Paul Rogers: A Pioneer in Critical

Security Analysis and Public

Engagement Paul Rogers
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/paul-rogers-a-pioneer-in-critical-security-analysis-and
-public-engagement-paul-rogers/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Paul J Crutzen A Pioneer on Atmospheric Chemistry and

Climate Change in the Anthropocene 1st Edition Paul J.
Crutzen

https://textbookfull.com/product/paul-j-crutzen-a-pioneer-on-
atmospheric-chemistry-and-climate-change-in-the-anthropocene-1st-
edition-paul-j-crutzen/

Understanding Urbanism Dallas Rogers

https://textbookfull.com/product/understanding-urbanism-dallas-
rogers/

Audience Engagement in the Performing Arts: A Critical

Analysis Ben Walmsley

https://textbookfull.com/product/audience-engagement-in-the-
performing-arts-a-critical-analysis-ben-walmsley/

Critical Terms in Futures Studies Heike Paul

https://textbookfull.com/product/critical-terms-in-futures-
studies-heike-paul/
Entrepreneurial Finance 4th Edition Steven Rogers

https://textbookfull.com/product/entrepreneurial-finance-4th-
edition-steven-rogers/

The Neighbour 1st Edition Gemma Rogers

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-neighbour-1st-edition-gemma-
rogers/

The Feud 2nd Edition Gemma Rogers

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-feud-2nd-edition-gemma-
rogers/

Pluralism and American Public Education: No One Way to

School 1st Edition Ashley Rogers Berner

https://textbookfull.com/product/pluralism-and-american-public-
education-no-one-way-to-school-1st-edition-ashley-rogers-berner/

Silicon Nanomembranes: Fundamental Science and

Applications 1st Edition John A. Rogers

https://textbookfull.com/product/silicon-nanomembranes-
fundamental-science-and-applications-1st-edition-john-a-rogers/
Pioneers in Arts, Humanities, Science, Engineering, Practice 21

Paul Rogers

Paul Rogers:
A Pioneer in
Critical Security
Analysis and Public
Engagement
With a Foreword by Jenny Pearce
Pioneers in Arts, Humanities, Science,
Engineering, Practice

Volume 21

Series editor
Hans Günter Brauch, Mosbach, Germany
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15230
http://www.afes-press-books.de/html/PAHSEP.htm
http://www.afes-press-books.de/html/PAHSEP_Rogers.htm
Paul Rogers

Paul Rogers: A Pioneer

in Critical Security Analysis
and Public Engagement
With a Foreword by Jenny Pearce

123
Paul Rogers
Department of Peace Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford, West Yorkshire, UK

Series Editor’s Acknowledgement: The cover photograph as well as all other photos in this
volume were taken from the personal photo collection of the author who also granted the permission
for publication in this volume. A book website with additional information on Paul Rogers and his
major book covers is at: http://www.afes-press-books.de/html/PAHSEP_Rogers.htm.

ISSN 2509-5579 ISSN 2509-5587 (electronic)

Pioneers in Arts, Humanities, Science, Engineering, Practice
ISBN 978-3-319-95149-2 ISBN 978-3-319-95150-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95150-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018949418

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part
of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations,
recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission
or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar
methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from
the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the
authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or
for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to
jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Copyediting: PD Dr. Hans Günter Brauch, AFES-PRESS e.V., Mosbach, Germany

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer International Publishing AG
part of Springer Nature
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Amber and Felix
Foreword
Security and Peace: Building a Creative Interface

Introduction

Over five decades, Paul Rogers has explored the varied aspects of global insecu-
rities. The selection here illustrates the range and depth of these contributions. From
trade, development and food security to weapons technologies, in particular the
nuclear, to the phases of Britain’s defence posture; to the growing power of
sub-state armed actors and the vulnerability of modern cities to asymmetric warfare.
Most recently, Rogers has touched the nerve of the twenty-first century by showing
the connections between inequality, the environmental limits of human activity and
the rise of a new range of ‘threats from the margins’ for which traditional military
solutions have no adequate answer.
Though evidently important in their own right, Rogers’ attention to these par-
ticular aspects of global insecurity should not overshadow the real significance of
his body of scholarship to more universal debates. Rogers has meticulously

vii
viii Foreword

researched each of the tangled threads that constitute and reshape global security
policy and thinking over time. Simultaneously, however, he has unravelled their
logics and demonstrated how successive generations of politicians and policy
makers in the West appear to have been incapable of making our world more
secure. Indeed, at the time of writing, the headline is that NATO acknowledges that
the world is at the greatest risk for a generation. This emerged from a Guardian
interview with NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg (Guardian, 9/09/2017),
who referred to the sheer number of converging threats. Rogers has been tracking
our journey to this point for five decades. However, he has done so with a compass.
My comments are about how that compass has oriented him to build what I call a
creative interface between security and peace.

The Journey and the Compass

Security Seen from the Global South

Rogers’ journey begins with his early foray as a young biologist into the
‘developing’ world, what we now call the Global South. From that starting point
of the late 1960s, the compass takes shape. As a Latin Americanist myself, deeply
imbued by experiences in that region which enabled me to see the world through
the lens of the vulnerable, the dominated and the excluded, I appreciate how
Rogers’ compass was, at least partly, forged through an encounter with what he
calls the ‘margins’ in Africa. The margins are both a physical location in rela-
tionship with a centre, and a state of mind of individuals who feel their power-
lessness in varied social relationships. When you live with people in both senses of
marginality, of place and social space, you realise that far from powerless, people
are often extraordinarily resilient and creative. Their leverage to generate change in
their favour, however, is limited. Rogers early on saw the significance of this, when
he studied food security and the global international economic order of the 1970s
and its failure to prevent famine, despite overall world sufficiency in grain reserves.
Rogers’ ability to ‘see from the margins’ has enabled him to understand the frus-
trations of poverty as unfairness rather than a natural condition of the planet. It is
possible to trace this early exposure to the lens of marginality to his empathy for the
way some on the margins read the policies and discourses of the ‘centre’, partic-
ularly the USA and its allies in the West.
Thus, it is not the indifference to poverty per se which lies behind the chronic
failure of Western policy towards the Middle East and elsewhere in the Global
South. Rather, it is the relational aspects of marginality that have been misunder-
stood by those enjoying the privileges of absolute domination over the future of
peoples and planet. Blindness to the slow fuse of frustration is what Rogers exposes
as his work moves from the marginality engendered by the ‘New Economic Order’
of the 1970s, to the marginality within the global economic, social, military and
political order of the unipolar American world of the post-Cold War era.
Foreword ix

Access to education in the global South, which as Rogers describes, has been an
important feature of more recent history, can enhance the sense of marginality when
it fails to offer a dignified future. The effects are not inevitably lethal, of course. The
vast majority channel frustrations into varied forms of resilience and resistance.
However, when combined with the way so many cultures foster the performance of
masculinity, the effects can be deep on the psyche of young men who cannot fulfill
expectations. These might range from that of providing for the family to the need
for status and recognition and often includes the search for dominance and power
over others. The evidence that over two thirds of homicides are committed by
young men on young men suggests that we need to understand much better this
variable without crude reductionism. In the recent history of the Middle East, North
Africa and elsewhere, for instance, male and female frustrations have been chan-
nelled into democratising movements as in the Arab Spring. Many men and women
have made desperate migratory journeys in search of the means to life. The perverse
and dangerous side has been taken up by a minority, as when young men in
particular have turned to Jihadist terrorism. When they do, the lethality and
destruction have been devastating.
Rogers’ compass has enabled him to enter into the mindset of marginality, and to
recognise its complex expressions. He has used his insights to write a series of
reports as if he was part of a fictional Al-Qaeda Strategic Planning Cell, and letters
from Raqqa as if he was a young male ISIS militant. His compass oriented him to
communicate—not to justify—the psychic impact of marginality and the unprece-
dented kind of security threat it has generated in certain very specific contexts.
Security from the Cold War to the Post-Cold War
Rogers traces the efforts of the West to secure its military dominance during and
after the Cold War. His focus on nuclear options and their alternatives opened up to
scrutiny the assumptions of NATO in the 1980s that maintaining a policy of early
first use of nuclear weapons in the event of catastrophic reversals in a conventional
conflict with the Soviet Union could be justified. Similarly, he explores the justi-
fications behind the UK commitment to a nuclear option through Trident, despite
eschewing the first use option. Rogers does not endear himself to the defence
establishment through these contributions, although he has been frequently asked to
give talks to them.
With an acute sense of temporality, Rogers reminds us that the generations under
their 40s today do not live under the shadow of nuclear war. They are more
influenced by the narratives of the Cold War which saw nuclear weapons as a
deterrent. Rogers’ journey through time, navigated with his peace compass, reminds
us of the contingency around the roles of these weapons. More than ever before, we
need to listen to those who argue that rather than deterrence, nuclear war was only
very narrowly averted and we came so much closer than anyone dares to recognise
during the Cold War. In addition, the Cold War was played out in the theatres of the
Global South, such as El Salvador, where I experienced it directly in the 1980s,
when the US government in the name of ‘preventing communism’, played a huge
role in preventing a genuine social as well as political transformation in that small
x Foreword

and vulnerable country. As the threat of nuclear proliferation grew in the post-Cold
War, the short-sightedness of assuming that nuclear weapons can keep the world
safe is clear. However, it is only through activists and scholars such as Rogers, who
have navigated with a peace compass the varied phases of their development
(alongside other chemical and biological weapons), that we can see the continuities
and risks in the discourses of justification by the powerful.
The same compass is apparent as Rogers’ insights in the early years after the
Cold War revealed how blind were the powerful to emergent threats on their
doorstep and their meanings for the future of their own and global security. Already
in the 1990s, Rogers saw the devastation (mostly to infrastructure at this stage)
of the Provisional IRA’s crude bombs in the cities of London and Manchester. He
highlighted the significance of the attack on the New York Trade Centre in 1993,
which could have opened minds to the kind of violent attack within the belly of a
nation, that the West might not even have a concept for yet. It was not long before
9/11 provided that with the ‘war on terror’. However, as Rogers’ documents so well
in his book, Irregular Warfare, the West, in particular the USA and the UK,
deluded themselves that interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq would quickly
contain the new problem and return the world to US hegemony in a market-driven
global economy.
Security and the Conditions to Live without Violence
Throughout these contributions, Rogers brings together the world of security policy
and the real world it is trying to contain. He is showing the disjuncture between
these. As the post-Cold War era enters into the crises of the twenty-first century,
Rogers is urging his readers to accompany him on this journey through the complex
and apparently disparate threads of security policy, and to see the looming dangers
ahead to which it appears to offer no direction. Only, I argue, with Rogers’ com-
pass, can these dangers be made visible. Only if one recognises that the conditions
to live without violence have to be prioritised, can one appreciate the dangers
looming on the horizon as well as their immediate expressions. Of course, their
immediate expressions are of huge concern. However, an inability to analyse and
respond to them through a compass of peace means that military solutions con-
tinuously prevail, however much they reproduce more violence, consolidate
inequalities and avoid the ultimate shared threat to everyone on the planet of
climate change. A military-as-security response has become a kind of ‘common
sense’. It is this common sense that Rogers’ unpacks so skilfully.

Conclusion

Rogers is a natural scientist, who has migrated to social sciences. His concerns are
material realities not ephemeral ideals. His compass is thus not a series of abstract
norms, but a principled realism. In the dialogue between security and peace studies,
Rogers has freed himself from the constraints of disciplinary silos and what I have
Foreword xi

termed this ‘common sense’ of militarised security paradigms. In so doing, he has

created the intellectual potentiality of what it might mean to see security in terms of
a more peaceful world not one managed in the interests of a few people and places.
Much of Rogers’ writings are about war, but I would argue, they are actually about
peace. They highlight how a security approach that focusses on war can actually fail
to see the new expressions of collective violence emergent in its entrails. Rogers’
peace compass has enabled him to refine peace thinker, Johan Galtung’s, famous
dichotomy between negative and positive peace. He shows that it is the interface
between the two that matters. Security policy must be seen in constant dialogue
with the task of building the conditions to live without violence. It cannot reproduce
more violence. It must recognise the political impacts of inequality as well as their
social ones. A peace policy for security is urgent but evidently will not emerge
overnight. Without it as a compass, however, we return again and again to mutating
expressions of violence in the social relations we construct.
Over the last century, contributions to peace have ranged from Einstein to
Malala Yousafzai, from a male German Jewish physicist to a young female
Pakistani Muslim educationalist. The circle is widening for peace, and Rogers has
done a great deal to widen it further. Having had the fortune of working with
Rogers in Bradford Peace Studies, I can affirm that he widens the circle in multiple
ways, of which the written word readers have in front of them is only one.
A commitment to communicating, in accessible ways, in varied forms and to
multiple publics (including the military) with an ‘alternative common sense’ marks
Rogers out within academia. This helped shape the Department as one where the
compass of peace navigates our journeys of scholarship as well as our role as
citizens.

London, UK Prof. Jenny Pearce1

September 2017 London School of Economics
Caribbean and Latin America Centre

1
Jenny Pearce is Research Professor at the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at
LSE and was, from 1992 to 2016, in the Department of Peace Studies at University of Bradford.
Acknowledgements

From Potatoes to Peace

I would like to thank the staff of Springers for their work in seeing this through to
completion and the several publishing houses for giving permission for the inclu-
sion of previously published articles. More generally, this volume is due almost
entirely to the commitment of Hans Guenter Brauch as series editor and it would
not have been developed without his hard work throughout. I would also like to
thank Oliver Ramsbotham for his key contribution to one of the publications in this
collection, and Jenny Pearce for writing such a thoughtful preface which taught me
a lot about what I have been trying to do over the past fifty years.
During that time, I have worked with many different groups in the UK and other
countries and have learnt hugely from the interactions and sharing of knowledge
and experience. Staff and students in the Peace Studies community at Bradford
University are remarkable in their commitment and breadth of knowledge and it has
been a hugely valued learning experience to have been part of that community over
the past forty years. More personally, I would like to thank my wife, Claire, and our
sons, Robert, Thomas, Edward and William for bearing with me throughout—not
easy at the best of times.
When Hans Guenter approached me a couple of years ago about including this
volume in the series, my initial reaction was to say ‘no’, since I was not at all sure
that the work merited this kind of presentation and could readily be seen as a bit of a
vanity project. Having thought about it and talked to friends who took a much more
positive view, it did seem that there might be some value to it, for three different
reasons.
One is that my own career path has been thoroughly odd, starting with a doc-
torate in the microbial ecology of soil-borne plant pathogens of root crops (common
scab disease of potatoes) and ending up in peace studies specialising in research
into responses to political violence. It is true that a number of peace researchers
have had careers that have involved major changes, but mine is a bit extreme even
by those standards. That might give hope to others engaged in the eclectic pursuits
so common to peace research and who wonder where they might end up.

xiii
xiv Acknowledgements

The second is that I have tried throughout the whole period to combine academic
work with a commitment to engaging in public debate on the issues and that
experience does suggest that it is readily possible to do so. The print and broadcast
media are weird beasts, and if you are outside the mainstream, then it is not always
an easy matter to get your ideas across. Mike MccGwire once told me that the trick
was to be able to say outrageous things acceptably. I am still working on that but it
surely makes good sense to keep trying.
Finally, what has been both really challenging and thoroughly worthwhile has
been trying to make some kind of sense of a worldwide predicament that has so
many issues to address and so much new thinking needing to be done. Coming to
terms with a global community that is facing pervasive socio-economic marginal-
isation and environmental limits but with elite communities emphasising the need
to maintain the status quo means that alternative responses are essential. I have been
privileged for most of my career to work in academic environments that still enable
people to spend some of their time on their own work, with little limitation as to
what they study. With that comes a responsibility to use the time to good effect, and
if this collection of articles shows some evidence of that, then it will have served its
purpose.

Kirkburton, Yorkshire, UK Paul Rogers

May 2018
Contents

Part I On Paul Rogers

1 Biographical Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2 Paul Rogers’ Publications (1963–2017) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.1 Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.2 Papers, Chapters and Major Conference Reports . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3 The Publications in Context: An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
3.1 Development and Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
3.1.1 UNCTAD 2 (1968) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
3.1.2 Prospects for Food (1975) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3.2 Cold War and After . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.2.1 The Transformation of War: The Real Implications
of the SDI (1989) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.2.2 Alternative Military Options in Europe (1990) . . . . . . . 29
3.2.3 Learning from the Cold War (1999) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
3.3 The United Kingdom’s Defence Posture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3.3.1 Sub-strategic Trident: A Slow Burning
Fuse (1996) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 31
3.3.2 Big Boats and Bigger Skimmers: Determining
Britain’s Role in the Long War (2006) . . . . . . . . . ... 31
3.4 Global Political Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 32
3.4.1 Responding to the World Trade Centre
and Pentagon Attacks (2001) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
3.4.2 Political Violence and Global Order (2002) . . . . . . . . . 34
3.4.3 Iraq: Consequences of a War (2002) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
3.4.4 Letters from Raqqa (2017) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

xv
xvi Contents

3.5 Putting It Together . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

3.5.1 Then and Now: Peace Research – Past and Future
(1999) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
3.5.2 A Century on the Edge: From Cold War to Hot
World, 1945–2045 (2014) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

Part II Selected Texts on Development and Environment

4 UNCTAD 2 (1968) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
5 Food Security (1975) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
5.1 The Congress and Its Aftermath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
5.2 A World Turned Upside Down . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

Part III Selected Texts on the Cold War and After

6 The Transformation of War: The Real Implications
of the SDI (1989) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
6.1 Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
6.2 The Evolution of Weapons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
6.3 The Nuclear Transformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
6.4 Three Generations of Nuclear Weapons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
6.5 The Real Implications of the SDI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
7 Alternative European Defence (1990) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
7.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
7.2 The Single Country Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
7.3 Applications to Britain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
7.4 Debates Within NATO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
7.5 Alternative Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
7.6 Criticisms and NATO Responses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
7.7 Non-offensive Defence and Arms Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
8 Learning from the Cold War (2000) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
8.1 Origins and Early Development of the Nuclear Arms Race . . . 83
8.2 The Nuclear Arms Race – Acceleration or Control? . . . . . . . . 85
8.3 Strategic Nuclear Posturing and War-fighting . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
8.4 Tactical Nuclear Weapons and First Use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
8.5 Nuclear Accidents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
8.6 The Experience of Cold War Crises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
8.7 A Crisis out of Nowhere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
8.8 Resourcing the Cold War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
8.9 Proxy Wars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
8.10 Proliferation of Weapons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
8.11 Lessons to Learn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
Contents xvii

Part IV Selected Texts on British Defence Policy

9 Sub-strategic Trident (1996) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
9.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
9.2 Britain and NATO Nuclear Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
9.3 Some Aspects of British Out-of-Area Nuclear
Deployments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
9.4 Nuclear Weapons and the Falklands War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
9.5 The Gulf War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
9.6 The Wider Nuclear Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
9.7 In Relation to Trident . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
10 Big Boats and Bigger Skimmers (2006) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
10.1 From Cold War to Long War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
10.2 Trident Replacement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
10.3 The New Aircraft-Carriers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
10.4 The United States from Cold War to Long War . . . . . . . . . . . 149
10.5 The UK Connection: Convergence or Difference? . . . . . . . . . . 153
10.6 The Carriers and the Trident Successor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155

Part V Selected Texts on Global Political Violence

11 Responding to the World Trade Centre and Pentagon Attacks . . . 159
12 Political Violence and Global Order (2002) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
12.1 Trends in Conflict and Insecurity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
12.2 The US Security Paradigm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
12.3 The Implications of September 11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
12.4 Future Trends in Political Violence – and Alternatives . . . . . . 170
12.5 Endless War? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
13 Iraq: Consequences of a War (2002) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
13.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
13.2 Why Attack Iraq Now? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
13.3 The Relevance of Oil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
13.4 What Kind of War? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
13.5 Area Impact Munitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
13.6 A Ground War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
13.7 The War from Baghdad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
13.8 Chemical and Biological Weapons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
13.9 A Nuclear Response to Iraqi CBW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
13.10 The British Position on Nuclear Use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
13.11 After the War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
13.12 Further Possibilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
13.13 Consequences of a War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
xviii Contents

14 Letters from Raqqa (2014–2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

14.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
14.2 First Letter (9 October 2014) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
14.3 Second Letter (31 October 2014) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
14.4 Third Letter (22 January 2015) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
14.5 Fourth Letter (22 March 2015) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
14.6 Fifth Letter (14 May 2015) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
14.7 Sixth Letter (22 July 2015) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
14.8 Seventh Letter (15 October 2015) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
14.9 Eighth Letter (4 February 2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
14.10 Ninth Letter (28 July 2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216
14.11 Tenth Letter (8 December 2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

Part VI Selected Texts: Putting It Together

15 Peace Research, Then and Now (1999) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
Paul Rogers and Oliver Ramsbotham
15.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
15.2 Peace Research – The Past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
15.3 Peace Research – The Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
15.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
16 A Century on the Edge (2014) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
16.1 The Cold War Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
16.2 A Jungle to Be Tamed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
16.3 Remote Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
16.4 Lessons Unlearnt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
16.5 New Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
16.6 Consequences and Responses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254
16.7 Choices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
Bradford, Its University and Peace Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
 Part I
On Paul Rogers
2 Part I: On Paul Rogers

Paul Rogers aged 7 with his mother Eileen and father Lawrence, Chingford, August 1950. Source
From the author’s personal photo collection
Chapter 1
Biographical Background

Paul Rogers was born in Chingford, a suburb in north east London, on 10 February
1943. His father, Lawrence, was a firefighter during the war in the London Fire
Brigade and his mother, Eileen, had taught elocution before the war. He had a
sister, Mary, two years older, and another sister, Lucy, was born five years later.
Paul was too young to remember the war, but has clear memories of the devastation
that was still visible across the East End of London and the docklands after the war.
Although Chingford was an outer suburb that was away from the main target areas
of the docks and industry, there was a very large anti-aircraft artillery battery close
to the town, and bombers caught in the bombardment would frequently jettison
bombs on the town. It was also hit by V-1 cruise missiles and V-2 ballistic missiles
towards the end of the war.
After the war Paul’s father developed a small wholesale ironmongery business
which he ran mainly on his own, supplying shops across east London and north
Kent. The family was Roman Catholic by belief and Lucy, who had severe learning
difficulties, was taken to Lourdes in the hope of a cure. It wasn’t to be and she died
quite young. His mother had long periods of depression and both she and his father
died when Paul was in his twenties.
Paul went to a local state school, McEntee Technical school in Walthamstow,
and then on to Imperial College at the University of London in 1961. There he took
a degree in biological sciences, studying botany, zoology and chemistry, special-
ising in his final year in plant pathology before going on in 1964 to get a post as a
research assistant in plant pathology, also at Imperial College.
His research led to a Ph.D. which was in the microbial ecology of soil-borne
plant pathogens and included farm-based field trials. In 1968, at the age of 24, he
was appointed to a lectureship in plant pathology in the same department. This was
a post funded as part of the UK’s international development programme, and the
terms of the appointment were that he could be seconded overseas for the majority
of the time. He continued with that work for three years, including two years as a
Senior Scientific Officer with the East African Agriculture and Forestry Research
Organisation, based in Kenya for a few months and then spending most of the
period in Uganda.

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 3

P. Rogers, Paul Rogers: A Pioneer in Critical Security Analysis and Public
Engagement, Pioneers in Arts, Humanities, Science, Engineering, Practice 21,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95150-8_1
4 1 Biographical Background

While a student at Imperial College Paul was active in Catholic student politics
at a time of ferment in Catholic social teaching, not least in relation to liberation
theology. He also got heavily involved in the early campaigning on international
development with groups that went on to coalesce as the World Development
Movement. This is now Global Justice Now, which is the UK’s largest and most
active development activism group. He was also a member of the Haslemere Group
which did the first substantive activist-orientated analysis of North-South trading
relations and their link to the grossly unequal distribution of wealth. The Haslemere
Declaration, published in 1968, provided motivation for many campaigners, and
Paul learnt much from his involvement in the group. During this time he worked
with many other young development campaigners, one of whom was Claire
Skellern who was also researching towards a Ph.D. at Imperial College.
His period in East Africa was hugely influential on him, further stimulating his
interest in the politics of development, with a particular concern with food security
that stemmed partly from his professional work in a regional crop improvement
research programme. This was another considerable learning experience, not least
as he travelled many tens of thousands of miles by road throughout Kenya, Uganda
and Tanzania engaged in field research on crop pest and disease problems. The
three governments had jointly established a programme to breed varieties of sugar
cane specifically suited to local climatic and soil conditions rather than rely on
varieties imported from other sugar cane growing areas of the world. The aim was
to satisfy increasing local demand rather than export refined sugar but it was
essential that new varieties had natural disease and pest resistance. Paul’s job was to
determine the most important pests and disease and then establish a programme to
test the newly bred varieties, ultimately handing over to a Ugandan plant pathol-
ogist who had recently completed postgraduate training.

Paul Rogers at 25 on the Uganda-Sudan border, December 1968. Source From the author’s
personal photo collection
1 Biographical Background 5

When he returned to the UK in 1970, he and Claire got married and they moved
to live in her home village of Kirkburton in West Yorkshire. By this time his
academic interests had already moved towards the politics of resource use rather
than just the scientific elements and Paul took a post at one of the new and
pedagogically innovative polytechnics. He worked at Huddersfield Polytechnic
(now a university) for eight years, being heavily involved in a radically new degree
programme that integrated the study of politics, economics, ecology, geography and
human health studies into a single degree programme in Human Ecology. Over that
period he edited four books, co-authored a biology textbook with Claire and wrote
widely on environmental issues, especially those concerned with resource conflict.
Much of this revolved around the concept of environmental limits to growth and
came to the fore internationally on the occasion of the first UN Conference on the
Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972.
During this time his earlier interest in North-South trading relations, which had
included some published articles in the late 1960s, was further developed by the
advent of “producer power” through the actions of the oil producing organisation,
OPEC, in 1973–74. The surge in commodity prices led in turn to calls for a New
International Economic Order through the UN Conference on Trade and
Development (UNCTAD) and a Special Session of the UN General Assembly in
1974. During the same period of international economic and political ferment there
developed a world food crisis which resulted in an emergency UN World Food
Congress in Rome in November 1974. Paul attended the conference representing
the World Development Movement. Writing for their magazine enabled him to gain
a press pass which, in turn, gave him something of an inside view of the complex
politics of international food policy.

Claire and Paul Rogers on holiday, Norfolk, July 1971. Source From the author’s personal photo
collection
6 1 Biographical Background

At the end of 1978 and after eight years at Huddersfield, a senior lectureship was
advertised at the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University, then a small
department that had been established just five years earlier. He was to stay there in
full-time posts for the next 32 years, being awarded a professorship in 1992. From
1993 to 1999 he was head of the Department and also spent a period as Chair of the
University’s Social Sciences Faculty and Deputy Chair of the University’s Research
Committee. He was also active in the British International Studies Association and
in 2002 he was elected to a two-year term as Chair of the Association.
When Paul joined the Peace Studies Department in 1979 it was just as renewed
East-West tensions were coming to the fore, with successive leadership crises in the
Soviet Union combining with more forceful political attitudes in key western
countries, most especially after the election of President Ronald Reagan in the
United States and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. In the
very early 1980s a number of new nuclear weapons systems were being developed,
including US cruise and Pershing II mobile missiles being deployed in Western
Europe and Soviet SS-20 mobile missiles being deployed in Eastern Europe. The
heightened tensions were exacerbated by crises in the Middle East and the Soviet
military occupation of Afghanistan, with one result being the growth of
mass-movement anti-nuclear organisations, especially in Western Europe.
During this period Paul worked with two other colleagues in Bradford, Malcolm
Dando and Peter van den Dungen, to research and write on nuclear issues. These
frequently provided a critical perspective on security trends and were rarely popular
with governments. They were also subject to critical scrutiny by other academics
who might take a more positive view of nuclear developments. The scrutiny proved
to be a very useful aid to improving the empirical and analytical quality of the work
at Bradford. This period during the 1980s enabled Paul to study and analyse wider
military developments, a task further stimulated by Britain’s war with Argentina
over control of the Falklands/Malvinas islands. While often taking a markedly
independent if not critical position on defence and security issues he received
regular invitations from 1982 onwards to lecture at Britain’s senior defence col-
leges. This is a connection that continues to this day and has also involved many
briefings to the UK Ministry of Defence, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office,
the Home Office, the Cabinet Office and national police, security and intelligence
organisations.
1 Biographical Background 7

The family at Kirkburton in July 2006. From left: Rob and Pauline, Will, Tom, Claire, Ed, Paul.
Source From the author’s personal photo collection

Within a year of the ending of the Cold War, the 1990–91 Iraq crisis and war
broke out and Paul was heavily engaged in a critical analysis of the war and its early
aftermath. From 1992 onwards, and in light of an evolution in the Northern Ireland
conflict involving the Provisional IRA’s (PIRA) change of strategy towards eco-
nomic targeting of the City of London, he began a study of the evolution of
paramilitary movements, especially in relation to their strategies and tactics. By the
mid-1990s he had developed a view of trends in international security that pointed
to the risk of what might be termed “revolts from the margins” in a world in which
widening socio-economic divisions combined with environmental limits to growth
would lead to an unstable security environment in which smaller paramilitary
organisations might have an impact out of all proportion to their apparent
capabilities.
In many ways this was a continuation of his earlier work linking development
and environment issues, not least interdisciplinary work with Tony Vann back at
Huddersfield Polytechnic in the early 1970s. His book, Losing Control: Global
Security in the 21st Century, written in the late 1990s and published a year before
the 9/11 arracks, developed this analysis further, pointed to the risk of catastrophic
attacks and predicted accurately how the United States and other western states
8 1 Biographical Background

would respond. After the attacks the book sold widely and was translated into a
number of languages including Chinese and Japanese.

Paul working on barn roof, 1994 and the finished barn. He started building it in 1988 towards the
end of the Cold War. He thought it would take three years but it took him ten, by which time a new
global disorder had emerged. Source From the author’s personal photo collection
1 Biographical Background 9

In the decade after 9/11, Paul published extensively on the evolving war on
terror while remaining at Bradford University, the published output ranging from
journal articles and books through to substantial web publishing. While he retired
from his full-time post at Bradford at the age of 67 in 2010 he was asked to stay on
for six more years on a part-time basis before taking up an emeritus professorship in
2016 where he retains a continuing commitment to the work of the Department,
including some teaching. He combines this with an association with the
London-based think tank, the Oxford Research Group, which works on
non-military responses to security challenges, and also with the web journal, Open
Democracy.
For the whole of the past half century he has combined an academic career with
extensive writing and lecturing in support of peace and development activism,
contributing well over a thousand articles, many of them in recent years being
web-based outputs with a world-wide readership. These include over 850 weekly
articles for www.opendemocracy.net and close to 150 monthly analyses for the
Oxford Research Group. He continues to take up frequent invitations to speak at
senior defence colleges and is an Honorary Fellow of the UK’s Joint Services
Command and Staff College. Over three decades he has provided extensive
informal advice to political leaders and has also served as an expert witness for the
defence in court cases involving peace activists taking direct action at nuclear and
other installations.
Paul’s academic output has included 29 books and over 150 papers and chapters,
and his work has been translated into many languages including Russian, Catalan,
Turkish, Farsi, French, German, Polish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and
Greek. Since 1974 Paul has been a regular contributor to radio and television
stations and networks throughout the world, including BBC, ITV, Al-Jazeera,
CNN, CBC, US National Public Radio, Radio France International, RTE Dublin,
FM4 in Vienna, ABC, Monocle 24, RTV Hong Kong and Radio New Zealand. He
has done thousands of interviews and still averages over 200 each year.
Paul and Claire have four sons, Robert, Thomas, Edward and William, and five
grandchildren. All four sons took science or engineering degrees and are now
scattered around Europe, currently working in the UK, the Netherlands and
Switzerland. Claire and Paul still live in the same house in Kirkburton and have a
few acres of land where they grow a range of fruit and vegetables and keep some
livestock. Claire worked for many years as a biology lecturer and was an examiner
for the Oxford and Cambridge schools examination board for twenty-five years.
She has long been active in local politics including time as a case-worker for a
Labour member of parliament. She is also a bee-keeper. Although both are now
non-theists they are regular change ringers – a form of church tower-bell ringing
that originated in England around four hundred years ago. Paul remains a keen
amateur builder and is also an occasional hill-walker.
Paul’s approach to international security might best be expressed by a summary
of his most recent book, Irregular War: the New Threats from the Margins
(London: I B Tauris, 2017):
10 1 Biographical Background

ISIS, al Qaida, Boko Haram, Al Shabab and the Taliban are all separate manifestations of a
new non-state dynamic which is now driving international conflict through asymmetric and
hybrid warfare, but their real significance is much more fundamental. The problem for the
future is not a clash of civilisations but revolts from the margins with ISIS, in particular,
having been a proto-movement for wars in an increasingly divided and constrained world.
The underlying drivers of future conflict are far more than the growth of extreme Islamist
movements. They stem from a deeply flawed world economic system that is producing
greater inequalities and marginalisation, combined with the onset of persistent global
environmental limits, especially climate disruption.
The failed war on terror shows that the consequences of these drivers cannot be controlled
by military force and we cannot close the castle gates. What is required is a fundamentally
new approach to security if we are to avoid a highly unstable and violent world - an age of
insurgencies which might even involve weapons of mass destruction. We need radically to
change our understanding of security, a change that is possible but requires vision and
commitment.
Chapter 2
Paul Rogers’ Publications (1963–2017)

2.1 Books

Rogers, Paul (editor), The Education of Human Ecologists, Charles Knight,

London, 1973.
Vann, Anthony and Paul Rogers (editors), Human Ecology and World Development,
Plenum Press, New York and London, 1974.
Rogers, Paul (editor), Future Resources and World Development, Plenum Press,
New York and London, 1976.
Jones, J. Owen and Paul Rogers (editors), Human Ecology and the Development of
Settlements, Plenum Press, New York and London, 1976.
Skellern, Claire and Paul Rogers, Basic Botany, Macdonald and Evans, London,
1977.
Rogers, Paul, Malcolm Dando and Peter van den Dungen, As Lambs to the
Slaughter: The Facts About Nuclear War, Arrow Books, London, 1981.
De Kaunay, Bertrand, Paul Rogers, Malcolm Dando and Peter van den Dungen, Le
Poker Nucleaire, Syros, Paris, 1983 (French adaptation of As Lambs to the
Slaughter).
Rogers, Paul, Guide to Nuclear Weapons, Bradford University, Bradford, 1983.
Dando, Malcolm and Paul Rogers, The Death of Deterrence, CND Publications,
London, 1984.
Randle, Michael, April Carter, Dan Smith, Owen Green, Paul Rogers and others,
The Politics of Alternative Defence, Grafton Books, London, 1987 (the second
report of the UK Alternative Defence Commission, chaired by Paul Rogers).
Rogers, Paul, Guide to Nuclear Weapons, Berg Press, Oxford and Providence RI,
1988.
Landais-Stamp, Paul and Paul Rogers, Rocking the Boat: New Zealand, the United
States and the Nuclear-Free Zone Controversy, Berg Press, Oxford and
Providence RI, 1989.

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 11

P. Rogers, Paul Rogers: A Pioneer in Critical Security Analysis and Public
Engagement, Pioneers in Arts, Humanities, Science, Engineering, Practice 21,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95150-8_2
12 2 Paul Rogers’ Publications (1963–2017)

Randle, Michael and Paul Rogers (editors), Alternatives in European Security,

Dartmouth Publishing Company, Aldershot, 1990.
Rogers, Paul and Malcolm Dando, The Directory of Nuclear, Biological and
Chemical Arms and Disarmament 1990. Tri-Service Press, London, 1990.
Rogers, Paul and Malcolm Dando, A Violent Peace: Global Security after the Cold
War, Brasseys, London, Washington and New York, 1992.
Tansey, Geoffrey, Katherine Tansey and Paul Rogers (editors), A World Divided:
Militarism and Development After the Cold War, Earthscan, London and St
Martin’s Press, New York, 1994.
Rogers, Paul, Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century Pluto Press,
London, 2000 (second edition 2002, third edition 2010).
Brauch, Hans Guenter, P.H. Liotta, Antonioa Marquina, Paul Rogers and
Mohammad El-Sayed Selim (editors), Security and Environment in the
Mediterranean: Conceptualising Security and Environmental Conflicts,
Springer, 2004.
Rogers, Paul, A War on Terror: Afghanistan and After, Pluto Press, London, 2004.
Rogers, Paul, Iraq and the War on Terror, Oxford Research Group International
Security Report, Oxford, 2004.
Rogers, Paul, Iraq and the War on Terror, 2003–04, Oxford Research Group,
Oxford, 2004.
Rogers, Paul, Iraq and the War on Terror, 12 Months of Insurgency, 2004–05, I.B.
Tauris, London, 2005.
Rogers, Paul, A War Too Far: Iraq, Iran and the New American Century, Pluto
Press, London, 2006.
Ritchie, Nick and Paul Rogers, The Political Road to War with Iraq, Routledge,
London, 2006.
Rogers, Paul, Into the Long War, Pluto Press, London, 2007.
Rogers, Paul, Towards Sustainable Security: Alternatives to the War on Terror,
Oxford Research Group, London, 2007.
Abbott, Chris, Paul Rogers and John Sloboda, Beyond Terror: The Truth About the
Real Threats to our Security, Rider, London, Sydney, Auckland, Johannesburg,
2007.
Rogers, Paul, Why We’re Losing the War on Terror, Polity Press, Cambridge and
Malden, MA, 2008.
Rogers, Paul, Global Security and the War on Terror: Elite Power and the Illusion
of Control, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2008.
Rogers, Paul, Irregular War: ISIS and the Threat from the Margins, I.B. Tauris,
London, 2016.
Rogers, Paul. Irregular War: The New Threat from the Margins, I.B. Tauris,
London, 2017 (Revised edition of Irregular War, 2016.)

2.2 Papers, Chapters and Major Conference Reports

Rogers, P. “Imperial College Sierra Leone Expedition 1963”, Nature, 197, 1256,
1963.
Rogers, P. “UNCTAD 2”, The Tablet, 222, 6663, 97–8, 3 February 1968.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
guilty of some crime which the law would punish. But poor Caroline,
like myself, was at the mercy of the merciless Covey, nor did she
escape the dire effects of her refusal: he gave her several sharp
blows.
At length (two hours had elapsed) the contest was given over.
Letting go of me, puffing and blowing at a great rate, Covey said:
“Now, you scoundrel, go to your work; I would not have whipped you
half so hard if you had not resisted.” The fact was, he had not
whipped me at all. He had not in all the scuffle, drawn a single drop
of blood from me. I had drawn blood from him, and should even
without this satisfaction have been victorious, because my aim had
not been to injure him, but to prevent his injuring me.
During the whole six months I lived with Covey after this
transaction, he never again laid the weight of his finger on me in
anger. He would occasionally say he did not want to have to get hold
of me again—a declaration which I had no difficulty in believing; and
I had a secret feeling which answered, “you had better not wish to
get hold of me again, for you will be likely to come off worse in a
second fight than you did in the first.”
Well, my dear reader, this battle with Mr. Covey, undignified as it
was, and as I fear my narration of it is, was the turning-point in my
“life as a slave.” It rekindled in my breast the smouldering embers of
liberty; it brought up my Baltimore dreams, and revived a sense of
my own manhood. I was a changed being after that fight. I was
nothing before; I was a man now. It recalled to life my crushed self-
respect, and my self-confidence, and inspired me with a renewed
determination to be a free man. A man without force is without the
essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it
cannot honor a helpless man, though it can pity him, and even this it
cannot do long if signs of power do not arise.
He only can understand the effect of this combat on my spirit,
who has himself incurred something, hazarded something, in
repelling the unjust and cruel aggressions of a tyrant. Covey was a
tyrant, and a cowardly one withal. After resisting him, I felt as I never
felt before. It was a resurrection from the dark and pestiferous tomb
of slavery, to the heaven of comparative freedom. I was no longer a
servile coward, trembling under the frown of a brother worm of the
dust, but my long-cowed spirit was roused to an attitude of
independence. I had reached the point at which I was not afraid to
die. This spirit made me a freeman in fact, though I still remained a
slave in form. When a slave cannot be flogged, he is more than half
free. He has a domain as broad as his own manly heart to defend,
and he is really “a power on earth.” From this time until my escape
from slavery, I was never fairly whipped. Several attempts were
made, but they were always unsuccessful. Bruises I did get, but the
instance I have described was the end of the brutification to which
slavery had subjected me.
The reader may like to know why, after I had so grievously
offended Mr. Covey, he did not have me taken in hand by the
authorities; indeed, why the law of Maryland, which assigned
hanging to the slave who resisted his master, was not put in force
against me; at any rate why I was not taken up, as was usual in such
cases, and publicly whipped, as an example to other slaves, and as
a means of deterring me from committing the same offense again. I
confess that the easy manner in which I got off was always a
surprise to me, and even now I cannot fully explain the cause,
though the probability is that Covey was ashamed to have it known
that he had been mastered by a boy of sixteen. He enjoyed the
unbounded and very valuable reputation of being a first-rate
overseer and negro-breaker, and by means of this reputation he was
able to procure his hands at very trifling compensation and with very
great ease. His interest and his pride would mutually suggest the
wisdom of passing the matter by in silence. The story that he had
undertaken to whip a lad and had been resisted, would of itself be
damaging to him in the estimation of slaveholders.
It is perhaps not altogether creditable to my natural temper that
after this conflict with Mr. Covey I did, at times, purposely aim to
provoke him to an attack, by refusing to keep with the other hands in
the field, but I could never bully him to another battle. I was
determined on doing him serious damage if he ever again attempted
to lay violent hands on me.
“Hereditary bondmen know ye not
Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow!”
 CHAPTER XVIII.
NEW RELATIONS AND DUTIES.

Change of masters—Benefits derived by change—Fame of the fight with

Covey—Reckless unconcern—Author’s abhorrence of slavery—Ability to
read a cause of prejudice—The holidays—How spent—Sharp hit at
slavery—Effects of holidays—Difference between Covey and Freeland—
An irreligious master preferred to a religious one—Hard life at Covey’s
useful to the author—Improved condition does not bring contentment—
Congenial society at Freeland’s—Author’s Sabbath-school—Secresy
necessary—Affectionate relations of tutor and pupils—Confidence and
friendship among slaves—Slavery the inviter of vengeance.

MY term of service with Edward Covey expired on Christmas day,

1834. I gladly enough left him, although he was by this time as
gentle as a lamb. My home for the year 1835 was already secured,
my next master selected. There was always more or less excitement
about the changing of hands, but I had become somewhat reckless
and cared little into whose hands I fell, determined to fight my way.
The report got abroad that I was hard to whip, that I was guilty of
kicking back, that though generally a good-natured negro, I
sometimes “got the devil in me.” These sayings were rife in Talbot
County, and they distinguished me among my servile brethren.
Slaves would sometimes fight with each other, and even die at each
other’s hands, but there were very few who were not held in awe by
a white man. Trained from the cradle up to think and feel that their
masters were superior, and invested with a sort of sacredness, there
were few who could rise above the control which that sentiment
exercised. I had freed myself from it, and the thing was known. One
bad sheep will spoil a whole flock. I was a bad sheep. I hated
slavery, slaveholders, and all pertaining to them; and I did not fail to
inspire others with the same feeling wherever and whenever
opportunity was presented. This made me a marked lad among the
slaves, and a suspected one among slaveholders. A knowledge of
my ability to read and write got pretty widely spread, which was very
much against me.
The days between Christmas day and New Year’s were allowed
the slaves as holidays. During these days all regular work was
suspended, and there was nothing to do but to keep fires and look
after the stock. We regarded this time as our own by the grace of our
masters, and we therefore used it or abused it as we pleased. Those
who had families at a distance were expected to visit them and
spend with them the entire week. The younger slaves or the
unmarried ones were expected to see to the cattle, and to attend to
incidental duties at home. The holidays were variously spent. The
sober, thinking, industrious ones would employ themselves in
manufacturing corn brooms, mats, horse collars, and baskets, and
some of these were very well made. Another class spent their time in
hunting opossums, coons, rabbits, and other game. But the majority
spent the holidays in sports, ball-playing, wrestling, boxing, running
foot-races, dancing, and drinking whiskey; and this latter mode was
generally most agreeable to their masters. A slave who would work
during the holidays was thought by his master undeserving of
holidays. There was in this simple act of continued work an
accusation against slaves, and a slave could not help thinking that if
he made three dollars during the holidays he might make three
hundred during the year. Not to be drunk during the holidays was
disgraceful.
The fiddling, dancing, and “jubilee beating” was carried on in all
directions. This latter performance was strictly southern. It supplied
the place of violin, or of other musical instruments, and was played
so easily that almost every farm had its “Juba” beater. The performer
improvised as he beat the instrument, marking the words as he sang
so as to have them fall pat with the movement of his hands. Among
a mass of nonsense and wild frolic, once in a while a sharp hit was
given to the meanness of slaveholders. Take the following for
example:
 We raise de wheat,
Dey gib us de corn;
We bake de bread,
Dey gib us de crust;
We sif de meal,
Dey gib us de huss;

We peel de meat,
Dey gib us de skin;
And dat’s de way
Dey take us in;
We skim de pot,
Dey give us de liquor,
And say dat’s good enough for nigger.

Walk over! walk over!

Your butter and de fat;
Poor nigger you cant get over dat.
Walk over—

This is not a bad summary of the palpable injustice and fraud of

slavery, giving, as it does, to the lazy and idle the comforts which
God designed should be given solely to the honest laborer. But to
the holidays. Judging from my own observation and experience, I
believe those holidays were among the most effective means in the
hands of slaveholders of keeping down the spirit of insurrection
among the slaves.
To enslave men successfully and safely it is necessary to keep
their minds occupied with thoughts and aspirations short of the
liberty of which they are deprived. A certain degree of attainable
good must be kept before them. These holidays served the purpose
of keeping the minds of the slaves occupied with prospective
pleasure within the limits of slavery. The young man could go
wooing, the married man to see his wife, the father and mother to
see their children, the industrious and money-loving could make a
few dollars, the great wrestler could win laurels, the young people
meet and enjoy each other’s society, the drunken man could get
plenty of whiskey, and the religious man could hold prayer-meetings,
preach, pray, and exhort. Before the holidays there were pleasures
in prospect; after the holidays they were pleasures of memory, and
they served to keep out thoughts and wishes of a more dangerous
character. These holidays were also sort of conductors or safety-
valves, to carry off the explosive elements inseparable from the
human mind when reduced to the condition of slavery. But for these
the rigors of bondage would have become too severe for endurance,
and the slave would have been forced up to dangerous desperation.
Thus they became a part and parcel of the gross wrongs and
inhumanity of slavery. Ostensibly they were institutions of
benevolence designed to mitigate the rigors of slave life, but
practically they were a fraud instituted by human selfishness, the
better to secure the ends of injustice and oppression. The slave’s
happiness was not the end sought, but the master’s safety. It was
not from a generous unconcern for the slave’s labor, but from a
prudent regard for the slave system. I am strengthened in this
opinion from the fact that most slaveholders liked to have their
slaves spend the holidays in such manner as to be of no real benefit
to them. Everything like rational enjoyment was frowned upon, and
only those wild and low sports peculiar to semi-civilized people were
encouraged. The license allowed appeared to have no other object
than to disgust the slaves with their temporary freedom, and to make
them as glad to return to their work as they were to leave it. I have
known slaveholders resort to cunning tricks, with a view of getting
their slaves deplorably drunk. The usual plan was to make bets on a
slave that he could drink more whisky than any other, and so induce
a rivalry among them for the mastery in this degradation. The scenes
brought about in this way were often scandalous and loathsome in
the extreme. Whole multitudes might be found stretched out in brutal
drunkenness, at once helpless and disgusting. Thus, when the slave
asked for hours of “virtuous liberty,” his cunning master took
advantage of his ignorance and cheered him with a dose of vicious
and revolting dissipation artfully labeled with the name of “liberty.”
 We were induced to drink, I among the rest, and when the
holidays were over we all staggered up from our filth and wallowing,
took a long breath, and went away to our various fields of work,
feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go from that which our
masters had artfully deceived us into the belief was freedom, back
again to the arms of slavery. It was not what we had taken it to be,
nor what it would have been, had it not been abused by us. It was
about as well to be a slave to master, as to be a slave to whisky and
rum. When the slave was drunk the slaveholder had no fear that he
would plan an insurrection, no fear that he would escape to the
North. It was the sober, thoughtful slave who was dangerous, and
needed the vigilance of his master to keep him a slave. But to
proceed with my narrative.
On the first of January, 1835, I proceeded from St. Michaels to
Mr. William Freeland’s—my new home. Mr. Freeland lived only three
miles from St. Michaels, on an old, worn-out farm, which required
much labor to render it anything like a self-supporting establishment.
I found Mr. Freeland a different man from Covey. Though not
rich, he was what might have been called a well-bred Southern
gentleman. Though a slaveholder and sharing in common with them
many of the vices of his class, he seemed alive to the sentiment of
honor, and had also some sense of justice, and some feelings of
humanity. He was fretful, impulsive, and passionate, but free from
the mean and selfish characteristics which distinguished the creature
from which I had happily escaped. Mr. Freeland was open, frank,
imperative, and practiced no concealments, and disdained to play
the spy; in all these qualities the opposite of Covey.
My poor weather-beaten bark now reached smoother water and
gentler breezes. My stormy life at Covey’s had been of service to
me. The things that would have seemed very hard had I gone direct
to Mr. Freeland’s from the home of Master Thomas were now “trifles
light as air.” I was still a field-hand, and had come to prefer the
severe labor of the field to the enervating duties of a house-servant. I
had become large and strong, and had begun to take pride in the
fact that I could do as much hard work as some of the older men.
There was much rivalry among slaves at times as to which could do
the most work, and masters generally sought to promote such rivalry.
But some of us were too wise to race with each other very long.
Such racing, we had the sagacity to see, was not likely to pay. We
had our times for measuring each other’s strength, but we knew too
much to keep up the competition so long as to produce an
extraordinary day’s work. We knew that if by extraordinary exertion a
large quantity of work was done in one day, becoming known to the
master, it might lead him to require the same amount every day. This
thought was enough to bring us to a dead halt when ever so much
excited for the race.
At Mr. Freeland’s my condition was every way improved. I was
no longer the scapegoat that I was when at Covey’s, where every
wrong thing done was saddled upon me, and where other slaves
were whipped over my shoulders. Bill Smith was protected by a
positive prohibition, made by his rich master (and the command of
the rich slaveholder was law to the poor one). Hughes was favored
by his relationship to Covey, and the hands hired temporarily
escaped flogging. I was the general pack-horse; but Mr. Freeland
held every man individually responsible for his own conduct. Mr.
Freeland, like Mr. Covey, gave his hands enough to eat, but, unlike
Mr. Covey, he gave them time to take their meals. He worked us
hard during the day, but gave us the night for rest. We were seldom
in the field after dark in the evening, or before sunrise in the morning.
Our implements of husbandry were of the most improved pattern,
and much superior to those used at Covey’s.
Notwithstanding all the improvement in my relations,
notwithstanding the many advantages I had gained by my new home
and my new master, I was still restless and discontented. I was
about as hard to please by a master as a master is by a slave. The
freedom from bodily torture and unceasing labor had given my mind
an increased sensibility, and imparted to it greater activity. I was not
yet exactly in right relations. “Howbeit, that was not first which is
spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward that which is
spiritual.” When entombed at Covey’s, shrouded in darkness and
physical wretchedness, temporal well-being was the grand
desideratum; but, temporal wants supplied, the spirit puts in its
claims. Beat and cuff your slave, keep him hungry and spiritless, and
he will follow the chain of his master like a dog; but feed and clothe
him well, work him moderately, surround him with physical comfort,
and dreams of freedom intrude. Give him a bad master, and he
aspires to a good master; give him a good master and he wishes to
become his own master. Such is human nature. You may hurl a man
so low beneath the level of his kind, that he loses all just ideas of his
natural position, but elevate him a little, and the clear conception of
rights rises to life and power, and leads him onward. Thus elevated a
little at Freeland’s, the dreams called into being by that good man,
Father Lawson, when in Baltimore, began to visit me again; shoots
from the tree of liberty began to put forth buds, and dim hopes of the
future began to dawn.
I found myself in congenial society. There were Henry Harris,
John Harris, Handy Caldwell, and Sandy Jenkins (this last, of the
root-preventive memory.)
Henry and John Harris were brothers, and belonged to Mr.
Freeland. They were both remarkably bright and intelligent, though
neither of them could read. Now for mischief! I had not been long
here before I was up to my old tricks. I began to address my
companions on the subject of education, and the advantages of
intelligence over ignorance, and, as far as I dared, I tried to show the
agency of ignorance in keeping men in slavery. Webster’s spelling-
book and the Columbian Orator were looked into again. As summer
came on, and the long Sabbath days stretched themselves over our
idleness, I became uneasy, and wanted a Sabbath-school, where to
exercise my gifts, and to impart the little knowledge I possessed to
my brother-slaves. A house was hardly necessary in the summer
time; I could hold my school under the shade of an old oak tree as
well as anywhere else. The thing was to get the scholars, and to
have them thoroughly imbued with the desire to learn. Two such
boys were quickly found in Henry and John, and from them the
contagion spread. I was not long in bringing around me twenty or
thirty young men, who enrolled themselves gladly in my Sabbath-
school, and were willing to meet me regularly under the trees or
elsewhere, for the purpose of learning to read. It was surprising with
what ease they provided themselves with spelling-books. These
were mostly the cast-off books of their young masters or mistresses.
I taught at first on our own farm. All were impressed with the
necessity of keeping the matter as private as possible, for the fate of
the St. Michaels attempt was still fresh in the minds of all. Our pious
masters at St. Michaels must not know that a few of their dusky
brothers were learning to read the Word of God, lest they should
come down upon us with the lash and chain. We might have met to
drink whisky, to wrestle, fight, and to do other unseemly things, with
no fear of interruption from the saints or the sinners of St. Michaels.
But to meet for the purpose of improving the mind and heart, by
learning to read the sacred scriptures, was a nuisance to be instantly
stopped. The slaveholders there, like slaveholders elsewhere,
preferred to see the slaves engaged in degrading sports, rather than
acting like moral and accountable beings. Had any one asked a
religious white man in St. Michaels at that time the names of three
men in that town whose lives were most after the pattern of our Lord
and Master Jesus Christ, the reply would have been: Garrison West,
class-leader, Wright Fairbanks, and Thomas Auld, both also class-
leaders; and yet these men ferociously rushed in upon my Sabbath-
school, armed with mob-like missiles, and forbade our meeting again
on pain of having our backs subjected to the bloody lash. This same
Garrison West was my class-leader, and I had thought him a
Christian until he took part in breaking up my school. He led me no
more after that.
The plea for this outrage was then, as it is always, the tyrant’s
plea of necessity. If the slaves learned to read they would learn
something more and something worse. The peace of slavery would
be disturbed; slave rule would be endangered. I do not dispute the
soundness of the reasoning. If slavery were right, Sabbath-schools
for teaching slaves to read were wrong, and ought to have been put
down. These christian class-leaders were, to this extent, consistent.
They had settled the question that slavery was right, and by that
standard they determined that Sabbath-schools were wrong. To be
sure they were Protestant, and held to the great protestant right of
every man to “search the Scriptures” for himself; but then, to all
general rules there are exceptions. How convenient! What crimes
may not be committed under such ruling! But my dear class-leading
Methodist brethren did not condescend to give me a reason for
breaking up the school at St. Michaels; they had determined its
destruction, and that was enough. However, I am digressing.
After getting the school nicely started a second time, holding it in
the woods behind the barn, and in the shade of trees, I succeeded in
inducing a free colored man who lived several miles from our house
to permit me to hold my school in a room at his house. He incurred
much peril in doing so, for the assemblage was an unlawful one. I
had at one time more than forty scholars, all of the right sort, and
many of them succeeded in learning to read. I have had various
employments during my life, but I look back to none with more
satisfaction. An attachment, deep and permanent, sprung up
between me and my persecuted pupils, which made my parting from
them intensely painful.
Besides my Sunday-school, I devoted three evenings a week to
my other fellow slaves during the winter. Those dear souls who came
to my Sabbath-school came not because it was popular or reputable
to do so, for they came with a liability of having forty stripes laid on
their naked backs. In this Christian country men and women were
obliged to hide in barns and woods and trees from professing
Christians, in order to learn to read the Holy Bible. Their minds had
been cramped and starved by their cruel masters; the light of
education had been completely excluded, and their hard earnings
had been taken to educate their master’s children. I felt a delight in
circumventing the tyrants, and in blessing victims of their curses.
The year at Mr. Freeland’s passed off very smoothly, to outward
seeming. Not a blow was given me during the whole year. To the
credit of Mr. Freeland, irreligious though he was, it must be stated
that he was the best master I ever had until I became my own
master and assumed for myself, as I had a right to do, the
responsibility of my own existence and the exercise of my own
powers.
For much of the happiness, or absence of misery, with which I
passed this year, I am indebted to the genial temper and ardent
friendship of my brother slaves. They were every one of them manly,
generous, and brave; yes, I say they were brave, and I will add fine
looking. It is seldom the lot of any to have truer and better friends
than were the slaves on this farm. It was not uncommon to charge
slaves with great treachery toward each other, but I must say I never
loved, esteemed, or confided in men more than I did in these. They
were as true as steel, and no band of brothers could be more loving.
There were no mean advantages taken of each other, no tattling, no
giving each other bad names to Mr. Freeland, and no elevating one
at the expense of the other. We never undertook anything of any
importance which was likely to affect each other, without mutual
consultation. We were generally a unit, and moved together.
Thoughts and sentiments were exchanged between us which might
well have been considered incendiary had they been known by our
masters. The slaveholder, were he kind or cruel, was a slaveholder
still, the every-hour-violator of the just and inalienable rights of man,
and he was therefore every hour silently but surely whetting the knife
of vengeance for his own throat. He never lisped a syllable in
commendation of the fathers of this republic without inviting the
sword, and asserting the right of rebellion for his own slaves.
 CHAPTER XIX.
THE RUNAWAY PLOT.

New Year’s thoughts and meditations—Again hired by Freeland—Kindness

no compensation for slavery—Incipient steps toward escape—
Considerations leading thereto—Hostility to slavery—Solemn vow taken—
Plan divulged to slaves—Columbian Orator again—Scheme gains favor—
Danger of discovery—Skill of slaveholders—Suspicion and coercion—
Hymns with double meaning—Consultation—Password—Hope and fear—
Ignorance of Geography—Imaginary difficulties—Patrick Henry—Sandy a
dreamer—Route to the north mapped out—Objections—Frauds—Passes
—Anxieties—Fear of failure—Strange presentiment—Coincidence—
Betrayal—Arrests—Resistance—Mrs. Freeland—Prison—Brutal jests—
Passes eaten—Denial—Sandy—Dragged behind horses—Slave-traders
—Alone in prison—Sent to Baltimore.

I AM now at the beginning of the year 1836, when the mind naturally
occupies itself with the mysteries of life in all its phases—the ideal,
the real, and the actual. Sober people look both ways at the
beginning of a new year, surveying the errors of the past, and
providing against the possible errors of the future. I, too, was thus
exercised. I had little pleasure in retrospect, and the future prospect
was not brilliant. “Notwithstanding,” thought I, “the many resolutions
and prayers I have made in behalf of freedom, I am, this first day of
the year 1836, still a slave, still wandering in the depths of a
miserable bondage. My faculties and powers of body and soul are
not my own, but are the property of a fellow-mortal in no sense
superior to me, except that he has the physical power to compel me
to be owned and controlled by him. By the combined physical force
of the community I am his slave—a slave for life.” With thoughts like
these I was chafed and perplexed, and they rendered me gloomy
and disconsolate. The anguish of my mind cannot be written.
 At the close of the year, Mr. Freeland renewed the purchase of
my services of Mr. Auld for the coming year. His promptness in doing
so would have been flattering to my vanity had I been ambitious to
win the reputation of being a valuable slave. Even as it was, I felt a
slight degree of complacency at the circumstance. It showed him to
be as well pleased with me as a slave as I with him as a master. But
the kindness of the slave-master only gilded the chain, it detracted
nothing from its weight or strength. The thought that men are made
for other and better uses than slavery throve best under the gentle
treatment of a kind master. Its grim visage could assume no smiles
able to fascinate the partially enlightened slave into a forgetfulness
of his bondage, or of the desirableness of liberty.
I was not through the first month of my second year with the kind
and gentlemanly Mr. Freeland before I was earnestly considering
and devising plans for gaining that freedom which, when I was but a
mere child, I had ascertained to be the natural and inborn right of
every member of the human family. The desire for this freedom had
been benumbed while I was under the brutalizing dominion of Covey,
and it had been postponed and rendered inoperative by my truly
pleasant Sunday-school engagements with my friends during the
year at Mr. Freeland’s. It had, however, never entirely subsided. I
hated slavery always, and my desire for freedom needed only a
favorable breeze to fan it to a blaze at any moment. The thought of
being only a creature of the present and the past troubled me, and I
longed to have a future—a future with hope in it. To be shut up
entirely to the past and present is to the soul whose life and
happiness is unceasing progress—what the prison is to the body—a
blight and mildew, a hell of horrors. The dawning of this, another
year, awakened me from my temporary slumber, and roused into life
my latent but long-cherished aspirations for freedom. I became not
only ashamed to be contented in slavery, but ashamed to seem to be
contented, and in my present favorable condition under the mild rule
of Mr. Freeland, I am not sure that some kind reader will not
condemn me for being over-ambitious, and greatly wanting in
humility, when I say the truth, that I now drove from me all thoughts
of making the best of my lot, and welcomed only such thoughts as
led me away from the house of bondage. The intensity of my desire
to be free, quickened by my present favorable circumstances,
brought me to the determination to act as well as to think and speak.
Accordingly, at the beginning of this year 1836, I took upon me a
solemn vow, that the year which had just now dawned upon me
should not close without witnessing an earnest attempt, on my part,
to gain my liberty. This vow only bound me to make good my own
individual escape, but my friendship for my brother-slaves was so
affectionate and confiding that I felt it my duty, as well as my
pleasure, to give them an opportunity to share in my determination.
Toward Henry and John Harris I felt a friendship as strong as one
man can feel for another, for I could have died with and for them. To
them, therefore, with suitable caution, I began to disclose my
sentiments and plans, sounding them the while on the subject of
running away, provided a good chance should offer. I need not say
that I did my very best to imbue the minds of my dear friends with my
own views and feelings. Thoroughly awakened now, and with a
definite vow upon me, all my little reading which had any bearing on
the subject of human rights was rendered available in my
communications with my friends. That gem of a book, the Columbian
Orator, with its eloquent orations and spicy dialogues denouncing
oppression and slavery—telling what had been dared, done, and
suffered by men, to obtain the inestimable boon of liberty, was still
fresh in my memory, and whirled into the ranks of my speech with
the aptitude of well-trained soldiers going through the drill. I here
began my public speaking. I canvassed with Henry and John the
subject of slavery, and dashed against it the condemning brand of
God’s eternal justice. My fellow-servants were neither indifferent,
dull, nor inapt. Our feelings were more alike than our opinions. All,
however, were ready to act when a feasible plan should be
proposed. “Show us how the thing is to be done,” said they, “and all
else is clear.”
We were all, except Sandy, quite clear from slaveholding
priestcraft. It was in vain that we had been taught from the pulpit at
St. Michaels the duty of obedience to our masters; to recognize God
as the author of our enslavement; to regard running away an
offense, alike against God and man; to deem our enslavement a
merciful and beneficial arrangement; to esteem our condition in this
country a paradise to that from which we had been snatched in
Africa; to consider our hard hands and dark color as God’s
displeasure, and as pointing us out as the proper subjects of slavery;
that the relation of master and slave was one of reciprocal benefits;
that our work was not more serviceable to our masters than our
master’s thinking was to us. I say it was in vain that the pulpit of St.
Michaels had constantly inculcated these plausible doctrines. Nature
laughed them to scorn. For my part, I had become altogether too big
for my chains. Father Lawson’s solemn words of what I ought to be,
and what I might be in the providence of God, had not fallen dead on
my soul. I was fast verging toward manhood, and the prophesies of
my childhood were still unfulfilled. The thought that year after year
had passed away, and my best resolutions to run away had failed
and faded, that I was still a slave, with chances for gaining my
freedom diminished and still diminishing—was not a matter to be
slept over easily. But here came a trouble. Such thoughts and
purposes as I now cherished could not agitate the mind long without
making themselves manifest to scrutinizing and unfriendly observers.
I had reason to fear that my sable face might prove altogether too
transparent for the safe concealment of my hazardous enterprise.
Plans of great moment have leaked through stone walls, and
revealed their projectors. But here was no stone wall to hide my
purpose. I would have given my poor tell-tale face for the immovable
countenance of an Indian, for it was far from proof against the daily
searching glances of those whom I met.
It was the interest and business of slaveholders to study human
nature, and the slave nature in particular, with a view to practical
results; and many of them attained astonishing proficiency in this
direction. They had to deal not with earth, wood, and stone, but with
men; and by every regard they had for their safety and prosperity
they had need to know the material on which they were to work. So
much intellect as the slaveholder had round him required watching.
Their safety depended on their vigilance. Conscious of the injustice
and wrong they were every hour perpetrating, and knowing what
they themselves would do if they were victims of such wrongs, they
were constantly looking out for the first signs of the dread retribution.
They watched, therefore, with skilled and practiced eyes, and
learned to read, with great accuracy, the state of mind and heart of
the slave through his sable face. Unusual sobriety, apparent
abstraction, sullenness, and indifference,—indeed, any mood out of
the common way,—afforded ground for suspicion and inquiry.
Relying on their superior position and wisdom, they “would often
hector the slave into a confession by affecting to know the truth of
their accusations. “You have got the devil in you, and we’ll whip him
out of you,” they would say. I have often been put thus to the torture
on bare suspicion. This system had its disadvantages as well as its
opposite—the slave being sometimes whipped into the confession of
offenses which he never committed. It will be seen that the good old
rule, “A man is to be held innocent until proved to be guilty,” did not
hold good on the slave plantation. Suspicion and torture were the
approved methods of getting at the truth there. It was necessary,
therefore, for me to keep a watch over my deportment, lest the
enemy should get the better of me. But with all our caution and
studied reserve, I am not sure that Mr. Freeland did not suspect that
all was not right with us. It did seem that he watched us more
narrowly after the plan of escape had been conceived and discussed
amongst us. Men seldom see themselves as others see them; and
while to ourselves everything connected with our contemplated
escape appeared concealed, Mr. Freeland may, with the peculiar
prescience of a slaveholder, have mastered the huge thought which
was disturbing our peace. As I now look back, I am the more inclined
to think he suspected us, because, prudent as we were, I can see
that we did many silly things very well calculated to awaken
suspicion. We were at times remarkably buoyant, singing hymns,
and making joyous exclamations, almost as triumphant in their tone
as if we had reached a land of freedom and safety. A keen observer
might have detected in our repeated singing of

“O Canaan, sweet Canaan,

I am bound for the land of Canaan,”

something more than a hope of reaching heaven. We meant to reach

the North, and the North was our Canaan.
 “I thought I heard them say
There were lions in the way;
I don’t expect to stay
Much longer here.
Run to Jesus, shun the danger—
I don’t expect to stay
Much longer here,”

was a favorite air, and had a double meaning. In the lips of some it
meant the expectation of a speedy summons to a world of spirits; but
in the lips of our company, it simply meant a speedy pilgrimage to a
free State, and deliverance from all the evils and dangers of slavery.
I had succeeded in winning to my scheme a company of five
young men, the very flower of the neighborhood, each one of whom
would have commanded one thousand dollars in the home market.
At New Orleans they would have brought fifteen hundred dollars
apiece, and perhaps more. Their names were as follows: Henry
Harris, John Harris, Sandy Jenkins, Charles Roberts, and Henry
Bailey. I was the youngest but one of the party. I had, however, the
advantage of them all in experience, and in a knowledge of letters.
This gave me a great influence over them. Perhaps not one of them,
left to himself, would have dreamed of escape as a possible thing.
They all wanted to be free, but the serious thought of running away
had not entered into their minds until I won them to the undertaking.
They all were tolerably well off—for slaves—and had dim hopes of
being set free some day by their masters. If any one is to blame for
disturbing the quiet of the slaves and slave-masters of the
neighborhood of St. Michaels, I am the man. I claim to be the
instigator of the high crime (as the slaveholders regarded it), and I
kept life in it till life could be kept in it no longer.
Pending the time of our contemplated departure out of our
Egypt, we met often by night, and on every Sunday. At these
meetings we talked the matter over, told our hopes and fears, and
the difficulties discovered or imagined; and, like men of sense, we
counted the cost of the enterprise to which we were committing
ourselves. These meetings must have resembled, on a small scale,
the meetings of the revolutionary conspirators in their primary
condition. We were plotting against our (so-called) lawful rulers, with
this difference—we sought our own good, and not the harm of our
enemies. We did not seek to overthrow them, but to escape from
them. As for Mr. Freeland, we all liked him, and would gladly have
remained with him as free men. Liberty was our aim, and we had
now come to think that we had a right to it against every obstacle,
even against the lives of our enslavers.
We had several words, expressive of things important to us,
which we understood, but which, even if distinctly heard by an
outsider, would have conveyed no certain meaning. I hated this
secresy, but where slavery was powerful, and liberty weak, the latter
was driven to concealment or destruction.
The prospect was not always bright. At times we were almost
tempted to abandon the enterprise, and to try to get back to that
comparative peace of mind which even a man under the gallows
might feel when all hope of escape had vanished. We were
confident, bold, and determined, at times, and again doubting, timid,
and wavering, whistling, like the boy in the grave-yard, to keep away
the spirits.
To look at the map and observe the proximity of Eastern shore,
Maryland, to Delaware and Pennsylvania, it may seem to the reader
quite absurd to regard the proposed escape as a formidable
undertaking. But to understand, some one has said, a man must
stand under. The real distance was great enough, but the imagined
distance was, to our ignorance, much greater. Slaveholders sought
to impress their slaves with a belief in the boundlessness of slave
territory, and of their own limitless power. Our notions of the
geography of the country were very vague and indistinct. The
distance, however, was not the chief trouble, for the nearer the lines
of a slave state to the borders of a free state the greater was the
trouble. Hired kidnappers infested the borders. Then, too, we knew
that merely reaching a free state did not free us, that wherever
caught we could be returned to slavery. We knew of no spot this side
the ocean where we could be safe. We had heard of Canada, then