"Slave owner Sir Thomas Picton" Topic

A portrait of slave owner Sir Thomas Picton has been put back on display, albeit boxed up-and alongside new artworks and information that "reframes" his place in history.

From Here:

link

I do so love a comeback story.

As much as I am glad they are giving context to the portrait and hopefully allowing General Piction to be viewed by many generations to come, this is not what will help change the issues we face with our past.

I teach history at an all-black inner city school in Richmond, Virginia, no more than a mile away from the Lee Statue that was taken down recently. Taking down statues and portraits of historical figures whose past was not appropriate compared to our modern values is not the answer to what will help my students have a better life. Money should focus on providing reading coaches, tutors, and mentors. Most students lack basic reading, writing, and studies skills and have almost no parental guidance. I would say at least half my students have one parent, and many do not have any parents at all.

I am glad that people want to be more polite about statues and portraits, but the reality is my students need more hands-on help as they sadly probably never will visit a museum to view portraits of men who owned slaves, nor do they care that much.

Apologize for adding my two cents!

Michael

Michael,

Good points and well said.
It is so easy just to virtue signal and then
walk away.

Interesting to me is that Lord Picton was sacked, ordered home and successfully prosecuted for maltreatment of the Trinidadians. He won an appeal on a technicality regarding jurisdiction.

The 14-year old "girl" (then she was of legal age to marry, etc.) was not a slave, and not tortured personally by Lord Picton. The girl was free and a suspect in a GBP 500 (today GBP 50,000 by purchasing power) theft – then a capital offense. The use of an Army stress-position torture was requested by the prosecutor and Lord Picton granted the request.

If we are to be more inclusive, and study the history of Britain from the perspective of Trinidad, it might be well to note that Lord Picton's governorship was a cause celebré for reform among leading British Whig politicians and a goodly number of British people.

The whole affair caused quite a strong public reaction in England in favor of the Trinidadians, leading to criminal charges against Lord Piction. Lurid pamphlets circulated, with illustrations such as ….
link

And this last actually mattered, because Britain did have enough democracy in 1800 to have an opposition party and to occasionally seek the consent of the governed. Compare France, Russia, Austria, Spain ….. well, just about everywhere except Britain's own former colonies in North America.

While "using tattooing to kind of bring people together to share this connected story" is I am sure necessary to understand the history of Britain, it might have been useful to also tell the actual history of Lord Picton and Luisa Calderon.

See : link

Michael, I couldn't agree more with you.

I work in an affluent area about thirty miles from Richmond. Once a semester I teach for Driver's Ed. One of the schools I teach is from the good part of town, the other the poor part. I've been teaching the class for 10 years.

The good school has a principal that believes in 'progressive' teaching. He's Dr. and has never taught a class. The school has gone way down hill since he took over. Students are disruptive, some come in with blankets and go to sleep, test scores are low, teachers are demoralized, but the students did walk out to protest during the BLM riots.

The other school got an old school teacher that worked her way up to principal. She believes in discipline and demands the best of her students. Test scores are up, the kids are respectful and pay attention, and she kicks the trouble makers out.

The kids need help and a firm hand, not political indoctrination. I'm sure its much harder where you're at.

If no one else wants that painting of Sir Thomas Picton, I would gladly display it in my home!

It would go well with two early nineteenth century aquatints in my collection, depicting him at the storming of Badajoz and his death at Waterloo.

He made an error of judgement in permitting the picketing of Luisa Calderon, and was perhaps denied further honours in relation to his later military career because of it. But he still did his country excellent service in command of the Third Division in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo, and deserves to be remembered for that, too.

Well said arthur1815.

"In Lieut. General Sir Thomas Picton His Majesty has sustained the loss of an officer who has frequently distinguished himself in his service; and he fell gloriously leading his division to a charge with bayonets, by which one of the most serious attacks made by the enemy on our position was repulsed."

Piston was never ennobled, possibly because the shadow of his decision in Trinidad hung over him. But certainly he deserves a few good words, and the epitaph above, from the Waterloo Dispatch, seems to me to do him justice.

After all, if we really want to examine in full the less pleasant aspects of public figures' lives, we might find ourselves knocking some of today's secular saints right off their pedestals- by the standards of their times, or our own.

Who's this "Lord Picton?" It was notable in 1814 that Tom Picton was the highest-ranking and most successful of Wellington's officers NOT to wind up with a title. Might have been connected to the Trinidad business. Might not have been.

No one's mentioning that Picton's actions were legal in that colony at that time, and that the accused immediately told the authorities where the loot was buried. Not how we'd do things here and now, but I've known more "inclusive" people to do things I'd regard as worse.

Let's see what happens to their statues in a century or so.

To what extent, I wonder, did Picton's contemporaries object to the flogging of troops under his command, or to what was stated to be a vehement dislike of the Irish.

It would be interesting to know what people in 200 years' will make of US agencies kidnapping, waterboarding and incarcerating miscellaneous Arabs, or having them chopped to pieces by bladed missiles without a trial, following 9/11.

Before posing and virtue signalling about things people in other countries legally did 200 years ago, it's advisable to reflect on what your own country has been up to within the last 20, and to locate your outrage about that. Failure to make a commensurate fuss just makes you look like a posturing, vacuous moral Lilliputian.

4th Cuirassiers,

It depends on what new station you will listen to in the future. The far left is outraged, and the far right is happy USA is safe by any means.

Having a wife from another country has helped me learn a new perspective on how the rest of the world views the United States.

No one is a saint and judging people who lived in a completely different society than we live in today is unfair without having a decent amount of background knowledge about the economic and social ways of life in the 1800s.

Michael

"NOT to wind up with a title."

Sorry ….. please forgive a foriegner – I thought Sir = Baronet = "Lord".
My mistake.

Sorry, Michman. I try to check, but you've got no country listed.

"Lord" in the UK was limited to barons and up and the sons of dukes--very, very rare because of primogeniture. The Duke of Marlborough has multiple sons. Only the eldest gets to be the Marquess of Blandford--a "courtesy title"--and will eventually become Duke of Marlborough in his turn. Second-born son becomes, say, Lord Randolph Churchill, and HIS son is just Winston Churchill unless he's knighted for some accomplishment.

Baronets get a hereditary "Sir" for the eldest son in his turn, but a baronet is not a peer, and got no seat in the House of Lords. If he wanted a seat in Parliament, he'd have to stand for election and take a seat in the Commons. (This is before the end of hereditary seats in the Lords, you understand.)

But most "sirs" are knights, awarded the non-hereditary title as a reward for personal service. This was the case with Thomas Picton, son of an untitled Welsh squire, who was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Bath in early 1815 for his services in the Napoleonic Wars. He'd be "Sir Thomas" for no more than the last six months of his life, and no such honor would pass to his eldest son. On Trinidad, he'd just have been "Colonel (later Brigadier) Thomas Picton."

Oh. And I'm perfectly willing to believe Picton disliked Irish or Catholics or both, but I'm not sure referring to the 88th as the "Connaught Footpads" is evidence. I've heard American units called worse by other American units.

"referring to the 88th as the "Connaught Footpads"

The 'footpads' incident at Pinhel (other versions of the epithet are available) was indeed the basis of the belief that, from their first meeting, Picton bore a deep set prejudice against the "Rangers of Connaught," as he would address them thereafter, if not Irish soldiery at large. Perhaps this belief was as much a counter-prejudice on the part of the 88th.

@robert piepenbrink

Thanks for the details.

I am French, more or less.
My mother was English, from Portsmouth, and my father was a merchant ship captain from Brittany. And I have spent most of my life at sea or abroad. So, I have an "intolerable" accent in both French and English !

If you would ever need to sort out a French prince, duc, marquis, comte, vicomte, vidame, baron, chevalier, écuyer, seigneur, châtellen, gentilhomme or noble homme, I would be at your service.
:-)

@ MarbotsChasseurs

Agree completely. My point really is that someone who spends their days fretting about bad things that happened 200 years ago while having nothing to say about worse things going on right now risks looking like the most vacuous kind of dilettante.

I don't think it's looking good for climate change alarmists either.

Agree completely. My point really is that someone who spends their days fretting about bad things that happened 200 years ago while having nothing to say about worse things going on right now risks looking like the most vacuous kind of dilettante.

I don't think it's looking good for climate change alarmists either.

Well said. I hate it when people judge the past by standards of today

I look forward to my next visit to the splendid Capital of the United States of America and the plethora of amended road signs directing me to "Slave Owner Washington".

Yep, the British weren't the only money making from slavery nation.

YouTube link

Did the Brits decide to end slavery because they cared and believed it was wrong – er, no, it was more like those making profits from slavery could cash in more by ending it. Take off your blinkers Brit lovers – LOL

link

The British people were the driving force in stopping the slave trade and
The world over saw slavery as the norm. Britain wanted to stomp it out.

Oh! I love my country but there are people who like nothing more than sitting in their basement, self-flagellating both physically and mentally with irrational guilt.

Go do some research. My link is a good starter. Britain has good reasons to be proud of ending the slave-trade, more so than any other country on earth.

Your link is by? They have a huge blind-spot where the slave trade and slavery out of Africa to the US is concerned. And an even bigger one of its history as a whole.

As in the drugs trade, who in the slave trade were the more culpable? The supplier, the dealer, the buyer or the user? Two out of those listed were orchestrated by who? How many blacks were enslaved and used by other blacks apart from those they sold? How many sick, too young or too old were slaughtered by the black slavers?

Is it only the Black Africans who should be retrospectively pitied and compensated for the trading and using of slaves? Or should it be considering all mankind has had to put up with slavery on a huge scale, by all peoples, of all peoples, that we should recognise what happened and move on?

Who's using slaves to this day? Perhaps the black American community should look to their own race for blame before looking to others.

The notion that "the black American community should look to their own race for blame before looking to others" sounds just a tad defensive. No "race" has a monopoly on trading in human beings and human misery in the 21st century.

But making sweeping transhistorical, context lacking statements about how there was always slavery, "blacks were enslaved and used by other blacks" etc adds nothing to a huge and complex issue that will still be being studied and debated long after the last of us currently on this list are dead and gone.

The transatlantic chattel slave trade was quantitatively and qualitatively different from forms of slavery that had gone before. It became a huge and profitable industry in itself, and it fueled all manner of self justifying pseudoscience. That does not make earlier forms of slavery excusable, just different.

Britain had a range of reasons for ending the slave trade, some honourable, others commercial.

To get back to the original post, Picton was of his time, and his time included behaviours, including some sanctioned by Picton himself, that are unacceptable by today's standards. Let's know the whole picture, rather than just stick to the bits we like, or the bits we can condemn.

PS. The country I'd argue has the most cause to be proud of its role in ending slavery is tiny wee Haiti, the only country in the world to ever have a successful, enduring slave revolt. Yes, it's history has been grim since, not helped by the fact that it spent another 150 years paying crippling reparations to France for loss of property (ie, in effect paying France for its slaves' freedom). That revolt alone is cause for all Haitians to feel immensely proud of their forebears.

I don't believe that "'"blacks were enslaved and used by other blacks' etc adds nothing to a huge and complex issue". The trade in sub-Saharan African slaves after 1492 was a collective act. It is important that the role of each group be explored and made known. It is also important for context that other populations being sent to the Americas involuntarily and their status when they got here also be explored and made known. The argument against this is that it will give ammunition to the slavery apologists. The reality is that many of them already know it, and the failure of "mainstream" historians to discuss this in their presentation of slavery is being presented as disingenuous. The point "mainstream" historians should be pushing is that even though blame for the existence of African slaves in the Americas was widespread, it was still the choice of the individual slaveowners to participate in the practice. Especially those who continued to participate in it after 1792-1848 when the tide had definitely turned against the practice.

Moving back to the original story, is this really about slavery? Or is it about a man who due to his limited experience was not competent to exercise civil control as Governor?

The problem with statements like "blacks were enslaved and used by other blacks" is that it dehistoricises the triangular trade, which was quite different from previous and other contemporary models of slavery. I agree that there is a need to look specifically at those who continued to use slavery as their economic model after the tide had turned.

I think you're right that the 'incident', while it exists in the context of slavery, is more about administrative incompetence than anything else.

Not sure about anyone else but since grade school the African slave trade was presented (to me anyway) as the triangle trade, exclusively Africans being brought to North America. The truth is though that both Arabs and Africans (primarily, not sure about other groups) traded slaves for centuries both before and after the triangle trade ceased, and it still goes on.
While the "everybody does it" argument isn't really valid, the triangle trade loses vital context when presented alone.

dibble has missed the point completely, perhaps deliberately. LOL yes, there were a lot of people trying to stop the evil, profit making slave trade, including many Brits. But the fact the British government had to pay them off for loss of their 'property', is nothing more than criminal! That money, if anywhere, should have gone to freed slaves, not the sick and greedy property' owners. But money came first. Surely even dibble can see that? And what would have happened had the British government not agreed to pay them? I don't think the Brits have anything sing about.

Remember that when the slave owners originally purchased the slaves, they were acting lawfully – albeit, in some (but not all) other people's eyes, immorally. Therefore, when Parliament changed the law so that they could no longer own slaves they had lawfully purchased, it was not unreasonable – and probably politically essential to ensure the passage of the legislation – to compensate them. To do otherwise would have suggested that the government claimed the legal power to simply seize people's property and set a dangerous precedent.

Whilst compensating slave owners appears dubious from today's moral point of view, when slavery has been outlawed by the UN, it was surely a far better way of securing the slaves' freedom than that eventually adopted in the USA?

Which is not to say that more could not, and should, have been done to ease the former slaves into their new situation.

PS. The country I'd argue has the most cause to be proud of its role in ending slavery is tiny wee Haiti, the only country in the world to ever have a successful, enduring slave revolt. Yes, it's history has been grim since, not helped by the fact that it spent another 150 years paying crippling reparations to France for loss of property (ie, in effect paying France for its slaves' freedom). That revolt alone is cause for all Haitians to feel immensely proud of their forebears.

indeed that is a very beautiful fairly tale…
first that was France who abolished the slavery in Saint Domingue and American colonies, and certainly not Haïti not existing before 1804 10 years later, despite some others countries in the world consider curiously as pioneer in this affair maintaining the slavery in the french colonies they have conquered
– by the way other point and hard historical fact, contrary to others European colonial powers such as England Spain Portugal, slavery was forbidden on the soil of the Kingdom of France since 1315 under Louis X, confirmed by various parliaments thoughout 16th to 18th century, so many centuries before England who allowed it on its own soil exactly as Spain and Portugal and their huge forgotten quantity of slaves in Europe -
second, many black slaves of Saint Domingue participated in the war between 1793 and 1798 in the side of the English enslavers and Emigrés agaisnt the Republican French, whites mulattos or blacks
third Toussaint Louverture the great hero was himself slave owner (13 slaves) and as governor restablished the slav…forced labour, I am still expecting that the woke inculture new Inquisition apply the same treatment as the confederate generals and others non-politically correct historical figures
fourth the Independance was built on the forgotten and occulted racial genocide of all the whites inhabitants (very far to be all slave owners), I undertand how it is not quite 'bankable' to recall that for the so-called first free black republic having beaten Napoleon (well helped by the disease killing 75% of the troops)
five France was not paid if not as in the British case the owners settlers exiled in France Cuba Louisiana etc and was not responsible of the military gerontacry of the Haitian generals, the delirious Emperors Dessalines or Soulouque King Henry and etc until the Duvalier and Tontons Macoutes, all these countries of the Third World who like to see themselves always as eternal poors victims of the Western World to forget their own responsabilities, including in the slavery for the African and muslims countries…

Not a fairy tale by any stretch, but a messy and complicated history. Yes, the French abolished slavery in 1794 but not until after the revolt had begun in 1791, and Napoleon reinstated it in 1802, following up with an invasion which was successfullly resisted by the Haitians prior to the final declaration of Haitian independence in 1804, so to suggest that France is responsible for the end of Haitian slavery is to deny the full facts of the matter.

Toussaint Louverture owned one slave, whom he freed in 1776. He briefly leased 13 slaves (for about three months). His wife and children were slaves. His life was much closer to that of a slave (which he had himself been) than to a slave owner or land owner. But regardless, he was no saint and history is rarely as tidy as a matter of the clean and good vs the bad. Louverture's attitudes and policies were shaped by his experience and his time. No one pretends he was some kind of liberal democrat.

Haiti did pay reparations for loss of French property, from 1825 (when French warships rocked up to Port au Prince harbour to demand it) to 1947 (when final interest payments were settled), which had a crippling impact on Haiti's economy and is part of the reason Haiti has been the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.

To simply recite the names of Haiti's bad leadership (many of whom, such as the Duvaliers, ruled with US backing) to condemn Haiti does nothing to deny that the slave revolt did result in Haitian independence and no other slave revolt has ever achieved independence. Did it end misery and exploitation, no, of course not. But it is nevertheless an event of historical significance. If Spartacus had achieved freedom from Rome, who knows what his rule would have looked like, but we'd still celebrate his slave revolt succeeding. It failed and he's still seen as a heroic figure.

Slavery is a brutal system and the slavery in Saint-Domingue was notably brutal. Brutal systems brutalise people. For the leaders of that revolt to have been paragons of virtue would have requires a miracle – indeed, a fairy tale. Louverture, Dessalines, Sanité Bélair etc were flawed people but they did achieve an historical feat. Let's not deny them that.

Are we going through the list of slave owners from that time and giving them the same treatment?
George Washington springs to mind

I think it's appropriate (although I don't mean on a wargames discussion group necessarily) that those issues are allowed to see the light of day, rather than present a sanitised version of any leader, past or present.

You hit the nail on the head Marbot Chasseur

ot a fairy tale by any stretch, but a messy and complicated history. Yes, the French abolished slavery in 1794 but not until after the revolt had begun in 1791, and Napoleon reinstated it in 1802, following up with an invasion which was successfullly resisted by the Haitians prior to the final declaration of Haitian independence in 1804, so to suggest that France is responsible for the end of Haitian slavery is to deny the full facts of the matter.

the deny is more to forget that Toussaint Louverture restablished a kind a slavery before Napoleon while France had abolished the slavery in 1793 partially, then confirmed by the Convention in 1794, that there were dozens of generals officers serving in the French Army yeas before others colonial armies, there were so-called Haitians among the French troops until the end as there were in the French Army throughout this period and also that the list of blacks units raised by the British enslavers in 1793-1798 allied to Emigrés and local slaves owners is endless, and as said instead of as great resistance there was sanitary disaster killing more expeditionary soldiers than the insurgents who have converted that in a national myth where they beaten Napoleon (?) a non-sense

Haiti did pay reparations for loss of French property, from 1825 (when French warships rocked up to Port au Prince harbour to demand it) to 1947 (when final interest payments were settled), which had a crippling impact on Haiti's economy and is part of the reason Haiti has been the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.

To simply recite the names of Haiti's bad leadership (many of whom, such as the Duvaliers, ruled with US backing) to condemn Haiti does nothing to deny that the slave revolt did result in Haitian independence and no other slave revolt has ever achieved independence. Did it end misery and exploitation, no, of course not. But it is nevertheless an event of historical significance. If Spartacus had achieved freedom from Rome, who knows what his rule would have looked like, but we'd still celebrate his slave revolt succeeding. It failed and he's still seen as a heroic figure.

I don't condemn Haïti I am fed up with the double standard and the definitive hypocrisy about such historical topics that's all, and until the unlikely day where such countries will face to their own responsabilities instead of trying to find excuses and scapegoats and cease to rewrite the History in blacks good -victims and white bads exactly as Mister Raoul Peck from Haïti and his hemiplegic racialist racist revisionnist documentary celebrated around the world, explaining the conquest of Sudan with dreadful racists white-european-victorian British but forgetting the muslim Egyptian-Sudanese Army of an African State, explaining the Congo with the bad Belgians but forgetting that the Public Force responsible of the atrocities, instead of whites, came from 10 000 active black mercenaries or recalling the Ashantis as poors victims of the colonialism while thay had a great history with the slave trade of their black brothers, exactly as in Haïti and his long list of 19th century Bokassas having as priority the creation of a nobility, they were also invaders and occupiers in Dominican Republic with several wars

Gaz! It's you who has 'missed the point' with your fairy-tail ideas.

Britain had already paid in blood and gold to enforce the abolition internationally. Had she tried to force the slave owners by 'liberating' them. It would have sparked conflict and more death and misery. And it would be a good idea to stop looking back with your 21st century ideals.

Erzherzog Johann

The notion that "the black American community should look to their own race for blame before looking to others" sounds just a tad defensive. No "race" has a monopoly on trading in human beings and human misery in the 21st century.

It's not defensive, it's a matter of fact. The ignorance of most blacks of ancestral slaves in the US as to what it took for the slaves to get enslaved in the first place, is rife. Oh! There should be no exceptionalism in any part of the history of slavery. All peoples of the world have suffered it and been part of its prosecution.

The problem with statements like "blacks were enslaved and used by other blacks" is that it dehistoricises the triangular trad

That trade was fueled by who? The main point of that triangle was kept sharp by the suppliers and the dealers, who were?

The trade was one of the great evils of world history But it should be noted that it took many of our nations and cultures to make it come about.

The country I'd argue has the most cause to be proud of its role in ending slavery is tiny wee Haiti

Locally yes, she most certainly should be proud of what she did but It's the international scheme of things that mattered. Haiti could have done what to stop the trade and owning of slaves? She would have succeeded via the ending of slave trade anyway.

But making sweeping transhistorical, context lacking statements about how there was always slavery, "blacks were enslaved and used by other blacks" etc adds nothing to a huge and complex issue that will still be being studied and debated long after the last of us currently on this list are dead and gone.

So! was there always slavery? Is there slavery now? Will there be in the future?

Was there slavery from the East African seaboard to the Muslim world hundreds of years before that on the Western seaboard? Neither 'East or West' was worse than the other. But both caused misery for millions of humanity and 'like slavery as a whole' should not be ignored.

Should we ignore for example the Mongols/Golden Hoard who slaughtered and enslaved millions? The Asian nations who enslaved countless other peoples as well as there own? The Europeans, who also enslaved and were themselves enslaved? Even the American Tribes kept slaves, including blacks. It goes on and on. None should be exclusive, whether again for example, it's those of 150 years ago or 1,500 years ago. They all suffered and many by degree, more than others.

My link above is an excellent historical overview of slavery. If you have watched it but it hasn't sunk in. I suggest you watch it again.

Here it is again.

YouTube link