How the British Empire fits in with South Jersey

HOME TRUTH, by Sm Knight, The New Yorker, August 23, 2021

For the past month, I have been watching one season after another of Agatha Christie's great detectives: Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. If you have ever watched them, you know that many of the episodes are set in the 'great country manors' of Great Britain. If not, perhaps you remember Downton Abbey, or Brideshead Revisited, or for that matter, Upstairs Downstairs. Most of us, if we imagine ourselves in these dramas at all, imagine we would be the aristocrats, not the servants. I, however, having a strong maternal link to our Irish heritage, always notice the servants. In Downton Abbey, for example, one of the daughters of the manor elopes with the Irish chauffeur. Most often, the servants were the female housemaids, the kitchen workers, the general cleaners.

Sometime back, I wrote a post mentioning what Alice Paul, the noble, courageous and devoted Sufffrage activist, called "The Irish Girls" or the servants who took care of the housework in the Quaker farmstead of the Paul family, and who lived in the attic but remained mostly nameless.

Just recently, I received the confirmation e-mail that I was accepted back as a volunteer at the James and Ann Whitall House at Red Bank Battlefield, although the season is nearly over. There will be the candlelight tours December 3, 4,, and 5. It struck me when I was there years ago, as a volunteer docent, that the servants of the Whitall family, also remained largely nameless in the journals of both Ann Whitall and her son Job Whatll, both of which I read. My heart gave a little leap, however, when another volunteer showed me a phtocopy of an advertisement for a reward for the return of an escaped indentured servant from that household. Similarly, I read interesting dexcriptions of the clothing worn by escaped servants ina booklet put out by Rancocas Merchant called "Had on and Took With Her." The author, who makes and sells authentic period clothing for re-enactors and volunteers, had made both that booklet and another one of recipes which were fascinating. Clothing was highly valuable in the days when fiber had to be grown, harvested, spun, and then woven before being cut and sewn. So it was almost portable wealthy that thos eescaped servants made off with.

I am not against a fair deal, but 7 years of labor in return for passage to the new world seems a high price to me, not to mention the brutal conditions under which many indentured servants labored. so I was glad when one got away.

the article I referenced is mainly about the National Trust and its efforts to address the Colonial slave trade of the British Empire which made the aristocrats so rich that they could build thos lavish country manor houses to rule over the feudal systems by which the villagers were actually a form of sharecroppers. About three million Africans were trafficed in the Triangle of trade from Africa to England, to the colonies in North America and the Carribbean. The inhumane and torturous existence of the poor souls transported to the plantations in the Caribbean is a whole world of books and articles, as is the plantation system in our own southern states.

I am glad that enlightened members of the National Trust are making the effort against the unexpected and intransigent backlash they have faced, to do justice to those voiceless people whose freedom and lives were forfeit to the fortunes of the residents of thos English Country Manor Houses. It is also gratifying that so many of our own historic sites are finally making the effort to acknowledge the labor and the lives of the invisible werving and field labor in our own country. After all, the vast majority of the people who came to this country regardless of what myths they may have offered their descendants, were not aristocrats, but working class and poor, seeking freedom and opportunity. And while on that subject, let us add a note to praise the efforts of those who affirm and acknowledge the immense suffering and loss endured by the indigenous people, the First Peoples of both North America and South America in that same period.

As we approach Halloween, we may join with the Southern himisphere in celebrating "The Day of the Dead" by given a few moments of silent acknowledgement to all those who suffered and died and succeeded and ended up being us!