NEMO REPENTE FRUIT TURPISSITNUS (No man becomes a villain all at once)

  “Are we willing to cast ourselves as a society that creates crimogenic for some of its members, and then acts out rituals of punishment against them as if engaged in some awful form of human sacrifice?”- Glenn Loury, quoted in The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

Osterhout slaves in Kingston year of 1755- Nathaniel Sylvester, History of Ulster County

William Oosterhoudt- 4 slaves

Tuenes Oosterhoudt- 1 slave

Nelle Oosterhoudt- 3 slaves

    Before small pox, chicken pox, bubonic plague, pneumonia, cholera, diphtheria, influenza, measles, scarlet fever, typhus, tuberculosis, yellow fever, whooping cough, the common cold, and every S.T.D. known to man were introduced into the Americas by the Spanish, French, Dutch, English, Italian, German, Irish, and (not by their own accord) African slaves, this was a complex, violent, warring, significantly inhabited place. An Amerindian was always one short step out of the raging fire, or just across from a torturous enemy, well before the alien invasion. But to European eyes, North America had always been empty before they arrived. 

     Many ancient Indian communities were surrounded with miles of corn and squash fields in permanent village settlements, that had been in existence for centuries. What is referred to as “The Columbian Exchange,” historian Alfred Crosby’s term that encompasses the disease, flora and fauna, that European’s brought west with them to this paradise, and all that was returned to Europe, captures what took place in the early years of empire. Christopher Columbus and his syphilitic crew are credited with bringing a cornucopia of ills, and a few copper pots to their Caribbean landfall. After ripping the gold earrings out of the ears of the peaceful Arawak braves, in the centuries that followed, fur, lumber, ginseng, captured Indian slaves, scalps, and Christmas tree seeds would return to the Old World, as more aliens, booze, gunpowder, and disease flowed west, in this decidedly unequal exchange.

      The Columbian Exchange was a raging, unqualified success, and showed no signs of dissipating, as the 19th century ground forward. All this barbarity and bloodshed was fertilizing the gluttony and greed of, what Karl Marx referred to as, the “rosy dawn of capitalism.” In the lead up to the American Civil War, the money spent on both sides of the Atlantic flowed as never before. Rampant global consumerism was firmly in place, as corporate power, and patrician authority, joined forces in an unstoppable union moving west across the continent. Men were becoming richer, while other men, (already rich) were becoming politicians. Land that had been there all along, sight unseen, was theoretically gobbled up by the large patent holders, “land companies,” (Holland Land Company and Susquehanna Land Company) as well as states like Connecticut. The void was about to be taken over by alien force, using questionable quit-claim deeds, codified with vague paperwork, even before any white man ever set foot on it. 

     This would be land agent Henry Seward’s (and his brother Benjamin Jennings Seward) brilliant gift, in seeing empire commodified in concrete terms, staked out with surveyor chains, certified and purchased by bureaucracies. Ideology and religious conversion were used as a powerful tools and incentives for expansion, guided by the hands of a devout, and heavily armed, hierarchy. More power, land, money, and unlimited consumerism were always the ultimate goals of capitalist empire. Quoting from an antislavery activism site www.orbitist.com/ugrr,  “By March 1837, the Chautauqua Land Company was running smoothly enough that Seward asked his brother Jennings to join him. On 3 July 1837, Seward wrote to [wife] Frances that “we are all here, housed in my domicile, or rather that which late was mine, but now is my brother’s.” Chautauqua Land Company was formed after a buyout by George Lay (no relation) and Trumbull Cary of Holland Land Company; with William Henry Seward as a major investor.  

       

    As Hodges and Conklin steeled themselves, “relinquishing all claim to a single principle of virtue,” for the years ahead in the war zone, life went on outside the stone walls of Newgate Prison. The Panic of 1819 was the young nation’s first major financial crisis after the War of 1812. It effected both the inside of Newgate Prison, and the fragile economies driving expansion on the outside. Excessive speculation in real estate, and the flooding of the market with U.S. paper currency, combined to fuel an already uneasy economic climate. Unable to produce hard currency (gold) for worthless notes, banks began to foreclose on heavily mortgaged farms, forcing small farmers and village merchants into bankruptcy. Federalist policies pushed by men like Martin Van Buren and Alexander Hamilton, were perceived as flawed and inept. The manor system was again called into question, coming into conflict with poor tenants in New York State, eventually erupting in armed struggle of the Down-Rent wars. Politics on the local, as well as state, and Federal levels, became all important for the survival of the agrarian micro-economy in the United States. It marked the end of the ironically titled “Era of Good Feelings,” and “American Enlightenment.” This was the economic backdrop in the aftermath of the Jennings land feud, and the Teed and Dunning hangings. This period of growth culminated with massive foreclosures, widespread unemployment, a murder and two hangings. The party was over.

     Curiosity, and affinity to warmer climes, mixed with the unflinching exuberance of youth, seemed to have been what pulled the teenager, William Henry Seward, to Putnam County, Georgia. At least that’s what the historians want us to believe. Ezra Conklin and Dr. Samuel Seward may have been among the last of the large slave owners in Goshen, but this was anything but the case in Putnam County, Georgia. Coming upon the William Alexander plantation, Henry set his satchel down in the red Georgia dust and looked around. Where was everybody he wondered? He looked out across the field. As far as the eye could see, there were bent over slaves planting cottonseed, nobody daring to look up at the skinny, strange looking white boy with a big nose, standing there. The vision in the field was one of such seamless human efficiency, it was as invisible as the conspiracy of those “hired assassins,” back home in Goshen. What Henry meant to ask was where were all the white people?