I am waiting, not so patiently, for my DNA results. It is said that a watched pot never boils, well what about a watched post office box. It's always empty, even when it's full of mail.
I spoke to a friend yesterday (AD) about my "project" tracing my family history. He said that it was something he would not do, because he might find out something he did not want to know. Well, the worst thing I could find is the thing that is already obvious. My family started out in this country as slaves. Moving on with my search is not hindered by this. My paternal great-grandmother was raped by a white man and had a child, my Aunt Rosie. Bad thing revealed and my search goes on. My paternal grandmother did really horrible things to other people, which I can't mention. That's something bad. There are family "secrets" and I know this, so my search goes on.
I've come to the conclusion that it's not the past that can hurt you. It's ignoring it and being blind to the present and the future. Learn from the past, don't repeat the past. I just desire to know my past. So here I am.
I was calculating last night. It seems that I have a firm grasp on my family going back about 150 (+/- 10 years). From roughly 1850 through the beginning of slavery, which, according to one timeline (see below) began in 1640. But the first Africans came to Virginia in 1619. So that's about 210 years. Somewhere in those 231 years, my mother's, mother's, mother's, etc. or someone in her line, was brought to this country.
I hope I can put this puzzle together.
The picture above is of me and my sister at Christmas. I must have been about seven. Our mother is standing just to the left and you can see her profile.
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1502 First reported African slaves in the New World.
1640-1680 Beginning of large-scale introduction of African slave labor in the British Caribbean for sugar production.
1791The Haitian Revolution begins as a slave uprising near Le Cap in the French West Indian colony of Santo Domingo and leads to establishment of black nation of Haiti in 1801.
1793Waves of white refugees pour into U.S. ports, fleeing the insurrection in Santo Domingo.
1794The French National Convention emancipates all slaves in the French colonies.March 22: U.S. Congress passes legislation prohibiting the manufacture, fitting, equipping, loading or dispatching of any vessel to be employed in the slave trade.
1800May 10: U.S. enacts stiff penalties for American citizens serving voluntarily on slavers trading between two foreign countries.
1804January 1: The Republic of Haiti is proclaimed. The hemispere's second Republic is declared on January 1, 1804 by General Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Haiti, or Ayiti in Creole, is the name given to the land by the former Taino-Arawak peoples, meaning "mountainous country."
1807British Parliament bans the Atlantic slave trade.Great Britain converts Sierra Leone into a crown colony.
1810British negotiate an agreement with Portugal calling for gradual abolition of slave trade in the South Atlantic.
1815At the Congress of Vienna, the British pressure Spain, Portugal, France and the Netherlands to agree to abolish the slave trade (though Spain and Portugal are permitted a few years of continued slaving to replenish labor supplies).
1817September 23: Great Britain and Spain sign a treaty prohibiting the slave trade: Spain agrees to end the slave trade north of the equator immediately, and south of the equator in 1820. British naval vessels are given right to search suspected slavers. Still, loopholes in the treaty undercut its goals. Slave trade flows strongly, 1815-1830. Slave economies of Cuba and Brazil expand rapidly.In the Le Louis case, British courts establish the principal that British naval vessels cannot search foreign vessels suspected of slaving unless permitted by their respective countries -- a ruling that hampers British efforts to suppress the slave trade.
1819U.S. and Spain renew commercial agreements in the Adams-Onis Treaty.U.S. Congress passes legislation stiffening provisions against American participation in the slave trade.Britain stations a naval squadron on the West African coast to patrol against illegal slavers.
1820May 15: U.S. law makes slave trading piracy, punishable by the death penalty.The U.S. Navy dispatches four vessels to patrol the coast of West Africa for slavers. This initial campaign lasts only four years before the Americans recall the cruisers and break off cooperation with the British.
1824Great Britain and the U.S. negotiate a treaty recognizing the slave trade as piracy and establishing procedures for joint suppression. But the Senate undercuts the treaty’s force in a series of amendments, and the British refuse to sign.
1825The Antelope case: A U.S. Revenue Cutter seizes a slave ship, the Antelope, sailing under a Venezuelan flag with a cargo of 281 Africans. The U.S. Supreme Court hears the case and issues a unanimous opinion declaring the slave trade to be a violation of natural law, meaning it can be upheld only by positive law.But the ruling sets only some of the Africans free, holding that the U.S. could not prescribe law for other nations and noting that the slave trade was legal as far as Spain, Portugal, Venezuela were concerned. So the vessel is restored to its owners, along with those Africans designated by the court as Spanish property (numbering 39).
1831A large-scale slave revolt breaks out in Jamaica -- brutally repressed.
1833Great Britain passes the Abolition of Slavery Act, providing for emancipation in the British West Indies -- set to take effect August 1834. (Following emancipation, a 6 year period of apprenticeship is permitted.)
1835June 28: The Anglo-Spanish agreement on the slave trade is renewed, and enforcement is tightened. British cruisers are authorized to arrest suspected Spanish slavers and bring them before mixed commissions established at Sierra Leone and Havana. Vessels carrying specified “equipment articles” (extra mess gear, lumber, foodstuffs) are declared prima-facie to be slavers.
1837Britain invites the U.S. and France to create an international patrol to interdict slaving. The U.S. declines to participate.
1838In the British West Indies, most colonial assemblies have introduced legislation dismantling apprenticeships. Laws against vagrancy and squatting attempt to keep the social and labor system of the plantation economy intact, with varying results.
1839January: Nicholas Trist, U.S. Consul in Havana, recommends that the administration dispatch a naval squadron to West Africa to patrol for slavers, warning that the British would police American vessels if the U.S. did not.
June 12: The British navy brig Buzzard escorts two American slavers, the brig Eagle and the schooner Clara, to New York City to be tried as pirates. Two more arrive several weeks later, and another pair later that Fall.The Amistad is seized off Long Island and taken to New London.(Fall) U.S. federal officers arrest several vessel owners in Baltimore implicated by the British as slave traders. Several schooners being built for the trade are seized as well.Turner’s The Slave Ship (also known as Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying -- Typhoon coming on) goes on display at the Royal Academy in London.
1841Nicholas Trist is dismissed as U.S. Consul in Havana, amid allegations he connived at, or at any rate took no effort to suppress, frequent illegal sales of U.S. vessels to Spanish slave traders.
See this Web site for more information:
http://amistad.mysticseaport.org/timeline/amistad.html
http://amistad.mysticseaport.org/timeline/amistad.html
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