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“British gold and promises of personal freedom served as futile incentives among the Negroes of the American Navy; for them, the proud consciousness of duty well done served as a constant monitor and nerved their strong black arms when thundering shot and shell menaced the future of the country; and, although African slavery was still a recognized legal institution and constituted the basic fabric of the great food productive industry of the nation, it was the Negro’s trusted devotion to duty whichever guided him in the nation’s darkest hours of peril and menace.”
By Alex Hays (US Naval History Command) Kelly Miller, a premier black intellectual at the turn of the 20
This Week In Illinois History: Abolitionism Begins in Illinois (Feb. 1, 1833) (Feb. 1, 2021)
One hundred and eighty-eight years ago, Illinois’s nascent anti-slavery movement began to pick up steam. On Feb. 1, 1833, eleven men who shared a fierce loathing of America’s peculiar institution banded together and established the Putnam County Anti-Slavery Society, the first anti-slavery society in Illinois, and one of the first in the western United States.
Many white settlers of Putnam County came from eastern abolitionist stock. In the early 1830s, they sought new opportunities along the fertile Illinois River, in the Spring Valley region north of Peoria. Putnam County quickly became a hotbed of abolitionist activity.
Statue of Shakespeare, Central Park, New York City. (Courtesy of Getty Images)
Before Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton asserted that slavery had been a “necessary evil” and urged that the US military be deployed in American cities “in an overwhelming show of force,” he made a quieter but equally extreme proposal during an appearance on the Fox News show
Sunday Morning Futures. While railing against allowing STEM students from China to study at US universities, he staked a claim for what counts as our foundational national texts. “If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that’s what they need to learn from America,” he said.