Penelope Rodman is a remarkable story for thinking about this kind of material transformation of New England lives through this industry. So, again, like a good genealogist, you could start with the uh the the the census of 1810, find Robert Rodman, uh see that Robert Rodman has uh a number of children, like eight children. He and his wife are trying to raise them in Southern Rhode Island, but then you might also on the left side discover that in 1814, Robert Rodman has been incarcerated in debtors prison because he's unable to pay his bills. And this is a fairly common predicament for people living on the economic margins of this period. When you can't pay your bills, your creditors are entitled to put you in jail. When Robert Rodman is put into jail, a number of his neighbors come and they they issue uh statements that give testimony to uh the state legislature that is empowered to provide a discharge for an incarcerated debtor. And at the bottom of this testimony, a neighbor tells a remarkable story. He says, "I had a son who uh wanted to start a school here in Southern Rhode Island, and I knew that the Rodmans had like seven kids. So, I went over to tell Robert Rodman that I could give him a discount on this school that my son would be more than happy to educate his kids, and Robert Rodman says, 'I can't. My children have no clothing to wear. They would be naked, and I cannot send them, and thus the answer is no.'" So, here's a family again who is so poor that the children are wearing tattered rags, and the father ends up in debtors prison. But what happens at the end of the 1810s and the early 1820s is quite remarkable. And what happens is that the leading entrepreneur in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, uh a man named Isaac uh or two men, Isaac Gibson Hazard and and and Rowland uh uh Rowland Gibson Hazard and Isaac Peace Hazard, they begin producing textiles for plantation markets, and they come to create opportunity for families like the Rodmans to pull themselves out of this poverty. So, by 1821 or 1822, we can see Robert Rodman's account book, and we can see at the bottom here on the right, by his children's work uh on his account, $225. And if you go through this ledger, you see that in fact, the children's labor has paid their house rent, has paid for virtually all of their food, has paid for virtually everything that has sustained this family and brought them back to solvency. And we can see the ways in which it's not just buying basic things like molasses or butter or sugar or pork, but also buying larger quantities of cloth, additional pairs of shoes, and again we can see that that robust rising standard of living. If we trace Penelope Rodman who's doing this as a 12-year-old and then as a 15-year-old, we can see that she'll be spending time then signing contracts to weave for the Hazards in 1822, again in 1825, earning more money than her brothers can potentially earn because they're not able to do this work right away, certainly more money than her mother and father can earn because they're not the desired labor force for this, and we can trace someone like Penelope Rodman all the way then through as she becomes a married woman to doing that piecework stitching of clothing that enslaved people will soon be wearing. So again, you can put this all together and tell a fairly remarkable story. But the archive contains some other kinds of records that have to sit alongside these. And these are lists that look more like this. This is a list that comes into the Hazards in 1839 from a Louisiana slaveholder whose plantation is called Providence Plantation. And on this list he he includes the names of Kitty and Tom and Cuffee and Henry and Henry Middleton and Fountain and Jim and Charles and Isaac and Daniel with their ages, with their heights, with their foot measurements, sometimes with bodily descriptions like heavy built, and sends these with orders that say, I need to buy plantation suits for all of my people. And the term plantation suit will come up a great deal. This does not mean that enslaved people were receiving custom-made clothing, anything but the sort. New England manufacturers like the Hazards quickly took these bodily measurements and reduced them to standardized sizes in which height was usually the only metric so that a man who is 5'6" and weighs 120 lb and a man who is 5'6" and weighs 220 lb would receive the same garment, which would then require a good deal of additional labor in plantation spaces by enslaved seamstresses to enlarge these clothes or to create trades so that people could finally get ready-to-wear clothing because when it arrived it was anything but that. So, one of my goals in this book was to try to see if I could say here in 1839 someone like Sarah Brooks or someone like Sarah Craig was wearing a dress that someone like Penelope Rodman had made back in New England. Could I follow a specific single garment from the hands of a New England farm woman to the body of an enslaved field worker in Louisiana and through that movement talk about these lives that are often very much removed from one another that not are not often thought to be part of the same story, but by that material artifact tied profoundly together. I can't quite get you that close, but I can get you pretty close. I can, for example, use a list like this, like the one you saw before, to see in the left-hand column that people like Leonard Williams or Robert Gardner's wife in the left-hand column were producing for J.B. Goldsby. And Goldsby is a Louisiana slaveholder. So, I can then find his records, which might exist in an archive in Louisiana, and I can say, "Well, who are the enslaved men and women on that plantation in 1839? Who, if there's a record, are is receiving cloth or receiving clothing in that season?" And I can come pretty close to tell you that a woman on that plantation might be wearing something that Mrs. Gardner made or Mrs. Greenman made or Mrs. Williams made. And again, that makes it pretty pretty close. And again, we can then, if we think about the lives of the enslaved, someone like Solomon Northup, the New England or the New York man who is who is kidnapped and who spends 12 years in slavery, this is the frontispiece of his book, Solomon in his plantation suit. That plantation suit is a Rhode Island garment, right? This notion that there is an open collar shirt with a matching pair of pants, put those together, call it a plantation suit, and we see these Rhode Island women making these time and time again. The book ultimately comes to spend much of its final chapters in plantation space, thinking about the ways in which these New England manufactured goods shape the material lives of enslaved people, how their fit, how their motion, how their affordances ultimately create political possibilities and shape the texture of work itself on the plantation. And when I bring the talk to a conclusion today, I'll share exactly what that means. But before I do, I want to spend another minute on sort of these New England manufacturers because they are largely the prime movers and the kind of people who were whose lives could be documented in a museum like this one. So, again, someone like Rowland Gibson Hazard of Peace Dale, Rhode Island. This is his business card as he does plantation-to-plantation sales in the South in the 1830s, specializing in coarse woolens, cottons, brogans, which are kind of high-top boot, and hats. Hazard is born in in in early the early 1800s in 1801. His older brother Isaac is born in 1793. The two of them have a very fine Quaker upbringing. In fact, they're sent from Rhode Island to be educated at the Westtown Friends School in Pennsylvania. Their family has a long history of testimony against slavery, but by the time their coming of age in the 1810s, they're pretty much not too concerned about that. So, you end up with these incredibly powerful artifacts in the letters in the archive where it's dotted with the these and thous and thines of Quaker diction, and yet it's, you know, "Thou art to make 200 yards of negro cloth." Right? And you come to think like that's that's kind of a remarkable thing that one confronts in these kinds of records. But the Hazards uh they they take over their father's mill, they begin producing low-quality uh woolen textiles, but they do so before they actually have a market. And so they send them to Boston. Hey, Boston merchants, can you sell these to say uh will ship captains who might want garments to go in the slop chest? Eh, not so much. They send them to New York. Can you sell these to uh canal diggers working in the western part of the state who are digging the Erie? Might they want these fabrics? Eh, not so much. They send them to Philadelphia and they get a really remarkable response. "Many slaveholders in our in our market at this moment and they seem interested in these fabrics thinking that they will make ideal clothing for slaves." And with that tip, the Hazards really come to devote almost all of their energies to breaking into the southern market. They begin to write to slaveholders in South Carolina and Georgia asking for advice. They travel to the south to meet slaveholders and ultimately to talk to enslaved people about what are the desired qualities of a fabric. There's testimony that comes from the letters when one brother is traveling through Georgia back to the brother in Rhode Island saying, "I talked to the men and women on the so-and-so plantation and they said 42 inches uh fabric is much more desirable than 28 inches or 36 inches. They say 16 oz or 17 oz to the yard is more desirable than 12 to 13. They say twill woven is more desirable than plain woven. They say that the wool cotton blend holds up better than the all wool uh fabric. So there's a huge amount of in essence we might call consumer feedback coming from slaveholders, coming from southern march merchants, but also coming from the enslaved that will shape New England's manufacturing practices. The Hazards very quickly come to develop a fairly robust presence in this market, and already by the end of the 1820s, their fabrics are being marketed by named brand. But a remarkable thing happens as these fabrics move into Southern markets, and that is that they come to have a new name that is not one that would be prevalent in Rhode Island and well-known in Rhode Island until they make it so. And so you'll see this, and it's a bit jarring, but I've already tipped you off to what it is on this advertisement from a Charleston, South Carolina dry good merchant, William Ripley, whose store on King Street will offer the Hazards negro cloths. So what makes a cloth negro cloth? Right? That's a really interesting question, and it's a remarkable sort of process by which an inanimate object can be part of the larger history of making race in the United States. The term negro cloth is a thing, and it is also not a thing. And here's what I mean by that. People in the north and people in the south, people who are black, people who are white, people who are enslaved, and people who are free would know this term by the late 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. They could talk about it as though it was a distinct material object. And at the same time, the same fabric when it rolls off of a mill in Rhode Island and is sent to the Erie Canal might be called Kentucky jeans. When it rolls off a factory in in Rhode Island and is sent to a whale ship in Nantucket, might be called kersey or Welsh plains. But when it's sent to the south to be worn by enslaved men and women, it is transformed into this magical thing called negro cloth. There is no difference in the textile. It is functionally be same textile that working class people across the United States are wearing in the 1820s and 1830s, but it is thus weighted with a kind of racial stigmatization. And it is sold to slave holders in a kind of clever marketing as something that will help you extract labor more efficiently and will protect your investment in human property. The Hazards become through this label of Negro cloth keen marketers to slave holders and they make claims. This is not just fabric, this is performance fabric. Your people, they will say, can pick faster by wearing our cloth. Your people can protect their health during the cold mornings from respiratory diseases because this fabric will breathe and keep the moisture off of their bodies. There's a whole discourse that emerges that draws on racist ideas of bodily difference uh to create a claim that these are performance fabrics that will be necessary for enslaved people. And the Hazards are really at the forefront of the of this market. But at the same time, as we see from one of their price lists and one of their merchandising advertisements from New Orleans by the middle of the 1830s, it is not just one thing. That there are dozens of different fabrics of different width, of different weight, of different weave, of different composition, of different color, of different price points that can all be marketed under the label of Negro cloth. So, if you were to walk into a store in in New Orleans or a store in Mobile or a store in Charleston in 1840 and say, "Please show me some Negro cloth." They would say, "Well, do you want the twill woven or the plain woven? Do you want the 32-in or the 36-in? Do you want the all wool or do you want the wool cotton blend? Do you know, on and on and on." And so, it allows slave holders also and enslaved people too to engage in a conversation around sort of differentiation and a conversation about a kind of expertise where slaveholder Jones will say the best fabric is this and slaveholder Smith will say the best fabric is that and the enslaved man Jim will say well actually the best fabric is this and the enslaved seamstress Martha will say I know better than the rest of you because I'm the one cutting it and sewing it that this is in fact the best fabric and that creates a dialogue that involves people north and south about what fabric actually needs to look like. We learn more about the fabric itself through some remarkable records that the United States government prepared in the context of trying to impose tariffs on British imports. When I started this research I thought tariffs this is the most boring subject on earth. Little did I know that we would now be obsessed with tariffs. So maybe some of you remember from high school history the most boring part really was the tariff debates of the 1820s and 1830s. It's it's mind-numbingly boring except if you get into the weeds it's almost all about the question of who is going to dress the slaves. Will it be weavers in Wales and Scotland and England or will it be weavers and seamstresses in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut. So in order to sort of figure this out the government sends a bunch of surveys to manufacturers and so here from 1832 they inquire from the Rocky Brook factory in South Kingstown, Rhode Island what do you make and what is your your business look like and there are a couple things I wanted to identify for you on this record that speak to some of the challenges but also some of the opportunities of this research. So number two the question is what do you make? Oh we make negro cloth, right? This is not something that is unspoken. This is not something that people are hiding. This is a term that the federal government recognizes. And indeed if you look at the congressional debates over tariffs the term negro cloth comes up time and time again in the congressional record. Again in this sense it becomes a very real thing. Question number 16 at the very bottom is where's your primary market? And this would be the place where any reasonable historian who wanted to get a sense of the scale of this industry would go, hoping that in fact you would say shipped to New Orleans, shipped to Mobile, shipped to Charleston, and that we could see the ways in which this interregional trade would function. Unfortunately, virtually every manufacturer of clothing for slaves says what these people say, shipped to New York. Already by the 1820s, New York is the major wholesale market of the United States. It is the place where uh southern slaveholders do most of their purchasing, and to that extent the records don't give us much sense of a quantifiable uh amount of this business. So, it's hard to say, did the production of clothing for slaves account for 6% of northern GDP or 7% of the New England textile industry? You can't use these records to come up with a reasonable quantitative estimate, and that is somewhat disappointing. Number 10 also points out something quite interesting about this, and this is about the supply chain. The question is, where do you source your raw materials? And the the people in Rocky Brook say, we get 20,000 lb of wool at 35 cents from Smyrna. Not Smyrna, Georgia, not Smyrna, New York, Smyrna in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Ottoman Empire. And when not when they're not importing uh coarse wool from Smyrna, they're importing it from Buenos Aires. So, it is a global supply chain, which has all sorts of implications, right? If the British are blockading Argentina, the price of this wool goes up dramatically. New England manufacturers can't afford to purchase it, and enslaved people don't get clothing the following year, right? The people who were on the end of this global supply chain are the enslaved, and they are often the most exposed. But, it also means that if we're trying to create more complicated stories that might weave together the lives of a New England seamstress and a uh an an enslaved uh field worker, we might also now need to have an Ottoman goat herder or or an Argentine sheep rancher as part of this much broader space. Again, though, in the book, I really want us to pay attention to enslaved people as as the folks wearing and using these goods. And this is a detail from an 1848 uh fairly famous painting called War News from Mexico by Richard Caton Woodville. Uh at the center of this scene that these two figures are looking up at, a group of white men are standing on the porch of a hotel holding a giant newspaper reading about the United States' military victories over Mexico. But, in the bottom right-hand corner in the most American part of this image, the people who are dressed in red, white, and blue, uh we see an enslaved man and an enslaved child who are functionally modeling the range of textiles in which enslaved people might find themselves in this period, ranging from the tattered rags that leaves the child exposed to the elements and and without really any privacy at all to the fairly substantial red woolen shirt, blue woolen patched pants, and ankle-height brogans uh that festoon this man. And if we're to look closely at his clothing, it is very much possible to trace almost all of it back to New England communities where these goods would have been made. So, as I bring this talk to conclusion, I want to talk about his shoes. Uh and his shoes, as I hinted at earlier, would have come from North Brookfield, Massachusetts. Again, the slave shoe capital of New England in this period. Two entrepreneurs there by the 1830s, Tyler and Ezra Batchelder, have transformed this region into a mass uh factory of shoe production without actually ever building a factory at all. They don't have a centralized workspace other than for cutting leather. But, the leather that they cut is then distributed to hundreds, if not thousands, of families in Central and Western Massachusetts. And at the end of a season, those families turn back shoes, turn back boots, are paid in store credits, and the town of North Brookfield is credited with something making something like 400,000 pairs of these shoes in any given year. It is enormous and these all end up as sort of on the feet of enslaved people. The russert brogan becomes a particular marker of the enslaved and these shoes are referenced for example in fugitive slave advertisements as the standard footwear that you would expect to find on an enslaved man or an enslaved woman in flight. The shoes have a couple of interesting functions and features. One and this is if we get to look at their design, this is the sole of the shoe and there's a kind of planned obsolescence built into this because one of the innovations that the bachelor that that the bachelors bring to this industry is to move away from hand stitching the sole to the upper which is fairly time-consuming and instead using wooden pegs and nails to attach the upper to the sole and in doing so these shoes have a clear life expectancy of six months, no more than six months. This is actually something that works well for virtually everyone, right? The slaveholders can say the price point of this is quite low. But also by getting to give out these goods twice a year rather than just once a year, we can pretend as though we are benevolent caregivers and in fact they develop a huge number of rituals around these distributions so that shoes that people need to do coerced labor ultimately are re-conceptualized in the minds of slaveholders as gifts. Northern manufacturers of course like this because with the planned obsolescence built into the shoe, they can sell twice as many shoes because they go out twice a year rather than once a year. And enslaved people would say we would always rather have shoes twice a year than once a year because you would give us no guarantee that a once a year shoe would actually last once a year would actually be better and that by a more regular distribution uh can do a great deal more. But thinking more about the shoe actually tells us uh a few other interesting things about the lives of enslaved people. And this is where you can take a fairly mundane material artifact like the shoe and connect it to the larger political project of enslaved people's quest for liberation. The shoe is crucial in this regard. For example, no one is able to run away to the north without shoes. People who in fact come across the Mason-Dixon line and escape to freedom often say, "I couldn't have done it without footwear." No one is on the record of having made it without shoes. But it's not just for the the daring escapes. If you need, for example, to go see your wife on a neighboring plantation overnight and make it back by 5:00 a.m. the next morning before the horn blows to be in the fields before you are whipped for being late, shoes are crucial for this. If you need to go meet several plantations away with your co-religionists in order to have a prayer ceremony that sustains your soul, you need shoes to get there and get back in time. Shoes create these larger kinds of communities, right? Shoes allow people on different plantations to come to see themselves as part of a broader collective, to maintain kin groups across space, to maintain religious identities across space, to maintain political identities across space, to meet about what's going to be done about this particular patroller, what's going to be done about this particular abusive overseer. And one of the things I argue in this book is that shoes basically create a political network that is latent until finally the moment comes in 1861 when it is activated and allows for enslaved people when the Union Army comes on the horizon to engage in this process of self-liberation. So it is a really important thing here. But what the shoe giveth, I would argue the shoe also taketh away. And so here is a fugitive slave advertisement from 1841 that notes something else quite interesting. So here when Marriott has has fled, uh he is sought to be recaptured because of his blue cloth coat, his white uh pants, his small fur hat, and his black brogan shoes number 13. New England industry has standardized sizes. And by standardized sizes, you now have a shoe size. You don't have big feet, you don't have small feet, you have number 13s. And so, this man can now be recaptured if someone gets him and looks at his shoes and says, "You meet this description." Not because maybe you talk like this or maybe you look like that, but because you have these number 13s. So, again, the standardization of this has real consequences. But, the story of North Brookfield is a very interesting one. And again, I'll just remind you just a little bit to the west of Worcester. And as I begin to sort of wrap up my talk, I'll tell you exactly what I mean by this. In 1854, the town's congregational minister, a man named Thomas Snell, writes a town history. He's been the congregational minister in North Brookfield since 1798. So, he has spent a long time there. And what he writes in the town history is this. When I came to North Brookfield in 1798, this was the worst place on Earth. People here were dirt poor, people here were barbaric, no one went to church, everyone was drunk, we couldn't go outside because we were dressed so poorly, our streets were covered in in dirt and rocks. It was horrible. Horrible. He says, "Okay, here we are. It's 1854. Look at us now. We have 16 benevolent organizations, four temperance groups, six Bible societies, seven lyceums. Uh each Sunday, the churches are their pews are full. Our children are beautifully dressed, they're well educated. We don't have any drunk people, we don't have any vagrant people. We are a thriving community. Why?" And then Snell says it. He says, we all know why. Not $1.50 passes through our community from a source other than slave shoes. So again, this is not a secret and Snell is not an abolitionist. He is someone who actually finds William Lloyd Garrison and the other radical abolitionists to be a far greater threat to the future of the United States than the continuation of slavery. Uh, he has no sympathy for those folks. But he does think that people in his community should at least acknowledge what they're doing. He says, "This fact does not make slavery right and it doesn't make shoe making wrong. It simply compels us to recognize that this is the source of our prosperity." And it's that kind of recognition that Snell provides that ultimately is the larger point that I want to make with this book. And I'm going to end with a conversation by basically suggesting where I want people to take this. If you are interested in 19th century American history, this could very much be a book for you. You will learn about New England entrepreneurs. You will learn about New England workers. You will learn about the networks of credit and debt that tie north and south together in the history of advertising. You'll learn about southern slaveholders and their aspirations for mastery and dominance through goods like axes and shoes. And you'll learn about the resistance strategies of enslaved people deploying these in their struggle for liberation. But ultimately, I don't think you can read this book without thinking about our present moment. Without thinking about the kinds of dilemmas that confront us virtually every single day about our economic connectedness to forms of oppression across the globe. And this is again something that I think we confront all the time. Whether we're thinking about our carbon footprints, whether we're thinking about our desire to purchase fair trade coffee as opposed to unfair trade coffee, whether we're thinking about the label on our college bookstore sweatshirts that says "sweatshop free sweatshirts", whether we're thinking about paper straws, whether we're thinking about whether the electric vehicle that we're driving has a battery that is made with rare earth materials that require at the present moment hideous labor exploitation of children in West Central African mines. Right, every turn we make, every place we look, we are confronted with these kinds of entanglements. And this quest for clean hands does organize much of modern political life. It is something that people are acutely aware of and that we talk about a great deal. We are not the first, and that's one of the things I hope people take away from this book. To recognize that globalization did not begin in the 1990s and that the dilemmas of globalization have in fact as long of a history as globalization itself, several centuries now if not more. And then the kind of dilemmas about, yes, I would like to put this sugar in my tea, but yes, I need to recognize that this sugar only comes through the violence that produces it on places like Jamaica or Barbados. And that someone else's suffering is sweetening my drink. Right, that is crucial to the abolition movement in Britain in the 1790s. But these dilemmas come up again and again and again, and I try to think about the ways in which people in the 1830s and 1840s might have encountered them. Take someone like Penelope Rodman sitting at her loom, who I mentioned at the beginning of this talk. As she's throwing that shuttle back and forth, is she thinking I'm doing God's work? Is she thinking I'm fulfilling the biblical call to clothe the naked and that in fact I am a good Samaritan by making low-quality textiles for enslaved people to wear? Is she humming a minstrel tune because in a racist popular culture in New England at this moment of time this would be very much available. And the kind of degradation of black people in the popular culture could be very much woven into the very fabric that she's making. We don't know, but what we do know is that people in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s thought about it all the time. And the conclusions that they drew were not necessarily the conclusions that we would like to draw, but I think it is useful and helpful to be reminded that we are not alone and we are not the first, and that we are in fact entering this conversation about the way we want to engage a globalized economy uh in conversation and in the wake of these people. One of the terms that so often comes up around this, and I think a lot about it in this book, is complicity. Right? As a description of the condition of being entangled with someone else's exploitation. We are complicit in global warming because we take two flights a year to California. We are complicit in uh someone else's exploitation because we really can't get rid rid of our iPhone, and our iPhone requires these rare earth minerals, or we simply know that it's being assembled in a in a factory in China that doesn't adhere to the same labor standards that we might want to. We are complicit. So much of the history about slavery and New England industry has been organized around complicity for a very long time, as though this is something that we would find a smoking gun for, right? As though aha, we can definitively prove that New England was complicit. We are at a point now though in our scholarship that this is not enough, that complicity is the starting point rather than the end point. And I try to use this in this book to say, let's not say that complicity is the thing that we must prove, let us take complicity as the thing that is for granted, that we assume that complicity is simply part of modernity, it is part of the lives that people have lived in countries like the United States for hundreds of years, and the more interesting question is not whether people were or weren't complicit, but rather what did people do with that complicity? How did they make sense of it? How did they attempt to square those circles? How did they blind themselves to certain kinds of connections, but how did they come to see themselves as good people for other kinds of work that they did? And I think in thinking about beyond complicity, we do ourselves the best service in trying to figure out not only the world that we inhabit today, but the world we might hope to inhabit in the future. So, with that, I thank you so much for your attention and look forward to your questions tonight. >> [applause] >> Thank you, Seth. Um, we will take some questions from the audience. Please wait till I come to you with the microphone so we can record it even if we can hear you in the room. >> So, thank you for your, um, triggering, traumatizing lecture for me as a black American. Um, my question is in the last sort of pending comment that you made, complicity, how do you, how are you looking at the current conversation about reparations for American freedmen and black Americans? >> Yeah, no, this is this is a very a very important question. And as as you know, my my talk began with, uh, this research coming out of the reparations activism of the 1990s and the likelihood that my own institution, Brown University, was going to be named the defendant in in a suit. I think as we come to recognize that the United States' economy doesn't make any sense without recognizing slavery as its driving engine, uh, the ability to deny, uh, the agenda of reparatory justice stops making sense. And I think there is an incredibly strong, not in merely moral claim, but empirical claim based on the fact that there is no American prosperity that doesn't have its origins here in this national economy of slavery. But the question then becomes how do we mobilize that? How do we institute that into public spending, into public policy, into a project that draws not necessarily on a given set of perpetrators, but rather on the collective of the United States itself. And I think frankly that is where our best chance for any kind of repertory justice is going to come is not identifying this family and this family and this family and and and and identifying the need to reallocate their wealth from some from some funds into other funds, but rather to say collectively as the United States, can we choose to redress this part of our history? Can we make ourselves whole as a society? And can we do so with active and robust public policy that seeks to create true equality and to remedy the racial wealth gap? I'm not quite sure how to do that and I'm certainly not sure how to do that at this moment in our political lives. >> Tony, uh thanks for your presentation. Um I'm just kind of curious um as we get into the tail end of the period you're talking, so into the '50s and then into the 1860s and then immediate post-war uh post-Civil War, um what is happening with the structuring of these plantation goods manufacturers and then like my general assumption from my general understanding of like New England economic manufacturing histories of a lot of these things just become much more mechanized and then those industries move, but like what's the impact um both from the war but also with changing manufacturing processes uh on these places that have become so economically based in slavery. >> Now, wonderful question. So, I would have thought when I started this research that the entrepreneurs at the heart of the plantation goods industry would be dragged kicking and screaming into the Civil War, right? And this is one of the things that that their Southern customers say. >> [clears throat] >> They They say the north will never kill its golden goose. They're not going to do anything about slavery cuz it's going to simply cost them too much. But it turns out people like the Hazards, people like the Bachelors, people like the brothers running Collinsville rush headlong into the Civil War. They embrace the Republican Party not necessarily because of the Republican Party's position on slavery, which is a very very small part of their platform, but because of the Republican Party's far bigger platform commitments to economic development. If you are a businessman in New England and a political party comes along and says, "You want a central bank? You want a protective tariff? You want federal spending on infrastructure to allow you to have greater market efficiencies?" Sign me up. And indeed Rowland Gibson Hazard himself is a delegate at the 1856 Republican convention and again in 1860. They are not sad to see the South go in this sense. However, their their loss is cushioned by a really crucial fact. Once the war breaks out, the factory that last week was making negro cloth, this week is making Union Army uniforms. The boots that are on the feet of Union infantryman had been the boots that were on the feet of enslaved field workers two or three years earlier. The hoe factories retool to make rifle ramrods. Basically, government contracts ease the loss of the southern market for many of these firms. Now, for some of these firms, this is in fact exactly what they're looking for and on the other side of the Civil War, they seek to then spend the capital that they've gained in advancing their mechanization and ultimately being able to produce far more and to produce better products for a national market instead. But others of these firms are very keen to re-enter the southern market through the logic that they speak about explicitly as 4 million liberated consumers. They look at the southern landscape and they see the cash register, you know, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching. Because while they could sell a significant amount of cloth or a significant number of shoes to southern slaveholders, they thoroughly believe that liberated and now free black men, women, and children organized in nuclear families will spend far more on consumer goods. That a husband as a good patriarch will be providing his wife with three or four pairs of shoes a year, not the one pair of shoes that the stingy slaveholder provides. That the family that is basically producing its own cotton for market and ganding to keep its earnings will buy calico and flannel and other kinds of fabrics that the slave owners did not distribute to them. They're very, very keen to enter the south again, and their vision is ultimately demolished by the fact that economic prosperity does not return for the freed people and that the violence of reconstruction and post-reconstruction ultimately obliterates the kind of consumer marketplace that they had fantasized about. Many of these firms, I should add, precisely for this reason, carry on into the 1880s, 1890s, but many of them are bankrupt by the first decades of the 1900s. Many of them suffered through the same sort of processes of deindustrialization that affects so much of the New England countryside as textile manufacturing picks up and moves to places like North Carolina. Uh so, it's also hard to say that any of these firms have successor firms or legacy firms that continue to bear their main their names, and that's another way that we could have answered uh the previous question, right? There isn't a Hazard Manufacturing Company that is a straight line from Rowland and Isaac Hazard in the 1810s to a company today that is capitalized in a certain amount. Same with the shoes, same with the axes, so on and so forth. And so that makes it very difficult to identify specific beneficiaries in the present day of this specific industry. >> The work that I do has to do right now with the aspect of the minstrel shows here in Boston put on by many of the bicycling clubs in the 1890s. Uh so that's a long ways away from your mentioning of the minstrel shows in the 1810s, I guess. Could you say a little bit more about the history of minstrelsy and [snorts] how it relate to certainly ideologically uh to support uh slavery and the institutions beyond slavery. >> Yeah. So, the the the minstrel show as an American invention is is usually traced to the late 1820s and the early 1830s. And indeed, this is where many of the stock characters with names like Jim Crow actually emerge on the stage of New York. Uh and then they come to travel in in in in and do performances uh throughout New England, throughout the Mid-Atlantic, and into the Midwest as well. They build on the much longer tradition of mocking black people in print that is part of New England's literary culture from the Revolution onwards. And scholars have talked about the ways in which once gradual emancipation comes in 1780s and 1790s, white popular culture really really really invest itself in trying to make black people stock characters, to degrade them through mockery, and that this is pretty much in the air that white New Englanders are breathing. So, to that extent, uh this is something that would be available uh in the process of white New Englanders coming to think about, well, what makes them white and what makes them different from the people for whom they are producing these goods. And what that thought about difference is can we can maybe imagine it as part of the good itself. Oh, I don't have to make this well because it's just for this person who I don't care about, who I hate, who I think is inferior to me, right? We can think about the way in which quality and white supremacy might affect the nature of the shoes themselves. But we can also think about the ways in which white people throughout New England who don't know any black people, who've never seen any black people, who are unlikely to talk to any black people, nonetheless come to have real strong opinions about black people. And opinions about whiteness as as as as a benefit and as blackness as a stigma because they spend a lot of time talking about the kind of shoes that black people wear rather than the kind of shoes that they wear cuz they're spending their time making those shoes. And in an industry in which they are making axes and Kentucky axes, and the term Kentucky is serving as a synonym for south, or where they're making cloth and negro cloth, or where they're making uh brogans and negro brogans, right? This creates a conversation, and it's a conversation that white Americans, again, who live far from the plantation and who don't have day-to-day experience with black people, nonetheless come to think a lot about race through these goods. And that's one of the things I try to explore in this book is the ways in which these goods fit not only into an economic relationship, but also into the nationalization of white supremacy, if you will. >> Um this is a contemporary question, which is with all the talk now about redoing museums and cutting of grants um to give a more positive view of American history, are you starting to feel that or do you sense that um that the way in which museums or books may describe, you know, avoid the complexity that you're describing? Um and is there any effort to push back at that? What's that going to look like over the next few years? >> Yeah, it's it's it's a wonderful question. And I think the landscape is very unstable right now. As a a person with a tenured professorship at a fairly wealthy institution, I don't worry for my job. I don't worry that when I get up and teach a class that says that slavery is really important to American history, that I'm going to be carted off to the camps next week. I say that jokingly and and and probably with a degree of of mockery, but I also know that that's very real. And I know that there are other people on campuses who don't have tenure or who by virtue of their subject position or their immigration status are in fact vulnerable to exactly that. And we've seen that with the kind of deportations here in in New England of of students through their speech and so on and so forth. So, this is very much real. Um, in light of that, I think that our professional organizations need to stand tall and try to declare the urgency of a full and truthful American history. And the major organizations of of the historians have tried to do that. Um, but I think it also is very much then tied up in federal funding. And if in fact the federal government is going to tie every suit future NEH grant to declaring only the positive things of American prosperity, then institutions that have long relied on federal funding are need to get going to need to find other sources. And so, does that mean that private philanthropy is the thing that will carry a true American history forward? Perhaps. Is it the kind of thing where simply people going about their business and demanding a truthful history will be important? Absolutely. So, I mean, I think as say installations in the Smithsonian change in the next couple of years, right? People who visit these institutions need to say absolutely not. Need to say this is inaccurate. Need to say this is inadequate. Need to say this is a fiction that we grew up learning about the kind of propagandistic regimes in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union and we were not that and yet here we are. And how do we stop that? So, I think it requires uh uh not just sort of institutions and leaders, but everyday people demanding a truthful history and calling out the places where we're being denied it. >> I'd like to know how wool is a good fabric in the South. >> That is a great question and and initially you would say like, "Oh my goodness, is this just an additional layer of torture that is part of the slave regime?" Um but in actuality when slaveholders tried to stop giving woolen textiles to enslaved people, enslaved people was like, "No. You're you're stinting. You're holding back. You're not giving us the good stuff." How could wool be the good stuff? Well, and many of us actually have the experience of performance wool today. Uh wool does things that cotton can't do in terms of wicking, uh in terms of pulling moisture off the body and keeping moisture off the body, in having particularly when it is uh woven uh twill woven as having greater kinds of potential for mobility and dexterity and flexibility than say a cotton cloth. If you've ever tried to work in a long-sleeve cotton shirt that's all wet, you recognize how that fabric doesn't have any give. You recognize how it in fact impedes your mobility. And if you're a person who is trying to produce a quota of cotton a day and if you don't, you're going to be beaten, that mobility matters a great deal to you. And so, it is largely the case that cotton or that wool does serve the kind of performance needs of field laborers, does protect their arms and legs from the rough stems of cotton plants, does last longer than cotton cloth, and does allow people's arms and legs to move with more ease and more speed. Um so, it does become quite desirable. Is it scratchy and horrible? Yes. But, the other thing about wool is that it felts, and that the combination of sweat and sunlight and uh the mordants that are part of the dyes do create, over the course of a month or 2 month, a worn-in fabric that in many cases is softer than cotton. And many slaveholders and enslaved people will talk about this process of wearing in clothing. But, it's a weird thing because at the very moment it is worn in and becomes comfortable, it's precisely the moment that it gives out, and then the next provision comes. There's a kind of planned obsolescence built into this, as well. But, there are many, many reasons to think about wool as actually a desired textile rather than uh an imposed textile in this setting. >> Um I have a two-parter. In your looking through the archives, is there any record of either North Brookfield or the Hazards trying to build retail relationships with plantations and plantation owners in New England, like the Royals in Medford and um their plantation in Medford, but also the one in Antigua. Um and then my second question is that the original colonizers of Hawaii were from Massachusetts with uh James Dole, who is a Harvard industrialist. And is have you read of any connections maybe that translated from the plantation goods and their productions here in the Continental US pre-Civil War to then developing plantation goods in Hawaii or elsewhere around the world? >> Right. No, these are both really good questions, and I'll and I'll take the second one first. Uh this was not something that I saw in my particular research, but it is exactly the kind of research question that I hope my book can inspire. Uh I hope that the Yes, sorry. No one wants that answer. Um It It is the case that by thinking more broadly about these long-distance economic connections, by thinking about the ways in which New England industry over its its crucial first years in the 19th century is tied to global processes of colonialism and imperialism, and that looking to find out exactly how would be time very well spent. But it might be that we find that these industrialists are putting a huge amount of money into Bible societies to trying to send Bibles to natives in Hawaii. And if you ask them, "Are you doing horrible things?" they would say, "No, we're in fact doing wonderful things." And indeed, one of the things that I confronted in this book thinking about this Rowland Gibson Hazard figure in particular is if we could go back and time travel and interview him and say, "Mr. Hazard, were you in fact skimming profits atop a corrupt system of human exploitation?" What are you talking about? I'm a philanthropist. And you're like, "A what? Excuse me? A philanthropist?" And here's what he would say. He would say, "Because I have organized this business, families like the Rodmans are not in debtors' prison anymore, and people like Penelope Rodman have homes and prosperity because I have created this world in a small corner of New England just like the people in Central Massachusetts have with benevolent societies, with temperance organizations. The quality of life has increased. And at the same time" this is the one that's the clincher "if I didn't make warm and durable clothing for the slaves, the slaves would go naked, and that would be worse. I am indeed fulfilling a biblical command to clothe the unclothed, and that makes me doing God's work rather than someone who is engaged in a criminal you know, uh form of exploitation. And I think that logic is on the one hand self-delusional and on the other hand totally real in the world that these people have created. And I think the more time we spend with New England industrialists in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s and beyond, we will find exactly this kind of self-justification. But we have to I think look at it not as exculpatory, but simply we have to understand these people as full of contradictions and able to maintain a notion of themselves as doing really good work even as we see what they've done is contribute to this system in the case of Hawaii of colonialism and so forth. But that work remains to be done and whether it's the connection there, whether it's a connection to parts of of Latin and Central America, I think scholars in the future can follow this in any number of other directions. The Hazards do maintain any number of deep personal relationships with Southern slave holders. They invite many of them to Newport in the summer so that they can then come across the bay in order to see what factory labor looks like in South Kingstown. They visit them. They attend their daughters' weddings. They send operatives from New England to help some of these for some of these slave holders begin their own industrial projects in the 1840s and 1850s. This is a social world and it is an American elite north and south that may be divided by whether it's slave owning or not, but which shares a whole set of assumptions about the kind of stewardship that wealthy people are supposed to provide for poor people and there's a kind of class solidarity that far exceeds the kind of regional division that we might otherwise expect. >> Thank you everybody. Thanks, Seth. >> Thank you. [applause] >> Mhm.