1933, Knopf, NY, 318 pages

This review of pages 1-99

When considering the question of slave rebellions in Plantation America we totter on perception’s edge. Most have never been recorded. Those recorded have generally been mischaracterized to fit the white over black monolithic narrative, despite most being mixed race rebellions against mixed race oppression—in other words, class warfare. Bacon’s Rebellion began as freed men with no rights or slaves [which went hand-in-hand] led by a slave owner, rebelling against more prosperous slave owners with the players almost exclusively European American and ended with a band of freed slaves of European and African race battling for freedom.

In Herbert Asbury’s wonderful narrative this reader mined the following and comes away with the impression that Cormac McArthy must have read Asbury before writing Blood Meridian.

In pre-American San Francisco 700 whites and 150 Indians, Negroes and Polynesians lived freely. Note that only whites can be spelled correctly according to this computer without being capitalized.

Then gold was discovered and the secret held by the two rich land speculators was let out by “a female servant” race unknown. Stop right here. If I had discovered she was a Negress, your mind would be saying, “Oh, so she was a slave.” If I had discovered she was not, your mind would have filled in, according to this conditioning, “Indentured [read voluntary] servant.”

Other servants were mentioned in Asbury’s accounts. Late Plantation American terminology for unpaid laborer was usually servant and sometimes slave.

This is the true current legacy of the concept of White Supremacy, that Africans are helpless to maintain their freedom or win it without a white patron and that no white person can be held in bondage without our consent. The Third Reich never even dared such heights of racial self-worship as the liberal ghost mind of America bathes in, that we alone are the slave makers and slave emancipators, literally the master race.

Now, as we have totally missed the rich and poor class warfare of reality for the red herring of race—here non-existent so far as we know—lets return to what actually happened in a country which suddenly became America after the Mexican-American War, which was nothing but a huge land grab, a predation of one European American nation upon another European American nation.

Threats of beating might have kept tens of thousands of slave sailors on their ships in normal times. But when gold was discovered 500 ships were abandoned in San Francisco Harbor as the sailors abandoned ship for the Gold Fields. These ships sometimes became prisons or hotels. The flush of cash made slavery almost non-existent as even hired laborers insisted on grandiose titles and to be asked not told, as their labor was in such high demand. This does indicate, along with the fact that in slave states, a man could not make a living as a laborer due to slavery depressing wages, that money supply and currency do bear upon the slave condition.

“Mammy Pleasant, a gigantic Negress” said to be as dark as coal but having non-African facial features, arrived from New Orleans, a slave state [from whence, according to our modern narrative all Africans were bound as slaves] came to San Francisco from New Orleans, where she was a free woman of color, to find employ as a cook. Her fame so preceded her that crowds of men [mostly white] fawned after her services and eventually bid against each other for her services. The modern mind should reel at this, as all southern blacks are said to have been slaves. However, from the 1640s through the 1840s a flat 10% of African Americans were free men and women [most having worked free of slavery by their own power] and often owned slaves of their own, sometimes, white slaves, such as the Irish girl purchased by Mister and Mrs. Glass who beat her to death in Louisiana in about 1789. [1]

Paid and respected “Negro” musical performers, miners, laborers and whores thrived in San Francisco 12 years before the American Civil War, such as the Chorus at the Aguila de Oro. Interestingly, “white” is never capitalized in this or other texts while Negro always is. Riddle me that, Ham Slice?

A group of 60 thugs, who called themselves The Hounds and then The Regulators, terrorized every race of human in San Francisco, with a particular hatred for Mexicans. These were veterans of the late war who had stayed upon swearing to oppress and exterminate the Mexicans. A Mexican whore who was pregnant was lynched for the crime of defending herself against rape. Her white defenders were beaten and run out of town. A Negro man had his ears cut off for back talking to a Regulator. Many Mexican men were lynched and women raped.

230 Vigilantes hunted these dogs down and drove them out of town. That was the first Vigilance Committee, convened as a voluntary organization, which disbanded itself.

A Mexican youth by the name of Joaquin Murieta and his side kick Three Fingered Jack, fought back against the Anglo occupation after they were attacked, their brothers hung and their women raped, and waged a guerilla war which included slaughtering entire work crews of unarmed Chinese. And somehow American hate can only be ivory on ebony?

Then came the bloody year of 1856 when criminal syndicates, foremost among them the Sydney Ducks, Australian thugs, began robbing, raping and murdering citizens even in broad daylight and burned the city every year so that they could loot it. Only “The Duck Pond” never burned and the fires always swept away from it, caused by arson to be taken by winds to the rest of the city. These were hardened British penal system graduates, associated with the gangs of New York [a book Asbury wrote before this] who murdered law men and did not respect women, even white women.

Oh, they fucked up there, disrespecting the Ivory Goddess!

The law enforcement establishment, all the way up to Governor Johnson, refused to address the rampant violent crime, which included 489 murders in the year ending January 1, 1856, roughly two thirds in San Francisco, yet not a single man had been hung for murder in that city, while in the rest of California 46 murderers were lynched and 6 tried and hanged.

Then came the Second Vigilance Committee, which was promptly outlawed by the Governor, and then became the Vigilant Army. This army acquired artillery, built forts, maintained a prison, and captured and released members of the cucked Law and Order Party. The cucked Governor named William Tecumseh Sherman as commander of forces to defeat the Vigilante Army. Yet, the distinguished Mexican War veteran, who would do more to win the coming Civil War than any other man, declined to fight the Vigilante Army. [2]

The Vigilant Army lynched many white men, never touched an Indian, Negro or mestizo and disbanded itself. Yet this cannot be part of our history and hence remains buried in a nearly 90-year-old book, written just before The Lie Monolithic became sacred and everlasting across the dreaming land. [3]

Notes

-1. See So Her Master May Have Her Again

-2. June 3 1856 Governor Johnson issued a proclamation that San Francisco was in a state of insurrection.

-3. The easy victory of the Vigilante Army and the fact that Bacon’s Rebellion succeeded until the death of its leader and the outside intervention by pirates and the military, and also the fact that America defeated Great Britain and the Confederacy won almost every engagement against the Union, points to rebellion as being possible. However, every rebellion by unfree men was put down, indicating that, UNDER Plantation America conditions, a certain amount of starting resources are necessary to launch a successful rebellion.

+ Cracker-Boy + The Greatest Lie Ever Sold

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A History of Runaway White Slaves in Plantation America: Part Two