Louis Massiah, founder and director of Scribe Video Center, will talk about the five-channel video installation that will be part of the President's House site at Sixth and Market Streets in Philadelphia, slated to open in December 2010.
These dramatic vignettes look at the lives of the nine enslaved Africans brought to Philadelphia by George and Martha Washington during the first presidency (1790-1797) and the resistance of the free African American community, and explore the contradictions of freedom and slavery in establishing a new nation.
Special Guests: Karen Warrington, Member of the Project Oversight Committee and Director of Communications for U.S. Congressman Bob Brady; Lorene Cary, Scriptwriter; Novella Nelson, Actor; Beth Warshafsky, Digital Media Painter and Computer Graphics Art Director; and W. Tre Davis, Actor.
History as Cultural Work: The President's House Project in Philadelphia
The Philadelphia Inquirer culture writer, Stephan Salisbury, reports "Glitches bedevil President's House," on 25 September 2011:
The President's House is broken.
That should not come as a surprise to most of the tens of thousands of visitors who have passed through the exhibition and slavery memorial on Independence Mall.
More often than not, they've been greeted by blank video screens.
In fact, since "The President's House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation" opened to the public in December 2010, key elements of the exhibition have not functioned properly.
The video screens, which tell much of the story of enslaved Africans associated with the site, repeatedly have shuddered and died. The large glass box that encloses archaeological remains of the house where George Washington and John Adams served most of their presidencies and where Washington held nine enslaved Africans has fogged up and leaked.
Officials at Independence National Historical Park, steward of the exhibition, say the city, as construction manager, is responsible for shepherding repairs.
City officials say they are chagrined.
"It's an embarrassment," said Gary Knappick, deputy commissioner of public property, who hastened to add that when repairs are made, the city is determined "to get it right, and get it right the first time."
Repairs may be on the way, but visitors have been complaining for months.
"People, visitors to the site, have been concerned because the videos were not operating," said Karen Warrington, director of communications for U.S. Rep. Bob Brady (D., Pa.) and a member of the committee that oversaw development and construction of the site.
The finicky screens have been swapped out, in some cases repeatedly, but replacements haven't worked any better.
The problem is highly technical, Knappick noted, but can be summarized succinctly: The President's House environment is too hot and wet for the current video configuration.
Emanuel Kelly, principal of Kelly/Maeillo Architects & Planners, designer and builder of the President's House exhibition, said the pace of repairs had been slowed by complicated warranty coverage on various parts and by less-than-enlightening responses from far-flung subcontractors. Late summer's relentless rain did not help.
He said he persisted in trying to get the original units to function, and they just as persistently refused to do so.
Different parts of the video system are covered by different warranties, and no single manufacturer could be held responsible when a screen went dark, Kelly said.
So who would be on the hook for non-warranty costs?
"Probably we are," Kelly said, adding that he didn't yet know what those costs would be.
After months of tinkering, architect, park, and city officials met in August and agreed that complete replacement of the screens seemed appropriate.
"They were giving it such a college try to make what was there work," Knappick said. The city, to nudge things along, suggested an outside evaluation, and Kelly agreed.
In the evaluation, Kelly said, "we found the design and manufacturing were flawed"; tests on how the original units would perform in the face of "water and heat were not all done before bringing these units to site."
A new test screen, made by a different manufacturer, will be installed, possibly by late November, Knappick said. If it works, all the screens will then be replaced. The new units, manufactured in California, will not sit flush with the exhibition's masonry elements, which will help prevent the electrical components from overheating.
If the demo screen works correctly, replacing all the screens will take perhaps three months, Knappick said.
The problems with leakage at the glass archaeological box, Kelly said, "are minor."
The glass began fogging as soon as the site opened, largely because of moisture within the excavated area. Dehumidification equipment seemed to be improving that situation.
Then, on July 3, the top of the box fractured, and now leaks have appeared within what is supposed to be a dry area.
Knappick said the city brought in a consultant who determined the glass fractured because of a "rare" manufacturing flaw.
The California manufacturer will ship replacement panels within the week, and Knappick said installation should be complete by mid-October.
There also have been leaks through the seals between the glass panels, which Knappick said have been repaired. Other leaks have been traced to an area near the foot of the glass box. Water has been seeping through a weatherproof barrier beneath and making its way into the excavated area below.
"We're waiting for dry weather" to repair that leak, Knappick said, adding that the repairs might be completed in the next week. Kelly added that "you need at least two days of dry weather" in order to effect the repairs, which should not be costly.
There are reports of other possible water issues inside the archaeological area, but examination of them also awaits drier weather, according to park officials.
Once the site is functioning as intended, it will be transferred completely to the care of Independence National Historical Park.
"We're doing the best we can under the conditions," Kelly said.
Fergus M. Bordewich writes: Seventy-five years old, with less than two years left to live, and in almost constant pain from a variety of ailments, Stevens focused his efforts on a new amendment to the Constitution, the Fourteenth, which would prohibit states from abridging equality before the law, and bar former Confederates from office and from voting in national elections until 1870. Although Stevens felt that the measure did not go far enough, it would totally change the states’ relationship to the federal government, by making it explicit that Americans were citizens of their nation first, and of their respective states second, and that states were therefore bound to abide by federal law. It was a truly revolutionary measure in the South where, in the pre-war effort to suppress criticism of slavery, states had passed laws limiting freedom of the press, the freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly, and even imposing censorship of the U.S. mail.
THE RADICALS WERE APPALLED when they realized that Lincoln’s successor, Tennessee-born Andrew Johnson, intended to allow the rebel states to speedily reenter the Union, without significant punishment of rebel leaders, or plans to protect the rights of newly-freed slaves. Their worst fears were confirmed when, in spite of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1866, the President permitted elected assemblies of former Confederates to enact new laws designed to reduce freedmen to semi-slavery, as anti-black rioting swept Southern cities, leaving hundreds of African-Americans dead. Stevens had himself carried in a chair onto the floor of the House, and in a voice so weak that his colleagues had to crowd around him to hear him, he pleaded with his colleagues to consider what was at stake in the South. “While the South has been bleeding at every pore, Congress has done nothing to protect the loyal people there, white or black, either in their persons, in their liberty, or in their property,” he whispered. Stevens got what he wanted, and federal troops returned to the South. It is said that the speech was one of the few ever delivered in Congress that resulted in the changing of votes on the spot. Stevens’s last battle was a losing one, however. He led the effort to impeach Johnson for firing the Radical members in his cabinet, a movement that failed—by a single vote—to oust the president from office.
Thaddeus Stevens
“Stevens was ahead of his time because he truly believed in racial equality,” Says Hans Trefousse, author of “Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth Century Egalitarian”. “Without Stevens, the effects of Reconstruction, the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing suffrage to the freedmen, would have been impossible.” Although he would not live to see the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment, in 1870, no one had worked harder or longer to make it a reality. Says Trefoussse, “In practice, those amendments were effectively nullified in the South, in the years after the end of Reconstruction. But they were still in the law. In the twentieth century, they would remind Americans of what they had once stood for: they were still there as the standard that the nation had set for itself.”
Thaddeus Stevens
The North won the Civil War, but lost the remembrance of it. By 1877, federal troops had been completely withdrawn from the South. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments were systematically undone by a combination of harsh discriminatory laws and the terrorism of vigilante organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. The South, and indeed most of the nation, slumped into almost a century of entrenched racism and institutionalized segregation. In the memory of a country committed to reconciliation at the expense of the rights of African-Americans’ rights, there was little place for the furious idealism of an egalitarian like Stevens.
The nadir in Stevens’s reputation was reached with D.W. Griffith’s classic 1915 film “The Birth of A Nation,” a Civil War epic which heroized the Klan, and smeared blacks as clownish and lascivious monsters whose freedom endangered American democracy. (President Woodrow Wilson liked the film so much that he gave it a private showing at the White House.) Stevens was portrayed as a vengeful hypocrite, plotting with his diabolical black mistress to instigate a race war against helpless Southern whites. Someone who learned about Stevens only from the film might have supposed that he and Lydia Hamilton Smith were the source of all the nation’s racial problems. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, James Buchanan’s stock steadily rose, at least in Lancaster, and in the 1930's Wheatland was restored to its luxurious mid-nineteenth century splendor. When the Lancaster Historical Society published a guidebook to important sites in the city’s downtown, in 1962, Stevens’s home wasn’t even included on the map.
Law Office and Home of Thaddeus Stevens, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1868
AS SNOWFLAKES SWIRLED and danced over the streets of Lancaster, Jim Delle and I walked through the row house where Thaddeus Stevens lived, just a block from Penn Square where in times gone by crowds of supporters once roared to his surging oratory. The years have taken a heavy toll. The house’s modest Georgian facade has been covered over with ugly white modern bricks, and a garage door has been punched through the front of Stevens’s front parlor. Decrepit industrial carpeting, broken plaster, and scrawled graffiti cast a mournful pall through his one-time law office. Behind the house, Delle scraped the snow off the sheet of plywood that covered the broken crown of the cistern, and we climbed down into it on an aluminum ladder. In the dank brick compartment, Delle pointed out the small aperture through which fugitives had crawled from the tunnel that led to the tavern basement next door. The cistern was more than an exotic hiding place. It was physical proof of Stevens’s personal commitment not just to the abstract principle of emancipation, but in the most personal way possible to the men and women who suffered under slavery.
Wheatland - Home of James Buchanan, 15th President of the United States
Wheatland was built by William Jenkins, a lawyer, who built and named the Federal mansion in 1828. Buchanan purchased the property - three tracts totalling 22.45 acres (90,900 m2), including the mansion and several outbuildings, in December 1848 from William Morris Meredith, a Philadelphia lawyer.Buchanan resided here on occasion as President and after his term until his death
I kept thinking of the fiery, iron-willed, silver-tongued man who had made this refuge possible, at a time when harboring fugitive slaves was a federal crime. He had died thinking himself a failure. But he had paved the way for the civil rights advances of the twentieth century. In the 1950's and 1960's, the nation would have to learn again the lesson that Stevens tried to teach in the 1860's, that the rights of African-Americans could only be protected by the power, and occasionally the armed force, of the federal government. Had land been distributed to the ex-slaves as Stevens wished, the nation might well have been spared much of the shameful racial history that followed, and might instead have created a stable, economically and politically independent black middle class. After generations of neglect, however, his greatest work, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, still lay waiting for Americans to rediscover their meaning, and they became the foundation upon which was erected virtually all the civil rights legislation that reshaped the country since the 1960's.
Whether enough of Stevens’s home survives intact to become a museum dedicated to him and to the regional activities of the Underground Railroad, as local preservationists wish, is still an open question. Developers agreed after considerable local protest to leave about half of Stevens’s house standing, but they maintain that the rest must be leveled to make room for the new convention center. “We can’t just walk away from this house,” says Randy Harris, the former director of the Lancaster Preservation Trust, who has fought to prevent the demolition of the house and the adjoining properties that belonged to Stevens. “Stevens is way too important a figure in our history to abandon once again.” —Fergus M. Bordewich
(source: "Thaddeus Stevens and James Buchanan: How their Historic Rivalry Shaped America," by Fergus M. Bordewich. This article originally appeared as “Was James Buchanan Our Worst President? Digging into a Historic Rivalry” in Smithsonian Magazine, February 2004.)
William Penn owned at least 12 slaves. During his life he gradually came around to advocating abolition, but when he died in 1718, Pennsylvania was a long way from ending the practice.
In the mid- to late 1760s, 1,500 blacks lived in slavery in Philadelphia. Statewide, there were an estimated 5,600. The number of slaves peaked in the early 1780s at 6,855, according to historian Gary B. Nash.
Among the people who owned slaves in Philadelphia were Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Chew, John Dickinson, Thomas Cadwalader, Samuel McCall, Samuel Mifflin, Robert Morris and Edmund Physick. They are some of the most prominent ones, whose names recur in accounts of the colonial city and for whom streets and counties and institutions are named. Many of Philadelphia's slaveholders were tradesmen - barbers, brewers, sailmakers, leather workers. According to Nash, "about one-quarter of the households in the city were involved in slavekeeping in the closing years of the 1760s."
By 1790, the number for the state had fallen to 3,760. And by 1810, to 795.
"Of the states south of New England, slavery died first in Pennsylvania and it died there the fastest," write Nash and Jean Soderlund in the 1991 book, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath.
The motivations were complicated, the authors say. Quakers had been debating the morality of slavery for a century, and the first recorded North American protest against slavery was signed by a group of Quakers in Germantown in 1688 and sent, to no immediate effect, to other Quaker groups. But moral outrage was only one factor in slavery's demise in Pennsylvania, and not always the overriding one. Economics, politics and a propensity for slaves to free themselves had a lot to do with it.
Slavery withered more rapidly in Philadelphia than in surrounding areas, in part because slaves did not live as long, nor have as many children, as they did on farms. In 1810, 94 percent of the slaves in Pennsylvania were in seven rural counties.
Slavery was even more common in neighboring states. In 1790, Delaware had 8,887 slaves, New Jersey had 11,423, and New York 21,193.
In 1779, Pennsylvania passed the first abolition law in America. The measure was praised for embodying the spirit of enlightenment at the time, but its gradual terms were no godsend.
The law did not emancipate a single slave - anyone who was a slave the last day before it went into effect March 1, 1780, remained a slave until death unless freed by his or her owner. All children born of slaves after the law took effect could be kept enslaved until age 28. So it would have been possible for a slave girl, born on the last day of February 1780, to live out her life in slavery. And for her children, theoretically born as late as 1820, to remain slaves until 1848.
Total abolition didn't come to Pennsylvania until 1847.
Why doesn't Chris Matthews know that Pennsylvania was a slave state? Pennsylvania was a slave colony, in fact ALL 13 original colonies were slave colonies. The full power of the USA government protected the system of slavery, and black subjugation after emancipation. Every branch of the government supported slavery. Pennsylvania was a slave state. Grow-up Chris Matthews and read some history of slavery in Pennsylvania. Start here with the website Slavery in the North.
