Pub Date : 2019-11-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501716119.003.0005
Rachel B. Herrmann
This chapter looks at how enslaved peoples and self-liberated men and women used food to shape the Revolutionary War in ways that failed to address their own hunger. In November of 1775, before the colonies declared independence, Virginia governor Lord Dunmore issued a proclamation that offered freedom to slaves of rebel masters, setting the stage for an exodus of thousands of self-liberated men and women from colonists' homes and plantations to British lines. Dunmore's Proclamation was also responsible for changing white colonists' and British officers' ideas about hunger prevention and just war. Dunmore's Proclamation affected white colonists and Britons less than it did free black folks, enslaved people, and former bondpeople. People of African descent played various roles in the conflict. Dunmore's offer turned some men into victual warriors capable of creating and preventing white hunger. Throughout the war, self-liberated men and women did not enjoy the luxury of worrying about their own appetites—and sometimes, hunger seemed immaterial. But their experiences created the knowledge that would later become necessary to institutionalize a food system that granted black colonists the political authority to fight hunger.
{"title":"Black Victual Warriors and Hunger Creation","authors":"Rachel B. Herrmann","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501716119.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501716119.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter looks at how enslaved peoples and self-liberated men and women used food to shape the Revolutionary War in ways that failed to address their own hunger. In November of 1775, before the colonies declared independence, Virginia governor Lord Dunmore issued a proclamation that offered freedom to slaves of rebel masters, setting the stage for an exodus of thousands of self-liberated men and women from colonists' homes and plantations to British lines. Dunmore's Proclamation was also responsible for changing white colonists' and British officers' ideas about hunger prevention and just war. Dunmore's Proclamation affected white colonists and Britons less than it did free black folks, enslaved people, and former bondpeople. People of African descent played various roles in the conflict. Dunmore's offer turned some men into victual warriors capable of creating and preventing white hunger. Throughout the war, self-liberated men and women did not enjoy the luxury of worrying about their own appetites—and sometimes, hunger seemed immaterial. But their experiences created the knowledge that would later become necessary to institutionalize a food system that granted black colonists the political authority to fight hunger.","PeriodicalId":311322,"journal":{"name":"No Useless Mouth","volume":"112 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124239498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501716119.003.0002
Rachel B. Herrmann
This chapter examines how, between the 1500s and 1700s, two varying approaches toward dealing with food and hunger allowed inconsistent ideas about hunger to form, which in turn influenced how Natives and non-Natives exchanged food and destroyed it. From the decades after the arrival of Columbus to the mid-eighteenth century, food functioned together with the alcohol, furs, trade goods, and wampum that Indians and Europeans imbued with practical and symbolic meanings. These cross-cultural dealings ensured the existence of a type of Native and non-Native diplomacy called forest diplomacy—and thus of peace. Food sharing, like other practices, could work within the framework of a commodity-exchange economy and a gift-exchange economy. The overlap between these two economies permitted creative misunderstandings and cooperation, while also fostering conflict. Cooperative food exchange was paralleled by battles over commodities, including the destruction of crops and attacks against domesticated animals. Europeans employed victual warfare against other Europeans during military conflicts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in North America, Indian warriors, soldiers, and colonial civilians practiced victual warfare. Meanwhile, mainland colonists did not practice victual warfare against enslaved Africans because they did not need to; they simply controlled access to food. Slaveholders ensured that bondpeople went hungry by restricting consumption and limiting their abilities to use land to grow garden produce.
{"title":"Hunger, Accommodation, and Violence in Colonial America","authors":"Rachel B. Herrmann","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501716119.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501716119.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines how, between the 1500s and 1700s, two varying approaches toward dealing with food and hunger allowed inconsistent ideas about hunger to form, which in turn influenced how Natives and non-Natives exchanged food and destroyed it. From the decades after the arrival of Columbus to the mid-eighteenth century, food functioned together with the alcohol, furs, trade goods, and wampum that Indians and Europeans imbued with practical and symbolic meanings. These cross-cultural dealings ensured the existence of a type of Native and non-Native diplomacy called forest diplomacy—and thus of peace. Food sharing, like other practices, could work within the framework of a commodity-exchange economy and a gift-exchange economy. The overlap between these two economies permitted creative misunderstandings and cooperation, while also fostering conflict. Cooperative food exchange was paralleled by battles over commodities, including the destruction of crops and attacks against domesticated animals. Europeans employed victual warfare against other Europeans during military conflicts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in North America, Indian warriors, soldiers, and colonial civilians practiced victual warfare. Meanwhile, mainland colonists did not practice victual warfare against enslaved Africans because they did not need to; they simply controlled access to food. Slaveholders ensured that bondpeople went hungry by restricting consumption and limiting their abilities to use land to grow garden produce.","PeriodicalId":311322,"journal":{"name":"No Useless Mouth","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127960305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-15DOI: 10.7591/9781501716133-007
Rachel B. Herrmann
{"title":"6. Learning from Food Laws in Nova Scotia","authors":"Rachel B. Herrmann","doi":"10.7591/9781501716133-007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501716133-007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":311322,"journal":{"name":"No Useless Mouth","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125746876","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501716119.003.0007
Rachel B. Herrmann
This chapter addresses black hunger in Nova Scotia. When white Loyalists fled the mainland American colonies, they transported ideas about hunger prevention with them. As refugee colonists, they advocated for food aid based on their knowledge of previous colonization efforts. In Nova Scotia, they blocked black colonists' access to land while taking more of it for themselves, and they enacted food laws to avoid famine. Their actions became a way to fight white hunger while ignoring—and sometimes creating—black hunger. Because white Loyalists interfered with black people's food choices while keeping them from obtaining land, their actions in Nova Scotia can be characterized as victual imperialism. These food laws were so consequential because they stopped black colonists from producing and obtaining edible commodities using the methods that had previously worked in land-scarce environments. Ultimately, black hunger was a product of several factors: inadequate planning prior to migrants' arrival in the province, land dearth, distance from food-aid distribution centers, unfavorable weather, and, finally, the introduction of laws controlling bread production, fish harvesting, and marketing practices.
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Pub Date : 2019-11-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501716119.003.0003
Rachel B. Herrmann
This chapter details how Indians used hunger to fight back. During the summer of 1779, the rebel American army mounted a devastating victual-warfare campaign, known today as the Sullivan Campaign, against Britain's Iroquois allies. Two major related changes occurred after the expedition. First, British descriptions of Iroquois hunger by the 1780s allowed most officials to envision Indians as useful mouths who could overlook hunger while also requiring more provisions. This altered perception of Iroquois hunger created a second change: a reworking of Iroquoian food diplomacy into something more violent than its previous iterations. Iroquoian food diplomacy in the American Revolution was constituted, in part, by mutual fasting—a policy the Indians sometimes had to enforce through the use of aggression. This diplomacy took Indian requests for certain types of provisions into account, obliging non-Natives to go out of their way to accommodate Native tastes. The American Revolution ravaged Indian communities, including Iroquois ones, but, during the war, changing British perceptions of hungry Indians allowed the Iroquois to challenge the state of power relations at a time when contemporaries assumed they were powerless in the face of crop destruction and land losses. Iroquois abilities to ignore and endure hunger made it impossible for their British allies to think of them as useless mouths.
{"title":"Iroquois Food Diplomacy in the Revolutionary North","authors":"Rachel B. Herrmann","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501716119.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501716119.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter details how Indians used hunger to fight back. During the summer of 1779, the rebel American army mounted a devastating victual-warfare campaign, known today as the Sullivan Campaign, against Britain's Iroquois allies. Two major related changes occurred after the expedition. First, British descriptions of Iroquois hunger by the 1780s allowed most officials to envision Indians as useful mouths who could overlook hunger while also requiring more provisions. This altered perception of Iroquois hunger created a second change: a reworking of Iroquoian food diplomacy into something more violent than its previous iterations. Iroquoian food diplomacy in the American Revolution was constituted, in part, by mutual fasting—a policy the Indians sometimes had to enforce through the use of aggression. This diplomacy took Indian requests for certain types of provisions into account, obliging non-Natives to go out of their way to accommodate Native tastes. The American Revolution ravaged Indian communities, including Iroquois ones, but, during the war, changing British perceptions of hungry Indians allowed the Iroquois to challenge the state of power relations at a time when contemporaries assumed they were powerless in the face of crop destruction and land losses. Iroquois abilities to ignore and endure hunger made it impossible for their British allies to think of them as useless mouths.","PeriodicalId":311322,"journal":{"name":"No Useless Mouth","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126129114","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501716119.003.0009
Rachel B. Herrmann
This chapter describes how, from 1792 to 1800, black colonists in Freetown, Sierra Leone—also referred to hereafter as “black Loyalists” and “Nova Scotians”—won several battles in the fight against black hunger. The Nova Scotians arrived in Africa in 1792 imbued with a sense of how to use food laws to exert dominance, and within half a decade, they had learned to behave as British subjects entitled to enforce that power. Whereas in Nova Scotia white Loyalists' food laws had controlled former bondpeople's access to food, in Sierra Leone, black colonists gained the right to enact their own antihunger rules, which white colonists uniformly approved, beginning in 1793. These Nova Scotians fought famine first by regulating their trade in alcohol, bread, fish, and meat. Later, the black Loyalists tried to regulate the trade of Africans, particularly Susu and Temne. These laws enabled former victual warriors to try to become victual imperialists by altering African food sales while occupying African land. This attempt failed because violent Temne and Susu reactions to colonists' price-fixing encouraged white councilmen in Sierra Leone to curtail black Loyalist lawmaking; those councilmen would later try to interfere with Africans' trade.
{"title":"Black Loyalist Hunger Prevention in Sierra Leone","authors":"Rachel B. Herrmann","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501716119.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501716119.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter describes how, from 1792 to 1800, black colonists in Freetown, Sierra Leone—also referred to hereafter as “black Loyalists” and “Nova Scotians”—won several battles in the fight against black hunger. The Nova Scotians arrived in Africa in 1792 imbued with a sense of how to use food laws to exert dominance, and within half a decade, they had learned to behave as British subjects entitled to enforce that power. Whereas in Nova Scotia white Loyalists' food laws had controlled former bondpeople's access to food, in Sierra Leone, black colonists gained the right to enact their own antihunger rules, which white colonists uniformly approved, beginning in 1793. These Nova Scotians fought famine first by regulating their trade in alcohol, bread, fish, and meat. Later, the black Loyalists tried to regulate the trade of Africans, particularly Susu and Temne. These laws enabled former victual warriors to try to become victual imperialists by altering African food sales while occupying African land. This attempt failed because violent Temne and Susu reactions to colonists' price-fixing encouraged white councilmen in Sierra Leone to curtail black Loyalist lawmaking; those councilmen would later try to interfere with Africans' trade.","PeriodicalId":311322,"journal":{"name":"No Useless Mouth","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123608512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-15DOI: 10.7591/9781501716133-010
Rachel B. Herrmann
This concluding chapter explores why Native and black revolutionaries lost the fight against hunger. Indians and formerly enslaved people lost the fight against hunger not because they became bad at stopping it but because imperial officials gathered enough information to circumscribe Native Americans' and black colonists' abilities to prevent hunger themselves. Knowledge acquisition gave these white officials a specific kind of power over Native and black revolutionaries: the power to reinterpret histories of hunger. They had received education about Native appetites and how to satisfy and then manipulate those appetites as they implemented a policy of victual imperialism. Government officials who delegitimized Native and black hunger-prevention efforts interfered with other people's food sovereignty. They decided that Indians and formerly enslaved people were unqualified to decide what to grow, sell, cook, and eat, and they made it harder for those communities to feed themselves. Ultimately, their actions ignored centuries of Native hunger prevention and erased a short decade of free black colonists' efforts to act similarly.
{"title":"Conclusion: Why Native and Black Revolutionaries Lost the Fight","authors":"Rachel B. Herrmann","doi":"10.7591/9781501716133-010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501716133-010","url":null,"abstract":"This concluding chapter explores why Native and black revolutionaries lost the fight against hunger. Indians and formerly enslaved people lost the fight against hunger not because they became bad at stopping it but because imperial officials gathered enough information to circumscribe Native Americans' and black colonists' abilities to prevent hunger themselves. Knowledge acquisition gave these white officials a specific kind of power over Native and black revolutionaries: the power to reinterpret histories of hunger. They had received education about Native appetites and how to satisfy and then manipulate those appetites as they implemented a policy of victual imperialism. Government officials who delegitimized Native and black hunger-prevention efforts interfered with other people's food sovereignty. They decided that Indians and formerly enslaved people were unqualified to decide what to grow, sell, cook, and eat, and they made it harder for those communities to feed themselves. Ultimately, their actions ignored centuries of Native hunger prevention and erased a short decade of free black colonists' efforts to act similarly.","PeriodicalId":311322,"journal":{"name":"No Useless Mouth","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122750149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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