A Connecticut Yankee in King Coal's Court
| Map from http://www.bcuim.co.uk/black-country/ with thanks |
“In peace and war, King Coal is the paramount lord of industry” – David Lloyd George 1930
Elihu Burritt (December 8, 1810 – March 6, 1879) was a US diplomat, a missionary, a polyglot, a peace camapaigner and an enthusiast for Birmingham and the Black Country during the Industrial Revolution.
Appointed by Abraham Lincoln as consul to Birmingham he connects the workshop of the Empire to the New World. Mr Burritt was a fascinating character and his 1868 book (which I have yet to read) Walks in the Black Country and Its Green Border-Land is still in print today. Actually whenever I travel around the Black Country which is quite often, I always think they should rename it the Green Country because so much of the former industrial landscape has been recolonised by nature, the Black Country is no longer black.
This is very different to the Birmingham and Black Country that Elihu Burritt knew and indeed the places I knew growing up. When I went to school Birmingham was still known as the City of a Thousand Trades and was highlighted on the globes still then dominated by the pink of the British empire where the city was also called the Workshop of the Empire. Here is evidence of a special relationship with the United States of America that then existed in the industrial West Midlands heartlands of England, one built then upon peace and coexistence - not war and neo imperialism as is unhappily the case now we have NATO, where we once had civilisation.
Here is a contemporary visit to the Black Country which was a term popularised by Elihu Burritt
but he was not he originator of the term (as claimed by veteran TV celeb David Dimbleby in the film)...the label Black Country had been in use since at least the 1840s as a description of the area.
This extract from a BBC programme called A Picture of Britain when Mr Dimbleby visited our area and commented upon what he found here. As a resident of 'hell' I feel it is perhaps a pity that Dicken's was wrong in his belief that we would rise up, but I do think that the metropolis beyond the Black Country, the so-called second city of Birmingham has more in common with colonial cities than the historic cities of England, York, Bristol, London, Oxford and so on....to me Birmingham belongs to the New World just as much as Sydney, Toronto, Wellington or Philadelphia does. It came into being about the same time and like its colonial cousins it has the stamp of the Enlightenment upon it.
I had never heard of Elihu Burritt but he seems to have been one of those fascinating figures of Anglo-American peace and cooperation that rise up and remind us of the common social heritage. Here there are men like Charles Dickens and Burritt, men with interests in culture and condition of the changing workplace on both sides of the English-speaking North Atlantic. This had nothing to do with military alliances.
ReplyDeleteI am hardly a historian, but I venture you are on to something in placing the rise of Birmingham with the rise of American colonial bastions like Boston and Philadelphia and of course New York (the latter after the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam were pushed out in the 1660's. All these Atlantic cities were created by British settlement--after the native peoples were pushed back through expansion of settlers, bloody war and attrition from disease of course. In the early days, the accents of many Americans in New England and the Mid-Atlantic colonies were probably a lot like the West County people who populated it, especially after 1700. Cities like Bristol and later Birmingham cannot be overlooked when talking of American life and times.
In the early 19th Century the nation was built up in part with the help of British capital, especially the railroads. That capital came from the power of industry and trade, of which "the Black Country" was indispensable. The power of these paintings in the "gates of hell" do indeed seem to also evoke for me images of the industrial cities of Detroit, Pittsburgh and Youngstown--cities with foundries like Birmingham that built cannons and steel rails and later automobiles and everything that made a modern world, and took its toll on the people of these places and laid waste to its environment. Still the land is scarred and the jobs outsourced or gone to automation but the people still have much in common--including renewed desire over the last few decades to make the black patches green again.
Thanks AA.
It occurs to me that the Dutch were pushed out in terms of power, but they also contributed to the settling of the Hudson River Valley of the New York colony and later state even after their flags were hauled down.
DeleteThanks for your comments Doug. Those of us born into a place "more terrible than the regions of everlasting punishment" as the apocalyptic 19th century painter John Martin describled the Black Country during the high point of industrialisation, we Brummies and Yammers (i.e. Black Country residents) have had to take more than our fair share of flak over the years. I think it is interesting that David Dimbleby despite a few factual inaccuracies in this programme, hit the nail on the head when he noted the changing Victiorian attitude to industry and industrialisation. Despite being well-meaning Charles Dickens I think misunderstood the area and motivations of the workers that made this hive of industry tick. It has always included a large dollop of dissent and it should be remembered that the early iron masters of the Severn Valley who literally sparked off metal bashing on an industrial scale that gave birth to the Industrial Revolution were mostly Quakers or other Christian non-conformists.
DeleteThe way for Elihu Burritt to follow was first mapped out by the Lunar Society whose work had begun a century before he visited these shores.
The exact make-up of that informal group is disputed amongst commentators but I'm happy to accept Wikipedia's 14 Lunar Society members as follows..Matthew Boulton, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Day, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Samuel Galton, Jr., James Keir, Joseph Priestley, William Small, Jonathan Stokes, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, John Whitehurst and William Withering.
These were the original architects of the Birmingham and West Midlands industrial heritage and here we find another earlier American connection with Birmingham. A corresponding member of the Lunar Society was Benjamin Franklin, the Bostom Masachusetts born intellectual all rounder was in 1771 a guest of Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) in Lichfield where a branch of Aardvark family have their seat even to this day and where the current author resided for a period of several years in the 1970s and early 1980s and a city which I have visited only this afternoon as a coincidental matter of fact.
Franklin was an honourary member of the Lunar Society and by virtue of that fact he was also an honourary Brummie too.
I think the demonisation of heavy industry and these Gates of Hell images have I think rubbed off as complimentary stigma, or guilt by association which has tainted the reputation and social standing of the people who live in these areas. There is still even after the industrialisation has gone away a prejudice throughout England toward Birmingham and Brummies that still persists....( forYammers even worse). Interesting to pick up on these transatlantic roots of industrialisation in the 18th and 19th centuries which links Birmingham and the Black Country first to New England and then all of North America but especially with the once-rapidly industrialising East Coast and the East North Central States that together form the latterday Rust Belt.
The same sort of interactions that once ignited the industrial revolution on both sides of the Atlantic now work together in the aftermath of deindustrialisation to reinvent postindustrial society. A vision which once again is apprently viewed by the orthodoxy and defenders of legal status quo as dangerous dissent and non-conformity. We''ll win of course we always do eventuially!
Thanks again for the comments Doug and for further opening up the discussion.
To pick up on your points about the Dutch Doug... I agree they shouldn't be written out of the picture when it comes to the European colonisation of North America...why should they get away with it? The Dutch are popularly associated with soft drugs, legal prostitution, painted wooden shoes, canals, dykes and tulips.
DeleteCompared to the warlike imperialism the British have to face the consequences for...they are altogether more lovable than us ...but is that fair?
The Anglo-Dutch wars began in 1651 and continued until 1784 ...a fascinating period in global history when the British took control of Dutch colonies like New Amsterdam, Cape Colony and Ceylon to create the British empire.
The origins of these events lay in the Tudor period but the catalyst for war was the English Revolution (1640–1660) otherwise known as the English Civil Wars which were in full swing when the Dutch wars began. Who actually the winner was is debatable. The British got Dutch colonies and trade yes, but the Dutch got Britain itself when in 1689 William of Orange appropriated the British throne following the Glorious Revolution the year before which made hime King William III of England and Wales and also king of Orange and the Low Countries, Scotland, Ireland in a massive Protestant victory against the Catholic royal houses of Europe.
Those events of course sparked a conflict in Ireland that remains unresolved to this day. Your mention of New Amsterdam has sparked an interest in perhaps a future blog on the subject of the Anglo/Dutch conflicts which resurfaced again during the Napoleonic wars in 1810 France formally annexed the Netherlands.
All good stuff Doug but never let it be forgotten that it was Peter Stuyvesant who built Wall Street and was the first person to become big on Broadway, not a bad record of achievement for a man with one leg Doug, thanks for introducing these topics in your comments.
You're welcome, AA. Benjamin Franklin has long been my favorite of the major Founding Fathers of the Republic.
ReplyDelete