Hello and welcome to creating a human rights culture which aims to promote a lived awareness of the interdependency and invisibility of human rights principles in our minds, hearts and bodies, that is, dragged into our everyday lives. What after all is freedom of speech to a person who is homeless and lives in a world at war? Therefore, it is dedicated ultimately to the application of the human rights triptych which in brief consists of the universal declaration of human rights at its center, the conventions, that is, international treaties on the right and implementation measures on the left. Hello, I'm Joseph Franca again and I'm here with Professor Peter Durico. He's a retired professor from the Legal Studies Department of UMass, Amherst. This is part two of our discussion on some of the struggles, the twists and turns that led to the endorsement of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. So he has a bunch of slides here, I think it's about 18 or so, and he's going to talk about them, and the title of this slideshow is The Doctrine of Christian Discovery from Genesis to US Law, so the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. I'll throw a wrench in here at the beginning, but there's a quote from Chief Joseph that I like very much where he said that the humility and kindness of Christ is much like the spirit of the Indian. I'm sure that what has gone on, Christopher Columbus, according to Howard Zinn in his people's history of the United States, said that he would cut off the ears of the Indians for the Blessed Trinity. I'm sure this is not what Christ had in mind, but let me stop there. The show is yours, so this is The Doctrine of Christian Discovery from Genesis to US Law. Go on. Thanks, Joe. The Doctrine of Discovery, I imagine that everybody has heard about the so-called discovery of the New World by Columbus, and the Doctrine of Discovery has evolved in US law as the basis for what's called federal Indian law. It's actually the basis for US property law, and it is the claim by the United States that it owns all of the land that was discovered. So I want to unpack that, and the subtitle from Genesis to US law is a way of pointing to the beginnings of this Doctrine, which is not starting, has nothing to do with Jesus. It has to do with the biblical origin story. When I refer to God, I'm talking about the God that's mentioned in the Bible, and the story in the Bible that says that God made a covenant with Abraham that gave him other people's lands, the land of the Canaanites. So when we remember that, we get the beginnings of the thread of The Doctrine of Christian Discovery. And it may seem strange to go back that far, but I want to read a quote. It's under the title of the abyss. And there was a, Carl Schmitt was a legal philosopher, political philosopher, writing back around the 50s, and he said, and I'm just going to read this quote. You'll see it on the slide. And abyss separates us from the time when international law textbooks still spoke of Christian international law and the right of Christian nations. So according to Carl Schmitt, we're on the other side of that abyss, that Christendom, the power of Christian nations, is no longer the basis of international law. But what we're going to see is, we go through this little presentation here, is that in fact, US property law is based on the biblical origin story of a promised land. And that is the way in which we can see the meaning of saying Christopher Columbus was the discoverer. So Christopher Columbus, the name Christopher is Christ-bearer. So we keep in mind that even the name says the origin story, bearing Christ. Now, the Bible story about Genesis and Abraham and the Covenant is considered to be the part of the Jewish part of the Bible. And the Christian part, Christ-bearer, is the Christian part of the Bible. But if you've studied anything about the Bible, you know that it's the Christians presented as an entirety, the so-called Old Testament and the New Testament tied together. And that the Christians took on this Covenant and considered themselves to be the heirs of that Covenant so that the Covenant that God made with Abraham in the story of Genesis goes into the Jewish story because Abraham's firstborn son was the origin of what became Islam. The Islamic branch claims that Covenant. And when the Christians come into the picture, they claim the Covenant.  You have the Abrahamic religions, all of them claiming they're the ones that got the Covenant from God.  So, but I want to back up to just the legal doctrinal story. Pope Alexander VI, one year after Columbus made his landfall here, I think of Columbus as kind of boat people, lost, trying to find his way, lands here, thinks he's in India. Always thought he had made it to India, never really changed his mind about that. But on behalf of Ferdinand Isabella, who were king and queen of what was becoming Spain, Spain was just coming into existence. It had pushed the Moors, the Islamic population out of the Peninsula, the Iberian Peninsula at the very same time that it was financing and sponsoring Columbus's voyage to the so-called New World. So Spain is in the midst of all this and it wants to make sure that it has the property rights because it's been in a dispute for a few years with Portugal over Africa and the rights to go slave hunting in Africa. And the Pope has already approved that and said Portugal can go do this. So the Spanish don't want to be left out. And when Columbus comes back and says he's found this land, the Spanish go to the Pope, Alexander VI, and he issues a bull, a formal document and just a few words out of it. He says, our beloved son Christopher Columbus discovered some remote islands and mainland and we by the authority of Almighty God do give, grant and assign forever to the kings of Castile and Leon, all of these countries. Provided, this Pope says, they at no time have been in the actual temporal possession of any Christian owner. So right at the beginning, the Pope as the arbiter of the highest power in Christendom, the Pope is higher even than the kings and queens, says, okay, I under my power from God, I'm going to give you that land. Just like God said to Abraham, I'm going to give you the land of the Canaanites and it's going to be yours. And the Pope is playing out that covenant story saying, the power that God gave me, I am now going to give Spain these lands in the new world. Okay, earlier, the ones that I had referred, the papal bulls I referred to earlier, 1452 and 1455, Pope Nicholas V had already set the precedent when he allowed Portugal to do slave trading in Africa. And he was also very explicit that this is a Christian venture. And just a few words out of the bulls, the two bulls that Pope Nicholas V issued, he gave permission to Portugal, the king of Portugal, to invade, conquer, fight, subjugate, the pagans and other infidels and enemies of Christ. And to put them into perpetual servitude, to appropriate their possessions and goods. So this is the principle, God gave Abraham somebody else's land. The Pope gives Spain somebody else's land. An earlier Pope gave Portugal somebody else's land. We see this thing being developed as a theme. And so it becomes a kind of a doctrine. But before we get to US law, one more quote from Nicholas V. He talks about the intrepid champions of the Christian faith. He's talking about the kings and queens and carrying out their missions to capture, invade and so on. And he says that this is to subdue the enemies of Christ wherever they are placed and reduce their persons to perpetual slavery. So we have here papal decrees approving slavery and land theft. But it's not called theft because it's called discovered. And the essential point is that the peoples who are already there are pagans, heathens and enemies of Christ. So they don't count. So now we jump ahead. 1823, that's a few hundred years. Chief Justice John Marshall, United States Supreme Court. Case of Johnson against Macintosh. It's a property case. It's a case where there's competing groups of land speculators, white people fighting over who gets to have the native land of the Piancashaw Nation, which is the area that we now call Illinois. And so Marshall says that when he makes the decision as to which group of land speculators is going to get it, and it's going to be, as it turns out, it's the speculators that did not go and make a deal with the native Piancashaw people. It's the speculators that were working with the US government that, he says, have the actual title. But he says that they have the right to take possession of this land, notwithstanding the occupancy of the natives who were heathens. So Marshall repeats this directly, the same papal language. He says that the Christian people have the title unless there was a prior Christian. Then the prior Christian gets it. And Marshall says the United States have adopted that rule. So in 1823, Marshall takes this. It's unbelievable in a way. If you've never thought of it before, he takes a 500-year-old papal doctrine that was used to justify slavery and the Spanish claim to title in the so-called New World. And he says, we're now adopting this in 1823, beginning early 19th century. We're adopting this into United States law. Joseph Story was a member of the court that made that decision. And in 1833, just a decade later, he wrote a very influential book to this day as regarded as an important book called Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. And Joseph Story said, this is quote, the title of the Indians was not a right of property and dominion, but is a mere right of occupancy. We're back to thinking about Standing Rock. Whose land is this? And Story says, as infidels, heathens, and savages, they were not allowed to possess land as sovereign and independent nations. And he says, he concludes by saying the territory over which the natives wandered, he doesn't even say that they lived there, they used for temporary purposes and in respect to Christians, they were deemed to be brute animals. Now these are very high level, we have John Marshall, Joseph Story, these are very high level, very influential people in the development of US legal system and they are developing that doctrine at the beginning of the 19th century, which is the 500 year old doctrine of the papal rights of Christians and they're not making any, they're not trying to cover it up. They're saying it's because it's true, Christians have this right. Let's take another leap, 1954, we're getting very close now to our present time. The case of the Tijiton versus the United States, Tijiton are in the area that you were in, the area that's called Alaska, and the US government had sent in contractors to take timber, to turn it into pulpwood, to print newspapers. And the Tijiton had protested and said you're taking our timber. And you owe us money. And so they sued the United States. Well the Solicitor General for the United States, defending the United States against that claim that the Tijiton were making, this is what was in the brief that he filed. Wait, I'll just spend a minute on each slide because I'm looking out that time. Yeah, I will. Thanks. Okay. So, Sobolov says that the Christian nations of Europe acquired jurisdiction over the discovered lands by virtue of grants from the popes, the power to grant to Christian monarchs the right to acquire territory in which heathens and infidels live. This is 1954. And Sobolov says the natives only had a right of occupancy through the grace of the sovereign, the sovereign being the US claim. So when that case was heard by the Supreme Court, Justice Stanley Reed, who was not the chief justice, but a justice of it, he adopted the US argument and he said it's well settled that the states of the, in the states of the Union, the tribes who inhabited the lands of the states after the coming of the white man had only permission from the whites to occupy, 1954. And so they concluded the Tijiton get no money because they don't actually own anything, neither the land nor the timber. They just have the grace of the US that they can stay there. Yeah. So now we're going to make a big leap, 2005, the city of Cheryl versus the United Indian nation. This is what the, what the opinion of the court was, which was written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. This will tell you, we're not talking about this as like all liberals are somehow in favor of native rights and all conservatives or not, Ruth Bader Ginsburg starts off footnote one in her decision says, under the doctrine of discovery, she now drops the word Christian in the 21st century, it's not permissible to remember what this is, the doctrine of discovery titled to the lands occupied by the Indians became vested in the United States sovereign. This is 2005, Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the case of city of Cheryl versus United Indian nation. In 2018, we're getting practically yesterday, the solicitor in a case called Royal v. Murphy, it was a case had to do with Creek Nation jurisdiction. He talks about the history of the US in relation to the Creek Nation is an intent to dismantle the Creek Nation and abolish its tribal organization and extinguish its tribal titles. So he admits that what was being aimed at, he called was the civil death of the Muscogee Nation. Now that language is the same language that is used in the international definition of genocide, which was developed by another lawyer, an international lawyer, Ralphie Lempkin in 1944. And he says genocide means a plan of actions aiming at the destruction of the essential foundation of a life of national groups. He said the objectives are to disintegrate the political and social institutions, the national feelings, the religion and the economic existence. That's precisely what in 2018 the US solicitor said was the aim of the US in regards to the Creek. And it's amazing to me that the Creek brief, in that case it hasn't yet been decided, it's actually still being argued inside the chambers of the judges, but it's amazing to me that the Creek Nation or anybody else called that out and said the US has just admitted that it's trying to commit genocide against the Creek Nation. And this stuff happens kind of under the radar, I guess, even though it's been blatantly said by the US in its brief. So also in 2018 the Yakim Nation filed an amicus brief in a case involving a conflict between the state of Washington and a trucking company that is a trucking company, it's not a Yakim Nation company, but it's a company that operates within the Yakim Nation and the state of Washington was trying to prohibit them from running their trucks on highways without paying taxes to the state. And there the Yakim Nation is the only case that I know of where at the level of the Supreme Court a native nation has called out the Doctrine of Christian Discovery and just a few words from there. The Yakim Nation referred to the religious, racist, genocidal doctrine of Christian discovery. A doctrine of domination and dehumanization. Then they said it is not welcome within Yakima territory and should no longer be tolerated in US law. And in the brief this is the first thing that they did and then they secondly referred to the treaty and they say that the solemn promises made in the treaty between the US and the Yakim Nation is the actual relationship, not the so-called power of Christian discovery. And when that case was decided recently, it was decided in favor of the Yakim Nation and here again just to confound people who are thinking about liberal and conservative, Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion saying that the Yakim Nation treaty guaranteed their right to travel and not pay taxes to the state of Washington. And he says that if the state and the federal governments don't like the terms of the treaty they can try to bargain for more. But they do not have the power to actually just override the treaty. He doesn't deal with Christian discovery. There were two favorable opinions. They referred to the Yakim Nation brief but only in relation to the part with the treaty. And my sense is the strategy the Yakim Nation used actually was successful which is they present a brief. They say the court has two roads it can go down. One it can go down Christian discovery and they call it out and they reject it and the other is it can go down with the treaty. And when you read the opinions of the court they are not going to touch that live wire of Christian discovery and actually have to deal with it instead they embrace the treaty. And the dissent the part of the Supreme Court that dissented they don't want to name Christian discovery but they are there mired in that same old doctrine that the U.S. has some kind of you know superior power here. And so just to bring it right to a conclusion this is a language from Genesis. This is Genesis 12 1 verses 6 to 7 and 15 verses 18 to 21 if you didn't want to track it down. And this is the new international version language. The Lord said to Abram go from your country and I will show you other land. He says the Canaanites were in the land. The Lord appeared to Abram and said to your offspring I will give this land. And then the Bible actually mentions all the people the Canaanites, Canaanites, Kadmanites, Hittites, names all the people who live there that God says it doesn't matter they're there but I'm giving you this land. And it judges to another book of the Bible. The angel of the Lord said I brought you up out of Egypt and led you into the land that I swore to give to your ancestors. I said I will never break my covenant with you and you shall not make a covenant with the people of this land but you shall break down their altars. You have disobeyed me. Why have you done this? So this is not only a colonial God that gives the land but when the people move into the land and they coexist, God gets angry. And so they're gonna be chastised. Is this the Palestine? Is this what we call Israel? This is in this, exactly. This is what we're talking about. This is the roots of where the Palestine-Israeli is as happening. And by the way, since Palestinians and Israelis are all Semites, you can't say that it's anti-Semitic to talk about the conflict between them. I just want to say that you see already from these recent cases that this is still considered valid law that just a month ago I did a quick search on legal database called Westlaw. And there are 349 cases citing Johnson against McIntosh and the most recent one was in March, 2019. So this is considered to be valid U.S. law. And so the UN Declaration of Rights and conditions of People has also taken this head-on. And it says that the doctrine of Christian discovery is racist, scientifically false, legally invalid, morally condemnable, socially undust. I think that if you want to follow this up, you can look at a couple of books that Steve Newcomb, my colleague has done, one called Pagans in the Promised Land and a video he's put out called The Doctrine of Discovery Unmasking the Domination Code. So that's, I guess when this show is edited, those slides will be presented and people can see for themselves without having just hear me read this. Yeah, well I'll do my best. Okay, I'll do my best. But that leaves us a couple of minutes, but articulate and well said. One thing you forgot on your slide, I have them in front of me, that you're asking people to petition Pope Francis to rescind the papal bulls from the 15th century. Maybe you want to talk about that. He is kind of a liberal guy. There's actually a quite widespread movement, particularly in the US and Canada, petitioning the Vatican to rescind the papal bulls. It's been going on for a while. The Vatican claims that the bull no longer means anything, that it was superseded by later bulls, but it has never actually been rescinded. I want to say that's fine as far as that goes, but what I'm talking about is US law. Let's say that Francis decided that, yep, we're going to rescind that bull, that 15th century bull that said Christians can go and slave heathens and pagans. It's no longer going to be allowed to be Vatican doctrine. That does not mean that the US law has changed. US law is where, from my perspective, it's not wrong to ask the Vatican to rescind it, but the proper target has to be the operation of the doctrine in US law, which is why the Yakama Nation amicus brief in Washington versus Cougar Den is so crucial, is that they made that challenge within the US legal system, and they say they're rejecting that and that it has no place in governing than the Yakama Nation. That's where the crucial action is. Right. Well, I think if Pope Francis does rescind it, and maybe it'll eventually seek into our symbolic consciousness. Yes, indeed. It would be a very powerful act to do, even if you want to say, oh, it would only be symbolic because it didn't change US law, but it would make you, you're talking about shame and blame or something that sort of. That same force is working here. The Yakama Nation calls this out. It seemed pretty clear to me the court has suddenly put on notice. You're going to have to wait in some thorny thickets here if you want to go down that path. Okay, we have about a minute and a half left. Okay, any advice for the viewers? What can we do to improve the quality of life in general and or for indigenous people? Yeah. Any final words? You've been with us for close to two hours now, and I wonder if you have any. Well, I would, I guess I'd say what we've talked about already is that do some homework. Figure out that when you start with basic concepts that are confused and contradictory, you're not going to get anywhere. So try to pair back. If you want to talk about mascots, okay, talk about mascots, but in fact, let me say if you're in Massachusetts, you want to talk about the state seal because that's now another movement that's changed the state seal. Let's be clear. The bill that's actually in the legislature is setting up a commission to study the state seal, and the charge of the commission is to show how that if you misunderstood that seal, that was unintended and that the Commonwealth has always been dedicated to justice. I'm thinking, well, if that's your starting point, your study is already prejudiced. You're not going to really look at the history of Massachusetts. And I feel more like it's better to leave the seal and maybe put a stamp on it saying what's wrong with this picture? It's like the Confederate generals. Got it. Look at them. Thank you. Think about it. Got it, we got to stop. Thank you, Peter. Okay. Thanks everyone for listening. Take care of yourselves and take care of others as needs be. Hope to see you again. Thanks. Bye. Thank you.


Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual book talk with Alice Baumgartner, author of South to Freedom. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Tuesday, February 9th, at 1 p.m. Alex Tresniowsky will tell us about his new book, The Rope, which recounts the investigation into the murder of a 10-year-old girl in 1910 and how it helped launch the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And on the following Tuesday, February 16th, at noon, Robert P. Watson will discuss his book, George Washington's Final Battle. Watson describes how our first president tirelessly advocated for a capital on the shores of the Potomac and provides a historical lesson in leadership and consensus building. In her introduction to South to Freedom, Alice Baumgartner relates an encounter she had in Mexico City while doing research for this book. When a man asked her where she was from and she replied she was American, he reminded her that everyone on that subway was American. We often forget that the name America applies to the lands of the entire Western Hemisphere and American history need not be confined to the borders of the United States. Baumgartner's new book, South to Freedom, directs our attention to our nation's southern border and the actions of thousands of people seeking freedom from slavery. Their acts of self-emancipation and southerners' reactions to those acts intensified the antebellum sectional crisis and endangered the fraught balance between northern and southern states. South to Freedom gives us a new perspective on the state of the Union before the Civil War and the causes of the Civil War. By reminding us that the journey to freedom did not always lead north, Alice Baumgartner helps us understand the continental scope of this critical chapter of our history. Alice Baumgartner is an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern California. She holds a PhD from Yale University and a degree in Latin American studies from the University of Oxford where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Her article The Line of Positive Safety won the Lewis Peltzer Award from the Organization of American Historians and the Bolton Cutter Prize from the Western History Association. South to Freedom was selected as an editor's choice by the New York Times Book Review and as one of the best black history books of 2020 by the African American Intellectual History Society. Now let's hear from Alice Baumgartner. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much to the National Archives for inviting me to be part of this series. I did a lot of work for this book out of the National Archives in DC, College Park in Fort Worth, Texas and I really couldn't have done that work without all of the archivists who helped me find materials and the archivists who preceded them who helped to catalog them. So it's especially gratifying to be able to share the results of that research now in this series. I had to admit though that I never really expected to study runaway slaves who escaped to Mexico in the decades leading up to the US Civil War, the topic of my book. In the summer of 2012, I was doing research in northeastern Mexico on a different topic, on violence on the US-Mexico border in the 19th century. I was expecting to find a lot of evidence of filibustering and know not the type that congressmen do now to delay bills. Filibustering of the rioting that US citizens did in the mid 19th century to further the cause of quote-unquote manifest destiny, the idea that the United States was destined to span from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And I found plenty of evidence of US citizens invading places like Mexico in pursuit of manifest destiny. But I also found evidence of another more unexpected type of violence, slavery from the United States attempting to kidnap there enslaved people who had escaped to Mexico and facing both legal and violent resistance from Mexican authorities. At the time, I didn't know that local Mexican authorities were using the law on violence to protect enslaved people. I didn't even know that enslaved people were escaping to Mexico. But the more research I did, the more evidence I found that enslaved people were escaping to the south. Some received help from free blacks, ship captains, male writers, and other quote lurking scoundrels. But most escaped to Mexico by their own ingenuity. They forged travel passes. They prayed to their gods bearing bones beneath their doors to protect them on their journey. They stole horses, firearms, skiffs, for hats, and in one instance, 12 gold watches and a diamond breastpin. And then they disappeared. Their stories have, for the most part, disappeared too. Reconstructing this history requires in-depth research on both sides of the border. This project took me to 27 different archives in three different countries. Some of those archives were so out of the way that I was written up in the local newspaper for going. But the main reason that this story has been overlooked is that U.S. historians assume that neither Mexico's government nor its citizenry was particularly committed to anti-slavery and that Mexico's anti-slavery policies buckled easily under pressure from the United States. If the promise of freedom in Mexico was illusory, then fugitive slaves escaping across the Rio Grande was a small local story without broader implications for our understandings of abolition in the Americas. The problem with this conclusion, as I learned over the course of my research, was that the Mexican government did not, in fact, retreat from its anti-slavery position under pressure from the United States. Mexico's Congress abolished slavery in 1837, but it didn't stop there. Much to the consternation of its neighbors, it adopted a constitution in 1857 that promised freedom not just to slaves within Mexico, but to the slaves of other countries from the moment they set foot on the national soil, a promise known as the Freedom Principle. Writing this guarantee into Mexico's constitution signaled that the Freedom Principle was not a legal doctrine to be invoked or ignored as the circumstances required, but a general and inviolable principle written into the law of the land. Mexico's laws were no radical than those passed by the Northern States and Canada. The Northern States had, of course, either abolished slavery or passed gradual emancipation laws, but the fugitive slave clause of the U.S. Constitution and the laws that were passed to enforce it prevented those states from promising freedom to all enslaved people who set foot on the soil like Mexico did, and that meant that the promise of freedom could not legally extend to enslaved people in neighboring states. Similarly, slavery had been abolished in the British Empire, including Canada in 1833, and while Canadian authorities didn't work to try to protect enslaved people who crossed into Canada, they continued to extradite criminals to the United States, criminals who sometimes happened to be fugitive slaves, as in the case of one runaway who was returned to his owner in 1842 for having stolen a beaver overcoat, a racing mare, and a gold watch while escaping from Arkansas. The only nation in the Americas with anti-slavery policies as radical as Mexico's was the former French colony of San Bamanque, which revolted in 1791 and founded the Republic of Haiti. Haiti abolished slavery in 1804 and adopted the freedom principle in 1816, although Haiti's anti-slavery policies destabilized slavery in Cuba and Jamaica, and although it struck fear in the hearts of southern slaveholders, the island lay 500 miles by sea from the southernmost tip of Florida. Mexico, by contrast, directly bordered the U.S. South. This proximity of spaces of mass-travel slavery meant that Mexico's anti-slavery policies would have profound consequences for its neighbors, especially when war broke out between Mexico and the United States in the mid-19th century. In 1846, as U.S. congressmen debated the status of slavery in the territories that they stood to acquire from Mexico, northerners of both political parties, both Whigs and Democrats, balked at the prospect of re-establishing slavery where it had been prohibited. Abolition in Mexico does undermine the norm of admitting slavery in southern territories while prohibiting it in northern ones, a norm that had kept sectionalism at bay since the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The escape of enslaved people into Mexico is a small window into a much bigger story, and today I want to tell three parts of that story. First, of Mexico's rise as an anti-slavery public, second of the ways in which abolition shaped the lives of enslaved people in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and third, the forgotten significance of Mexican abolition to slavery in the United States. By showing how Mexican abolition altered the geography of freedom for enslaved people in Texas and Louisiana, and how it provoked a major congressional controversy in the United States, I hope to offer a new perspective on the history of anti-slavery in the Americas, and of early national Mexico's forceful intervention into that history. On September 16, 1829, President Vicente Guerrero, himself of African descent, celebrated Mexico's 8th Independence Day with an act of, quote, justice and charity. He decreed an end to slavery across the country, and historians often date abolition in Mexico to Guerrero's decree, a policy that they argue passed largely without comment, because black slavery was simply no longer important to Mexico's national economy. Slavery had taken root in New Spain at the end of the 16th century after a series of epidemics decimated the indigenous population, and the Portuguese were granted a monopoly or asiento to supply the Spanish colonies with African slaves. As we can see in this chart here of the enslaved population in New Spain, between 1580 and 1640, there's a huge influx of African slaves to New Spain, and in fact, New Spain imported more African slaves than any other colony in the western hemisphere except Brazil. But a drop in sugar prices in the end of the Portuguese asiento put black slavery on a path of decline, and we can see that decline here in the enslaved population. By the time that Mexicans took up arms against Spain in 1810, black slaves numbered only 9 to 10,000. At the same time that Mexico's enslaved population was declining, anti-slavery sentiment was on the rise, and there are a couple of reasons why we see anti-slavery sentiment rising in this period. The first is that the war against Spain, Mexico's independence movement, had forged a link in the popular imagination between slavery and colonialism, individual emancipation, and national independence. Enslaved people reinforced this connection in the 1820s in Puebla in central Mexico, an enslaved man named José Muñoz petitioned for his freedom on the grounds that slavery could not exist in a newly independent republic. 300 miles to the north in Guadalajara, the enslaved people belonging to a man named Doni Ciro Gonzales made the exact same argument, and this is just one of many examples of the ways in which enslaved people, by their individual actions, contributed in important ways to larger political changes. The second reason that we see anti-slavery on the rise in the early national period in Mexico is that championing anti-slavery helped to distinguish Mexico from Spain, an important task for any fledgling government. While Spain continued to permit human bondage and its colonial possessions particularly in the island of Cuba, anti-slavery helped Mexico to cast itself in a different, more enlightened mold. Third, anti-slavery helped Mexico to differentiate its independence movement from its more renowned forbear, the American Revolution. Mexican politicians predicted that the Americans' uprising would be forgotten because of the contradiction between its professed ideals of liberty and equality and the millions of people enslaved in its fields. Mexico's independence movement, by contrast, would make good on its rhetoric of liberty and equality. The anti-slavery sentiment in Mexico manifested itself most clearly at the state level. From 1821 to 1827, seven of Mexico's 19 states abolished slavery outright and you can see them highlighted here in blue. These nine other states also decreed that the children born of enslaved people would be free, what was known as a free wound law and they were highlighted here in pink. These laws, of course, did not abolish slavery, at least the free wound law didn't. But like the gradual emancipation laws adopted in states like Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey, these laws did guarantee that human bondage would eventually come to an end. Given the declining enslaved population and the popular enthusiasm for anti-slavery is not unreasonable to assume, as historians have, that President Geddo's decree in 1829 abolishing slavery would have been welcomed and applauded, but the opposite happened. From the sugar producing south came predictions of economic ruin. Slave holders in Chiapas, which you see highlighted here, demanded immediate compensation. The town council of Córdoba Veracruz warned that the decree would cause the ruin of this population that labors exclusively in the cane fields. Meanwhile, Yucatan seceded from the Mexican confederation. Its legislature lambasting the national government for assuming powers that rightly belong to the states. Among its grievances was the abolition of slavery, a cruel attack on property that the legislators insisted, disadvantaged Yucatan more than any other state. The Anglo-American colonists who famously were settling in the Mexican province of Tejas, claimed the same distinction. The threat of a revolt among these colonies was in fact so great that President Geddo accepted the province from his degree. But these protests would soon become moot because in 1831, Mexico's Congress abrogated all the laws, decrees, regulations, ordinances, and orders that Geddo had issued, including the decree abolishing slavery. The revocation of Geddo's decree meant that slavery did not end in 1829, and the protests over the decree suggest that the decline of black slavery did not in fact guarantee its end. If Mexico's anti-slavery laws were not simply the result of a declining slave population, then when and why was slavery actually abolished in Mexico? Although slavery was declining nationally, it remained important regionally. It's hard to give exact numbers of where the enslaved population was focused after independence, because the Mexican government, when it declared its independence from Spain, had abolished distinctions of caste, and census takers had stopped recording racial categories on censuses. And this is a good example of a post-independence census from 1827, which records the name, the age, the work, whether or not someone knew how to write, but nothing about race or ethnicity. So we have to rely on anecdotal evidence, and that evidence suggests that the remaining enslaved population of Mexico was concentrated in two regions, the sugar producing south where we'd seen a lot of resistance to Geddo's decree, and also in the Khan producing north in the Anglo-American colonies of Tejas. The Mexican government could not abolish slavery immediately across the entire nation without risking a revolt in these two slave holding regions. But I think what's important really to emphasize here is that just because the Mexican government didn't abolish slavery outright, that doesn't mean that it was complicit in or condoning human bondage forever. As we talked about, state governments had taken really important measures against slavery, and the national government was also making its own inroads against the peculiar institution. In particular, in 1824, the national government forbade any enslaved person from being imported into Mexico, a law that posed a major threat to those Anglo-American colonists immigrating to the Mexican colony of Tejas with ambitions of using enslaved labor to grow cotton. Both state and national laws in Mexico posed a threat to the future of slavery in that country. Anglo colonists had learned to circumvent these laws, particularly the law against the importation of slaves, by enforcing enslaved people to sign indentured contracts for periods of up to 90 years, in other words, a lifetime contract to labor. But on April 28th, 1832, the legislature of Coahuila y Tejas, the state to which the province of Tejas was attached, passed a law that limited the terms of any contract to 10 years and invalidated any previous contracts that had been signed for a longer period of time. Suddenly, those lifelong indentures that slaveholders had forced their enslaved people to sign were annulled. Within months, enslaved people started to claim their freedom under this new law. In the spring of 1832, enslaved people, Peter and his son John, escaped from the Anglo-American colonies in eastern Tejas to San Antonio de Bejar. After gaining an audience with the mayor of San Antonio, they petitioned for their freedom on the grounds that they had been imported to Mexico in violation of its prohibition against the slave trade. In 1834, an enslaved woman named Minerva also claimed her freedom, this time before the U.S. District Court of Western Louisiana, on the grounds that her owner had taken her from Arkansas into Tejas in violation of Mexico's laws. That same year, in 1834, Mexico's vice president dispatched a secret agent to Tejas with instructions, quote, to seek by every possible and prudent means to make it known to the slaves who have been brought to the republic in the circumvention of the law, that the law gives them freedom by the mere act of stepping on the territory of the republic, close quote. As more enslaved people filed suit for their freedom and Mexican officials redoubled their efforts to enforce the ban on the importation of slaves, the Anglo colonists in Tejas concluded what they had long suspected, that their rights would never be safe under Mexican rule. Texan's ability to circumvent anti-slavery legislation was even further diminished when President Antonio López de Santa Ana overturned Mexico's federalist constitution in favor of a more centralist system of government in which he could impose laws on the states without their consent. In the fall of 1835, the Anglo colonists in Tejas took action against this political change and revolted. And less than a year later, on April 21, 1836, Texas forces defeated the Mexican army at the Battle of San Jacinto, securing independence of Texas, at least for the moment. The Mexican government planned to launch another expedition to reconquer Texas, and so it came as a surprise and an affront when on March 3, 1837, a mere 10 months after the Texas revolution, the U.S. government recognized Texas's independence. The U.S. authorities insisted that their decision recognized by law what Texas had established in fact. The republic had formed a stable government with regular elections, even a circulating currency, which we can see here. Now, this diplomatic recognition might seem not particularly important, but when we think of a recent headline that the Palestinians recognized Texas as a part of Mexico, it really shows that this issue continues to be of profound importance. Just kidding, fake news, that didn't actually happen. But it shows us that this is something that is important, that even though diplomatic recognition doesn't mean that the United States was sending arms and weapons to Texas, that that diplomatic recognition alone granted the Republic of Texas a certain status within the community of nations that undermined Mexico's claims to retake its seceded colony. Six weeks after the Van Buren administration recognized Texas independence, Mexico's Congress voted to abolish slavery without exception. And the timing of abolition in Mexico is really no coincidence. The secession of Texas eliminated the largest slaveholding state from the Mexican Federation, and because the Texans had revolted, the Mexican government was under no obligation to compensate those citizens for any loss, so the financial costs of implementing abolition were smaller than before. Moreover, the benefits appeared greater. Defending liberty acted on popular anti-slavery sentiment in Mexico, and we can kind of see an expression of that anti-slavery sentiment in this playbill for you might recognize that this is a play version of Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, a very, very successful play produced in Mexico. It was for building upon that anti-slavery sentiment that had been in development since the 1820s. And that anti-slavery sentiment was even more important now in the wake of the Texas revolution, because it allowed Mexicans to sort of find victory and defeat. Texans, for all of their talk of liberty and the rights of man, state's rights, were, according to Mexicans, destroying the true liberty of humanity by enslaving black people. The United States might boast of its successes, as did the Republic of Texas, but only in Mexico could stand upright before the world. This position also galvanized international support from Mexico, from Edinburgh, Scotland, to Westchester, New York. Anti-slavery societies condemned Texas as a quote-unquote loathsome republic that had exercised its political liberty in defense of slavery. And again, this image of the eagle of liberty, the free eagle of Mexico grappling the cold-blooded viper, tyranny, or Texas really encapsulates that feeling that was prevalent, particularly among anti-slavery leaning people, that the Texas revolution was unjustified and that Mexico truly was in the right. The abolition of slavery bolstered morale among Mexicans and a galvanized support for Mexico, but it also served a larger political purpose. A number of enslaved people had fled from their masters before, during, and after the Texas revolution, and this flight helped to convince the Mexican government that by revolt or escape, enslaved people had the power to destroy the fledgling republic of Texas when it most needed to gain the respect of the international community, although it had been recognized by the United States no other country had followed suit. And they were hoping that maybe there was a slave revolt that perhaps further international recognitions would not be forthcoming. As news of Mexico's abolition policy spread, Texans complained that their enslaved people displayed a very refractory disposition, and they blamed the Mexican government for sending emissaries, quote, to excite an insurrection. You can see here in this article from the Telegraph in Texas Register. Not only did abolition promise to help return Texas to the Mexican Federation, it also posed an obstacle to U.S. expansion. The U.S. government made no secret of its ambition to acquire part, if not all, of Mexico's territory. But if slavery were abolished in the lands that southern adventurers hoped to acquire from Mexico, then the Mexican authorities believed that their neighbors would have to turn their tensions elsewhere. The United States' slaveholding empire could not extend into non-slaveholding Mexico. To reestablish slavery where it had previously been abolished, in the words of Mexico's Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1848, violated the reigning, quote, philosophical principles of the civilized world. If enslaved people resisted their masters using what scholars call weapons of the weak, breaking tools, feigning illness, working slowly, minor ways in which they could resist their enslavement, governments could also resist in these furtive ways. Mexico's anti-slavery policies were a powerful weapon in the hands of a weak government. They weren't overtly belligerent. The northern states in Canada had also abolished slavery. But these measures boosted morale, attracted international support, recruited military alanis by encouraging enslaved people to revolt or escape, and discouraged further U.S. expansion. They were, in the words of one Mexican diplomat, quote, the rock that could shatter the clay foot of the United States. After Mexico abolished slavery, enslaved people responded by escaping in increasing numbers across the border into Mexico. Two options awaited most runaways in Mexico. The first was to join Mexico's military colonies, a series of outposts along Mexico's northern frontier which defended against native peoples and foreign invaders. Most fugitive slaves joined one particular military colony in northern Coalila, a state in Mexico's northeast, where the Seminole Indians and their black allies started settling beginning in 1815. And we can see a picture of black Seminole scouts here. Life in Mexico was not easy. Few fugitive slaves spoke Spanish. As a senate of one remembered in an interview with historian Kenneth Wiggins Porter in 1942, we couldn't even ask for a chaw of tobacco. Most had so little taste for Mexican food that they scraped the red beans from the tortillas that their neighbors handed them. And the demands of military service, perhaps most importantly, constrained their autonomy. Fathers, husbands, and sons had to take up arms at a moment's notice. But this military service also earned the fugitive slaves respect from Mexican authorities who praised them for their desire, quote, to succeed in punishing the enemy. Mexican authorities recognized that the very people, the very filibusters that they were trying to protect against, were the very people who sometimes were seeking to re-enslave those escaped slaves. For all of its restrictions, military service also helped fugitive slaves defend themselves against those who wished to return them to slavery. On September 20th, 1851, Sheriff John Crawford of Bear County, Texas, rode 200 miles from San Antonio to the Mexican military colony in Coahuila, where most of these enslaved people had settled. There he arrested two men he suspected of being runaways and carried them across the Rio Grande. Jose Antonio de Arredondo, a justice of the peace in Guerrero Coahuila, insisted that the two men were both, quote, under the protection of our laws and government and considered as Mexican citizens, close quote. When US officials explained that a court in San Antonio had ordered their arrest, the sub-inspector of Mexico's eastern military colonies demanded that they be released. Meanwhile, a force of black and seminal people attempted to cross the Rio Grande and free the prisoners by force. Though military service helped to ensure the freedom of former slaves, that freedom came at a cost, risk to one's life and the heat of battle, and participation in Mexico's brutal campaign against native peoples. But not every runaway joined the colonies. Some settled in cities like Monterey, which you can see pictured here, or Matamoros, which had a growing black population of merchants and carpenters, bricklayers and manual laborers, hailing from Haiti, the British Caribbean, and the United States. Others didn't go to cities. They hired themselves out to local landowners who were in constant need of extra hands. Evaristo Madero, a businessman who carted goods from Saltillo, Mexico to San Antonio, Texas, hired two black domestic servants. Espirillón Gomez employed several others on his ranch near San Fernando. These were who he has encountered a different set of challenges than those who joined the military colonies. Those who worked on haciendas and in households were often the only people of African descent on the payroll, leaving them no choice but to assimilate into their new communities. Most learned Spanish, and many changed their names, as did one former slave named Dan, who in Mexico called himself the Onicio de Chevarilla. Fugitive slaves also encountered labor practices that bore some of the homers of chattel slavery. In northern Mexico, hacienda owners enjoyed the right to physically punish their employees, meeting out corporal punishment as harsh as any on plantations in the United States. And parts of southern Mexico, such as Yucatán and Chiapas, that peonage tied laborers to plantations as effectively as violence. But in contrast to the United States, where enslaved people in the south knew no other law beside the whim of their owners, laborers in Mexico enjoyed a number of legal protections. These workers could file suit when their employers lowered their wages or added unreasonable charges to their accounts. They could also sue in cases of mistreatment as Juan Castillo of Galeana Nuevo León in northeastern Mexico did in 1860, after his employer hit him, whipped him, and ran him over with a horse. His employer admitted to quote, an excess of anger. In general, laborers had the right to seek new employment for any reason, a right that was of course denied to enslaved people in the United States. But in contrast to the antebellum United States, fugitive slaves could and did become citizens of Mexico. A former slave named John was elected to serve on the municipal jury of Musquiz, Colila in 1858, a duty reserved for citizens. Santos, another black man in Musquiz, served as a deputy for a local judge, a gun of responsibility for citizens alone. This was important because as historian Stephen Cantrowitz reminds us, 19th century African Americans demanded not just freedom from slavery, but also belonging, political citizenship. And perhaps the greatest proof of that belonging was the links that Mexicans would go to defend the former slaves who had become their neighbors. On August 20th, 1850, Manuel Luis del Fiero stepped outside his house in Reynosa Tamolipas, a town just across the border from McAllen, Texas. And you can see a slightly later image of the Plaza principal in Reynosa. The night was hot and a band was playing in the plaza. And as he stood listening to the music, two foreigners approached asking if he wanted to join them on the plaza. Del Fiero politely refused their invitation. And he didn't really give the incident much thought until later that night when he woke to the sound of a woman screaming. Del Fiero hurried toward the commotion. In one of the rooms of the house, he came across the two foreigners who invited him to the concert earlier. One of them was waving a pistol at his maid, Matilda Hennes, who quote, had been held as a slave in the United States, as Del Fiero later testified. Hennes had belonged to a planter named William Cheney, who owned a plantation near Cheneyville, Louisiana, a town 150 miles northwest of New Orleans. When Solomon Northrop, a free black man who was kidnapped from the north and sold into slavery, arrived at a plantation in a neighboring parish, he heard that several enslaved people had been hanged in the area for planning, quote, a crusade to Mexico, close quote. As Northrop recalled in his memoir, 12 Years of Slave, the plot was, quote, a subject of general and unfailing interest in every slave hut on the bayou, close quote. From her years working on Cheney's plantation, Hennes must have known that Mexico's laws would give her acclaimed freedom. At some point, when her house was unclear, Hennes acted on that knowledge, escaping from Cheneyville, making her way to Reynosa, and finding work in Manuel Luis Del Fiero's household. To Del Fiero, Matilda Hennes was not just a runaway. As a servant, she was a member of his household. In the room where she was battling out with these slave holders, Del Fiero took hold of his gun, while his wife called for help from the balcony. One of the kidnappers who was arrested turned out to be Hennes's former owner, William Cheney. In Mexico, Cheney found that he could not treat people of Africanist descent with impunity, as slaveholders often did in the United States. While Cheney sat in prison, Judge Jufe de Trevino of the District of Northern Tamaulipas began an investigation into the attempted kidnapping. Del Fiero's actions were not unusual. In 1851, the townspeople of a small village in Northern Coelhila took up arms, quote, in the service of humanity, close quote, to stop a slave catcher named Warren Adams from kidnapping a black family. Later that year, the Mexican army posted a respectable force and two artillery pieces on the Rio Grande to stop a group of 200 Americans from crossing the river, likely to see his fugitive slaves. In 1852, four townspeople from Guerrero Coelhila chased after a slave holder from the United States who had kidnapped a black man from their colony. They found the slave holder who pulled out a six-shooter, but one of the townspeople drew faster, killing the man. Unable to bring the kidnapper to court, the councilman brought his corpse to the judge of Guerrero, who certified that he was in fact dead, quote, for not having responded when spoken to in other cadaverous signs, close quote. The protection that Mexican citizens provided was significant because the national authorities in Mexico City did not have the resources to enforce many of the country's most basic policies. Mexico's anti-slavery laws might have been a dead letter, in other words, if not for those ordinary people of all races who risked their lives to protect fugitive slaves. As Mexico became known as a refuge for runaways, the landscape of slavery in the south-central United States began to shift. Perspective immigrants chose not to settle in south Texas, quote, for the unsafety of bringing slaves, close quote. Point Isabel to the mouth of a Rio Grande was deemed by most immigrants to be, quote, non-slave holding due to its proximity to Mexico, close quote. Slave holders in Texas and Louisiana were so concerned by the number of enslaved people escaping to the south that diplomats from the United States were instructed to pressure the Mexican counterparts to sign an extradition treaty that would return fugitive slaves to their owners. But negotiations for such a provision failed in 1850, 1851, 1853, 1857. Mexico's extradition of fugitive slaves, according to the US Secretary of State, would not be entertained, quote, for a moment, close quote. And we can really see the effect of this in this census from Brownsville, Texas in 1860, where we list the names of slave holders and the number of slaves that they owned. And in column six, you can see the list of those enslaved people who were, quote, unquote, fugitives from the state. We can see here that four out of the seven enslaved people in Brownsville, Texas, just on the border with Mexico, were escaped, presumably to Mexico. The freedom that Mexico promised with threatened slavery, not just in the nearby states of Texas and Louisiana, but also at the very heart of the Union. The trouble began in 1845 when the United States annexed the Republic of Texas. And that debate only accelerated a year later when the United States provoked a war with Mexico. President James K. Polk, who was in charge of the United States during this war, made clear that he intended to pay for the conflict by seizing Mexico's territories. And the question soon became what the status of slavery in those conquerors' territories would be. On August 8, 1846, several months after the start of the Mexican-American War, a U.S. congressman from Pennsylvania named David Wilmot proposed that slavery be excluded from any territory that the United States might acquire from Mexico. The so-called Wilmot proviso threw the issue of slavery into the center of the political arena, leading historian Eric Foner to argue, rightly, I think, that the introduction of the Wilmot proviso was the event in U.S. history, quote, that seemed to lead almost inevitably to sectional controversy and civil war, close quote. Despite its significance, the Wilmot proviso remained something of a puzzle. Why was a proviso that was never adopted so controversial? And why would someone like David Wilmot, a Northern Democrat who had never given any sign of anti-slavery convictions, make such a proposal in the first place? Historians had proposed a number of explanations, which I'd be happy to talk about more in the Q&A, but none are as compelling as the argument that Northern Democrats themselves made, which was that the federal government had no power to interfere with slavery where it existed. It was for that reason that David Wilmot had supported the annexation of Texas as a slave state in 1845, because as he explained, quote, slavery had already been established there, close quote. If the federal government lacked the power to abolish slavery where it existed, as in Texas, then Wilmot argued it also lacked the power to establish slavery where it had been abolished, as in Mexico. Since the Mexican government had abolished slavery in 1837, Wilmot argued that any land ceded to the United States after the Mexican American War would enter the Union as free territories. Wilmot insisted that this proviso was not an anti-slavery measure. Instead, he claimed that his proviso promised to do only what, quote, the gentleman from the South asked, to let slavery alone. Southern congressmen, many of whom have long argued against federal interference of any variety with slavery, nonetheless refused to accept Wilmot's reasoning, because the Wilmot proviso threatened to upset the delicate balance of power between North and South. If the territories ceded from Mexico were recognized as free territories, then basically all of the remaining territories in the West would be closed to slavery. Mexican abolition, in other words, forced the U.S. Congress to make what seemed like an impossible choice, either to admit the former Mexican territories as free states, which would destroy the balance of power between North and South in D.C., particularly in the Senate. As you can see here, blue states are red states, red states are slave-holding states. Or they could argue for re-establishing slavery, where it had been previously abolished, which would help to maintain that sectional balance, as you can see in option number two, but would create a dangerous precedent for federal intervention with respect to slavery. Northern politicians who had no particular desire to support slavery weren't about to reverse their long-standing convictions that the federal government should be limited in order to defend that political balance between North and South. Southern politicians, for their part, really didn't want to choose between those two options. Instead, they blustered that Mexico could not possibly have abolished slavery. It is a way to kind of avoid having to choose between these two options. Senator John Berrien of Georgia argued that Mexico's federal government had no more right than its U.S. counterpart to abolish slavery. He said, quote, I understand the Mexican confederation to have been formed upon the model of our own, and that the power over the subject of slavery belonged to the separate states of the Mexican Republic, close quote. In other words, he's saying the Mexican Congress couldn't possibly have abolished slavery in 1837 because their constitution didn't allow them to. This was incorrect, but he was insistent anyway. Congressman William Henry Brockenbrough of Florida pointed to, quote, the servitude of poor debtors of all races to the wealthy, which was more profitable to the master and less comfortable to the slaves. He's arguing that all of those ways in which coercion continued in Mexico meant that slavery really did continue, even though it was legally abolished, and that the southern states didn't have to recognize the abolition of slavery as a result. Northerners deemed these arguments hardly admissible. Senator James Shields of Illinois scoffed that, quote, the people of Mexico will be highly edified when they learn that their old acquaintances, the Norte Americanos, had discovered that slavery was in full force in operation in that country without the people themselves being aware of that fact. I think when they hear this, they will come to the conclusion that we are as invincible in logic as we are in battle, close quote. To prove once and for all that slavery had been abolished. Congressman started to read the laws of Mexico on the floor of the Congress. Representative Henry C. Murphy of New York borrowed a collection of Mexican laws from the State Department Library to read before the House, and Senator Thomas Hart Benton took things one step further. He read Mexico's laws in the original Spanish, reading from this law digest here. Ninguno es esclavo en el territorio de la nación, Benton read. Another congressman complained, quote, the Senate cannot understand a word of what he reads. The introduction of the Wilma proviso turned the slow burn of sectionalism into a blaze. But Senator Thomas Hart Benton saw a simple solution to the disputes caused by Mexico's abolition of slavery. Benton was, of course, the representative from Missouri, which was a slave state. He argued that if Mexico's laws prohibiting slavery remained enforced in the ceded territories, that the Wilma proviso was redundant, unnecessary. The peculiar institution could not legally extend to the territory ceded from Mexico, proviso or no proviso. To Benton, Mexico's abolition of slavery made the proviso into, quote, a thing of nothing, an empty provision, a cloud without rain, close quote. In other words, he's saying we don't need to pass the Wilma proviso. Slavery can't extend to that session. And the people who are proposing the proviso are just trying to stir up sectional animosities. Benton's argument convinced many of those northern Democrats who had broken party lines by voting for the Wilma proviso. Richard Broadhead of Pennsylvania wondered, quote, if the territory will be free when it is annexed and Congress has no power to make it slave, where is the necessity for the adoption of the amendment, close quote. Like Benton, he's arguing we don't need the amendment because Mexican laws are still enforced. We're still respecting them. To Senator James W. Bradbury of Maine, the proviso was, quote, an unnecessary enactment, close quote. For slavery had already been as prohibited by Mexican laws as by any act of Congress. And he said, quote, these laws remain enforced. And the proviso is now there prohibiting slavery throughout their entire extent, close quote. So Congress is basically saying that they can't overturn Mexico's laws. But if Congress couldn't do that, who could? All but the most strident abolitionists believed that the territories, when admitted as states, possessed the unquestioned right to amend previous legislation, including the laws relating to slavery. Northerners assumed that slaveholders would not risk taking their enslaved people to the former Mexican territories, and that as a result, those territories would join the union as free states. But Southern whites thought that immigrants to the former Mexican territories would bring their slaves, and that they would vote to reestablish slavery in the American Southwest. So although Congress was not going to explicitly prohibit slavery in those territories, there was this question about whether Mexican laws remained enforced and how those laws could be overturned. If slaveholders believed that immigrants to the former Mexican territories would vote to reestablish slavery, they would soon be disabused of this belief. In 1849, less than a year after the end of the Mexican-American war, California petitioned for admission to the union as a free state. The bounds of power between the North and South hung in the balance. There were 15 free states and 15 slave states at the time, and the admission of California as a free state seemed to put slaveholders at a permanent disadvantage in the Senate. To put an end to the sectional controversy provoked by Mexican abolition, Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky introduced a series of resolutions on January 29th, 1850. The compromise measures would admit California as a slave state in accordance with the will of the people in the territory. But the compromise refrained from passing any legislation on the remaining territories, what would become New Mexico, Arizona, parts of Utah, and Colorado. And the compromise refrained from passing any legislation on slavery in those territories because in Clay's own words, quote, slavery does not exist by law in any of the territory acquired by the United States from the Republic of Mexico, close quote. As a result, Clay deemed it in expedient for Congress to provide by law, either for its introduction into or exclusion from any part of the said territory, close quote. Mexico's laws abolishing slavery remained in effect in its seated territories until the people voted to alter, or as in the case of California, to uphold those laws. Southern politicians had only to look at a map of the United States to realize what this meant for the sectional balance between North and South. After the admission of California, there were 16 free states and 15 slave states. And there was no guarantee that the remaining territories would enter the union as slave states. Southern politicians spent the next decade trying to revert the loss of power that the Mexican American War and Mexican abolition set in motion. Their efforts led to the failed annexation of Cuba in 1854, the overturning of the Missouri compromise also in 1854, the outbreak of violence in Kansas, and the birth of a new political party, the Republican Party, whose success in the election of 1860 led to the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War. Mexico's policies with respect to slavery had serious implications for human bondage in the United States. Mexico bordered the U.S. South, and specifically the Deep South, where slave-based agriculture was booming. Eventually, enslaved people escaped to Mexico with such frequency that Texas seemed to have more in common with the states that bordered the Mason-Dixon line. Samuel Houston, then the governor of Texas, made the states clear on the eve of the Civil War, quote, Texas is a border state, close quote, he wrote in 1860, quote, Mexico renders and secure her entire Western boundary. Her slaves are liable to escape, but no fugitive slave law is pledged for her recovery, close quote. In fact, Mexico's laws rendered slavery insecure not just in slavery in Texas and Louisiana, but at the very heart of the Union, Washington, D.C. The land seized from Mexico at the close of the Mexican-American War in 1848 was free territory. That territory included what is most of modern-day California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. When Southern politicians attempted to establish slavery in that region by popular sovereignty, they ignited a sectional controversy that would eventually lead to this assertion of the Southern states. It's easy to discount Mexico's anti-slavery stance, given that coercion continued in so many other forms in Mexico, as enslaved people who escaped there sometimes learned, but these laws were a momentous achievement nonetheless. Only by abolishing human bondage was it possible to extend the debate over the full meaning of universal freedom, the enslaved people who escaped from the United States, and the Mexican citizens who protected them, ensured that the promise of freedom in Mexico was significant, even if it was sometimes incomplete. As the poet Walt Whitman put it, quote, it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary, close quote. Their work, our work, is not over.


the M2 macrophages are a type of immune cell that has been found to have a wide range of functions in the body. They are characterized by the expression of certain genetic markers such as those for scavenger receptors, enzymes, growth factors, hormones, cytokines, and cytokine receptors. These markers are thought to provide insight into the differentiation of the M2 macrophages from other types of macrophages. Additionally, the M2 macrophages are influenced by the tissue environment and a neuroendocrine system, which may help explain why they have such varied functions. Finally, the evolutionary origins of the M2 macrophages are discussed. This article was authored by Thomas Risser.


So we're here with the third eye, and who are you? I'm Nick Cherkuri, I'm the founder and president of 3rd Eye. So are these, can you wear them for one second, is this augmented reality? Yes, so these are our X1 augmented reality smart glasses. So if you wear them, you see a digital screen that's equivalent of a 90 inch screen at 10 feet. It has about a 40 degree diagonal field of view. It has high definition resolution, so it's HD. When the screen comes on, you can show 3D content. You can run any type of application you can run on your phone. It runs on Android, so it has a lot of cool AR applications you can run on this. Is it a dual display? It is dual display, so it displays both of them. Is it an open micro-display? No, it's not open. Some of it's proprietary technology, and some of it's other OEMs. But it's a liquid crystal L-cost display, so a good benefit about this is it has high brightness. So for enterprise use cases, they want to use it without any brightness issue. So you can walk around in different situations and see the screen really clearly, because it has really high brightness compared to OLED. So L-cost-based display, Full HD or HD? 720 on each side, or? Full HD, so. Full HD on each side? Yes. So, do you have Android running on a little processor here? Yes, so it runs on Android, Android 7.0. So do you talk about what CPU you're using? So we use a Qualcomm-based CPU. So it's a Qualcomm? Yeah. Is it one of the new ones? It's fairly new. It has a powerful GPU on this as well. So the benefit of this is you can run parallel processing highly intensive applications. Where do you have the CPU and everything? It's stored basically in a frame of this. It's frame, sides, we have everything in here. It's PCBs and the battery? Yeah, everything's stored. How long is the battery life? So the cool thing about our battery is we have the largest battery life in any smart class. Really? 2,400mAh. On both sides? So no, total 2,400mAh, so you can use it for 6-7 hours. It's almost double what most smart classes typically have. They're also replaceable batteries, so you can pop them in, pop them back out. So you can use it for 24 hours, 48 hours if you have a pack of batteries with you. So this is huge for enterprise because they want to use it for a full work day. They don't want it to run out of battery. So did you develop the whole uptakes and stuff? Is this your company doing that? Some of it is proprietary and some of it we use other manufacturers, but it's a partnership. A lot of this we have developed in-house, so the cool thing is we developed both the hardware and the software in-house. So we have a lot of control over the application. You say this is the most powerful AR glasses? Yes, that's one of the most powerful. The main thing is for the users who are targeting enterprise, they want to use it for a full work day with high brightness. We are the largest battery life of any smart class. It's great for enterprises. They can give it to their workers for a full work day. We also don't have any brightness issues. They can be in bad lighting situations, still see the screen really clearly. So these are huge advantages that companies, if they want to give it to their workers, they need these advantages. Nice. So what would be the use case? You have an office working, do augmenting stuff. That's a good question. So we work with manufacturing, logistics, sports, entertainment, healthcare. To give you an example of what we use for each one, for manufacturing a biggest use case is a point of view remote help use case where a remote worker can wear a smart class, stream their live point of view to an expert who could be sitting at his desk. It's for sports entertainment, someone wearing a smart class could be watching eight different high definition matches all in real time, all in high definitions. So this cool AR application can run for different industries. He's watching eight matches. That's one class because you run just on smart glasses. That's a 13 megapixel camera. Can you do any kind of gestures? So right now, that's a good question. Our UI is based on head motion. So you control the cursor and everything based on head motion, which is really useful because we want people to be hands free. We don't want them to be using hands. We want them to continue working. Is this the bag you use to transport it? So this is a portable case. So people can place a smart class in here and put any microphones, USB, anything in here. If you want to extend the battery, can you just plug in a cable with a power bank? Yes, you can plug it. It has a USB-C port. USB-C here. So you can connect any USB-C compatible battery. Nice. So it has Android 7? Android 7, yes. The UI. Is anybody working on the UI to make a nice AR UI kind of? Because Google was supposed to do something but it didn't really follow up with that, right? Right. So our UI, our main focus is making it hands-free. So as you know, there's no touchpad on here. You develop the UI? We develop the UI in-house. So we have engineers who develop our head motion control. So there's no touchpad on here. The way you move the cursor... No need to touch at all. No need to touch.    You can try to copy or something. You have an eye tracker in there. Yeah. That could be interesting. But just head movements. Head motion. You can move the cursor. You can move the screens around. So... Potentially you can have Bluetooth controls, right? You can connect Bluetooth. So if people are more comfortable with the Bluetooth control, they can easily connect the Bluetooth here. Like some kind of a gamepad. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So you can walk around in the street and not bump into things? So we don't recommend people walking around the street wearing this at this stage. Why not? But unless they're really good with smart glasses. But for our main use cases, enterprise, mid-backstring, specific use cases, they wear us for our glasses and they find it really useful. We found a 33% savings and efficiency, which is huge. It's been the dream that you enter Whole Foods and they give you one of those when you came in. And then it knows your profile and it tells you, you need to buy that soy milk. Exactly.  So retail is the one we're trying to get into where you can go into a store, you can look at an object, you can see the prices for a price comparison in real time. It's a countdown. You only have 30 minutes. You cannot just spend three hours with those. Exactly. There's so many use cases for this. So AER is definitely going to be the next computational platform. It's at the beginning stages but we're definitely focusing on making it as user-friendly as possible. One issue is the transfer of bacterias. When many people wear it. What's the solution for that? You just wipe it with a cloth? Is that the only solution? So, yeah. We're going to get sick. You can use a cloth and you can wipe it. I think that's a challenge. We provide a cloth with a package so you can put some soap on and wipe it. I hope so. Because otherwise it's not good if you go to the store and you have a high likelihood to get the sickness or something like that. Cool.


Now over to a couple of spotlights on exciting work shipped and upcoming starting with Time Lock Encryption Patrick. Hello everybody. I'm Patrick from the DRAN team. For those of you who don't know, DRAN is a network for generating publicly verifiable, unpredictable, unbiased random numbers. We recently implemented a practical implementation of Time Lock Encryption that does not use proof of work. Time Lock Encryption is the ability to encrypt something now that cannot be decrypted until some point in the future. It's got some cool use cases like a Devman switch, MEV prevention in blockchain systems, anonymous auctions, and many, many more. Concrete things we shipped recently are a Time Lock library in GoLine and a Time Lock library in TypeScript. We also developed a demo website for encrypting vulnerability reports called Time Vault. All these were released and discussed at DEF CON Las Vegas two weeks ago. Additionally, we've written a Notion page about our scheme for people who want to get into the weeds, as Rob said earlier. Additionally, we're releasing a blog post in the next two weeks. It's going to detail how it's going to work and hopefully get the community involved a bit more. Also, coming up, we're going to make a Rust compatible library for Time Lock as well. We'll check for that. Feel free to join us on our Slack or on our Notion page and give us feedback. Thanks. Super cool. Users here need it. So if this solves a scratch issue, you're trying to solve. Come get involved in the Slack channel and start actually using this in primetime. Over to Peter for Unified CI. Me again. Hi. So yeah, the main thing we did this week on the developer experience side was to release new version of Unified CI, mainly targeted at Go users here. But maybe first let's start with what Unified CI is. So it's a set of GitHub Action workflows, define how to test and release our code. Currently supported for Go and JS that we distribute to participating repositories. If you want to participate, it's as easy as creating a single PR to protocol.github repo that has a name of the repo. You're interested in adding back to release. So in the most recent release, the main thing that's new is Go 119 support. And we dropped Go 117 support from our Go workforce, which means that all participating repositories are free to use generics now, which is the most exciting thing. And the other cool thing that's new in Unified CI lands is that from now on, whenever we detect a new repository that uses Go in our organizations, we're going to automatically suggest adding Unified CI there. One more thing. If you're updating your repository of Unified CI, it doesn't get merged automatically. It might be for various reasons. Most of the time it comes down to upgrading some dependencies. But if you're stuck and if you want some help with getting the upgrade through, please reach out to us at IPDX in Filecoin Slack. That's all I had. Thank you. Thank you for helping everyone merge and check their PRs quickly. Super useful. It makes for a great developer experience. Over to Steve for IPFS gatherings. Yeah. So after hiatus, it's time to re-energize the IPFS community with IPFS camp. It is happening in Portugal in late October around the whole lab week time. So this is kind of building on a momentum of a series of great IPFS related milestones and announcements that happened in 2022. We've kind of shifted focus from our reference implementations to having many implementations, relaunch of the specs process, more developer and user tooling, the partnership to get IPFS into space, major commitments to IPFS funding, and IPFS hiring, and of course the successful event back in July with IPFS thing. So there's been a lot there and we want IPFS camp 2022 to carry on with that. And really set us up for more growth and adoption here in 2023. So there is a standing website right now. More details will be posted there soon. We look forward to seeing and having many of you present at it. In terms of if you want to, if you're gung-ho for camp and ready to prepare, there are all the videos from IPFS thing are now live. You can find them on the YouTube channel or if you want links to all the playlists, if you go to the recap blog post that's on the IPFS blog, you'll also find them there. So anyway, looking forward to seeing many of you all here at this event soon. Good times. Woot woot. Definitely watch the videos. They're fantastic.


Hi guys, what's up? This is Dr. Ahmet Ergen. I'm an endocrinologist and a diabetes education specialist now I'm going to talk to you about CGM which is continuous glucose monitoring systems now We have a lot of videos compared in dexcom to Libre I did another video where I compared the Libre 2 to dexcom to Guardian But in that video I basically gave myself a bunch of insulin drop my blood sugar down and just wanted to see how Effective the CGMs were in the low-range which one was more effective now today I'm just going to tell you my honest opinion and in today's condition Which one is the best now? So when I say which one is best? I don't mean necessarily which one is more accurate or which one is less accurate, etc I'm going to give you a quick view of what they are and what would fit you best Because everybody is different some people like dexcom some people like Libre And a lot of people don't understand the nuances in between them or how even how to use them We even have a video about how to analyze and interpret The CGM now if you want to find the links for those videos They are in the description below So make sure you watch all these videos or continue to watch the playlist that we have about the CGM So you can be very well worse before you make any decision now Let's start with dexcom dexcom has been very popular The problem with dexcom that I see personally in my clinic is that number one it is Expensive it is the one of the most expensive CGM out there They have done well They were really doing well But the problem is they have those growing pains and Unfortunately, the orders take forever and their customer service kind of is not that great A lot of people get pissed because they blame the doctor's office They blame they never blame themselves and it's a problem when a company says we are doing everything right and everybody else is wrong That is a problem. So be careful about that with dexcom Some people have good experience some people have bad experience again I'm not here to bash dexcom with the customer service when it comes to their device Device is very nice. You don't have any finger sticks involved. It goes directly to your phone So and then when you share your data with your doctor So I see a lot of patients remotely virtually and I can see their blood sugar From home or from my office without having to invite them to my office, right? So that's the one of the beautiful thing we do all the time even before the COVID we have been doing this Seeing patients virtually so they don't have to travel to the office and spend half a day, etc So but I think dexcom does well when it comes to accuracy I think it's very accurate except if your blood sugars are plummeting super fast a few times I have seen personally like when I did this to myself and I dropped my own blood sugar Not that I'm diabetic, but I'm doing crazy things all the time But basically that's that's what happened the dexcom was lagging behind and Libra 2 which is the newest Libra in the market did better And now by the way, this video is not sponsored by any means So don't think that I'm getting paid from anyone even if I did you know that I will never say anything Incorrect or I would never hide anything from you guys because my priorities you the bottom line is dexcom is very good technologically advanced They have a cloud system. You can share your data easily Accuracy is very good.  They have this Like every other CGM. They have the arrow system. They show you how fast your blood sugar goes up Again, I'm not gonna go into detail here because we have a video about how to analyze and interpret CGM Which link in the description below But definitely unit understand how to use your CGM So sometimes you may get you may get a camera for example for a thousand dollars And then if you think that you just gotta push the button, it's gonna work It will work But it's not gonna probably give you the full functionality that you want to get from the camera that you paid $1,000 for so same way unit to understand what that device that's expensive device that you got and Understand the details of it how it works or how what it does what it doesn't do And how you can get the most out of it. So very important try to understand dexcom That's why you have a lot of videos about that now How does it compare to Libre or Libre 2 now Libre the old Libre and the Libre 2 which are two different things now There are disadvantages and disadvantages to both now to be honest with you I did not like the original Libre because It has given a lot of false Positive low numbers like people will constantly come to me and say I'm waking up with the low blood sugar doc You know since I start using there's my blood sugars in the 50s 60s every morning And I'm like, do you feel anything they're like no I'm like, did you ever check the finger stick? They're like no. Well, yeah, check the finger stick because it's not correct You know more than 80% of the time when it says your blood sugar is 50. It's not really 50 It's maybe like 75 80. Yes, it's on the low side, but it's not really at the number that you need to pan it So that was the problem with the old Libre but what was the good thing about the old Libre is Although, you know, it still showed you by the way, it still showed the trends It shows you how you know your blood sugar trends. It may not make your finger stick like to the point Typically, there's around 20 milligram per deciliter difference But as long as what the difference is between your Libre and your meter then you can kind of do the math You know, like say, okay, well, maybe it's reading 20 higher 20 lower But and then you have to be aware of the false positives and false negatives Especially all Libre also was not very accurate when it goes about like 250 So if you're staying between 80 and 250 and you just want to see your trends the old Libre is great But a lot of false positive and false negatives You have to do a finger stick if you see something out of totally out of like normal Now the good thing about Libre was that also you were able to scan your blood sugars Now the the problem with the Libre overall is you have to scan it for for the for the device to keep recording your blood sugar numbers It's not like you cannot just forget about it and just check whenever you want on your cell phone So that scanning feature, I believe they're gonna get rid of that soon But you are still stuck with the you have to remember to scan now if you don't have if you're not using a phone If you're not into technology or too difficult for you and you're still using a meter Then you have to carry a meter with you which Dexcom also offers a two But I think it's kind of a pain to try to carry your meter with you I think that's one of the things that that defeats the purpose if I'm gonna carry a meter I might as well do a finger stick too. So it's like, you know, it's not in the world So why am I paying so much money or why am I, you know carrying an extra device on my body?  And that Libre still works well But you know, again, if you're using a meter, you have to keep it with you and scan with you, etc And then when you're using a meter with all the Libre that will not automatically go to the cloud You have to use a phone app A smartphone app for data to be transferable to your physician remotely, so if you are using a meter that comes with Libre that is not going to be transferable unless unless you Connect with the cable to a system, which is Libre system you go and do it yourself before your physician visit That is possible. Although it seems simple, but half the time when I tell patients, hey, did you upload your data? They're like no and then I'm like we're already seeing the patient It's like, you know, when you have a lot of patients You cannot just tell people and then it becomes a lot of back and forth and so from from my standpoint I like people when their data is already in cloud. I can't click on it. I can't see But that's one of the downsides with Libre Now also Libre 2 came around which is great I tested myself and patients are telling the same thing their data shows the same thing Which is is much better accuracy So there is the false negative rays and false positive rays are much much less Their accuracy is as good as Dexcom right now and the cool thing about Libre is one-third of a price of Dexcom So if you're trying to get this like for yourself, you know, you don't have enough insurance or your insurance doesn't cover it I would say Dexcom is going to rip you off No, they're not gonna rip you off, but I mean they're expensive. That's what it is Okay, so you either buy it or you don't buy it. It's a free market, right? But the freestyle Libre is one-third of the price. So if I'm diabetic I'm not gonna pay three times more for something that I can get for three times less And actually they have a program if you didn't know and again, this is totally non-sponsored I'm just trying to tell you to you can benefit from it So you may go to Publix or you know any other big chain Pharmacy like Walgreens or CVS. They may sell to you for 130 dollars But but to be honest with you if you call the company and say hey My insurance doesn't cover that and I still like your product They're gonna send you a voucher for be for you to be able to get that for 75 dollars. So there you have it 75 I just saved you. Oh, what $50 or $60. So a lot of times I tell this to my patients I like oh really I know that and actually That's for freestyle Libre old Libre and the new Libre which is Libre 2 But also and we are talking about right now at November end of November 2020 so things may change But at least right now they have this program now another program They just rolled out is like they have this freestyle Libre if you go to my freestyle Libre dot US They give you I believe either two weeks or four weeks something free Like a sensors and you can give it a try and see if you like it or not I think that's also a great thing for people to to try because you know Think about it. You're gonna pay for something you want to try right? So I think that's a great thing for them to offer Libre 2 we said that it is much better accuracy than the old Libre But the downside of Libre 2 is they still do not have a phone app Which means that you have to carry that meter with you and you have to upload to their web app in order for your doctor to see your data Or you have to go to the physician's office for them to download and you have to do everything manually Versus the old Libre you can just basically use a phone app and scan your phone for your numbers and In between the numbers, you know, it's gonna keep recording One thing some people forget is that dexcom For example constantly keep recording your blood sugar, but Libre if you don't do it at least every eight hours That device will stop working on you So if you didn't check your blood sugar for two days, Libre will have no data for you to review retrospectively So you better keep scanning your numbers at least every eight hours for that sensor to continue to work So that's important to know Another thing you need to also know that both dexcom and Libre if you if your sensors fail early Which happens sometimes, you know, like dexcom works for 10 days Libre works for 14 days But not always sometimes the device will fail they're gonna say change sensor And then you just paid for it either you paid a copay or you just purchased out of pocket But then you have a failed sensor that's frustrating So a lot of people don't know this but you can call dexcom and Libre and say hey I have a failed sensor I'm just gonna send it right back to you and then you send it a new one right back to me that way You don't have to lose any money so Another good thing about dexcom. I'm going back and forth as I remember Dexcom works with a insulin pump, which is Tendem or T-cellam insulin pump, which is control IQ system, which I love Especially for type one diabetics, but even for top two diabetics But type one I think is the best batch best match for this type of system because When you use a pump that works with your CGM with your dexcom Where it's like you're like a closed loop feedback mechanism where your pump can adjust the insulin delivery based on your needs If your blood sugars are not running high your pump will cut back on the insulin if your blood sugar running high Because you don't give enough bolus with the insulin pump then the then then the dexcom will feed it back to To your pump and your pump will give you a little bit more bolus to try to keep your blood sugar under control So I have seen a lot of great cases where we had trouble managing people's blood sugar Especially with brutal brutal type one diabetic patients when they went on this system dated very well So but again if you are thinking about switching or using a pump in the future and if you like that T-cellam pump I wouldn't go buy librae because librae is not going to work with that pump So As I said librae is much cheaper and everything and it's easier to get your hands on it's a better customer service It's if you're a Medicare patient, it's a lot easier to get freestyle librae and so forth in at least in my experience but if you are Wanting to go on an insulin pump such as tandem pump dexcom may be a better option And I always tell my patients that think you know thoroughly because you don't you know Sometimes insurance companies will say I already have librae. We're not gonna give you anything else. Then you're stuck with librae So you have to consider those as well But if you want to go for a metronic pump, you know, which a lot of people love a great customer service great pump There's still a market leader But you don't really care about T-cellam or dexcom much or maybe they're too expensive for you Then you can definitely use a freestyle librae sensor with the metronic insulin pump And again, this is only for I'm talking about the pump users but if you don't have a pump then you just think about everything else we talked about for dexcom and librae comparison comparison now You're gonna tell me that you didn't talk about the The Guardian well, I don't talk about the Guardian because it's not my favorite It is it is a good sensor, but you still have to do a finger sticks and when you talk about finger sticks I'm not gonna be like no, not so sure but there are some people for example use metronic pump and metronic pump goes with the Guardian sensor and For those people who don't mind doing finger sticks, which there are a bunch of people by the way You think that people don't know the finger sticks, but I have a lot of people who don't mind finger sticks at all so for those people who can do two couple finger sticks a day and see their data 24-7 with just a few finger sticks and still have the luxury of pump communicating with their sensor Metronic and Guardian system is still a good option So I hope that video helped you guys if it did please give a thumbs up Please share this video with someone who may be considering to buy any of these devices And we will see you in the next video and remember we have a lot of diet videos We have a lot of other cholesterol you name it. We have a lot of coming up Just sign up and we'll see you in the next one