#italian prison officers unions | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

if-you-fan-a-fire · 2 years ago

Text

"THREE-YEAR TERM FOR YOUTH WHO STOLE LETTERS," Toronto Star. October 15, 1912. Page 1 & 6. ---- Judge Denton Gave William Albon the Smallest Sentence Possible. --- SENTENCE DAY IN THE SESSIONS ---- Italian Who Used Razor on Fellow-Countryman Also Given Three Years. --- SOME WERE LET OFF --- Verney Pennoch Was Given Four Months for Burglary - Many Were Disposed Of. ---

Wm. Albon, theft, 3 years.

Dominic Rosso, wounding, 3 years.

Wm. J. Cottrell, perjury, 6 months.

John Gowans, assault, 6 months.

Verney Pennoch, burglar, 4 months.

Joseph Davis, assault, 3 months.

Arthur Scholes, housebreaking, 3 months.

Charles Hall, assault, $50 fine or 1 months.

Frank McCarron, theft, 30 days.

Wilfrid Walcyn, theft, suspended sentence.

David Applebaum, theft, suspended sentence.

Abraham Manhan, theft, suspended sentence.

David Reece, theft, suspended sentence.

Joseph Re, theft, suspended sentence.

John J. Foley, theft, suspended sentence.

Ernest McRae, theft, suspended sentence.

Clinton Shaw, theft, suspended sentence.

Thomas A. Bruce, theft, suspended sentence.

"These people have got to learn that they must keep their razors off other people's throats."

With this remark Judge Denton this morning sentenced Dominic Rosso, an Italian, [[pictured, top] charged with wounding with intent, to spend three years in Kingston Penitentiary. Rosso was the first of about thirty persons, found guilty in the Sessions and in sittings of the County Criminal Court, to come up for sentence.

"I hope the sentence will be a warning to his fellow countrymen."

John Gowans goes to the Central Prison for six months for a serious offence. 'I am told that he is feeble-minded," pleaded T. C. Robinette, K.C., but Judge Denton declared that his long record was against him. He served two years in 1899, terms for theft in 1894-97-99, and one this year. [Gowans would later be sentenced to the penitentiary in 1918...]

Harry Rollings, also up on a serious offence, was remanded for sentence. His Honor wanted to enquire into his case further.

Long Term for Theft. On two charges of the theft of registered letters, William Albon, a clean-cut, looking young man, was given three years in Kingston Penitentiary - the least possible under the code. It is said that the young fellow, who was employed as a clerk in the post office, received only about $4 in money.

Verney Pennock, convicted of burglary and assault, was sent down for four months. He broke into Alexander Cameron's livery stable on Keele street and stole five books of Exhibition tickets.

Sentence was suspended for two weeks in the case of David W. Ross and Morley Wilson, charged with taking W. E. Radcliffe's automobile from In front of the Grand Union Hotel. The young men, who were somewhat the worse for liquor, went for a "joy ride," which ended at an early hour in the morning. The motor car was damaged to the extent of $60. Mr. Robinette pleaded for leniency on the score of youth and good character, specially in the case of Wilson.

Three Months For Theft. "He pays too much attention to athletics and has not been well. The trouble is that he is overstrained," was the plea of T. C. Robinette in the case of Arthur Scholes, champion mile runner of Canada, and who came third at the Ward Marathon games last Saturday. He had pleaded guilty to the theft of two diamond rings from No. 190 Garden avenue, where he had gone to do papering.

"The man who was with me told me that the rings were lying there. First I said not to take them, and then I picked them up on the impulse of the moment as we were leaving. I gave one to him, and gave the other to a friend."

"A woman friend?" asked his Honor. "Yes."

The young man's father and mother both pleaded hard.

"What happened to the other man?" was asked. "He turned King's evidence."

"I can't afford to let you go," said his Honor, "you will spend three months in jail."

A fine of $50 and costs or two months in jall was the sentence given Charles Hall for assaulting Evelyn Ferris.

His Honor started to read a list of previous convictions when Hall declared: "You must have me mixed up with somebody else. I didn't do those things."

"That must be another case," suggested Crown Attorney Greer. "Why don't they do things right in the Police Court?" said his Honor with some heat, then turning to the prisoner he asked: "What terms have you served?"

"I was in jail once for six months and once for eight months."

"Both for assault?"

"No, just one of them."

Six Months For Perjury. William J. Cottrell, found guilty of perjury in a damage suit against the Toronto Railway Company, stood up quite calmly to receive sentence. He was chewing gum. He wanted to call witnesses to testify to his good character.

"You are found guilty on a very serious charge," said Judge Denton, "Perjury is one of the worst of crimes, and

"I could send you to the penitentiary for a very long time. You probably didn't realize what you were doing."

"It was all a mistake your Worship." broke in the prisoner eagerly.

"The evidence showed it was much more than a mistake. You probably, when you found yourself in that suit against the street railway, thought that you could win by stretching your statements a little. I have spoken to a number of people about you and they all speak highly of your character."

"If your Worship will let me go on suspended sentence I promise" interrupted Cottrell.

"I cannot do that" said the judge gravely. "You will be sent to the Central Prison for six months."

Was Allowed to Go. Wilfrid B. Watclyn, guilty of the theft of an automobile from the Shaw Overland Sales Company was allowed to go on suspended sentence. "He is making reparation," his Honor was told.

George Westman was remanded for sentence on the charge against him of stealing oil waste from the Simpson Wool and Knitting Company. Mr. Greer was told to investigate his story.

Three months was the sentence meted out to Joseph Davis, convicted of a serious offence. The girl, who was his second cousin, was feeble-minded. Davis' reputation in the past was excellent, and Judge Denton was lenient.

Rev. J. D. Morrow bore testimony to the good character of Albert Copley. convicted of hitting Walter Dwyer over the head after having consumed several bottles of beer. "I have every hope of reforming him," said the athletic parson. "He is a member of my church." The judge remanded him for two weeks for sentence.

G. B. Cates, for false pretences, was remanded for two weeks. He sold $210 worth of stock to Mrs. G. B. Thomas in the Artificial Ice and Distilled Water Company, a concern which was not in existence, and was given a chance to make good to Mrs. Thomas. Because Julius Bachrack is away on business, he and his brother, Emanuel, will come up again for sentence for conspiring to procure an illegal operation, in two weeks, as will David W. Ross and Morley Wilson, theft. The cases of Estella Smith, theft; Norman Tansley, indecent assault; F. A. Mansell, false pretences, were all stood over.

Remanded For Sentence. Harol Harold McKee, convicted of obtaining money under false pretences from his employers was remanded for sentence till the December Sessions. He was anxious to make restitution and was gradually doing so out of his wages.

The same treatment was accorded to Arthur Doyle, convicted of criminal negligence, who took a motor-car from in front of Shea's Theatre last July, and went for a joy ride. His sentence will depend on the efforts he makes to make good the damage.

Sixty days is the sentence on Frank McCarron for horse stealing. He hired a horse and later, together with another man, sold it. "It's cost me $200 now. I got all the blame, while the other man was discharged," exclaimed the prisoner, but he was sent down, nevertheless.

David Applebaum, Abraham Manhan, David Reece, ranging in ages from 16 to 20 years, employed at Hanlan's Point, where they stole amounts of from 70 cents to $10, were allowed to go on suspended sentence. Joseph Re, who got two $5 instead of one in making a sale also had sentence suspended.

Clinton Shaw and Ernest McRae, found guilty of stealing solder from J. C. McFadden, were allowed to go on suspended sentence. Both are of youthful appearance.

[AL: Albon was 17, born in Toronto, a first time offender, and was convict #F-485 at Kingston Penitentiary. He worked as a clerical assistant in a workshop, had no reports against him for breaking the prison rules, and was paroled in late 1913. Rosso was 29, born in Italy, a labourer on the docks, and had never been in the penitentiary before - he was convict #F-486 and worked in the quarry. He had no reports and was released in early 1915.]

0 notes

leftistfeminista · 1 year ago

Text

youtube

Film about the Fascist abuses in 2001 Italy

Treatment of prisoners at Bolzaneto

Prisoners at the temporary detention facility in Bolzaneto were forced to say "Viva il duce."[15] and sing fascist songs: "Un, due, tre. Viva Pinochet!" The 222 people who were held at Bolzaneto were treated to a regime later described by public prosecutors as torture. On arrival, they were marked with felt-tip crosses on each cheek, and many were forced to walk between two parallel lines of officers who kicked and beat them. Most were herded into large cells, holding up to 30 people. Here, they were forced to stand for long periods, facing the wall with their hands up high and their legs spread. Those who failed to hold the position were shouted at, slapped and beaten.[16] A prisoner with an artificial leg and, unable to hold the stress position, collapsed and was rewarded with two bursts of pepper spray in his face and, later, a particularly savage beating.

Prisoners who answered back were met with violence. One of them, Stefan Bauer, answered a question from a German-speaking guard and said he was from the European Union and he had the right to go where he wanted. He was hauled out, beaten, sprayed with pepper spray, stripped naked and put under a cold shower. His clothes were taken away and he was returned to the freezing cell wearing only a flimsy hospital gown.

The detainees were given few or no blankets, kept awake by guards, given little or no food and denied their statutory right to make phone calls and see a lawyer. They could hear crying and screaming from other cells. Police doctors at the facility also participated in the torture, using ritual humiliation, threats of rape and deprivation of water, food, sleep and medical care.[17] A prisoner named Richard Moth was given stitches in his head and legs without anaesthetics, which made the procedure painful.

Men and women with dreadlocks had their hair roughly cut off to the scalp. One detainee, Marco Bistacchia was taken to an office, stripped naked, made to get down on all fours and told to bark like a dog and to shout "Viva la polizia Italiana!" He was sobbing too much to obey. An unnamed officer told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that he had seen police officers urinating on prisoners and beating them for refusing to sing Faccetta Nera, a Mussolini-era fascist song.

Ester Percivati, a young Turkish woman, recalled guards calling her a whore as she was marched to the toilet, where a woman officer forced her head down into the bowl and a male jeered "Nice arse! Would you like a truncheon up it?" Several women reported threats of rape.[18] Finally, the police forced their captives to sign statements, waiving all their legal rights. One man, David Larroquelle, testified that he refused to sign the statements. Police broke three of his ribs for his disobedience.

#political prisoners #italy #film #Youtube

1 note · View note

newstfionline · 1 year ago

Text

Wednesday, July 26, 2023

A legacy of unfairness (NYT) As the fight over affirmative action fades from the headlines, a large study released Monday shows that maybe the conversation around college admissions in the U.S. should focus on something else. The research, conducted by a group of Harvard-based economists named Opportunity Insights, shows that children from the top 1% financially are over twice as likely to attend America’s top colleges as their middle-class peers with the same SAT and ACT scores. “What I conclude from this study is the Ivy League doesn’t have low-income students because it doesn’t want low-income students,” said Susan Dynarski, a Harvard economics professor who wasn’t involved in the study but did take a look at the data. According to the study, colleges gave preference to legacy admissions (the children of alumni) as well as recruited athletes. Top colleges also gave higher non-academic ratings to students attending private (read: paid) schools over their peers attending public schools.

Ecuador declares state of emergency amid violent clashes (Reuters) Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso on Monday declared a state of emergency and night curfews in three coastal provinces, amid a wave of violence over the weekend in the Andean country that left at least eight people dead. Lasso declared the state of emergency in the provinces of Manabi and Los Rios and in the city of Duran, near Guayaquil, after Agustin Intriago, the mayor of coastal city Manta, was shot dead on Sunday. It also comes on the back of riots over the weekend in the prison Penitenciaria del Litoral, in Guayaquil, involving clashes between gangs inside the prison. Lasso has frequently resorted to declaring states of emergency as Ecuador struggles with prison riots and waves of violence throughout the country.

Southern Europeans splash out on air-con as heatwave drags on (Reuters) As Southern Europe battles extreme heat with no end in sight, people have rushed out to buy fans and even invest in air-conditioning to keep cool. In-built air-conditioning in homes is much less widespread in Europe than in the United States, making people reliant on more traditional ways of coping in the heat, like closing shutters and resting in the middle of the day. But data shows Italians and Spaniards are increasingly opting for more effective cooling solutions as summers get hotter. Italian consumer electronics retailer Unieuro, which has more than 500 shops across the country, said sales of air-conditioning products doubled in the week to July 21 compared to the same week last year. El Corte Inglés, one of Spain’s largest department store chains, said that by mid-July it had already sold 15% more units than it did last year by the end of August.

Greek Islands Wildfires (1440) Wildfires across three popular Greek islands have triggered what authorities consider to be the largest fire evacuation in Greece’s history, prompting roughly 32,000 tourists and residents to flee to safety as hundreds more await evacuations in gyms, schools, and hotel lobbies. No injuries have been reported. A heat wave across southern Europe and high winds have partly contributed to the spread of the wildfires in the islands of Rhodes, Corfu, and Evia, with temperatures expected to reach highs of between 107 and 111 degrees Fahrenheit today. Greece has seen roughly 600 fires over the last 12 days, or 50 new fires a day, officials said.

Poland’s population shrinking (AP) Poland’s population has shrunk again to just under 37.7 million in June despite returning emigrants, the state statistical office said Tuesday. A preliminary report by the Statistics Poland office says there were around 130,000 Poles fewer in the European Union country at the end of June compared to a year ago. It was among Poland’s highest decreases since 2010, when the population was over 38.5 million, despite a policy of bonuses for families with many children that the right-wing government launched after taking office at the end of 2015.

Putin appeared paralyzed and unable to act in first hours of rebellion (Washington Post) When Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner mercenary group, launched his attempted mutiny on the morning of June 24, Vladimir Putin was paralyzed and unable to act decisively, according to Ukrainian and other security officials in Europe. The Russian president had been warned by the Russian security services at least two or three days ahead of time that Prigozhin was preparing a possible rebellion, according to intelligence assessments shared with The Washington Post. Steps were taken to boost security at several strategic facilities, including the Kremlin, where staffing in the presidential guard was increased and more weapons were handed out, but otherwise no actions were taken, these officials said. “Putin had time to take the decision to liquidate [the rebellion] and arrest the organizers” said one of the European security officials. “Then when it began to happen, there was paralysis on all levels … There was absolute dismay and confusion. For a long time, they did not know how to react.” It appears to expose Putin’s fear of directly countering a renegade warlord who’d developed support within Russia’s security establishment over a decade. Prigozhin had become an integral part of the Kremlin global operations by running troll farms disseminating disinformation in the United States and paramilitary operations in the Middle East and Africa, before officially taking a vanguard position in Russia’s war against Ukraine. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told The Post that the intelligence assessments were “nonsense” and shared “by people who have zero information.”

Russian expats boosting the economies of neighboring countries (Insider) Hundreds of thousands of Russians who fled their homeland following the country’s invasion of Ukraine have resettled in neighboring countries—and are boosting their economies. The exodus of Russians started after many highly educated professionals—such as academics, finance, and tech workers—left Russia in the early days of the war and after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a partial military mobilization for the Ukraine war on September 21. By October 2022, about 700,000 Russians had left the country, Reuters reported. Many of these Russians ended up in neighboring countries, setting up new lives and businesses, and ended up boosting the economies of these nations, the independent Russian media outlet Novaya Gazeta reported on Friday. The GDP of the South Caucasus—a region comprising Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia—grew by an outsized 7% in 2022, according to the World Bank. Armenia—once known as the Silicon Valley of the Soviet Union—saw its 2022 growth spike to 12.6%, per the World Bank. Meanwhile, Georgia’s GDP jumped by 10.1% in 2022, Kyrgyzstan’s economy grew by 7%, and Turkey, a hot spot for Russia fleeing the war, saw its economy grow 5.6% in 2022.

China’s labor challenge: Too many workers, not enough jobs (Washington Post) The sun is only just visible above the rooftops, but hundreds of job seekers are already getting restless in the 80-degree-and-rising morning. When a minivan that pulls up to the curb on a commercial street in Majuqiao, on the outskirts of Beijing, dozens charge at it. “What’s the gig?” they shout at the man inside, shoving forward in hopes of a payday and escape from the summer sun. The frantic scene—repeated again and again every morning here at an intersection where day laborers hope to pick up shifts—is testament to the bleak job prospects in the world’s second-largest economy. China’s economy is having more difficulty emerging from three years of zero-covid lockdowns than expected, with latest data showing growth remains sluggish. The property market and the construction work it generates, responsible for about a quarter of economic growth, is in decline. Consumption remains tepid as households are cautious about big purchases. Indebted local governments are flirting with defaults. Together these economic challenges have caused a big spike in joblessness, particularly among young people. The unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds hit a record 21 percent last month, although one economist thinks the real number may nearer to half.

China, Taiwan brace for their most powerful typhoon this year (Reuters) China urged fishing boats to seek shelter and farmers to speed up their harvest while Taiwan suspended annual military drills as super typhoon Doksuri spiralled closer to East Asia, potentially reaching deep into China. Doksuri will likely be the most powerful typhoon to land in China so far in the storm season this year. Nearly 1,000 km (620 miles) in diameter, Doksuri is expected to sweep past lightly populated islands off the northern tip of the Philippines by mid-week while fierce winds and heavy rain lash Taiwan to the north. Currently packing top wind speeds of 138 miles per hour (223 kph), Doksuri will make landfall on the Chinese mainland somewhere between Fujian and Guangdong provinces on Friday, China’s National Meteorological Center said on Tuesday. While Doksuri is expected to lose some power and land as either a typhoon or severe typhoon, it will still hammer densely populated Chinese cities with torrential rain and strong winds.

Sudan war enters 100th day as mediation attempts fail (Reuters) Clashes flared in parts of Sudan on the 100th day of the war on Sunday as mediation attempts by regional and international powers failed to find a path out of an increasingly intractable conflict. The fighting broke out on April 15 as the army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) vied for power. Since then, more than 3 million people have been uprooted, including more than 700,000 who have fled to neighbouring countries. Some 1,136 people have been killed, according to the health ministry, though officials believe the number is higher. Neither the army nor the RSF has been able to claim victory, with the RSF’s domination on the ground in the capital Khartoum up against the army’s air and artillery firepower.

Short-Term Pain for Long-Term Gain? Nigerians Buckle Under Painful Cuts. (NYT) A teacher in northern Nigeria walks three hours to school every day, no longer able to pay for a ride in a tuk tuk rickshaw. Bakers operate at a loss amid soaring flour prices. Workers in Lagos sleep overnight in their offices to avoid the prohibitive cost of commuting. Since President Bola Tinubu of Nigeria was sworn in less than two months ago, he has shaken up his country with economic decisions that have been welcomed by investors and international backers, but been devastating to the livelihoods of many Nigerians. Now the question is whether Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, with 220 million people, will thrive or just get sicker from the bitter medicine dispensed by its new president. Mr. Tinubu set off shock waves when he announced during his inaugural speech on May 29 that he was ending a fuel subsidy that for decades had given Nigerians some of the cheapest oil in Africa, but amounted to a quarter of the country’s import bill. Gas stations tripled their prices overnight. Transportation fares, electricity and food prices followed. “It’s about short-term pain and long-term gain,” said Damilola Akinbami, a Lagos-based chief economist at Deloitte, a consulting firm. “Nigeria had reached a point where it was not if, but when it should remove the fuel subsidy.”

#headlines #news

0 notes

quotesfrommyreading · 2 years ago

Text

But Germany's military successes left it with the huge logistical problem of what to do with the men scooped up as it surged through Europe. Prisoners were not just British, Commonwealth and American but French, Polish and Dutch and – as countries changed sides – Italian and Russian. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Germans took nearly three million soldiers prisoner in the first four months of fighting; by the end of the war she had nearly six million Russian prisoners. After the Italian Armistice in September 1943, Germany sent 60,000 of her former ally's troops to POW camps. Russian POWs were treated particularly badly and many British POWs are still haunted by memories of the starved and broken bodies they glimpsed through the barbed wire that separated the compounds. Like the Japanese, the Soviet Union had no sympathy for soldiers who had allowed themselves to be taken prisoner and these men (and some women) became non-persons. The Soviet Union had not signed the Geneva Convention and Russian prisoners could expect no assistance from home. While German captors felt a cultural connection with the British men they captured, they had only distrust for the Russians. It was left to other POWs to lob their own precious supplies over the wire to help the starving Russians.

At the start of the war Germany had thirty-one POW camps; by 1945 this figure had risen to 248 – of which 134 housed British and American men. After Mussolini joined forces with Hitler in June 1940, men who were captured in North Africa were usually held in Italy and by the time Mussolini was overthrown and an armistice declared in September 1943 there were nearly 79,000 Allied prisoners in the country. By the end of the year, 50,000 had been taken to Germany and more, like the future travel writer, Eric Newby, who had spent some time on the lose, were later rounded up.

There was a huge diversity of architecture among camps that varied dramatically depending on the prisoner's rank, his escape record and whether or not he was made to work. Andrew Hawarden's first camp of Stalag XXA does not conform to either of the two most common stereotypes of a POW camp – the barbed wire, barrack huts and sentry posts of somewhere like Stalag Stalag Luft III, near Sagan (now Żagań) one hundred miles southeast of Berlin, which Paul Brickhill made famous through his book, The Great Escape, and Colditz, the glowing castle which many people still cannot think of without recalling the ominous music which accompanied the TV series of the same name

Most POW camps were nearer in design to Stalag Stalag Luft III, which was run by the Luftwaffe. In 1940 the German air force decided to build and control separate camps but they were quickly overwhelmed by the intensity of Allied bombing raids and many POW airmen ended up in military camps, albeit in separate compounds. My father's first camp, Stalag IVB, at Mühlberg, near Dresden, was built to hold 15,000 men but at its peak housed double this and included a large RAF contingent.

At first, naval and merchant-sailor prisoners were held at Stalag XB near the North Sea coast at Sandbostel until the German navy took control in 1942, when they were concentrated at a purpose-built site nearby at Westertimke. Naval POWs were held at two compounds (one for officers and the other for petty officers and senior ratings) at Marlag (an abbreviation of Marine Lager). Merchant seamen were held nearby at the larger camp of Milag (Marine-Interniertenlager).

— The Barbed-Wire University: The Real Lives of Allied Prisoners of War in the Second World War (Midge Gillies)

0 notes

husheduphistory · 2 years ago

Text

Keep Him Safe: The Awful Exchange of Leonarda Cianciulli

From early on Leonarda’s life was filled with tragedy and deep pools of darkness, but by the time she was forty-five years old it may have appeared like the bad years were behind her. According to all outward appearances she had four children that she adored, her family was freshly settled into a new home, she opened a small shop that proved to be successful, and she found friends in her neighbors. It seemed like there was very little to dislike about Leonarda. After all, she was friendly, generous, wise, and she was known to lend a helping hand to people chasing their dreams that reached far outside their town of Correggio. And then there were her baking. Her treats were enjoyed by many, but only because no one knew the truth about them.

Leonarda Cianciulli was born in Montella in the Kingdom of Italy on April 18th 1894. In her early life she attempted suicide twice before marrying a registry office clerk named Raffaele Pansardi in 1917. Cianciulli’s mother immediately disapproved of the union and there were already plans for Leonarda to marry someone else, but she refused. According to Leonarda’s memoir, the marriage to Pansardi caused her mother to put a curse on the pair before they moved to his hometown of Lacedonia. Some might say the curse was successful, between 1917 and 1939 Cianciulli became pregnant seventeen times and of the seventeen three were lost and ten of the children died at a very young age. In 1927 Cianciulli spent just over a year in prison for fraud after creating a fake account with a sizeable amount of money in a ledger at the bank where she worked as an evening cleaner. On July 23rd 1930 the Irpinia earthquake struck and totally destroyed her home forcing the family to relocate to Correggio. Looking for answers to all the turmoil in her life Leonarda sought the insight of at least one fortune teller. The news was not good, not only was she told all of her children would die young, but a palm reader also told her that "In your right hand I see prison, in your left a criminal asylum."

A scene of devastation after the Irpinia Earthquake. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

After moving to Correggio Leonarda seemed to have entered a new chapter in her life. The people of Correggio welcomed her and her family and she and Raffaele became well-liked by the townspeople. After a lifetime of broken connections and instability Leonarda quickly found herself in an unfamiliar position: having friends. There were dinner parties, casual visits with neighbors, and Leonarda was well respected for her wisdom, insight, wit, and skills. The extreme paranoia and anxiety she had developed over the course of her life may have actually started to dissipate while she started new hobbies like writing poetry. She even re-opened the little shop attached to her new home and became successful at selling her homemade goods like soap. But, like so many other times in her life, turmoil was coming.

When World War II broke out nearly four million Italians joined the military to serve their country and among them was Giuseppe Pansardi, Leonarda’s eldest and favorite child. For an obsessively over protective mother, the thought of losing a child on the battlefield could have been suffocating, but for the psyche of Leonarda it was absolutely catastrophic. She remembered that the fortune teller said all her children would die young and she had already lost thirteen of them. No matter what she had to do, she was not going to lose her son to war. The solution was clear to her; she would offer human sacrifices in exchange for his protection.

The first was Faustina Setti, a woman who often confided in Leonarda that she desperately wanted to find a husband. The confession wasn’t overly unusual, the seventy-six year old Faustina was good friends with Leonarda and the two saw each other on a regular basis. On one particular visit with her friend Faustina was met by a very excited Leonarda who had some astounding news for her, she found her a husband, a man in the city of Pula that she had been exchanging letters with. She sent him a photograph of Faustina and he immediately said that not only did he want to meet her, he wanted her to be his wife. All of this should have seemed bizarre to Faustina but she was so overcome with joy at the news of a husband that no questions or hesitation came to mind. Leonarda was thrilled for her friend and offered to plan the entire trip to Pula for her. But she had one very specific rule that Faustina had to follow. She told her to be careful, that friends and family would try to discourage her from going. In order to avoid any problems Leonarda instructed her to write a series of letters to them in advance, assuring them she was safe in Pula and very happy. Leonarda promised to mail them for her. It was all for the best. It was a total lie.

A later photograph of Leonarda. Image via https://horroresrevelados.wordpress.com/2017/03/20/leonarda-cianciulli-creaba-jabones-con-humanos/

On the morning of Faustina’s departure she went once again to Leonarda’s home. It was early, quiet, and Faustina was sitting at her friend’s table with shaking nerves and empty pockets. Leonarda had made her dreams come true, the least she could do was give her all of her life savings. As usual, Leonarda was there for her friend, she handed her a glass of wine to calm her nerves. It worked quickly. Faustina became calmer…and calmer…and her eyes and limbs got heavier…and heavier. We will never know if Faustina saw Leonarda approaching her with the ax. She thought she entered the home as a friend, she had no idea she was Leonarda’s first sacrifice.

Leonarda was accustomed to butchering animals and she used those skills to cut Faustina Setti’s body into nine pieces. Her body parts were put in a pot with over ten pounds of caustic soda. The chemical turned the remains into a thick dark sludge that Leonarda disposed of in a nearby septic tank. But then there was the blood, there was an entire basin of it. Leonarda waited until it coagulated before putting it in her oven to dry out. Once it was ready she ground it up. Then she got rid of it…along with some flour, sugar, chocolate, milk, eggs, and margarine. She kneaded the dried blood of Faustina into the dough and proceeded to make a batch of her famous tea cakes which she generously shared with her friends.

But was the sacrifice of Faustina enough to ensure the safety of her son?

By August of 1940 Francesca Soavi was in need of help. The former schoolteacher had quit her job to take care of her ill husband and when he died she was left with very little. Unable to find work she sought out Leonarda, after all she heard about how Leonarda had found Faustina a husband and made her dreams come true. Francesca met Leonarda and amazingly, she said that she was able to help. As luck would have it Leonarda knew of a school in the city of Piacenza, and they had a job opening. It was a very sought after position but Leonarda told her not to worry, she would make magic happen. Sure enough, a few weeks later Leonarda gave Francesca the happy news that she got the mystery dream job. All she had left to do was pack and write letters in advance to her friends and family telling them she was happy and safe. She would not even have to worry about mailing them, Leonarda’s son would take care of that for her.

On September 5th 1940 Francesca arrived at Leonarda’s home in the early morning just before she departed for Piacenza. She wanted to thank her once again for helping her find a job and getting her back on her feet. Leonarda handed her a celebratory glass of wine. Once again Leonarda’s guest started to feel weak and once again her host grabbed the ax. Francesca met the very same fate as Faustina with her broken down, liquified remains being tossed into the septic tank and her blood being baked into tea cakes. Leonarda’s second sacrifice was complete.

As Giuseppe’s departure date loomed closer Leonarda’s worry over if she had done enough to ensure his safety might have been unbearable. She needed to find another sacrifice but this time she did not have to look far. Virginia Cacioppo was a celebrity in Correggio. She was a former opera singer who once sang at the famed La Scala opera house in Milan and her friends and neighbors often heard her tales of lavish living so many years ago. Now after spending a number of years away from the spotlight she missed her former life and her close friend Leonarda was happy to help her. Before long Virginia had good news, Leonarda found her a job as a secretary for an impresario who organized the kind of artistic events that she was so familiar with and missed so dearly. She had to act quickly though, the job was in Florence and she had a lot to do before moving and re-igniting her life.

On the morning of September 30th 1940 Virginia was ready to go, but she could not leave without thanking her friend Leonarda for all of her amazing help. She brought along her belongings and, of course, the letters that Leonarda told her to write in advance that would be mailed later telling everyone about her wonderful new life in Florence. Leonarda offered her a glass of red wine.

Once Virginia was dead on the floor Leonarda started the process again. The body was cut into pieces…the blood was put in a basin to dry for tea cakes…but this time was slightly different. The previous two times Leonarda put the body parts and the caustic soda in the pots the experiment went totally wrong and her friends ended up in the septic tank. This time it worked, according to Leonarda when she recalled the visit later on:

“She ended up in the pot, like the other two...her flesh was fat and white, when it had melted I added a bottle of cologne, and after a long time on the boil I was able to make some most acceptable creamy soap. I gave bars to neighbors and acquaintances. The cakes, too, were better: that woman was really sweet.”

Image via https://horroresrevelados.wordpress.com/2017/03/20/leonarda-cianciulli-creaba-jabones-con-humanos/

Leonarda may have thought her third sacrifice was a success and further ensured the safety of her son, but with the killing of Virginia she made a very big mistake. Her two previous victims, Faustina and Francesca, had families that were located far from Correggio and did not have anyone close by to notice that something was amiss, especially when they were still receiving letters from them. This was not the case with Virginia, she had a sister-in-law in town named Albertina Fanti who did not believe for an instant that she had left to pursue a new job. It was more than a simple hunch that Virginia would not up and leave. It was the added fact that the last time she saw Virginia she was walking into Leonarda’s home and shortly after her disappearance her clothes started popping up for sale in Leonarda’s shop.

The accounts of how Leonarda was arrested vary with some saying Albertina had to go to the police in Reggio Emilia after the local police in Correggio dismissed her. Some say she was questioned more than once and it was only after a bank voucher belonging to Virginia was traced back to Leonarda that her home was searched. Others say the items that brought her down were the letters from the three women, all with a similar story and all mailed after they arrived at Leonarda’s home and “went away” to their bright new futures. Law enforcement might not have known what they were facing when they entered Leonarda’s home to question her, but they probably did not expect what happened. The five-foot-tall forty-six year old woman casually confessed to killing the three women, cutting them into pieces, turning their flesh into discarded sludge and admired soap, and baking their blood into tea cakes. Reports state that during one search of her property the septic tank was searched and inside was found small portions of bone showing evidence of the soap-making process and a denture of fourteen teeth matching the one worn by Faustina Setti.

Leonarda was arrested but she did not see the inside of a courtroom for six years while the war raged on and her son Giuseppe, her “miracle child” that she committed such horrors for, fought in the army. While in prison attempts were made to determine if she was actually a cold-blooded killer or if she was legitimately insane. One of the most renowned Italian psychiatrists, Director of the Criminal Asylum of Aversa, Filippo Saporito, undertook this task and asked Leonarda to write about her life. Several years later he was presented with a memoir that was almost 800 pages long and entitled Confessions of a Bitter Soul filled with everything from passages from the Gospels to the grisly details on how she turned the bodies of the three women into tea cakes and soap.

Mugshot of Leonarda Cianciulli. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

According to the Criminology Museum in Rome when the trial began not everyone was so sure Leonarda was the only person responsible for the crimes. These were no simple murders and doubt began to grow that she could have killed the women and done the dismembering of the corpses herself. With suspicion growing the eyes of the courtroom began to shift over to the only other person that they felt could have been involved, Giuseppe. When questioned about his role in the murders Giuseppe admitted to mailing the letters for his mother, but he said he did not know anything about them. With the accusations creeping closer toward her son Leonarda became aggressively adamant he was not involved in the killings, even telling the courtroom to bring her a fresh corpse from the morgue and she would show them all how she did it right then in there, “I cut here, here and here in less than 20 minutes everything was done, including cleaning. I might as well prove it now.”

Leonarda Cianciulli during her trail. Image via https://murderpedia.org/female.C/c/cianciulli-leonarda-photos-2.htm

As the examination continued it became clear that Leonarda was their only killer with her even correcting the prosecutor on the finer details of her crimes. She was matter-of-fact, candid, and completely without remorse. At one point telling the courtroom “I gave the copper ladle, which I used to skim the fat off the kettles, to my country, which was so badly in need of metal during the last days of the war...."

The trial of Leonarda Cianciulli only took three days and the verdict was no surprise to anyone. She was convicted of the murders and was sentenced to thirty years in prison and three years in a criminal asylum. According to a nun who knew Leonarda during her imprisonment she was a quiet, calm, prisoner making the welcome speeches to visiting ministers and spending her time crocheting, writing, and baking sweets that the other prisoners refused to eat.

The tools allegedly used by Leonarda in her crimes.

Images via https://murderpedia.org/female.C/c/cianciulli-leonarda-photos-2.htm and https://www.letturefantastiche.com/la_saponificatrice_di_correggio.html

Leonarda Cianciulli died in the asylum on October 15, 1970 at the age of seventy-six. Her body was returned to her family and buried in a common grave of a local cemetery.

Over eighty years after the murders there are still many questions about Leonarda Cianciulli, “The Soap-Maker of Correggio.” What made her believe the answer to her son’s safety was human sacrifice? Did she really do what everyone says? There are some that say it would have been impossible for her to turn the remains of the women into tea cakes and soap inside her own home, but others say the evidence is clear. Some question her own accounts of the murders and wonder if she exaggerated everything to convince the court she was insane in order to avoid the death penalty. A maid allegedly spoke up decades later about seeing the body parts hidden in parts of the house. There will forever be some details that remain foggy but what is absolutely certain is that three women walked into the home of Leonarda Cianciulli excited by the promise of a new life, they never left, and the only traces of them ever found were in the septic tank, exactly where Leonarda said they met their end. Also found in the home were a cauldron, an ax, a hammer, a hacksaw, a kitchen cleaver, and trace amounts of blood in multiple rooms of the house.

The cauldron, axes, hacksaw, and knives used by Leonarda were obtained by the Criminology Museum in Rome and remained on display until the museum’s closure.

Portion of the exhibit on Leonarda in the Criminology Museum in Rome (now closed.) Image via https://allthatsinteresting.com/leonarda-cianciulli

***********************************************************

Sources:

“Foreign News: A Copper Ladle" Time Magazine published June 24th 1946.

“How Serial Killer Leonarda Cianciulli Made Her Victims Into Soap And Teacakes” by Katie Serena. Published January 29, 2018. allthatsinteresting.com/leonarda-cianciulli

“Leonarda Cianciulli: The Serial Killer Who Turned Her Victims into Soap” by Dan Hendrix vocal.media/criminal/leonarda-cianciulli-the-serial-killer-who-turned-her-victims-into-soap

“WWII Serial Killer Mom Sacrificed Victims to Keep Her Son Safe at War” by Karen Harris historydaily.org/wwii-serial-killer-mom-sacrificed-victims-to-keep-her-son-safe-at-war/4

“The Cianciulli case” www.focus.it/cultura/storia/545745165-il-caso-cianciuli-32653

“Murder: Cianciulli case” www.museocriminologico.it/index.php/2-non-categorizzato/120-omicidi-caso-cianciulli2

The Deadly Soap Maker of Correggio by Genovena Ortiz. True Crime Explicit Volume 6. Sea Vision Publishing 2022.

3 notes · View notes

gardenofkore · 4 years ago

Photo

“A wave of popular unrest washed over Sicily at the close of the nineteenth century. In town after town, peasants mobilized labor strikes, occupied fields and piazzas, and looted government offices. While the island had a long history of revolt, this marked a new era of social protest. For the first time, women led the social movement and infused the struggle with their own mixture of socialism and spiritualism. The activity began in the autumn of 1892, in the towns surrounding Palermo, in the northwestern part of the island. In Monreale, women and children filled the central piazza shouting “Down with the municipal government! Long live the union!” After attacking and looting the offices of the city council, they marched toward Palermo crying “We are hungry!” waving banners with slogans connecting socialism to scripture. In Villafrati, Caterina Costanzo led a group of women wielding clubs to the fields where they threatened workers who had not joined the community in a general strike against the repressive local government. In Balestrate, thousands of women dressed in traditional clothes and also armed with clubs marched through the streets, demanding an end to government corruption. In Belmonte, Felicia Pizzo Di Lorenzo led fifty peasant women through the town and then gathered in the palazzo comunale, demanding the abolition of taxes, the removal of the mayor, and the termination of the city council. Three days later, when the crowd had grown to six hundred women and men, the mayor and his police broke up the demonstration and arrested the most vocal protestors. In Piana dei Greci, thirty- six women were arrested after they occupied and then destroyed the municipal offices, throwing the furniture into the streets. Soon after the uprising, close to one thousand women there formed a fascio delle lavoratrici (union of workers). The word fascio, “meaning bundle, or sheaf (as in sheaf of wheat),” in this case referred to “a sodality of peasants, miners, or artisans.” They celebrated the founding of the group as they would a religious festival, with music and food, and wove their political and spiritual ideologies together in their speeches. In the words of one woman, “We want everybody to work as we work. There should no longer be either rich or poor. All should have bread for themselves and their children. We should all be equal. . . . Jesus was a true socialist and he wanted precisely what we ask for, but the priests don’t discuss this.” News of the uprisings traveled quickly. Within days, government officials and newspaper reporters arrived from the mainland to witness the disturbances. Adolfo Rossi, a government official who would become the Italian commissioner of emigration, was one of the first to appear on the scene, and his observations circulated in the Roman newspaper La Tribuna in the fall of 1893. From Piana dei Greci, an epicenter of activity, he wrote: “The most serious sign is that the women are the most enthusiastic. . . . Peasant women’s fasci are no less fierce than those of the men.” In some areas, “women who were once very religious now believe only in their fasci,” and “in those areas where men are timid against authority, their wives soon convince them to join the movement of workers.” When the government accused the newly formed Italian Socialist Party of orchestrating the rebellion, party leader Filippo Turati argued that the movement was indigenous and rooted in popular solidarity: “The women, whose role in igniting the insurrection is well known, have abandoned the church for the fasci and it is they who incite their husbands and children to action.” The Italian government responded swiftly. On 3 January 1894, Prime Minister Francesco Crispi (a Sicilian himself) called for a state of siege and sent forty thousand military troops to the island to “contain the socialist threat.” Movement leaders and participants were arrested, beaten, and gunned down in the streets or executed in prison. Yet agitation continued to spread across the island and to the mainland. As popular unrest moved from the South to the North, women continued to play a critical role, leading street demonstrations and riots in small villages and towns throughout Calabria, Basiciliata (sic!), and Puglia and in the cities of Rome, Bologna, Imola, Ancona, Naples, Bari, Florence, Milan, and Genoa. Across Italy, workers in the emerging industrial cities joined with peasants to demand a complete restructuring of society based on socialist principles and filled streets chanting “Long Live Anarchy! Long Live Social Revolution!” In October, Crispi ordered the suppression of all socialist and anarchist groups. A four- year repressive campaign culminated in the fatti di maggio of 1898—the massacre of eighty demonstrators in Milan. By 1900 most of Italy’s peasantry and workers had experienced or heard of this kind of revolutionary struggle. It was inthis climate that mass emigration from Italy took place.”

Jennifer Guglielmo, Living the Revolution. Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945, p. 9-11

#women #history #history of women #historical women #women in history #caterina costanzo #Felicia Pizzo Di Lorenzo #Francesco Crispi #contemporary sicily #people of sicily #women of sicily

38 notes · View notes

96thdayofrage · 4 years ago

Text

A beautiful late April day, seventy-two years after slavery ended in the United States. Claude Anderson parks his car on the side of Holbrook Street in Danville. On the porch of number 513, he rearranges the notepads under his arm. Releasing his breath in a rush of decision, he steps up to the door of the handmade house and knocks.

Danville is on the western edge of the Virginia Piedmont. Back in 1865, it had been the last capital of the Confederacy. Or so Jefferson Davis had proclaimed on April 3, after he fled Richmond. Davis stayed a week, but then he had to keep running. The blue-coated soldiers of the Army of the Potomac were hot on his trail. When they got to Danville, they didn’t find the fugitive rebel. But they did discover hundreds of Union prisoners of war locked in the tobacco warehouses downtown. The bluecoats, rescuers and rescued, formed up and paraded through town. Pouring into the streets around them, dancing and singing, came thousands of African Americans. They had been prisoners for far longer.

In the decades after the jubilee year of 1865, Danville, like many other southern villages, had become a cotton factory town. Anderson, an African-American master’s student from Hampton University, would not have been able to work at the segregated mill. But the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a bureau of the federal government created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, would hire him. To put people back to work after they had lost their jobs in the Great Depression, the WPA organized thousands of projects, hiring construction workers to build schools and artists to paint murals. And many writers and students were hired to interview older Americans—like Lorenzo Ivy, the man painfully shuffling across the pine board floor to answer Anderson’s knock.

Anderson had found Ivy’s name in the Hampton University archives, two hundred miles east of Danville. Back in 1850, when Lorenzo had been born in Danville, there was neither a university nor a city called Hampton—just an American fort named after a slaveholder president. Fortress Monroe stood on Old Point Comfort, a narrow triangle of land that divided the Chesapeake Bay from the James River. Long before the fort was built, in April 1607, the Susan Constant had sailed past the point with a boatload of English settlers. Anchoring a few miles upriver, they had founded Jamestown, the first perma- nent English-speaking settlement in North America. Twelve years later, the crews of two storm-damaged English privateers also passed, seeking shelter and a place to sell the twenty-odd enslaved Africans (captured from a Portuguese slaver) lying shackled in their holds.

After that first 1619 shipload, some 100,000 more enslaved Africans would sail upriver past Old Point Comfort. Lying in chains in the holds of slave ships, they could not see the land until they were brought up on deck to be sold. After the legal Atlantic slave trade to the United States ended in 1807, hundreds of thousands more enslaved people passed the point. Now they were going the other way, boarding ships at Richmond, the biggest eastern center of the internal slave trade, to go by sea to the Mississippi Valley.

By the time a dark night came in late May 1861, the moon had waxed and waned three thousand times over slavery in the South. To protect slavery, Virginia had just seceded from the United States, choosing a side at last after six months of indecision in the wake of South Carolina’s rude exit from the Union. Fortress Monroe, built to protect the James River from ocean-borne invaders, became the Union’s last toehold in eastern Virginia. Rebel troops entrenched themselves athwart the fort’s landward approaches. Local planters, including one Charles Mallory, detailed enslaved men to build berms to shelter the besiegers’ cannon. But late this night, Union sentries on the fort’s seaward side saw a small skiff emerging slowly from the darkness. Frank Baker and Townshend rowed with muffled oars. Sheppard Mallory held the tiller. They were setting themselves free.

A few days later, Charles Mallory showed up at the gates of the Union fort. He demanded that the commanding federal officer, Benjamin Butler, return his property. Butler, a politician from Massachusetts, was an incompetent battlefield commander, but a clever lawyer. He replied that if the men were Mallory’s property, and he was using them to wage war against the US government, then logically the men were therefore contraband of war.

Those first three “contrabands” struck a crack in slavery’s centuries-old wall. Over the next four years, hundreds of thousands more enslaved people widened the crack into a gaping breach by escaping to Union lines. Their movement weakened the Confederate war effort and made it easier for the United States and its president to avow mass emancipation as a tool of war. Eventually the Union Army began to welcome formerly enslaved men into its ranks, turning refugee camps into recruiting stations—and those African-American soldiers would make the difference between victory and defeat for the North, which by late 1863 was exhausted and uncertain.

After the war, Union officer Samuel Armstrong organized literacy programs that had sprung up in the refugee camp at Old Point Comfort to form Hampton Institute. In 1875, Lorenzo Ivy traveled down to study there, on the ground zero of African-American history. At Hampton, he acquired an education that enabled him to return to Danville as a trained schoolteacher. He educated generations of African-American children. He built the house on Holbrook Street with his own Hampton-trained hands, and there he sheltered his father, his brother, his sister-in-law, and his nieces and nephews. In April 1937, Ivy opened the door he’d made with hands and saw and plane, and it swung clear for Claude Anderson without rubbing the frame.1

Anderson’s notepads, however, were accumulating evidence of two very different stories of the American past—halves that did not fit together neatly. And he was about to hear more. Somewhere in the midst of the notepads was a typed list of questions supplied by the WPA. Questions often reveal the desired answer. By the 1930s, most white Americans had been demanding for decades that they hear only a sanitized version of the past into which Lorenzo Ivy had been born. This might seem strange. In the middle of the nineteenth century, white Americans had gone to war with each other over the future of slavery in their country, and slavery had lost. Indeed, for a few years after 1865, many white northerners celebrated emancipation as one of their collective triumphs. Yet whites’ belief in the emancipation made permanent by the Thirteenth Amendment, much less in the race-neutral citizenship that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had written into the Constitution, was never that deep. Many northerners had only supported Benjamin Butler and Abraham Lincoln’s moves against slavery because they hated the arrogance of slaveholders like Charles Mallory. And after 1876, northern allies abandoned southern black voters.

Within half a century after Butler sent Charles Mallory away from Fortress Monroe empty-handed, the children of white Union and Confederate soldiers united against African-American political and civil equality. This compact of white supremacy enabled southern whites to impose Jim Crow segregation on public space, disfranchise African-American citizens by barring them from the polls, and use the lynch-mob noose to enforce black compliance. White Americans imposed increased white supremacy outside the South, too. In non-Confederate states, many restaurants wouldn’t serve black customers. Stores and factories refused to hire African Americans. Hundreds of midwestern communities forcibly evicted African-American residents and became “sundown towns” (“Don’t let the sun set on you in this town”). Most whites, meanwhile, believed that science proved that there were biologically distinct human races, and that Europeans were members of the superior one. Anglo-Americans even believed that they were distinct from and superior to the Jews from Russia, Italians, Greeks, Slavs, and others who flooded Ellis Island and changed the culture of northern urban centers.

By the early twentieth century, America’s first generation of professional historians were justifying the exclusions of Jim Crow and disfranchisement by telling a story about the nation’s past of slavery and civil war that seemed to confirm, for many white Americans, that white supremacy was just and necessary. Above all, the historians of a reunified white nation insisted that slavery was a premodern institution that was not committed to profit-seeking. In so doing, historians were to some extent only repeating pre–Civil War debates: abolitionists had depicted slavery not only as a psychopathic realm of whipping, rape, and family separation, but also as a flawed economic system that was inherently less efficient than the free-labor capitalism developing in the North. Proslavery writers disagreed about the psychopathy, but by the 1850s they agreed that enslavers were first and foremost not profit-seekers. For them, planters were caring masters who considered their slaves to be inferior family members. So although anti- and proslavery conclusions about slavery’s morality were different, their premises about slavery-as-a-business-model matched. Both agreed that slavery was inherently unprofitable. It was an old, static system that belonged to an earlier time. Slave labor was inefficient to begin with, slave productivity did not increase to keep pace with industrialization, and enslavers did not act like modern profit-seeking businessmen. As a system, slavery had never adapted or changed to thrive in the new industrial economy—let alone to play a premier role as a driver of economic expansion—and had been little more than a drag on the explosive growth that had built the modern United States. In fact, during the Civil War, northerners were so convinced of these points that they believed that shifting from slave labor to free labor would dramatically increase cotton productivity.

It didn’t. But even though the data of declining productivity over the ensuing three score and ten years suggested that slavery might have been the most efficient way to produce the world’s most important crop, no one let empirical tests change their minds. Instead, historians of Woodrow Wilson’s generation imprinted the stamp of academic research on the idea that slavery was separate from the great economic and social transformations of the Western world during the nineteenth century. After all, it did not rely upon ever-more efficient machine labor. Its unprofitable economic structures supposedly produced antique social arrangements, and the industrializing, urbanizing world looked back toward them with contempt—or, increasingly, nostalgia. Many whites, now proclaiming that science proved that people of African descent were intellectually inferior and congenitally prone to criminal behavior, looked wistfully to a past when African Americans had been governed with whips and chains. Granted, slavery as an economic system was not modern, they said, and had neither changed to adapt to the modern economy nor contributed to economic expansion. But to an openly racist historical profession—and a white history-reading, history-thinking public obsessed with all kinds of race control—the white South’s desire to white-wash slavery in the past, and maintain segregation now and forever, served the purpose of validating control over supposedly premodern, semi-savage black people.

Such stories about slavery shaped the questions Claude Anderson was to ask in the 1930s, because you could find openly racist versions of it baked into the recipe of every American textbook. You could find it in popular novels, politicians’ speeches, plantation-nostalgia advertising, and even the first blockbuster American film: Birth of a Nation. As president, Woodrow Wilson—a southern-born history professor— called this paean to white supremacy “history written with lightning,” and screened it at the White House. Such ideas became soaked into the way America publicly depicted slavery. Even many of those who believed that they rejected overt racism depicted the era before emancipation as a plantation idyll of happy slaves and paternalist masters. Abolitionists were snakes in the garden, responsible for a Civil War in which hundreds of thousands of white people died. Maybe the end of slavery had to come for the South to achieve economic modernity, but it didn’t have to come that way, they said.

The way that Americans remember slavery has changed dramatically since then. In tandem with widespread desegregation of public spaces and the assertion of black cultural power in the years between World War II and the

1990s came a new understanding of the experience of slavery. No longer did academic historians describe slavery as a school in which patient masters and mistresses trained irresponsible savages for futures of perpetual servitude.

Slavery’s denial of rights now prefigured Jim Crow, while enslaved people’s resistance predicted the collective self-assertion that developed into first the civil rights movement and later, Black Power.

But perhaps the changes were not so great as they seemed on the surface. The focus on showing African Americans as assertive rebels, for instance, implied an uncomfortable corollary. If one should be impressed by those who rebelled, because they resisted, one should not be proud of those who did not. And there were very few rebellions in the history of slavery in the United States. Some scholars tried to backfill against this quandary by arguing that all African Americans together created a culture of resistance, especially in slave quarters and other spaces outside of white observation. Yet the insistence that assertive resistance undermined enslavers’ power, and a focus on the development of an independent black culture, led some to believe that enslaved people actually managed to prevent whites from successfully exploiting their labor. This idea, in turn, created a quasi-symmetry with post– Civil War plantation memoirs that portrayed gentle masters, who maintained slavery as a nonprofit endeavor aimed at civilizing Africans.

Thus, even after historians of the civil rights, Black Power, and multicultural eras rewrote segregationists’ stories about gentlemen and belles and grateful darkies, historians were still telling the half that has ever been told. For some fundamental assumptions about the history of slavery and the history of the United States remain strangely unchanged. The first major assumption is that, as an economic system—a way of producing and trading commodities—American slavery was fundamentally different from the rest of the modern economy and separate from it. Stories about industrialization emphasize white immigrants and clever inventors, but they leave out cotton fields and slave labor. This perspective implies not only that slavery didn’t change, but that slavery and enslaved African Americans had little long-term influence on the rise of the United States during the nineteenth century, a period in which the nation went from being a minor European trading partner to becoming the world’s largest economy—one of the central stories of American history.

The second major assumption is that slavery in the United States was fundamentally in contradiction with the political and economic systems of the liberal republic, and that inevitably that contradiction would be resolved in favor of the free-labor North. Sooner or later, slavery would have ended by the operation of historical forces; thus, slavery is a story without suspense. And a story with a predetermined outcome isn’t a story at all.

Third, the worst thing about slavery as an experience, one is told, was that it denied enslaved African Americans the liberal rights and liberal subjectivity of modern citizens. It did those things as a matter of course, and as injustice, that denial ranks with the greatest in modern history. But slavery also killed people, in large numbers. From those who survived, it stole everything. Yet the massive and cruel engineering required to rip a million people from their homes, brutally drive them to new, disease-ridden places, and make them live in terror and hunger as they continually built and rebuilt a commodity-generating empire—this vanished in the story of a slavery that was supposedly focused primarily not on producing profit but on maintaining its status as a quasi-feudal elite, or producing modern ideas about race in order to maintain white unity and elite power. And once the violence of slavery was minimized, another voice could whisper, saying that African Americans, both before and after emancipation, were denied the rights of citizens because they would not fight for them.

All these assumptions lead to still more implications, ones that shape attitudes, identities, and debates about policy. If slavery was outside of US history, for instance—if indeed it was a drag and not a rocket booster to American economic growth—then slavery was not implicated in US growth, success, power, and wealth. Therefore none of the massive quantities of wealth and treasure piled by that economic growth is owed to African Americans. Ideas about slavery’s history determine the ways in which Americans hope to resolve the long contradiction between the claims of the United States to be a nation of freedom and opportunity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the unfreedom, the unequal treatment, and the opportunity denied that for most of American history have been the reality faced by people of African descent. Surely, if the worst thing about slavery was that it denied African Americans the liberal rights of the citizen, one must merely offer them the title of citizen—even elect one of them president—to make amends. Then the issue will be put to rest forever.

Slavery’s story gets told in ways that reinforce all these assumptions. Textbooks segregate twenty-five decades of enslavement into one chapter, painting a static picture. Millions of people each year visit plantation homes where guides blather on about furniture and silverware. As sites, such homes hide the real purpose of these places, which was to make African Americans toil under the hot sun for the profit of the rest of the world. All this is the “symbolic annihilation” of enslaved people, as two scholars of those weird places put it.2 Meanwhile, at other points we tell slavery’s story by heaping praise on those who escaped it through flight or death in rebellion, leaving the listener to wonder if those who didn’t flee or die somehow “accepted” slavery. And everyone who teaches about slavery knows a little dirty secret that reveals historians’ collective failure: many African-American students struggle with a sense of shame that most of their ancestors could not escape the suffering they experienced.

The truth can set us free, if we can find the right questions. But back in the little house in Danville, Anderson was reading from a list of leading ones, designed by white officials—some well-meaning, some not so well-meaning. He surely felt how the gravity of the questions pulled him toward the planet of plantation nostalgia. “Did slaves mind being called ‘nigger’?” “What did slaves call master or mistress?” “Have you been happier in slavery or free?” “Was the mansion house pretty?” Escaping from chains is very difficult, however, so Anderson dutifully asked the prescribed questions and poised his pencil to take notes.

Ivy listened politely. He sat still. Then he began to speak: “My mother’s master was named William Tunstall. He was a mean man. There was only one good thing he did, and I don’t reckon he intended to do that. He sold our family to my father’s master George H. Gilman.”

Perhaps the wind blowing through the window changed as a cloud moved across the spring sun: “Old Tunstall caught the ‘cotton fever.’ There was a fever going round, leastways it was like a fever. Everyone was dying to get down south and grow cotton to sell. So old Tunstall separated families right and left. He took two of my aunts and left their husbands up here, and he separated altogether seven husbands and wives. One woman had twelve children. Yessir. Took ‘em all down south with him to Georgia and Alabama.”

Pervasive separations. Tears carving lines on faces. Lorenzo remembered his relief at dodging the worst, but he also remembered knowing that it was just a lucky break. Next time it could’ve been his mother. No white person was reliable, because money drove their decisions. No, this wasn’t the story the books told.

So Anderson moved to the next question. Did Ivy know if any slaves had been sold here? Now, perhaps, the room grew darker.

For more than a century, white people in the United States had been singling out slave traders as an exception: unscrupulous lower-class outsiders who pried apart paternalist bonds. Scapegoaters had a noble precedent. In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson tried to blame King George III for using the Atlantic slave trade to impose slavery on the colonies. In historians’ tellings, the 1808 abolition of the Atlantic trade brought stability to slavery, ringing in the “Old South,” as it has been called since before the Civil War. Of course, one might wonder how something that was brand new, created after a revolution, and growing more rapidly than any other commodity-producing economy in history before then could be considered “old.” But never mind. Historians depicted slave trading after 1808 as irrelevant to what slavery was in the “Old South,” and to how America as a whole was shaped. America’s modernization was about entrepreneurs, creativity, invention, markets, movement, and change. Slavery was not about any of these things—not about slave trading, or moving people away from everyone they knew in order to make them make cotton. Therefore, modern America and slavery had nothing to do with each other.

But Ivy spilled out a rush of very different words. “They sold slaves here and everywhere. I’ve seen droves of Negroes brought in here on foot going South to be sold. Each one of them had an old tow sack on his back with everything he’s got in it. Over the hills they came in lines reaching as far as the eye can see. They walked in double lines chained together by twos. They walk ‘em here to the railroad and shipped ’em south like cattle.”

Then Lorenzo Ivy said this: “Truly, son, the half has never been told.”

To this, day, it still has not. For the other half is the story of how slavery changed and moved and grew over time: Lorenzo Ivy’s time, and that of his parents and grandparents. In the span of a single lifetime after the 1780s, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out plantations to a sub-continental empire. Entrepreneurial enslavers moved more than 1 million enslaved people, by force, from the communities that survivors of the slave trade from Africa had built in the South and in the West to vast territories that were seized—also by force—from their Native American inhabitants. From

1783 at the end of the American Revolution to 1861, the number of slaves in the United States increased five times over, and all this expansion produced a powerful nation. For white enslavers were able to force enslaved African-American migrants to pick cotton faster and more efficiently than free people. Their practices rapidly transformed the southern states into the dominant force in the global cotton market, and cotton was the world’s most widely traded commodity at the time, as it was the key raw material during the first century of the industrial revolution. The returns from cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the United States had become the second nation to undergo large-scale industrialization. In fact, slavery’s expansion shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation—not only increasing its power and size, but also, eventually, dividing US politics, differentiating regional identities and interests, and helping to make civil war possible.

The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth. And that truth was the half of the story that survived mostly in the custodianship of those who survived slavery’s expansion—whether they had been taken over the hill, or left behind. Forced migration had shaped their lives, and also had shaped what they thought about their lives and the wider history in which they were enmeshed. Even as they struggled to stay alive in the midst of disruption, they created ways to talk about this half untold. But what survivors experienced, analyzed, and named was a slavery that didn’t fit the comfortable boxes into which other Americans have been trying to fit it ever since it ended.

I read Lorenzo Ivy’s words, and they left me uneasy. I sensed that the true narrative had been left out of history—not only American history in general, but even the history of slavery. I began to look actively for the other half of the story, the one about how slavery constantly grew, changed, and reshaped the modern world. Of how it was both modernizing and modern, and what that meant for the people who lived through its incredible expansion. Once I began to look, I discovered that the traces of the other half were everywhere. The debris of cotton fevers that infected white entrepreneurs and separated man and woman, parent and child, right and left, dusted every set of pre–Civil War letters, newspapers, and court documents. Most of all, the half not told ran like a layer of iridium left by a dinosaur-killing asteroid through every piece of testimony that ex-slaves, such as Lorenzo Ivy, left on the historical record: thousands of stanzas of an epic of forced separations, violence, and new kinds of labor.

For a long time I wasn’t sure how to tell the story of this muscular, dynamic process in a single book. The most difficult challenge was simply the fact that the expansion of slavery in many ways shaped the story of everything in the pre–Civil War United States. Enslavers’ surviving papers showed calculations of returns from slave sales and purchases as well as the costs of establishing new slave labor camps in the cotton states. Newspapers dripped with speculations in land and people and the commodities they produced; dramatic changes in how people made money and how much they made; and the dramatic violence that accompanied these practices. The accounts of northern merchants and bankers and factory owners showed that they invested in slavery, bought from and sold to slaveholders, and took slices of profit out of slavery’s expansion. Scholars and students talked about politics as a battle about states’ rights or republican principles, but viewed in a different light the fights can be seen as a struggle between regions about how the rewards of slavery’s expansion would be allocated and whether that expansion could continue.

The story seemed too big to fit into one framework. Even Ivy had no idea how to count the chained lines he saw going southwest toward the mountains on the horizon and the vast open spaces beyond. From the 1790s to the 1860s, enslavers moved 1 million people from the old slave states to the new. They went from making no cotton to speak of in 1790 to making almost 2 billion pounds of it in 1860. Stretching out beyond the slave South, the story encompassed not only Washington politicians and voters across the United States but also Connecticut factories, London banks, opium addicts in China, and consumers in East Africa. And could one book do Lorenzo Ivy’s insight justice? It would have to avoid the old platitudes, such as the easy temptation to tell the story as a collection of topics—here a chapter on slave resistance, there one on women and slavery, and so on. That kind of abstraction cuts the beating heart out of the story. For the half untold was a narrative, a process of movement and change and suspense. Things happened because of what had been done before them—and what people chose to do in response.

No, this had to be a story, and one couldn’t tell it solely from the perspective of powerful actors. True, politicians and planters and bankers shaped policies, the movement of people, and the growing and selling of cotton, and even remade the land itself. But when one takes Lorenzo Ivy’s words as a starting point, the whole history of the United States comes walking over the hill behind a line of people in chains. Changes that reshaped the entire world began on the auction block where enslaved migrants stood or in the frontier cotton fields where they toiled. Their individual drama was a struggle to survive. Their reward was to endure a brutal transition to new ways of labor that made them reinvent themselves every day. Enslaved people’s creativity enabled their survival, but, stolen from them in the form of ever-growing cotton productivity, their creativity also expanded the slaveholding South at an unprecedented rate. Enslaved African Americans built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden.

One day I found a metaphor that helped. It came from the great African-American author Ralph Ellison. You might know his novel Invisible Man. But in the 1950s, Ellison also produced incredible essays. In one of them he wrote, “On the moral level I propose we view the whole of American life as a drama enacted on the body of a Negro giant who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which the action unfolds.”3

The image fit the story that Ivy’s words raised above the watery surface of buried years. The only problem was that Ellison’s image implied a stationary giant. In the old myth, the stationary, quintessentially unchanging plantation was the site and the story of African-American life from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. But Lorenzo Ivy had described a world in motion. After the American Revolution—which seemed at the time to portend slavery’s imminent demise—a metastatic transformation and growth of slavery’s giant body had begun instead. From the exploitation, commodification, and torture of enslaved people’s bodies, enslavers and other free people gained new kinds of modern power. The sweat and blood of the growing system, a network of individuals and families and labor camps that grew bigger with each passing year, fueled massive economic change. Enslaved people, meanwhile, transported and tortured, had to find ways to survive, resist, or endure. And over time the question of their freedom or bondage came to occupy the center of US politics.

This trussed-up giant, stretched out on the rack of America’s torture zone, actually grew, like a person passing through ordeals to new maturity. I have divided the chapters of this book with Ellison’s imagined giant in mind, a structure that has allowed the story to take as its center point the experience of enslaved African Americans themselves. Before we pass through the door that Lorenzo Ivy opened, here are the chapters’ names. The first is “Feet,” for the story begins with unfree movement on paths to enslaved frontiers that were laid down between the end of the American Revolution in 1783 and the early 1800s. “Heads” is the title of the second chapter, which covers America’s acquisition of the key points of the Mississippi Valley by violence, a gain that also consolidated the enslavers’ hold on the frontier. Then come the “Right Hand” and the “Left Hand” (Chapters 3 and 4). They reveal the inner secrets of enslavers’ power, secrets which made the entire world of white people wealthy.

“Tongues” (Chapter 5) and “Breath” (Chapter 6) follow. They describe how, by the mid-1820s, enslavers had not only found ways to silence the tongues of their critics, but had built a system of slave trading that served as expansion’s lungs. Most forms of resistance were impossible to carry out successfully. So a question hung in the air. Would the spirit in the tied-down body die, leaving enslaved people to live on like undead zombies serving their captors? Or would the body live, and rise? Every transported soul, finding his or her old life killed off, faced this question on the individual level as well: whether to work with fellow captives or scrabble against them in a quest for individualistic subsistence. Enslaved African Americans chose many things. But perhaps most importantly, they chose survival, and true survival in such circumstances required solidarity. Solidarity allowed them to see their common experience, to light their own way by building a critique of enslavers’ power that was an alternative story about what things were and what they meant.

This story draws on thousands of personal narratives like the one that Lorenzo Ivy told Claude Anderson. Slavery has existed in many societies, but no other population of formerly enslaved people has been able to record the testimonies of its members like those who survived slavery in the United States. The narratives began with those who escaped slavery’s expansion in the nineteenth century as fugitives. Over one hundred of those survivors published their autobiographies during the nineteenth century. As time went on, such memoirs found a market, in no small part because escapees from southern captivity were changing the minds of some of the northern whites about what the expansion of slavery meant for them. Then, during the 1930s, people like Claude Anderson conducted about 2,300 interviews with the ex-slaves who had lived into that decade. Because the interviews often allowed old people to tell about the things they had seen for themselves and the things they heard from their elders in the years before the Civil War, they take us back into the world of explanation and storytelling that grew up around fires and on porches and between cotton rows. No one autobiography or interview is pure and objective as an account of all that the history books left untold. But read them all, and each one adds to a more detailed, clearer picture of the whole. One story fills in gaps left by another, allowing one to read between the lines.4

Understanding something of what it felt like to suffer, and what it cost to endure that suffering, is crucial to understanding the course of US history. For what enslaved people made together—new ties to each other, new ways of understanding their world—had the potential to help them survive in mind and body. And ultimately, their spirit and their speaking would enable them to call new allies into being in the form of an abolitionist movement that helped to destabilize the mighty enslavers who held millions captive. But the road on which enslaved people were being driven was long. It led through the hell described by “Seed” (Chapter 7), which tells of the horrific near-decade from 1829 to 1837. In these years entrepreneurs ran wild on slavery’s frontier. Their acts created the political and economic dynamics that carried enslavers to their greatest height of power. Facing challenges from other white men who wanted to assert their masculine equality through political democracy, clever entrepreneurs found ways to leverage not just that desire, but other desires as well. With the creation of innovative financial tools, more and more of the Western world was able to invest directly in slavery’s expansion. Such creativity multiplied the incredible productivity and profitability of enslaved people’s labor and allowed enslavers to turn bodies into commodities with which they changed the financial history of the Western world.

Enslavers, along with common white voters, investors, and the enslaved, made the 1830s the hinge of US history. On one side lay the world of the industrial revolution and the initial innovations that launched the modern world. On the other lay modern America. For in 1837, enslavers’ exuberant success led to a massive economic crash. This self-inflicted devastation, covered in Chapter 8, “Blood,” posed new challenges to slaveholders’ power, led to human destruction for the enslaved, and created confusion and discord in white families. When southern political actors tried to use war with Mexico to restart their expansion, they encountered new opposition on the part of increasingly assertive northerners. As Chapter 9, “Backs,” explains, by the 1840s the North had built a complex, industrialized economy on the backs of enslaved people and their highly profitable cotton labor. Yet, although all northern whites had benefited from the deepened exploitation of enslaved people, many northern whites were now willing to use politics to oppose further expansions of slavery. The words that the survivors of slavery’s expansion had carried out from the belly of the nation’s hungriest beast had, in fact, become important tools for galvanizing that opposition.

Of course, in return for the benefits they received from slavery’s expansion, plenty of northerners were still willing to enable enslavers’ disproportionate power. With the help of such allies, as “Arms” (Chapter 10) details, slavery continued to expand in the decade after the Compromise of 1850. For now, however, it had to do so within potentially closed borders. That is why southern whites now launched an aggressive campaign of advocacy, insisting on policies and constitutional interpretations that would commit the entire United States to the further geographic expansion of slavery. The entire country would become slavery’s next frontier. And as they pressed, they generated greater resistance, pushed too hard, and tried to make their allies submit—like slaves, the allies complained. And that is how, at last, whites came to take up arms against each other.

Yet even as southern whites seceded, claiming that they would set up an independent nation, shelling Fort Sumter, and provoking the Union’s president, Abraham Lincoln, to call out 100,000 militia, many white Americans wanted to keep the stakes of this dispute as limited as possible. A majority of northern Unionists opposed emancipation. Perhaps white Americans’ battles with each other were, on one level, not driven by a contest over ideals, but over the best way to keep the stream of cotton and financial revenues flowing: keep slavery within its current borders, or allow it to consume still more geographic frontiers. But the growing roar of cannon promised others a chance to force a more dramatic decision: slavery forever, or nevermore. So it was that as Frank Baker, Townshend, and Sheppard Mallory crept across the dark James River waters that had washed so many hulls bearing human bodies, the future stood poised, uncertain between alternative paths. Yet those three men carried something powerful: the same half of the story that Lorenzo Ivy could tell. All they had learned from it would help to push the future onto a path that led to freedom. Their story can do so for us as well. To hear it, we must stand as Lorenzo Ivy had stood as a boy in Danville—watching the chained lines going over the hills, or as Frank Baker and others had stood, watching the ships going down the James from the Richmond docks, bound for the Mississippi. Then turn and go with the marching feet, and listen for the breath of the half that has never been told.

11 notes · View notes