away all the dirty words, he basically says i want to get something for the senate seat. i'm not just going to give it away. and he did get something for it. >> 14 years. >> add it to the unemployment of the country, lost his job. it's about seven minutes to 3:00. should i give you all a gift of time? we will reassemble a few minutes after 3:00 for our next panel. thank you all very much. all this month on american history tv, we're featuring programs on the 40th anniversary of the watergate break-in, including panel discussions and oral history interviews recently released by the richard nixon presidential library. for more information on these programs and to see our complete schedule, go to c-span.org/history. this is american history tv, all

weekend, every weekend on c-s n c-span3. up next, we talk with albany law school professor paul fi finkelman about capturing free men from the north. he also discusses renting slaves and how this tied nonslave owners to the slave system. professor finkelman has taught classes and written about the slave trade for many years. this takes place at the american historians meeting in milwaukee. it's about 20 minutes. >> american history tv is at the annual meeting of the organization of american historians in milwaukee. joining us is paul finkelman, a professor of law and public policy at the law school. thanks for being here. >> it's a delight to be with c-span. >> you're here because you're participating in a panel called new perspectives on the 19th century slave trade? >> right. >> what did you talk about in your discussion today?

>> well, the panel talked about two pieces of the slave trade. one was the kidnapping of black children from mostly philadelphia, but also other places where they were free. and this is something that historians have known a lot about, but there has not been very much research. and so two of the panelists were able to discuss research that is ongoing about kidnapping gangs. this is really kind of an early version of trafficking people, because you have three people who are grabbed off the streets, thrown into ships, taken to delaware, maryland and, from there, transported further soft. >> because delaware, maryland, would have allowed the slave trade? >> well, they wouldn't. it's illegal everywhere. kidnapping free people is illegal, even in mississippi. it's illegal to kidnap a free person. the difference is that pennsylvania is in the process

of ending slavery. most of the blacks in pennsylvania by 1810 are free. so free black children on the streets of pennsylvania are f e free, but in maryland and delaware, slavery is an ongoing institution and the presumption of the law -- the presumption is that if you're african-american, you are a slave. and so if someone is taking a black child through maryland, nobody is going to intervene saying why are you carting this black child off? if the black child is chained, no one is going to say why are you carting this black child off? they'll assume the child was a slave. whereas if you're doing it in pennsylvania, you would be stopped by all kinds of people, saying why are you kidnapping this child? >> who is behind these gangs? >> people who are professional criminals. the most interesting one is a woman named patti cany canon.

she has people of mixed race, both african and european descent, to help entice children on the theory that the children will be more comfortable with somebody who appears to be african-american. that's one piece of it. the more interesting piece, in some ways -- i shouldn't say the more interesting piece because they're both interesting. that tells us something about human trafficking, but also suggests that trafficking in children, which is an international problem today, is nothing new. maybe it's easier to traffic children because they are less able to assert their rights. they're less able to escape. they're less able to fight back. so that's one piece of it. the other piece of the panel was about the interstate and intra state renting of slaves. and this is really fascinating. it turns out that significant numbers of slaves at some time in their life are rented out.

the most common time of being rented out is when your master dies. that's the worst day in the life of a slave. it means the master's estate will be dispersed among the heirs. slave families will be broken up, slave communities will be broken up. slaves will be separated from the people they've always known from the people that they have always lived with. probably the most famous example is thomas jefferson. >> how did it work? who handled the renting? >> what happens is someone dies. they have a will. the deceased person has a will. the will names an executor. the first thing the executor does is to pay off the debts of the estate and then to disburse the property. that could take many years. that doesn't happen instantaneously. often the way to disburse the property is to sell slaves, auction them off to various

parties. the most famous example is the settling of thomas jefferson's estate where close to 200 slaves are auctioned off in one day. four or five of jefferson's slaves get free. one of them, his blacksmith, is freed and jefferson says in his will that the blacksmith cannot only be freed but live on monticello, have his blacksmith tools and live in his cabin with his family. only jefferson forgot to free his family. so the day he got free he saw his wife and children auctioned off to a number of different buyers. that's the end point of settling the estate. but the middle point from the death of the master until the settling of the estate, the executor has to do something with slaves. and often the easiest thing to do is rent them out to other people. so that a man dies, leaving 15 slaves. his widow will eventually get a use of some of these slaves.

his children will eventually get the slaves while they're sorting this out. the executor comes in and says i'm just going to take these slaves and rent them out and have a steady cash flow. so, what we find is almost every american slave or a vast majority of them, at some point in their life, are rented out to someone else. now, here is where it gets interesting. we're in the middle of the civil war. one of the questions often asked, why do so many nonslave holding southern white men fight and die to preserve slavery? slavery is the cause of the war. and if people don't believe me, they can go look at the declaration of the causing of succession by any one of the southern states, south carolina, georgia, texas. they all say the same thing. we're leaving the union to protect slavery. why does the rank and file nonslave holder do this? people often ask that.

we now have an answer. many nonslave holders are, in fac fact, slave renters. they're involved in the slave economy, renting slaves, using slavery, important to their livelihood, even if they don't yet own slaves. one kind of modern example would be why do people who don't own homes believe in the private ownership of homes? because they're renting a home now and some day they hope to buy a home. >> how big was the slave trade prior to the civil war? >> two slave trades. that ends in 1808 legally. that is -- starting january 1, 1808, it is illegal to bring a slave into the united states. that slave trade probably brought 400,000 people to what becomes the united states. from the 1650s until 1808.

by the way, that's a very small piece of the larger atlantic african slave trade. millions went to brazil. millions went to the caribbean. far fewer went to what becomes the united states. >> with the closing of the african slave trade, you have a trickle of illegal slaving, but it's really a trickle, because it's -- the penalties are huge and the complexities of the illegal trade really diminish it greatly. there's much more of an illegal slave trade to cuba where spanish authorities simply turn a blind eye. once the african trade ends, the domestic trade picks up dramatically. millions of american slaves will move west. some of them will be brought by their masters. that is, somebody in virginia is moving to alabama. he takes his slaves with them. often, though, somebody in virginia will simply say i have

excess slaves. i will sell those slaves to a slave trader. the slave trader then will transport the slaves to alabama, to mississippi, to texas, to arkansas, to louisiana. the heart of the southwestern cotton boom. >> the children of those slaves are they, themselves, become slaves as children born into slavery? >> right. >> so the numbers increase? >> the numbers increase. and america has a very large slave population that reproduces rather rapidly. this is due to a combination of many things. one of which is simply climate. the american climate is heal healthier, say than brazil, or the caribbean. food supply is better. the work, while horrendous, is not lethal the way sugar planting is. so, the american slave population grows from a couple million after the revolution to -- actually, from about a million after the revolution to

4 million by the end of the civil war. >> you teach a course at albany law school called slavery and the law. >> right. >> tell us about that course. >> well, people often ask, why do you teach slavery and the law? it's not on the bar exam. that, of course, is true. but i teach slavery in the law for a couple of reasons. first, because much of american constitutional law actually is still based on precedents that were created by slavery. the oddest and most obvious example is the electoral college in the constitution. why do we have an electoral college? why not elect the president directly? they discuss this. the fittest thing, that is the best thing, would be for the people to directly elect the president. ie, popular vote. to use the most obvious example, al gore beats george bush because he has more votes. but madison then says there are two problems with that.

the first is the difference in the franchise, meaning that in south carolina, only adult white men who own a certain amount of property can vote, whereas in massachusetts, all adult men, black, indian, white can vote. and in new jersey, even women can vote. so, what madison is saying is that we would have a difference in the franchises to who could vote and that would skew the election to favor some states over others. but that could have been dealt with, you know. the constitution could have said, all adult males or all adult white men. they obviously weren't going to enfranchise women, can vote in the president's election. lot of ways to do it. then madison says the most important reason is that our slaves won't count. now, he doesn't mean the slaves should vote. what he means is that if you have a presidential election that's a popular vote, there won't be slaves voting. so, virginia, which is the largest state populationwise, becomes the third largest state if you don't count the slaves.

how do you get around it with the electoral college, based on congressional representation, which is based on counting slaves for three-fifths of the congressional representation. the three-fifths clause, which counts three slaves out of every five towards congressional representation gives the south extra representatives in congress and gives the south extra muscle in the electoral college and that's how we get the catastrophe in bush v. gore. there are real day-to-day consequences from american law that developed out of slavery. there are a bunch of other doctrines. dorman commerce clause begins with slavery. domestic police powers begin with slavery. i teach it for that reason. but the other reason to teach it is because law is a powerful tool, used to create societies, to help make society better. but law can also be used to help

make society much worse. it's an important thing for a lawyer to understand the power of the law, to do evil as well as to do good. we learn from our mistakes. and it's kind of shocking to see well-educated, intelligent judge s making decisions that, by our standards, are absolutely horrible because those decisions are supporting slavery. the most famous example, the dredd scott decision where chief justice says blacks have no rights, that the white man need respect. he was probably right constitutionally. that's what's shocking. students need to know that. >> i read that the course also looks at british law. when did they end slavery and how did they end it differently from the united states, except for the civil war? >> right. well, except for the civil war. that's a pretty big exception. we'll get to that in a second. britain deals with slavery in

the law in sort of three phases. the first phase is a decision by the chief justice of the court of kings bench, lord mansfield in 1772 known as the somerset case. somerset was a slave in virginia, brought to england by his master, who is a colonial bureaucrat. worked for a while in virginia. somerset gets to london says i don't want to be a slave anymore. runs away. his master, james stewart, grabs somerset and brings him back -- charles stewart, master charles stewart grabs james somerset, brings him back and has him chained in his ship to send him to barbados to be sold. abolitionists bring the case before lord mansfield and lord mansfield says that slavery

cannot exist by common law, only by statutory or what he calls positive law and since there's no statute creating slavery in england, it is against the law to hold someone as a slave against his will. that's 1772. many scholars -- and i'm one of them -- believe that one of the reasons for the american revolution was that southerners did not want to be tied to an england where there was a legal precedent that said slavery couldn't exist except by positive law and if they brought their slaves to england, they could lose their slaves. somerset scares southern masters, because it's really saying that slavery is immoral. it's legal in all the american colonies, but not the mother country. that's the first step. the second step is england bans the slave trade to all of its colonies. few months later in january 1st, 1808, we do the same thing.

that ends new slaves coming in to the caribbean, but it doesn't end slavery in the caribbean. then in the 1830s, england passes a law to end all slavery in the caribbean, paying masters a small sum for every slave, having some apprenticeship programs to ease the transition from slavery to freedom and by 1837, there's no slavery in the british western hemisphere. >> do you have any idea the numbers that were in the caribbean under the british empire? >> you know, this is something where i wish you would ask me before we went on camera. i would have looked it up. but it's probably 3 or 4 million slaves. >> so, many more than original in the u.s.? >> that's right. that's right. now here is the difference. in england, the basis of the empire is england. it's great britain.

it's the united kingdom. it's not barbados or jamaica. what you really have is parliament telling barbados asa jamaican masters, we're buying them from you. you have no choice. england is doing something for somebody else within the empire. they're ending slavery. of course, you can make the argument if you're an american slave, you're better off in the british empire than the american republic, because you'll be free a lot sooner. >> you're a law professor here in a conference of historians and history professors and teachers. >> right. but i am a phd historian. >> the perspective of the law, particularly in slavery, that you would impart to people teaching history that they're not teaching now? >> well, the first thing that i would do -- and this came up in my panel as well -- is that when you look at things like renting slaves, when you look at things like kidnapping, you have to understand the full, legal

implications of slavery. slavery is a pervasive system and it perfect vad pervades the system. i'll give you one example. when we're dealing with kidnapped black children, the only witnesses often would have been free blacks, but he -- the panelist then goes on to say, but the southern states, maryland and delaware, would not relax their rules to allow blacks to testify in these cases. and the point is that throughout the south, nowhere can a black testify against a white. so, you can't relax the rule in one instance, because then the whole system comes tumbling down. so, despite the fact that it's a crime to kidnap free blacks in delaware and maryland, you can't let blacks testify, because if you let blacks testify against whites, then the whole racial basis of slavery begins to crumble and you -- in law talk, law professors talk about the camel's nose under the tent.

the idea that if the camel sticks his nose under his tent next thing you know, you'll have the whole camel under your tent. or we talk about this big slope would be if you allow black testimony ever, then you lose the whole game, so part of the importance of understanding slavery is to understand that at a dramatic legal super structure which keeps it going, and this links us all the way back to the question of human trafficking because people often talk about slavery in the united states as, you know, modern slavery or the modern slave trade. there's a huge difference between human trafficking today and human trafficking in slaves in the 19th century, and that big difference was it was illegal then. it is -- it was legal thing, and it is illegal now. so today if somebody is trafficked into the united states, all that person has to

do is go to a law enforcement officer and say i'm being held against my will. help me. there's no fugitive farm worker law in the united states. many of the women who were trafficked end up in the sex business. there's no fugitive sex worker business. if a woman is being forced against her will to do things, all she needs to do is walk out of where she is, tell someone who is a law enforcement person, and unless that is a corrupt cop, she's going to be protected by the law. that's the difference between a fugitive slave today and a trafficked person. a fugitive slave then and a trafficked person now. i'm not saying, by the way, this is always easy because often a trafficked person is afraid to talk to law enforcement officers. they are often afraid they will be september back to their home country. there's lots of reasons why they don't do it, but the legal structure is very, very important. and when we fight modern trafficking, we can't keep using the slavery analogy because it leads us down the wrong path.

we have all kinds -- our legal toolbox to fight trafficking is enormous whereas the legal toolbox to fight slavery was very small. >> paul finkelman is professor of law and public policy at albany law school. thanks for the conversation. >> thank you very much. american history tv's "american artifacts" visits historic places. to learn the story of the united states through objects. this is the paw tux yet river that flows into the chesapeake bay. we're going to be going just up river to the highway 4 bridge and highway 4 is actually the very end of pennsylvania avenue. the same pennsylvania avenue that runs from d.c. and ends right up at the paw tux yet river, a little location calls waysin's corner. the scorpion is believed to be one mile, two miles up river from that bridge, so we're about 30 minutes from washington, d.c. we're about 20, 25 minutes from annapolis, maryland, and probably about 40 minutes from

baltimore. well, in 1814, the river was deeper, perhaps wider as well, too. a lot of sedimentation from agricultural runoff since 1814. at this time, you know, during the early 19th century and then in the 18th century, sea-going vessels were able to come further up river. during the war of 1812, the chesapeake was pretty much undefended. the british had free reign could come into the bay and come ashore, loot plantations, villages, take what they wanted as well to, you know, to also punish the american citizens. joshua barney, who is a revolutionary war and naval war hero, he proposed to build a flying flotilla of barges that would be able to defend the coast during the day, intercept the british landing parties and then at night harry the british

fleet, and he was given permission and funds to do this. these were put under the department of the navy. since joshua barney had been retired and he was no longer in the seniority system within the navy, he was made a come door of this whole flotilla. it was kind of somewhat -- part of the navy but also separate from the navy, and on his first voyage out with his flotilla that he -- this was 15, 16, 17 ships. he ran into superior british ships who chased him up the paw tux yet river. he fought some retreating battles. at one time he was bottled up in st. leonard's creek and then was able to fight his way out, but he couldn't fight his way into the bay. he was forced to come further and further up the river retreating, the british following him and to the building spot point we got so far upriver he could not get any further up river, and it was apparent that the british could capture his ships, so he was order by the secretary of the navy to abandon his ships, and

when the british tried to take them to set them on fire to explode them with gunpowder, which he did effectively, and it was at this point where we are now when the british guide came up river, that they could see the mast of barney's flotilla, and -- but very soon afterwards they saw the ships were on fire and heard the explosions from the powder kegs that were set. they went further on up river and found the fleet entirely scuttled except for one vessel that the fuse went out on, and they were able to capture this develops and bring it down river with them. the buy that we see up there marks the wreck. >> okay. >> well, we've over the site of the shipwreck. we think it could be the uss "scorian, the flagship of the barney float larks and it's the -- the bow is towards the bank just beyond this, the tree that's been sawn off or cut off, and then the stern comes out

into the channel a little more towards the red buoy that you see over here. we were involved in the commemoration of the war of 1812, and we propose to relocate and excavate this shipwreck site because it was probably one of the -- the best known and best preserved of the navy's war of 1812 vessels. >> so you dive in the water here yourself. what's it like diving this this water that looks pretty hard to see through? >> kind of like diving in pea soup. the visibility is not very good at all. the best it ever gets is a foot or two. it's, you know, and it's hard to -- it is hard to measure and to read tapes and work it. you almost have to work by braille and by feel and by touch, but you can used to it. if you're and underwater archaeologist and you've worked in black water, then you do get used to, you know, maneuvering around when you have very limited visibility and also you can, you know, determine what you're working on and what

you're feeling by touch, so your other senses kind of improve with time. anyway, this is what we've proposed to do in 2013 in commemoration of the war of 1812 is to look at this -- this shipwreck. our plans are for -- to build a steel cofferdam around the site, pump the water out to remove the sediment and conduct the excavation as if it was a dry excavation on land. we can have more control with the archaeology by doing that, but it also presents us the opportunity to bring the public out to the site, let them see the ongoing excavation in process and ask questions and help with the whole interpretation of the war of 1812 and help to perhaps make the american public more aware of the war of 1812 and the naval action that was part of that war. i might mention, too, that this is only the second dry coverdam that's been done for an

archaeological site in the united states. the previous example was that done in texas in mad gorda bay for the french explorer lasalle, the vessel laval, and this is the only second time something like this has been. we think that we will be able to put the steel coverdam around the site, have six months to excavate the site, have six months to use the coverdam, re-excavate the site and then do research and write-up and hopefully have things for exhibit during 2014 while the commemoration is still going on. >> watch "american artifacts" every sunday at 8:00 a.m., 7:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. eastern on c-span 3. if all of us decided at the same time we're going to interrogaten our welbelts and sd less, guess what we all end up

poor because all of our spending falls at the same time, and this is the kind of stuff that -- that we're supposed to know. this is -- this is stuff that we've known since the 1930s, right, that everybody to slash spending at the same time because they think they have got too much debt is -- is -- is self-defeating. >> who is going to tell them the truth? we have to tell them the truth. if we don't tell them the truth, then our country fails. we must succeed in this, and we will succeed in this. we'll reach them through the media and through politics and through pop culture. pop culture. we shouldn't be afraid to get out there. quit preaching to the choir but get out there and be influencers, right, in pop culture? >> the c-span networks covered the panels with paul krugman and elizabeth warren and wright on