Review: Hannah Durkin and Ned Blackhawk show the cruel side of American history in their books

It was called the Black Belt. A 12 thousand square kilometer strip in East Alabama. The earth there was pitch black but above all: very fertile. That Black Belt made Alabama the last refuge of cotton growing. Everywhere else the soil had become exhausted by this cultivation.

In Alabama, the last plantation owners were preparing for the last big profits. Prairie Bluff was the heart of the region. They could throw their money away there. Money earned through murder because, writes Hannah Durkin The survivors of the Clotilda, in the Black Belt “the slavery system functioned at its cruelest and most efficient.” Tens of thousands of enslaved people were driven there in the years 1820-1860 to harvest cotton and die. Among them were many survivors of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to make the gruesome journey from West Africa to the United States.

That journey was the result of a bet by several slave traders. The trade was already illegal. There was still supply in Africa, but British and American patrols controlled Atlantic shipping traffic. Meanwhile, in the US South, prices for enslaved people rose. Would it still work? There was a lot of money to be made.

So a ship was built, manned and sent away. 110 Africans, including women and children, were crammed into the hold. Seven did not survive the journey. The others, starving, weakened, were landed in the summer of 1860 and secretly traded. A few were lucky and found a humane owner. Most don’t.

The work on a cotton plantation was grueling, lasting from dawn until often late at night, and the enslaved (Durkin consistently speaks of ‘prisoners’) were beaten for the slightest thing. The food consisted of cornmeal, supplemented by the enslaved themselves with everything they found in the area that seemed edible.

Hardly any improvement

Dunkin closely follows a number of Clotilda survivors. She wrote a book that regularly grabs the reader by the throat. But there was also hope. The Civil War broke out and from 1863 Northern armies swept through the Southern states. The enslaved were ‘liberated’ and then left to their fate. After the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, his vice president Andrew Johnson became president. He himself had owned slaves until 1863. Johnson wanted everything to go back to how it was as much as possible. And so the battle against slavery was lost after all. In the decades that followed, white terror put an end to every attempt to give blacks a dignified existence.

Around 1920, sixty years later, journalists ‘discovered’ the last survivors of the Clotilda and wrote down their heartbreaking stories about the journey, the hunger, the fear and the liberation, which had hardly brought any improvement. Only one thing brought a smile to their faces: Africa. Life was good there, they were free and there was plenty of food. That’s where they belonged.

Prairie Bluff was founded in 1815, after the Creek tribe was expelled from there. Exterminated is a better word. The leader of the massacre, Andrew Jackson (he would become president in 1829), refused to talk of a war, because the Creeks were not people. His campaign had everything to do with slavery: Alabama had to be secured for the slave economy before the gutmen in Washington could intervene.

Indigenous perspective

The Creek War is just one part of Ned Blackhawks The rediscovery of America. Blackhawk, a Yale professor and member of the Shoshone, aims to offer the reader an “indigenous perspective on the discovery of the Americas.” Not the white story with tough explorers, but the story of the gradual, violent expulsion of the American indigenous population.

That’s not easy. There is some concern Native American history much has been achieved in the last decades, but the result remains poor, analytically, compared to the traditional ‘white’ perspective. And then Blackhawk also packs five centuries into one book. But his message gets through. “The pervasiveness of violence and dispossession are more than just footnotes or afterthoughts in American history. They question its central thesis.’

America was not ’empty’ and the US was founded on violence – against Native Americans and against enslaved people. The big question is whether the nation that considers itself chosen can ever live with this truth.