History has always been my weakest subject, so I tend to make many ignorant assumptions about the past that would outrage those who actually remember all these events that have helped shaped the future. One of these ignorant assumptions would be that I never believed that diversity would have existed in the colonies back in the 1600s. Yes, yes historians, feel free to shoot me. I deserve it.
I actually enjoyed Binder’s passage the most, because it gave me such great insight as to how diverse New York was from the very beginning. I was immensely irked however, by a line stated to Peter Stuyvesant in response to his conflict with John Bowne: “Stuyvesant was told, though it would be desirable to keep “these and other sectarians” away, the consequences of such efforts might well impede immigration, “which must be favored at so tender a stage of the country’s existence” (8). It gave the impression that diversity was not valued for diversity’s sake itself, but rather for the development and success of the nation.
However, slavery takes the stage here in all three passages, as the perspective on how it has shaped America seems slightly different than what we were taught in Kindergarten. Like ToniAnn, I actually forgot that slaves were human beings while reading certain parts of these passages. Focusing again on Binder’s passage, the crafting of words does this much for us: “they [slaves] had come in relatively small parcels from the Dutch West Indies” (14). It literally paints the image of a small package with a scarf tied around it.
Like practically everyone else here, I too was shocked to find out from the very first page of In the Shadow of Slavery that, slavery was relied on heavily in Manhattan. In grade school, I was always taught that the South relied on slaves to work the fields, whereas the North was more further developed and did not depend upon slave labor. The concept of slaves having certain rights in New Amsterdam was also shocking. Why don’t they go into detail about these aspects of American history in high school?
There has been a general discussion so far about how essential slavery seemed now for the development and success of the states, both culturally and economically. I’m tempted to play Devil’s Advocate and suggest that there would have been other ways and means of achieving the ethnic and economic success that we have (well, we’re not doing so well economically at the moment, but you know what I mean) today without the existence of slavery, but I’m not so sure if I could back that up.
But I’m willing to throw the question out there: Does anyone think that America could have achieved the kind of success that it did without slavery?
