Attempted Eradication of All Slavery in The United States of America
In 1851, Maury sent his cousin, Lieutenant William Lewis Herndon, and another former co-worker at the United States Naval Observatory, Lieutenant Lardner Gibbon, to explore the valley of the Amazon, while gathering as much information as possible for both trade and slavery in the area. Maury thought the Amazon might serve as a "safety valve" by allowing Southern slave owners to resettle or sell their slaves there. (Maury's plan was basically following the idea of northern slave traders and slave holders just as they sold their slaves to the southern states of the USA.) The expedition aimed to map the area for the day when slave owners would go "with their goods and chattels to settle and to trade goods from South American countries along the river highways of the Amazon valley." Brazil's slavery was extinguished after a slow process that began with the end of the international traffic in slaves in 1850 but did not end with complete abolition of slavery until 1888. Maury knew when he wrote in the News Journals of the day that Brazil was bringing in new slaves from Africa. Proposing moving those who were already slaves in the United States to Brazil, there would be less slavery or, in time, perhaps no slavery in as many areas of the United States as possible, while also hoping to stop the bringing of new slaves into Brazil which only increased slavery through the capture and enslavement of more Africans. "Imagine", Maury wrote to his cousin, "waking up some day and finding our country free of slavery!" (Source: s:Matthew Fontaine Maury/9 topic "African Slave Trade", the Letter to his cousin dated National Observatory, 24 December 1851
Maury started a campaign to force Brazilian Government to open up navigation in the Amazon river and to oblige it to receive the American colonizers and American Trade. But D. Pedro II's government deeply rejected the proposals. The Imperial Government had in mind US traditional process of territorial annexations in Latin America: immigration, provocation, conflict and annexation. So, Brazil acted diplomatically and through the press to avoid, by all means, the colonization proposed by Maury. By 1855, Maury´s project had certainly failed. Brazil authorized free navigation to all nations in the Amazon only in 1866 but only when it was at war against Paraguay and the free navigation in the area became necessary.
Read more about this topic: Matthew Fontaine Maury
Famous quotes containing the words attempted, eradication, slavery, united, states and/or america:
“Many have attempted unnatural acts, but Nature has always shown the way.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“As to a thorough eradication of prostitution, nothing can accomplish that save a complete transvaluation of all accepted values—especially the moral ones—coupled with the abolition of industrial slavery.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others. Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The United Nations cannot do anything, and never could; it is not an animate entity or agent. It is a place, a stage, a forum and a shrine ... a place to which powerful people can repair when they are fearful about the course on which their own rhetoric seems to be propelling them.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)
“If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth,
When time is old and hath forgot itself,
When waterdrops have worn the stones of Troy,
And blind oblivion swallowed cities up,
And mighty states characterless are grated
To dusty nothing, yet let memory
From false to false among false maids in love
Upbraid my falsehood.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)