I have finally reached the middle of the book! well I don't know where exactly the middle of the book is.....but whatever hear me out.
I AM HOOKED, ok? It is my new addiction until the end, now I need to fill you out on some things because what I talked before, scratch that! there is more.
Ahem, so I finished in Chapter 3, where surprise surprise, people still think it's ok to have slaves. Next, Chapter 4, A racist Wunderkind.
Remember Jhon Cotton and Richard Mather? Welp they are family now. Richard's wife dies, and John dies, Richard marries John's widow, Sarah. Sarah had a daughter, Maria ,which marries Richard's son, meaning that they are husband and wife and also step-siblings...... Oh also they have a kid, and wanna guess what his name is? It's Cotton Mather, Yeap!
Cotton Mather was in college by the time a rebellion towards Puritans happened, he was 11 years old, the youngest Harvard student of all time, which meant he was really smart, and really religious. Because his grandparents were Puritans, he was influenced (more like forced) into becoming a Puritan himself and create very weird ideas about race.
Cotton Mather believed in a pure being, this was the one with white skin, while those with black skin were very dirty and devilish, also also, he was obsessed with witchcraft, he liked it so much that influenced other into hunting them down, this lead into many killings of innocent people, especially black due to many white puritans "seeing" the devil as a black little man.
Eventually it wasn't trending anymore, and the hunts stopped. The Massachusetts authorities (yes we are in Massachusetts early 1700s, sorry for not clarifying) apologized for all the deaths and provided reparation, but oh no, Cotton Mather was not going to stop believing and defending the witch trials, and writting for people to believe the same thing. In the end, there were a couple of more details to this story, but Cotton Mather died, unlike his ideologies, instead they all started to influence other slave-owners as well as regular people.
So remember kids, not all Harvard students were or are smart.
Welcome ladies and gentlemen, to the Enlightenment Era, Woo Hoo! With our favorite President of them all-Sarcasm- and the one who is more indecisive then a woman! -Jesus Christ-. It's Thomas Jefferson and friends/slaves!
Ok, enough playing, seriously this man was annoying already in the Hamilton Musical, now he really was worse in real life, but I mean all of the founding fathers were pretty bad at the end of the day. Anyways, young Jefferson studied antiracism and considered black people as an equal to him, he called them friends. But do you think he was going to keep this morals and help Black slaves be an equal? Of course not, as he grew older, he made his own plantations and put money over morals, not it wasn't about slavery but about profit, so he, forced his "friends" to work for him and pay them little to nothing, as well as owning them. Also, even though, yes he had slaves, he had black friends, totally different black people which would be show off by Jefferson as people that could do some things white people could.
Well you can now see that in the matter of slavery, he was a mess, but let's move on to a more, down to earth character. Meet Phillis Whatley a woman who shocked the people around her. She was an African American who was able to read the bible, she could read Greek and Latin, and could write poems, this was because she was never treated like a slave, in fact, she was the adoptive daughter of John Wheatley who lost a daughter before her. She was able to learn many stuff other of her color couldn't and would dream about going to Harvard, an all male white school.
Her adoptive father gathered the 7 most smartest men in the city to test her, and she answered every single question correct, proving she was human.
Chapters 6 and 7 are very long, but a summary of it is that Africans are not savages.
The next couple of Chapters are just recapping and detailing more about Jefferson and his problems with slavery, and how blacks were still unable to be seen as an equal. Also more and more about Jefferson,, he is a whole disaster. He contradicted himself a lot of time and when it seemed his mind was going to right direction, he retired to work on his plantations. Why was he unable to pick a side? who knows really, either he was on something, or he couldn't decide between his "friends" or money, or maybe he thought that he was doing a good on the African people by giving them jobs and a place to stay, even if the conditions were horrible. Maybe he thought himself as a good slave-owner and one who was more like a leader, but we all know that was not the truth.
After Jefferson's death, his legacy was passed to the next generation, and with his legacy, his thoughts on slavery. Now by this time, many people were rising up to fight for African lives, but were immediately torn apart from owners and other. One of these fights was made by David Walker, a black man who wrote An Appeal to the coloured citizens of the world. Here, he wrote how he was against the idea of Black people serving whites. This appeal spread all over, and leading to a man named William Lloyd Garrison who was a newspaper editor. The two men met and Garrison was able to put Walker's ideas with propaganda, using his knowledge in literature, language and writting to appeal to more people than ever before. Slaves-owners were scared, holding onto their seat, and they better be, because by this time the AASS (American Anti-slavery Society) was created and with the help of mass printing, they were able to flood the streets with information. And that was not all, what the slave-owners were not prepared for, A million anti-slavery pamphlets distributed by the end of the year.
So, because of all of these writting, pro-slavery whites turned up fear and hate, making very nonsensical ideologies, for example, one of them being that "(black and whites were different and) was backed by "science".......The father of American anthropology, who was measuring the skulls of humans (gross) and determined that White people had bigger skulls and therefore greater intellectual capacity..." Page 91
Which I am not sure if you know, it is in fact not true, the bigger the head does not mean the more intelligence.......Let's not talk about anymore of the ideologies, shall we? Good.
But anyways, next, one of the hottest presidents of America (in my opinion, please don't question) Abraham Lincoln, a very innocent poor man who went to so much trouble to finally end slavery, well not quite. Yes, he did as much as he could to let slavery end, while dealing with other American problems as well as his own personal ones, but he wasn't really this simple. Ok yes, he wanted to end slavery, which black people loved, but at the same time he didn't want blacks to have the same equal rights, which racists loved, but at the same time he waned to help the poor whites who didn't own slaves and were unable to get jobs because slaves were already taking all the labor, which poor whites loved. This is how he basically won the elections and became president, by agreeing with everyone but with contradicting arguments.
But now that Lincoln proved that he waned to end slavery, slave-owners packed their bags and moved south, and most of the southern states did not want to be part of the country and be lead by Lincoln anymore. So everyone felt threatened, ok no punch line here, Welcome to the Civil War.
Blacks obviously wanted to fight slave-owners, but whenever the ran the the north, they would be sent back to their owners, this happened until the summer of 1862, were a law was passed saying "African who escaped to Union lines or who resided in territories occupied by the Union to be "forever free of their servitude."
Millions of Slaves ran for freedom to the Union sides, and to fight their previous owners, finding freedom, well part of it, they were their own person, but with no land nor place to go, these were problems the president was dealing with too.
Talking about Lincoln, he was labeled as the Great Emancipator, even though the blacks were emancipating themselves, but either way he was praised by the community. When they saw him, people would fall on their knees and thank him.
When the war ended, he stated the reconstruction plan, a plan which would give the blacks equal rights, and have the right to vote. Well, he dies tree days later on by getting shot...oop.
Now we are in Chapter 14, and I will leave it there for now.
I could've talked about so much more, but I waned to keep the middle of the book summary into the smallest summary possible, um well that didn't work, and I am not even done with the book!
I apologize for the fast pace I am taking while summarizing the chapters, but I hope it gives you an Idea of what is going on.
Now, as you might notice, this book talks about very interesting people of the American history, and I am not sure if you notice, but I am very interesting in every single new chapter or story in the book, and all telling it as one big story, just like a book.
And even though I've been reading this and learning more, I still can't believe all of this happened because of that weird Zurara.
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