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Yes, I’d say so, with a near certainty. Not just from Earth. From Mars, and possibly Venus too. Indeed if Ceres had life back then in transient muddy near surface oceans, or Vesta or any of the other large asteroids, there could be life from them too. And well preserved, at temperatures of liquid nitrogen for meteorites that hit the lunar poles.Properly speaking, not really fossils. The actual microbes or bits of ammonites etc. that got to the Moon from the Earth as a result of impacts on Earth. And kept in a frozen state ever since. No real fossilization processes going on on the Moon,That much is from the published science papers. But sequenceable DNA can also in principle survive for billions of years, in one study of the potential of sequenceable DNA in Martian ice. So, especially at such low temperatures, could there even be sequenceable DNA from the time of the dinosaurs up there? Fragments of dinosaurs or ammonites with still sequenceable DNA within them? Ammonites and other sea dwellers are more likely than land dwelling dinosaurs as the Chicxulub meteorite landed in a shallow tropical ocean. That’s a bit of a synthesis from the published literature, but not by much, just applying a result from Mars to the Moon.Also this is very speculative, but I love to speculate. It’s now thought that the Moon had an early atmosphere itself, peaking about 3.5 billion years ago, due to volatiles from the lavas that formed the lunar mares, or seas (formed from seas of molten lava). This atmosphere was about 1.5 times thicker than the current Mars atmosphere. Well, present day Mars just possibly has habitats for present day life. There were substantial amounts of water vapour in the early lunar atmosphere too, if their model is correct. They estimate that if 0.1% of it ended up trapped at the poles, that would be 150 billion tons. So - could there be native lunar life preserved in those cold traps too? Probably not evolved in situ, unless evolution is very fast, but delivered from Early Earth, Mars or Venus via pansermia? Or even Ceres?This answer originates as the section Search for life from Mars, Venus, or the Earth - on the Moon in Meteorites! in my online book “Touch Mars?”Search for past life from Mars, Earth or Venus - on the Moon in meteorites!I was quite surprised when I first learnt about this. The Moon can also help us with the biological search for early life throughout the inner solar system, through remains of life that landed there in meteorites. During the Late Heavy Bombardment, large meteorites impacting on Mars, Earth, Venus, must have sent rocks throughout the solar system. After the Moon formed, it was a prime target for these rocks to land on. So, the experts say, we might well find meteorites from any of these places on the Moon. The best place to look may be the lunar poles, where the ice deposits would help to keep the meteorites from drying out. We can also search for meteorites deep below the surface, protected from cosmic radiation.Our Moon has continued to get meteorite impacts from Mars and Earth through to the present day. Sadly, the current Venus atmosphere is so thick that any meteorites from Venus must surely come from at least several hundred million years ago. However, if it is true that Venus developed a thick atmosphere only half a billion years ago or so, then we might be able to find samples from its history all the way through from formation to the time when it first developed a stagnant lid and became the dry hot acidic pressure cooker of a planet it is today. We might even find life floating high in the clouds of present day Venus to complete the picture - if it did develop robust forms of life.Search for past life from Earth on the MoonJordi Guntierrez was first to look at this (AFAIK) in a paper from 2002. He didn't know of any earlier work on the subject, as he says in his chapter in the conference proceedings here. He studied the possibility of finding Terrene meteorites - meteorites from early Earth in the lunar highlands on the Moon.This was before recent ideas of ice at the poles, so he looks at the possibility of Terrene meteorites in the lunar regolith. He found that there could be meteorites buried several meters below the surface of the Moon. At that depth, they would be protected from cosmic radiation and also from the extreme temperature changes on the lunar surface. Though the shock of impact would convert 20% of the rocks kinetic energy into heat, the impact velocities for meteorites ejected from Mars would be low enough so that the "terrene meteorites" could include organics and even complete micro-organisms preserved for billions of years. He mentions that some of the lunar rocks have unshocked millimeter sized fragments of chondrites in them, which is promising for preservation of moderately sized micro-organisms since they would have hit the Moon at higher velocities than rocks from Earth.Also micro-organisms would be able to survive the shock of re-entry and still be viable -of course they would not find anywhere to grow but they could be intact and freeze dried, and indeed with their DNA intact as well presumably. By analogy with the martian meteorites, any rocks that reach the Moon should also include bubbles of the early Earth atmosphere, including any gases produced by early life.Wherever the microbes come from, some of them might then be unearthed recently as a result of meteorite impacts on the Moon. He also discusses the idea that early life on Earth may have developed multiple times, each time erased by giant impacts that sterilized the entire surface of Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment. If so, the Moon would have ejecta from those impacts too, so it might potentially preserve organics which preserves evidence from multiple separate attempts at evolution on early Earth, with different forms of biochemistry.We could recognize the meteorites by their fusion crust, which of course is not the result of passage through the very thin lunar atmosphere - but from their passage through Earth's atmosphere when they left Earth. Some might have distinctive banded formations of sedimentary rock, so proving their origins from Earth. Nearly all the processes that degrade organics on Earth would not act at all on the Moon, with no water, no oxidizing chemical reactions. Another early paper from 2007 suggests that robots could search the lunar surface for Earth meteorites, which they could recognize by the presence of carbonates and hydrated silicates.We now know that the Moon has extraordinarily cold conditions at the lunar poles, in craters that have never seen sunlight for billions of years. The conditions there are far colder even than Mars, so we could find organics there as well, preserved, hardly changed, since the early solar system. The lunar poles have ice too, which will help to preserve the organics. There may well be organics there dating back to soon after the formation of the Moon itself.Also, we aren't talking about just a few meteorites here. There may be as much as 200 kilograms of material from early Earth per square kilometer of the lunar surface. That's 200 milligrams per square meter on average. It might be buried deep but some of it might have been unearthed by later impacts. We might find fossils also, fossil diatoms are still recognizable after a simulated impact on the Moon, indeed the smallest ones are intact, complete fossils. There must be a lot of material from the Chicxulub impact on the Moon - so perhaps there are fragments of ammonites and other sea creatures from the Cretaceous period, with organics still preserved, there as well. Perhaps the Moon will turn out to be one of the best places for diligent fossil hunters in our solar system, outside of Earth.Artist's impression of Cretaceous period ammonites, courtesy of Encarta. The Chicxulub impact made these creatures extinct. It hit shallow tropical seas and the ejecta could have sent fragments of cretaceous sea creatures such as ammonites all the way to the Moon. Fragments in the cold polar regions may even have the organics preserved.Indeed (though he doesn't say that) I wonder if the main issue for recovery of more or less intact and originally viable ancient microbes might be whether the microbes are able to withstand the shock of ejection from Earth, leaving the surface at more than Earth's escape velocity, rather than the shock of impact with the Moon. If that is possible, then the impact with the Moon is a much lower level of shock to withstand, it would seem. See General case of transfer of life from Earth to Mars (in my Touch Mars? book), The most intact microbes might perhaps be ones that came from early Mars, if there was life there and we find it on the Moon.We have dinosaur bones on Earth with evidence of protein preserved from 195 million years ago. So that at least seems something that we could find on the Moon in principle. Could we go further than that? What about DNA, can we sequence the genomes of dinosaurs and ammonites from DNA fragments left on the Moon all this time?This is one of my speculative sections as I haven't found any research into whether we could find sequenceable ancient dinosaur or ammonite DNA on the Moon (though I have found some material on ancient DNA on Mars, more on that later).It seems a natural question to ask though, so let's have a look at it. So, at first sight this may seem unlikely, because the most recent impact likely to send material to the Moon is 66 million years ago, and DNA is rather fragile, and easily degraded, especially in warm or damp conditions. Our oldest DNA on Earth dates back to between 780,000 and 560,000 years ago, from the remains of a horse found frozen in the Canadian Arctic permafrost.Przewalski's horse, Photo by Claudia Feh. This is a wild horse that was preserved in zoos in Prague and Munich after it became extinct in the wild. By the end of the 1950s there were only twelve of them left in the world, but through careful selective breeding, they have been brought back from the brink of extinction as a viable genetically diverse population. They have now been reintroduced into the wild.DNA recovered from the remains of a wild horse preserved for over half a million years in Canadian permafrost proves that this is indeed the last remaining species of wild horse in the world.In the early days of gene sequencing, there were many claims of DNA recovered from dinosaurs, but so far, they have all turned out to be mistakes.The degradation of DNA is slowed down in drier and colder conditions. But even in dry conditions at -5 °C, then the hope is for sequenceable DNA a million years old. Older DNA, tens of millions of years old still seems unlikely.For more evidence on this, one paper worked out a half life of DNA decay using bones from the extinct New Zealand Moa. The average half life was about 521 years for a 242 base pair sequence. It was 158, 000 years for a 30 base pair sequence. This let them develop a model from which they predicted that there would be no sequenceable DNA left after 6.8 million years. They wouldn't expect to find even two base pairs attached together. They say:"Still, the results indicate that under the right conditions of preservation, short fragments of DNA should be retrievable from very old bone (e.g. greater than 1 Myr). However even under the best preservation conditions at −5°C, our model predicts that no intact bonds (average length = 1 bp) will remain in the DNA ‘strand’ after 6.8 Myr."They couldn't completely rule out DNA tens of millions of years old however. This was a decay rate for DNA in bones. There could be variations in decay rates depending on the tissue type. However, on the basis of their research, it seemed very improbable to them that a long sequence of dinosaur DNA could be preserved. No intact bonds after 6.8 million years and the dinosaur era is around ten times that age.Also, for the best chance of survival, it would have to have been preserved in cold dry conditions. They don't discuss this, but where on Earth could we find dinosaur bones that have remained cold and dry for all that time? At the time of the Cretaceous period, while dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, Antarctica had already reached the south polar region, which it shared with Australia,, but it's climate was different from any today. The world as a whole was warmer than it is today and there were no polar ice sheets. Antarctica was warm and ice free in summer, and dark and bitterly cold at night. Polar seas wouldn't keep it cold either, even now in a cooler world the polar seas are only -2 °C at the sea floor.Yes, there would have been permanent ice on high mountain tops in Antarctica back then - however, could a fossil in Antarctica, originally on a mountain top, have stayed continuously at temperatures of −5°C right through to the present? Through erosion and formation of mountains? It seems a long shot. At any rate, there is no chance at all of preserved DNA from earlier in Earth's history when the entire land mass was in the tropical zonesBut the Moon is different. The craters at the pole are extremely cold, -249 °C. This is well below the freezing points of nitrogen and oxygen, also cold enough for liquid hydrogen (though as a liquid, it would only last momentarily if exposed to the surface) and not far above the freezing point of hydrogen. What's more, they have remained like that for billions of years. If an asteroid impact such as the Chicxulub impact or an earlier one sent dinosaur DNA and ammonite DNA, and other forms of DNA to the Moon, it would have the best chance of preservation of DNA anywhere.So, if I can venture to speculate - might Cretaceous period DNA on the Moon still be sequenceable today? Even at a temperature of - 5 °C then it may be just within the bounds of what might be possible, depending on tissue type perhaps, if there is anywhere on Earth that's remained that cold for that long. So what about DNA stored at -249 °C for 66 million years or more?Well, this paper studying preservation of ancient DNA in the Martian polar ice caps would suggest that it could well survive that long, not just for a few tens of millions of years, but maybe for billions of years too. See page 146:"The Martian polar ice caps are believed to sustain temperatures of between -50 °C and -110 °C, and are thus likely to be a suitable place to look for simple chemical molecules, such as amino acids. The same is true of the Martian permafrost. Rough calculations using the Arrhenius equation suggest that 100 bp of DNA can theoretically survive 3.4 × 10^9–3×10^21 years at -50 °C and -110 °C, respectively (Figure 2, main text). Although the calculation is highly simplified, it does suggest that any nucleic acids on Mars would be preserved for periods of time significantly longer than can be expected on Earth"That's 3.4 billion years at -50 °C and 3 sextillion years at -110 °C. So at -249 °C, if it is buried deep enough to be protected from degradation by cosmic radiation, what then... He does warn that his calculation is hugely simplified. However, it's a thought, could there even be sequenceable DNA from early Mars, Earth and Venus?The ice at the poles must also contain organics from comets and asteroid impacts in the early solar system - and possibly, made locally too. Some prebiotic organics could have been synthesized in volcanoes in the early Moon too. See page 769 of this paper. So, study of the ice would give an insight into the pre-biotic chemicals delivered to the Earth as well - their quantity and diversity, and indeed chirality.Although these researchers don’t mention it, there’s another result that’s relevant here too. It is just modeling at present - no direct evidence it happens. But if they are right, then microbial spores are constantly lifted from Earth’s atmosphere in its “dust tail” due to fast moving dust flows of interplanetary dust hitting the atmosphere. This dust travels at up to at up to 70 km a second and could hit spores and other particles at 150 km altitude and higher, and take them to the Moon and elsewhere. This could be billions of years history of microbial spores from Earth to study. Maybe even small creatures like tardigrades. Unlike material thrown up from meteorite impacts, a continuous record through the Earth’s biological history.“Some bacteria, plants and small animals called tardigrades are known to be able to survive in space, so it is possible that such organisms – if present in Earth's upper atmosphere – might collide with fast-moving space dust and withstand a journey to another planet.”Space dust may transport life between worlds - paper hereAnother thought, another of my speculative ideas that you might enjoy thinking over. It's about the ice at the lunar poles (if it is ice). This is very speculative, but there's a suggestion that it could be "fluffy ice" or snow."We do not know the physical characteristics of this ice—solid, dense ice, or “fairy castle”—snow-like ice would have similar radar properties. In possible support of the latter, the low radar albedo and lower than typical CPR values for nonanomalous terrain near the polar craters are 0.2–0.3, somewhat lower than normal for the nonpolar highlands terrain of the Moon and are suggesting the presence of a low density, “fluffy” surface."(page 13 of Evidence for water ice on the moon: Results for anomalous polar)If there is fluffy ice like that - it could help decelarate those microbes, tardigrades etc in the dust tail. It could also help with the finer material in meteorite debris thrown up from Earth. That would be especially so for the occasional long grazing impact through the polar regions, that passes through hundreds of meters or more perhaps of "fairy castle" ice or snow in a lunar crater, pretty much horizontally. That would have much less shock of impact than a direct impact into ice or rock. The lunar polar regions might turn out to be the gentlest place in the solar system for catching meteorites from elsewhere.Not just for Earth meteorites. Even meteorites from Mars, Venus or Ceres are likely to get there after many flybys of the other planets, Earth and the Moon so could have comparatively low relative velocities once they finally hit the Moon.Search for past life from Venus on the MoonThe Moon may perhaps have meteorites from early Venus too, from before its atmosphere became as thick as it is now. Early Venus might have had oceans and might have been as habitable as early Earth and Mars. Also some scientists think it is possible that Venus remained habitable to life on its surface until at least 715 million years ago (see also NASA press release, and techy details in paper here). That would give many opportunities for life to be spread from Venus to Earth in giant impacts. Also if the Venus atmosphere only thickened up as recently as that, we should have meteorites from Venus on the Moon right through to that time, as a Chicxulub sized impact on Venus would then be large enough to send material to Earth and the Moon eventually (with escape velocity slightly less than for Earth).Perhaps Venus might have been habitable right through to the global resurfacing event 400 - 600 million years ago (or more generally, it could be anywhere from 200 million to 1 billion years ago), which took about 100 million years to complete. . It could have had a thin atmosphere much like Earth's until that upheaval which put so much carbon dioxide into its atmosphere that it transformed into its present state.Annabel Cartwright of Cardiff university - in her "Venus Hypothesis" - a non peer reviewed preprint on arXiv.org e-Print archive, goes so far as to suggest that large impacts on Venus combined with the global resurfacing event could have sent material all the way to Earth as recently as the Cambrian and Ordovician periods. She thinks that this might have been a time when it would be particularly easy for life to be transferred from Venus to Earth. Not directly through volcanic action but through large meteorites hitting Venus before its global resurfacing event, while it still had a relatively thin atmosphere and (perhaps) continental drift, before the stagnant lid formed that lead to the recent global resurfacing.Though her paper has not been published as a peer reviewed article, I think it's interesting with many stimulating ideas, to think over. So I felt it was worth summarizing here.She suggests that the increasing day length on Venus would have given an evolutionary advantage to life capable of extended deep hibernation states, high resistance to extreme temperatures and radiation. She cites examples of early life with these capabilities such as the tardigrades, nematodes and Triops cancriformis.Tardigrade (water bear) drying out and rehydrating. While dried out it is one of the hardiest of all multicellular lifeforms,, able to survive even the vacuum of space, extreme cold and heat, and quite high levels of ionizing radiation, a thousand times the levels that are fatal for humans. It can survive in the dormant state for at least a decade and is the top candidate for multicellular life that could be transferred on a meteorite.What about shock of ejection from a planet? Small things less than 100 microns across can survive, but in tests of impacts on a planet or the Moon, plant seeds break apart (for instance). So what about Tardigrades? They are complex multicellular creatures with around 40,000 cells. It turns out that resisting impact shock is another of their many talents! They survive impacts of 3.23 km / sec, the highest speeds tested in the experiment with shock pressures up to 7.548 GPa. After rehydration there were some tardigrades still swimming around :). Here is another experiment where they survive impacts of up to 5.49 km / sec. They can also survive accelerations of 16,000 g for one minute, in another experiment (this is different from an asteroid impact scenario though which involves accelerations up to tens of thousands of gs in 30 ms).So they might be pre-adapted, due to the increasing Venusian day length, to survive passage on a meteorite from Venus to Earth. Also life might have evolved more rapidly on Venus because of the higher levels of radiation there. She suggests this as a possible explanation for the species that arose during the Cambrian explosion with apparently no predecessors and only surviving for a short period of time on geological timescales. She also makes an interesting point that early Earth had connected seas, but early Venus might have had disconnected seas so permitting different forms of life to evolve in each one, so it might have had a lot more genetic diversity in its seas than Earth had, similarly to the way isolated islands on Earth have divergent populations of land animals.She suggests that periods of rapid increase in genetic diversity on Earth could be due to influxes of life on meteorites from Venus.You'd have a similar problem with meteorites from Venus as with the idea of panspermia from Earth to Mars, that the shock of ejection would be hard for life to survive. But the Venus escape velocity is 10.36 km / sec . The Earth escape velocity is 11.2 km / sec. So the shock of ejection would be less for Venus, though depending also on the thickness of its atmosphere. It would be easier for it to happen with the larger meteorites with a larger spall zone, but material still would be heavily shocked and the spall zone for a large meteorite is below the surface. It would be much easier if the meteorites were large enough to punch a hole in the Venus atmosphere, or if it had a very thin atmosphere, thinner than Earth's, for some reason. For more on the problems of transfer from Earth to Mars, see General case of transfer of life from Earth to Mars (above).If her hypothesis was right, then we'd expect to find evidence in life in meteorites from Venus on our Moon, from time periods on Venus as recent as the Cambrian explosion and the Ordovician period. We could then compare those with the life on meteorites from Earth at the same time and our fossil record.If the more generally accepted hypothesis is right that Venus was habitable to life and had a relatively thin atmosphere as recently as 715 million years ago, then we'd still expect to find many meteorites from Venus on the Moon up to that time and would probably find evidence of any life there too, including organics, and microscopic diatoms or the like and fragments of larger shells and other lifeforms.Search for past life from Mars - on the MoonThe Moon must have meteorites from Mars too, for us to pick up. See also section 3.1.1 of Back to the Moon: The Scientific Rationale for Resuming Lunar Surface Exploration. Even today, Earth gets around 500 meteorites from Mars that are as large as half a kilogram every year. though most fall in uninhabited areas, or the sea. The Moon also must have meteorites from Mars right through to the present. They may be easier to find there, without the erosion processes that quickly merge them into the landscape in most places on Earth.Jordi Guntierrez mentions this briefly in his paper too, he suggests that for present day meteorites they wouldn't have a fusion crust hardly any atmosphere to get through on the way from Mars to Earth, but would have a fusion crust from early on if the Mars atmosphere was thicker.Again the best place to look may be in the polar ice. The Moon must have numerous meteorites from Mars from the Late Heavy Bombardment particularly.WHAT ABOUT NATIVE LUNAR LIFE?But not native life, at least that’s unlikely unless it had a very fast early start there, or was seeded from Earth or elsewhere. This is another of my fun speculative sections, not meant as a scientific paper. Just something to ponder over.According to some calculations from volatiles that should have been emitted during the formation of the Mares - the “lunar seas” - vast plains of solidified lava - it should have had an atmosphere of around 1% of Earth normal around 3.5 billion years for up to 70 million years. It was thicker than the current Mars atmosphere, only marginally so, 1% of Earth normal, so could have done some weathering, and had water vapour and other gases. Deeper spots on the Moon would have had thicker atmosphere of course, as for Mars.There Ga means billion years (before present) and 987 Pascals are about 1% of Earth normal atmosphere.The amount of water would be quite substantial, enough, they think, to account for all the ice that our spacecraft have suggested may exist at the lunar poles, so making this one hypothesis for their origin. If only 0.1% of the volatiles released from the magma was retained at the poles, that would be 100 billion metric tons of water ice.An Atmosphere Around the Moon? NASA Research Suggests Significant Atmosphere in Lunar Past and Possible Source of Lunar Water - Astrobiology MagazinePaper hereThe modeled atmosphere consists mainly of carbon monoxide, some water vapour, hydrogen, and sulfur. The basalt itself has all the trace elements life needs. That leaves only nitrogen. They don’t say what the temperature would be as far as I could see, but it has to cool down enough for ice to form before the atmosphere dissipates.There would be some organics for it to use, from meteorite and comet impacts, though photosynthetic life could also make it in situ fixing carbon dioxide, if that was present (as seems likely, indeed, microbial communities could also include carbon monoxide oxidisers). Nitrogen would be in short supply, at least, not in the atmosphere, but again, perhaps it could be delivered on comets. After all the ice at the lunar poles is thought to have a fair bit of nitrogen now. By the LCROSS impact experiment. Relative to H2O at 100% they found H2S at 16.75%, NH3 at 6.03% SO2 at 3.19%, C2H4 at 3.12%, CO2 at 2.17%.Could there have been life on this very early Moon? After all, there are potential habitats for life on Mars, even with its very thin atmosphere (average 0.6% of Earth’s). By some of the same methods - life using 100% night time humidity, or in ice at the poles, in liquid water trapped beneath transparent ice warmed by the solid state greenhouse effect. Maybe seeded by life from elsewhere, e.g. early Earth?We know that life got off to an early start within a few hundred million years. But - there's a vast amount of complexity to build up, to get to DNA based life. So how long did that take? It must have got to RNA cells pretty quickly. Is 70 million years long enough?However whether that’s possible or not, 3.5 billion years ago would be well after the origins of life on Earth. There is clear fossil evidence from 3.5 billion years ago and some possible fossils from 3.77 billion years ago or earlier, as well as suggestive isotopic "Evidence for life on Earth before 3,800 million years ago - increased quantites of the isotopically light carbon 12 atom in apatite.There would be constant bombardment of Earth by huge meteorites up to hundreds of kilometers in diameter back then. So, if it has no indigenous life, this early Moon might well be seeded by life from early Earth. It could also be seeded by life from Mars, which was habitable for life earlier than Earth. Or indeed, Ceres, or Venus of course.Of course it doesn't mean life will happen there if it is suitable for life. Indeed quite possibly most places in our universe suitable for life are uninhabited.I haven’t seen that suggested anywhere else so it is just a very speculative suggestion of my own. If there was, then could it be trapped in the cold traps as organics preserved for billions of years at temperatures of liquid nitrogen?Anyway, if not native lunar life, there is a definite possibility of life from elsewhere in the solar ssytem, still preserved there for us to find.This answer originates as the section Search for life from Mars, Venus, or the Earth - on the Moon in Meteorites! in my online book “Touch Mars?”

Q. Were there any U.S. soldiers who claimed their children that they had with Vietnamese women in the Vietnam War? What happened to the ones that were left behind?A. Multiple articles regarding Amerasians treatment after the war, what led to the American Homecoming Act of 1987, and a look back 25 years later.40 years after the Vietnam war ended, the children of U.S. soldiers are looking for their dads.Legacies of warForty years after the fall of Saigon, soldiers’ children are still left behindPhotos by Linda DavidsonStories by Annie Gowen, Published: April 17, 2015Vo Huu Nhan was in his vegetable boat in the floating markets of the Mekong Delta when his phone rang. The caller from the United States had stunning news — a DNA database had linked him with a Vietnam vet believed to be his father.Nhan, 46, had known his father was an American soldier named Bob, but little else.“I was crying,” Nhan recalled recently. “I had lost my father for 40 years, and now I finally had gotten together with him.”But the journey toward their reconciliation has not been easy. News of the positive DNA test set in motion a chain of events involving two families 8,700 miles apart that is still unfolding and has been complicated by the illness of the veteran, Robert Thedford Jr., a retired deputy sheriff in Texas.When the last U.S. military personnel fled Saigon on April 29 and 30, 1975, they left behind a country scarred by war, a people uncertain about their future and thousands of their own children. These children — some half-black, some half-white — came from liaisons with bar girls, “hooch” maids, laundry workers and the laborers who filled sandbags that protected American bases.They are approaching middle age with stories as complicated as the two countries that gave them life. Growing up with the face of the enemy, they were spat on, ridiculed, beaten. They were abandoned, given away to relatives or sold as cheap labor. The families that kept them often had to hide them or shear off their telltale blond or curly locks. Some were sent to reeducation or work camps, or ended up homeless and living on the streets.They were called “bui doi,” which means “the dust of life.”Forty years later, hundreds remain in Vietnam, too poor or without proof to qualify for the program created by the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1987 that resettles the children of American soldiers in the United States.Now, an Amerasian group has launched a last-chance effort to reunite fathers and children with a new DNA database on a family heritage Web site. Those left behind have scant information about their GI dads — papers and photographs were burned as the Communist regime took hold, and memories faded. So positive DNA tests are their only hope.New season, fresh hopesMotorcycles and scooters crowd the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. (Photo by Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)Ho Chi Minh City in spring. The apricot flower trees, symbol of the spring festival of Tet, are in bloom. A never-ending parade of motorbikes swirls around traffic circles. High-end stores such as Gucci sparkle near chain restaurants such as KFC. There’s scant evidence of the U.S. military presence, save for a rusting helicopter in the yard of a museum devoted to communist glory.But family secrets are buried like land mines.Trista Goldberg, 44, is a Pilates instructor from New Jersey, proud to call herself Amerasian, and founder of a group called Operation Reunite. She was adopted by a U.S. family in 1974 and found her birth mother in 2001. Two springs ago, she arrived at a house in Ho Chi Minh City where 80 people had gathered to provide DNA samples. She hopes to use potential matches to help make the case for about 400 whose applications for U.S. visas are pending further verification.“With a twist of fate, I could have been one of the ones who stayed back,” she said.Operation Reunite Returns Amerasians to VietnamMore than 3,000 Vietnamese orphans were evacuated from Vietnam in the chaotic final days of war. The lives of the rest changed with the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1987, which allowed 21,000 Amerasians and more than 55,000 family members to settle in the United States.The “dust of life” suddenly became “gold children.” Rich Vietnamese paid to buy Amerasians, only to abandon them once they arrived in the United States, according to the former U.S. Marine and child psychiatrist Robert S. McKelvey, who wrote “The Dust of Life: America’s Children Abandoned in Vietnam.”In part because of such fraud, the United States tightened its screening procedures, and the number of immigrant visas issued dropped dramatically. Only 13 were issued last year.Nhan had traveled from his home in An Giang for Goldberg’s DNA collection session. He is a quiet man, a father of five with a third-grade education, a wide smile and ears that stick out slightly.His mother had told him he was the son of a soldier when he was about 10.“Why do kids tease me all the time? I get so upset, sometimes I want to hit them, ” Nhan recalled saying. “She paused for a while and told me I was a mixed kid. She looked sad, but my grandparents said they loved me the same. It didn’t matter.”After Nhan and the others gave DNA samples, they settled back to see whether this new technology would give them a chance at the old American dream.Making contactTop: Vo Huu Nhan, an Amerasian born to a Vietnamese mother and an American G.I. (Photo by Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)Bottom: Old photos of Bob Thedford as an officer in the Army during the late '60s. (Photo courtesy Vo Huu Nhan)In the fall, Bob Thedford’s wife, Louise, a genealogy buff, logged on to her account with Family Tree DNA, which is cooperating with Goldberg’s effort, and saw a surprising result. It was new information for her husband, a father-son link. The son was Nhan.Louise had long suspected that her husband might have had a child from his days as a military police officer in Vietnam in the late 1960s. She had found a picture of a Vietnamese woman tucked inside his wallet shortly after they wed.The news was more of a shock to their daughter, Amanda Hazel, 35, a paralegal from Fort Worth.“To be honest, the first thing I thought was, ‘Are you sure this isn’t a scam?’ ” Hazel recalled.But pictures of Nhan arrived a short time later. He was the image of his late grandfather, Robert Thedford Sr., a Navy veteran who had fought in World War II. “You look so much like your grandfather PawPaw Bob,” Bob told his son.Thedford, a strapping Tarrant County deputy sheriff known as “Red” for his auburn hair, had met Nhan’s mother while he was at Qui Nhon Air Base. His memories of her are hazy, and his family said he rarely spoke of the war.“He would never sit down and lament on it,” his stepson, John Gaines, recalled. “When I asked him, ‘Did you ever shoot someone?’ he said, ‘Yes, but you have to understand there are reasons behind that, and it’s part of war. I’m not going to sit here and explain to you what that’s like.’”As Thedford was teaching Hazel to swim and ride a bike in suburban Texas, Nhan was growing up on his grandparents’ pig farm, swimming in the river and getting caught stealing mangoes. The disparity in their lives was not lost on Thedford.“He just kept saying, ‘I didn’t know,’ ” Gaines said. “ ‘I didn’t know how to be there, or I would have been there. All I can tell you is I was surprised, and I hate finding out 45 years later.’ ”Tentative contacts followed, although Nhan speaks no English and does not have a computer. E-mails were exchanged through intermediaries, packages followed. Nhan sent sandals he had made and conical paddy hats; the Thedfords sent Nhan a $50 bill and Texas Rangers gear. “Is there anything you need?” Robert Thedford kept asking.Then there was the emotional first Skype call, when both men cried seeing each other for the first time.“He looked like me,” Nhan said after. “I felt like I connected with him right away.”But last August, Thedford, 67, who had previously been treated for skin cancer, fell ill again. The cancer had spread, and he had a series of operations, the most recent on April 3. As the Texas family rallied to care for him, Vietnam receded.‘My son in Vietnam’Dang Thi Kim Ngan, right, interprets for Vo Huu Nhan, center, as he Skypes with his half-sister Amanda Hazel. (Photo by Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)Recently, Nhan Skyped with Hazel from a dusty computer in the back of a friend’s sewing supply shop in Ho Chi Minh City. She spoke from her living room, her dogs running about.Nhan asked how his father was doing.“He’s doing good. He can sit up in a chair now. They’re working with him,” Hazel said. “I feel bad not connecting sooner, but Mom and Dad think about you and talk about you all the time.” Thedford had been showing pictures of Nhan to the nurses in the hospital and saying, “This is my son in Vietnam.”Nhan submitted the results of his DNA match to the U.S. Consulate in Ho Chi Minh City in December 2013, asking for a reconsideration. But he has not heard back. A State Department spokesman said that privacy laws prevent discussion of any case.Hazel says that the family is all for helping Nhan immigrate to the United States, even as she knows that the transition would be difficult. “It’s going to totally throw him for a loop,” she said.But for now, theirs is a story without an end, the way the war itself is a wound that never completely healed. The story keeps spiraling forward, like the DNA double helix that brought them together.Nga Ly Hien Nguyen in Vietnam and Magda Jean-Louis and Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.Amerasians in Saigon 1985 & 1987 including Kim NguyenJim LauriePublished on Feb 1, 2016Amerasian children were a fixture on the streets of Saigon from 1980 to 1987. Most had a very hard time; no parents and they were regarded as outcasts in society. Finally by 1988-1990, the US and Vietnamese governments agreed to allow nearly all to settle in the United States. Under the American Homecoming Act of 1988, about 23,000 Amerasians and 67,000 of their relatives entered the United States. These are excerpts of video shot in 1985 and 1987.Vietnam: A Tale of 'Miss Saigon,' Two Kims, Children of Dust and More Than 30 Years (huffingtonpost.com)Vietnam Legacy: Finding G.I. Fathers, and Children Left Behind (2013)SALTILLO, Miss. — Soon after he departed Vietnam in 1970, Specialist James Copeland received a letter from his Vietnamese girlfriend. She was pregnant, she wrote, and he was the father.He re-enlisted, hoping to be sent back. But the Army was drawing down and kept him stateside. By the time Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975, he had lost touch with the woman. He got a job at a plastics factory in northern Mississippi and raised a family. But a hard question lingered: did she really have his child?“A lot of things we did in Vietnam I could put out of my mind,” said Mr. Copeland, 67. “But I couldn’t put that out.”In 2011, Mr. Copeland decided to find the answer, acknowledging what many other veterans have denied, kept secret or tried to forget: that they left children behind in Vietnam.Their stories are a forgotten legacy of a distant war. Yet for many veterans and their half-Vietnamese children, the need to find one another has become more urgent than ever. The veterans are hitting their mid-60s and early 70s, many of them retired or infirm and longing to salve the scars of an old war. And for many of the offspring, who have overcome at least some of the hurdles of immigration, the hunger to know their American roots has only grown stronger.“I need to know where I come from,” said Trinh Tran, 46, a real estate agent in Houston who has searched in vain for her G.I. father. “I always feel that without him, I don’t exist.”By some estimates, tens of thousands of American servicemen fathered children with Vietnamese women during that long war. Some of the children were a result of long-term relationships that would be unimaginable to the veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where interaction with local people was minimal. Others were born of one-night stands. But few of the fathers ever met their offspring, and fewer still brought them home to America.After the war, those children — known as Amerasians — endured harsh discrimination and abject poverty in Vietnam, viewed as ugly reminders of an invading army. Shamed by reports of their horrible living conditions, Congress enacted legislation in 1987 giving Amerasians special immigration status. Since then, more than 21,000, accompanied by more than 55,000 relatives, have moved to the United States under the program, and several thousand more have come under other immigration policies.Many arrived expecting to be reunited with their American fathers. But the United States government did not help in that cause, and only a tiny fraction — perhaps fewer than 5 percent — ever found them.So many Amerasians continue to search, typically working with little more than badly translated names, half-forgotten memories and faded photographs.And some veterans are doing the same, driven by heartache, or guilt, to find sons and daughters. “It’s like the mother who gives up their kid for adoption,” said George Pettitt of Wales Center, N.Y. “You just never stop thinking about it.”Mr. Pettitt, 63, enlisted in the Army after dropping out of high school and was in Vietnam by age 19. During his year there, he developed a relationship with a Vietnamese woman who did laundry for soldiers. Soon she was pregnant.“I was taking comfort in having a girlfriend like that,” he said. “I never meant for her to get pregnant.”He returned home to western New York, lost touch with the woman, got a job driving trucks and raised a family. But when he retired for health reasons in 2000, he found himself haunted by memories of the child he left behind — a boy, he believes. He paid a man to look in Vietnam, but the trail went cold. This year, a woman in Virginia called to say she thought her husband might be his son. But a DNA test was negative.“I was hoping this was it,” he said. “I just feel so guilty about all this.”Yet against the odds and despite the many years, children and fathers sometimes find each other.Cuong Luu was born in Vietnam, the child of an American soldier who met his mother when she cleaned his apartment. The soldier left Vietnam before Mr. Luu was born, and his mother lost contact with him. Soon after, she married an American who worked for the military. He moved the family to the Virgin Islands when Mr. Luu was a toddler.Mr. Luu inherited many of his father’s features, and in the black neighborhood of St. Thomas where he grew up, he was taunted for being white. His mother also shunned him, he said, perhaps ashamed of the hard memories he evoked.At the age of 9, he was in a home for delinquent boys. By 17, he was living on the street, selling marijuana and smoking crack. At 20, he was in prison for robbing a man at gunpoint. When he got out, his half sister took him to Baltimore, where he resumed selling drugs.PhotoJames Copeland and Tiffany Nguyen, his daughter, who was born after he left Vietnam. Credit Lance Murphey for The New York TimesBut then he had a daughter with a girlfriend, and something inside him changed. “I worried I would just go to jail and never see her,” he said of his daughter, Cara, who is 4.Long plagued by questions about his identity, he decided he needed to find his biological father to set his life straight. “I wanted to feel more whole,” said Mr. Luu, 41. “I just wanted to see him with my own two eyes.”The quest became an obsession. Mr. Luu spent every night on his computer, hunting unsuccessfully until he realized he had spelled the name wrong: it was Jack Magee, not McGee.He discovered references to a Jack Magee on a veterans’ Web site and, through Facebook, tracked down a man who had served in the same unit. “What do you want from Jack Magee?” the man asked. “I just want a father,” Mr. Luu replied. “Your dad wants to talk to you,” the man wrote back not long after.Mr. Luu had his DNA tested, and it was a match. In November, Mr. Magee, a retired teacher from Southern California, visited Mr. Luu on his birthday. An awkward relationship, full of possibility but not untouched by resentment and wariness, was born.Mr. Magee now calls his son weekly, checking to make sure he is still working in his job cleaning hospital rooms in Baltimore. He also shipped a used Toyota Corolla from California to Mr. Luu, who had been commuting by bus.“I was stunned he was out there,” Mr. Magee, 75, said in an interview.Now that he has found his father, Mr. Luu said, he feels stronger. But the discovery, he has realized, has not solved his problems. What can a former felon do to make a better living? Go to college? Start a business? Drug dealing remains a powerful temptation.“I just wish I had met him before,” Mr. Luu said. “He could have taught me things.” " Recover the past" , Vietnam vets last battle to find his amerasian childBrian Hjort, a Danish man who has helped Mr. Luu and other Vietnamese track down their fathers, says Amerasians often have unrealistically high expectations for reunions with fathers, hoping they will heal deep emotional wounds. But the veterans they meet are often infirm or struggling economically. Sometimes the relationships are emotionally unfulfilling.“I try to tell them: I can’t guarantee love,” Mr. Hjort said. “I can only try to find your father.”Mr. Hjort, 42, is among a small coterie of self-trained experts who have helped Amerasians track down fathers, mostly pro bono. An industrial painter from Copenhagen, he first met Amerasians while traveling through Vietnam and the Philippines two decades ago and was struck by their desperate poverty.One asked him to find a friend’s father, and to his amazement he tracked the man down even though he had no knowledge of military records. News of Mr. Hjort’s success traveled rapidly through Amerasian circles, and he was soon besieged with pleas for help. Moved by the Amerasians’ suffering, he took on more cases, charging only the cost of his trips to Vietnam. He created a Web site, fatherfounded.org, that brought more requests than he could handle.Working in his spare time, he has found scores of fathers, he estimates. Some had died, and many others hung up on him. A few have threatened to sue him. But perhaps two dozen have accepted their children. And in recent years, veterans, too, have begun asking for help. James Copeland was one.In 2011, Mr. Copeland, by then retired, began reading about Amerasians’ miserable lives in Vietnam. Appalled, he decided to search for his own child.He found Mr. Hjort and sent him money to visit Vietnam. Armed with a few names and a crude map, Mr. Hjort found the village where Mr. Copeland had been based and tracked down the brother of an Amerasian woman who was living in America and who Mr. Hjort believed was Mr. Copeland’s daughter.Mr. Hjort sent a photograph of the woman and her mother to Mr. Copeland, and his heart jumped: he instantly recognized the mother as his old girlfriend. His hands were shaking with excitement as he dialed the daughter’s number and asked: “Is this Tiffany Nguyen?”In the coming days, he visited her, her mother and her three brothers in Reading, Pa., where she runs a nail salon at the Walmart. Ms. Nguyen and her three children spent Thanksgiving 2011 with him in Mississippi. For a time, they talked nightly, and she told him about how her mother had protected her from abuse in Vietnam, about their struggles to adapt to the United States, about how she had studied older men at the Walmart, wondering if one of them was her father.“There were a lot of years to cover,” Mr. Copeland said. “I can sleep a lot better now.”But the reunion has also brought him unexpected heartache. His wife became furious when she discovered that he had a Vietnamese daughter, and she demanded that he not visit her. He refused: Ms. Nguyen is his only biological child. After 37 years of marriage, he and his wife are separated and considering divorce, he said. His wife did not respond to efforts to reach her for comment.Mr. Copeland now helps Mr. Hjort contact veterans they believe are fathers of Amerasians. In his patient drawl, Mr. Copeland calmly tells them his story and urges them to confront the possibility that they, like him, have Vietnamese children.But if they dodge his calls or hang up, he continues to leave messages — with children, with spouses, on answering machines. They need to know, he said.“Some people, they just want to move on and forget it,” he said. “I don’t see how they can do it. But there’s a lot of them that I’m sure that’s the case. They just want to forget.”Father searching for amerasian child 2012-13, 12 casesExploring Stories Behind the Amerasian Experience After the Vietnam War | PBS EducationSEPTEMBER 27, 2017Before beginning this project, I did not know very much about the Vietnam War. Events such as the Tet Offensive and Operation Babylift were events I had heard about, but my knowledge of the events was vague. Since my parents lived through the war as children and came to America as refugees, I have always wanted to learn more about the people and history behind the war. It was important to me to discover what my parents experienced.Vietnamese Amerasians were merely children during the post Vietnam War era. Their American servicemen fathers left Vietnam. Their Vietnamese mothers would often abandon them or send them to orphanages. They were discriminated against and abused due to their appearance. This treatment is only some of what they had to go through when while still living in Vietnam.A Second Chance in the U.S.Fortunately, Robert J. Mrazek, a U.S. Congressman, flew to Vietnam after hearing about an Amerasian boy, named Le Van Minh, who needed medical help.. After seeing the horrid living conditions the Amerasian children endured and how they wanted to “go to the land of [their] father,” Mrazek decided to find a solution. He would eventually come to author the Amerasian Homecoming Act. As a result, the Vietnamese Amerasians, along with their families, were allowed a second chance at life and immigrated to the U.S.Even though I am of Vietnamese descent, I initially did not have any knowledge of Vietnamese Amerasians and their incredible stories. After intensive research and speaking to my parents, who interacted with Amerasians while they were still living in Vietnam, I realized that they had suffered way too much to not be mentioned in a history textbook. Amerasians also had a great impact on both the Vietnamese and American people. Almost 100,000 people immigrated from Vietnam to the U.S. and they are now living in better conditions, becoming productive and contributing members of society.A School Project Inspires a Deeper DiveAlthough creating a National History Day project at my school is part of a class assignment for juniors, I created a project as an extracurricular activity when I was a sophomore. The History Day program provides students with the opportunity to dive into a topic and dig deeper than a student would during an average history course.To begin my project, I spent numerous hours researching. I gathered background information on Vietnamese Amerasians and the impact of the Amerasian Homecoming Act. I visited the Watson Library at the University of Kansas, where I found numerous newspaper articles and books from their databases and library. I also researched in other libraries. I contacted two Vietnamese Amerasians that came to America through Operation Babylift and the Amerasian Homecoming Act. Then, I had to write my script, a 500 word process paper with an annotated bibliography, and create my documentary.A Homecoming Act DocumentaryI thought that the topic of U.S. Congressman Robert Mrazek’s stand for Amerasians could be expressed most clearly through a documentary. I used iMovie to create my project and found video clips, images, and music that complemented the information provided. Through this documentary, viewers are enlightened about the agony Amerasians went through and the positive results from Mrazek’s Amerasian Homecoming Act.After working on this project, my determination to learn more about the Vietnam War grew stronger. Meeting Amerasians and hearing their stories made me want to continue to deepen my understanding about their struggles. Today, since most Americans do not know about the Vietnam War, Amerasians and the impacts of the Amerasian Homecoming Act, I feel like it is important topic for young people to examine.Kim Vu is a junior in Seaman High School in Topeka, Kansas. She is currently involved in band, Math Club, Key Club, SHARP Committee, Scholar’s Bowl, Student Council, Writing Center, and Track and Field inside of school. Outside of school, she is involved in the youth folk choir and volunteer at my church and at food banks. Kim won National History's Day Vietnam War Era Prize with this documentary.KIM VU High School StudentAmerasian PhotosThe American Homecoming Act or Amerasian Homecoming Act, was an Act of Congress giving preferential immigration status to children in Vietnamborn of U.S. fathers. The American Homecoming Act was written in 1987, passed in 1988, and implemented in 1989.The act increased Vietnamese Amerasian immigration to the U.S. because it allowed applicants to establish mixed race identity by appearance alone. Additionally, the American Homecoming Act allowed the Amerasian children and their immediate relatives to receive refugee benefitsAbout 23,000 Amerasians and 67,000 of their relatives entered the United States under this act.While the American Homecoming Act was the most successful program in moving Vietnamese Amerasian children to the United States, the act was not the first attempt by the U.S. government. Additionally the act experienced flaws and controversies over the refugees it did and did not include since the act only allowed Vietnamese Amerasian children.BackgroundIn April 1975, the U.S.-backed government of South Vietnam fell to North Vietnamese forces. Refugees from Vietnam started to arrive in the United States under U.S. government programs. In 1982, the U.S. Congress passed the Amerasian Immigration Act (PL 97-359). The law prioritized U.S. immigration to children fathered by U.S. citizens including from Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand. However, the law did not provide immigration to mothers or half-siblings, only to Amerasian children. Amerasians would generally have to coordinate with their American fathers in order to obtain a visa. This provided a challenge for many since some fathers did not know they had children or the fathers may not be claiming the children. If the Amerasian children did not have documentation from the American father, then they could be examined for “American” physical features by a group of doctors. Additionally, since the U.S. and Vietnam’s governments did not have diplomatic relations, the law could not be applied to Vietnamese Amerasian children. Essentially the Amerasian Immigration Act did little for Amerasian children and even less for Vietnamese Amerasian children.As a way to address Vietnamese Amerasian children, the U.S. government permitted another route for Vietnamese-born children of American soldiers to the United States. The children would be classified as immigrants, but would also be eligible to receive refugee benefits. The U.S. and Vietnam governments established the Orderly Departure Program (ODP). The program is housed in the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). The ODP created a system where South Vietnamese soldiers and others connected to the U.S. war effort could emigrate from Vietnam to the United States. Initially the Amerasian children had to have documentation from their American fathers to be issued a visa, however the program eventually expanded to individuals that did not have firm documentation. The Orderly Departure Program moved around 6,000 Amerasians and 11,000 relatives to the United States.EnactmentOn August 6, 1987, Rep. Robert J. Mrazek [D-NY-3] introduced the Amerasian Homecoming Bill (H.R. 3171). The bill was cosponsored by 204 U.S. representatives (154 Democrats, 49 Republicans, and 1 Independent). In 1988, the U.S. Congress passed the Amerasian Homecoming Act (PL 100-200). The law took effect on March 21, 1988 and allowed Vietnamese Amerasians born January 1, 1962 through January 1, 1976 to apply for immigrant visas until March 21, 1990. Additionally the legislation removed immigration quotas and reduced legal barriers for Vietnamese Amerasians’ immigration. As a result of the act around 20,000 Amerasian children left Vietnam. Prior to the Amerasian Homecoming Act, many Amerasian children faced prejudice in Vietnam sometimes referred to as bui doi (“the dust of life” or “trash”). However, after the act many of these children would be called “golden children” since not only could the Amerasian children move to the United States, but so could their families. The act allowed the spouse, child, mother, or the next of kin of the Amerasian child to emigrate. The act was significant, because it allowed applicants to establish mixed race identity by appearance alone.Immigration processThe American Homecoming Act operated through the Orderly Departure Program in the respective U.S. embassies. U.S. Embassy officials would conduct interviews for Amerasians children and their families. The interviews were intended to prove whether or not the child’s father was a U.S. military personnel. Under the American Homecoming Act, Vietnamese Amerasian children did not have to have documentation from their American fathers; however, if they did their case would be processed quicker. The approval rating for Amerasian applicants was approximately 95 percent. The approved applicants and their families would go through a medical exam. The medical exam was less extensive than other immigration medical exams. If they passed, the U.S. would notify Vietnamese authorities and would process them for departure. The Amerasians would then be sent to the Philippines for a 6-month English language (ESL) and cultural orientation (CO) program. Once the Amerasians arrived in the United States they would be resettled by private voluntary agencies contracted with the U.S. State Department. Some Amerasians gave accounts that some “fake families” approached them as a way to immigrate to the United States. The U.S. Attorney General in conversation with the U.S. Secretary of State submitted program reports to the U.S. Congress every three years.ControversiesWhile the American Homecoming Act was the most successful measure by the United States to encourage Amerasian immigration, the act faced controversies. A primary issue was the act only applied to Amerasian children born in Vietnam. The American Homecoming Act excluded Korea, the Philippines, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. While Amerasian children from outside Vietnam could immigrate to the United States, they could do so only if their fathers claimed them. Most fathers did not recognize their children, especially if they were born to sex workers. In 1993, a class action lawsuit was filed in the International Court of Complaints to establish Filipino Amerasian children’s rights to assistance. The court ruled against the children, stating they were the products of sexual services provided to U.S. service personnel. Since prostitution is illegal, there could be no legal claim for the Filipino Amerasian children. Amerasian advocacy groups are actively attempting to gain recognition for Amerasian children through legal and legislative measures.There were other concerns facing the American Homecoming Act by the Vietnamese immigrants. Some accounts include a Vietnamese woman who attempted to claim American citizenship for her Amerasian son, but the father denied the relationship and responsibility by calling her a prostitute. Since sex workers were largely excluded, many children were unable to participate in the program. In the 1970s, the U.S. cut refugee cash assistance and medical aid to only eight months. Many Amerasian children account of their struggles in public school and very few attended higher education.Amerasian children who stayed in their respective countries found difficulties. Many of the children faced prejudice since their fair skin or very dark skin, blue eyes, or curly black hair would quickly identify them as Amerasian. Additionally the children faced judgment from the new socialist Vietnamese officials and other neighbors since their features positioned them as reminders of the “old enemy.”Amerasian Homecoming Act – 25 Years LaterThe Amerasian Homecoming Act, which passed into law in December 1987 and went into effect a few months later, began with a photojournalist, a homeless boy in Vietnam, and four high school students in Long Island, New York. Twenty five years later, almost 100,000 people have immigrated from Vietnam to the U.S. as a result of the AHA.First, a bit of background. One of the great tragedies of the Vietnam War is the story of the Amerasians–children of U.S. servicemen and Vietnamese women. There are tens of thousands of such children. In Vietnam, they were known as “children of the dust” because they were considered as insignificant as specks of dust, and many (if not most) suffered discrimination, abuse, poverty, and homelessness. Although the fathers of these children were United States citizens, the children did not qualify to immigrate to the U.S. The situation was complicated by the absence of diplomatic relations between the government of the United States and the government of Vietnam. Ten years after the war, the situation for the Amerasians seemed hopeless. A 2009 article from Smithsonian Magazine describes what happened next:In October 1985, Newsday photographer Audrey Tiernan, age 30, on assignment in Ho Chi Minh City, felt a tug on her pant leg. “I thought it was a dog or a cat,” she recalled. “I looked down and there was [Le Van] Minh. It broke my heart.” Minh, with long lashes, hazel eyes, a few freckles and a handsome Caucasian face, moved like a crab on all four limbs, likely the result of polio. Minh’s mother had thrown him out of the house at the age of 10, and at the end of each day his friend, Thi, would carry the stricken boy on his back to an alleyway where they slept. On that day in 1985, Minh looked up at Tiernan with a hint of a wistful smile and held out a flower he had fashioned from the aluminum wrapper in a pack of cigarettes. The photograph Tiernan snapped of him was printed in newspapers around the world. The next year, four students from Huntington High School in Long Island saw the picture and decided to do something. They collected 27,000 signatures on a petition to bring Minh to the United States for medical attention.They asked Tiernan and their congressman, Robert Mrazek, for help.Mrazek began making phone calls and writing letters. Several months later, in May 1987, he flew to Ho Chi Minh City. Mrazek had found a senior Vietnamese official who thought that helping Minh might lead to improved relations with the United States, and the congressman had persuaded a majority of his colleagues in the House of Representatives to press for help with Minh’s visa.Minh came to the U.S., where he still lives. but once he got to Vietnam, the Congressman realized that many thousands of Amerasian children were living in Vietnam, often in terrible conditions. Congressman Mrazek resolved to help these children. The result was the Amerasian Homecoming Act, which went into effect in early 1988.The AHA allowed Amerasians to come to the United States as lawful permanent residents. They are not considered refugees, but they do receive benefits (such as financial assistance and housing) normally reserved for refugees. In an important way, the law was quite succcesful–as a result of the AHA, approximately 25,000 Amerasians and about 70,000 of their family members immigrated to the United States.However, the law was not a success by all measures. For one thing, not all Amerasians in Vietnam learned about the AHA, and so many people who might have qualified to leave Vietnam were unable to do so.Another problem was fraud. One type of fraud involved people who claimed to be Amerasian, but who were not (there was no easy way to tell who was an Amerasian, and many decisions were made based on the person’s physical appearance). However, the more pervasive problem of fraud involved “fake families.” These were people who attached themselves to the Amerasian immigrants’ cases in order to come with them to the U.S. In many cases, the Amerasians agreed to this fraud because the fake families would pay the Amerasians’ expenses. Without this assistance, the Amerasians could not have afforded to immigrate. The extent of the fraud is unknown, but a November 1992 GAO report found that in 1991, about 20% of applicants were rejected for fraud. By 1992, 80% of applicants were rejected for fraud.A final problem–though perhaps this is not a problem with the AHA itself–is that many Amerasians had a tough time adjusting to life in the United States. A 1991-92 survey of 170 Vietnamese Amerasians found that some 14 percent had attempted suicide; 76 percent wanted, at least occasionally, to return to Vietnam. As one advocate put it, “Amerasians had 30 years of trauma, and you can’t just turn that around in a short period of time.”Of course, Amerasians did far better here than they could have in Vietnam, but given their difficult lives back home, the adjustment was often not easy. According to the Encyclopedia of Immigration:In general, the Amerasians who came to the United States with their mothers did the best in assimilating to American society. Many faced great hardships, but most proved resilient and successful. However, only 3 percent of them managed to contact their American fathers after arriving in the United States. By 2009, about 50 percent of all the immigrants who arrived under the law had become U.S. citizens.Now, Amerasians host black tie galas to celebrate their success as a unique immigrant community. And even in Vietnam, where they were vilified for many years, negative feelings towards Amerasians have faded.Finally, on a personal note, my first job out of college was for a social service agency that did refugee resettlement, and so I worked with Amerasians (and others) for a few years in the early 1990s. Of the populations we served, it seemed to me that the Amerasians had been the most severely mistreated. Many were illiterate in Vietnamese and spoke no English. They were physically unhealthy, and they had a hard time adjusting. Twenty five years after the AHA, it seems that Amerasians are finally achieving a measure of success in the United States. Their long journey serves as a reminder that persecuted people need time to become self sufficient. But the Amerasians–like other refugee groups–are well on their way to fully integrating into American society.The Children They Left BehindChildren of the Vietnam War (smithonianmag.com)Vietnamese Amerasians in America : Asian-NationVietnamese Find No Home Here in Their Fathers' Land (NYT 1991)1989 The Dust of Life: The Legal and Political Ramifications of the Continuing Vietnamese Amerasian Problem (elibrary.law.psu.edu)They came here as refugees. Now the U.S. may be deporting some Vietnamese nationals.Vietnamese deportees and Amerasians Thanh Hung Bui , from left, and Cuong Pham, from center, speak to U.S. lawyer and Vietnamese-American Tin Nguyen at a cafe in the suburbs of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam on April 19, 2018.James Pearson / ReutersA few days before Christmas last year, Cuong Pham boarded a plane in Texas to fly to his home country of Vietnam, he said.He had last visited the country about a decade before, but this time, Pham wouldn't be returning to the U.S., where his wife and three children live. He was being deported.Pham didn’t want to go back, he said, “because all my life is in the U.S. It's not here.”I want to go back to my family, my wife and children…. I don’t even know what I’m going to do next.Pham was one of a small number of Vietnamese nationals who were deported last December despite a bilateral agreement that apparently excludes them from being deported, according to several immigration and civil rights advocates.In 2008, the U.S. and Vietnam signed a repatriation agreement that explicitly excludes Vietnamese nationals who arrived in the U.S. before July 12, 1995 — the date the two countries reestablished diplomatic relations — from being subject to deportation. Many of those who arrived before that date were refugees of the Vietnam War.But civil rights and immigration groups say they believe that seven Vietnamese nationals who arrived in the U.S. before 1995 were deported late last year and early this year.“Many of them have never been back to Vietnam and many of them don’t have any family there,” Phi Nguyen — litigation director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta (Advancing Justice-Atlanta), which earlier this year filed a lawsuit challenging the detention of Vietnamese nationals not covered under the 2008 agreement — said. “The idea of being returned to a place that they are no longer connected to is causing a lot of fear in the community, especially when people who are in this situation have felt safe for the last several years and have been able to rebuild their life here and create families here.”'AMERASIAN' HOMECOMINGPham, 47, was born in Vietnam and grew up there until he was 20 years old, immigrating to the United States in 1990, he said. The son of a U.S. serviceman, Pham said he came to the U.S. under the Amerasian Homecoming Act, a law that allows some Vietnamese nationals whose fathers were U.S. citizens as well as their next of kin to immigrate to the U.S.Pham received his final order of removal in 2009 following two convictions, he said. In 2000, he was convicted of indecent assault and battery of children under 14, a sex crime. In 2007, he was convicted of driving under the influence.Vietnamese deportee and Amerasian Cuong Pham , 47, who was deported from the U.S., poses outside his former house, where he lived before he fled to the U.S., in central Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam on April 20, 2018.Kham / ReutersSince arriving in Vietnam, Pham has settled in a rural area of the country he described as a “jungle” where there is no running water. He said he has had difficulty in securing a job over the last four-and-a-half months as employers have rejected his inquiries based on his multiracial status. His wife has provided him with some financial assistance, but is also working to support their three children.“For me, right now it’s a very, very hard time,” he said by phone from Vietnam. “I want to go back to my family, my wife and children…. I don’t even know what I’m going to do next.”Reuters last month reported that former U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Ted Osius said a “small number” of people protected by the repatriation agreement have been sent back.Osius did not respond to a request for comment.As Cambodian deportations resume, community looks for ways to copeImmigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesperson Brendan Raedy said in an email that “both countries maintain and continue to discuss their respective legal positions relative to Vietnamese citizens who departed Vietnam for the United States prior to July 12, 1995.”The U.S. Department of State did not directly address the deportations when contacted by NBC News. Department spokesperson Ambrose Sayles said that the removal of aliens subject to a final order of removal, particularly those who pose a danger to national security or public safety, is a top priority for the U.S. government.“We continue to work closely with Vietnamese authorities to address this issue. ... The U.S. Government and the Vietnamese Government continue to discuss their respective positions relative to Vietnamese citizens who departed Vietnam for the United States,” Sayles said in an email.'IT'S ENTIRELY UP TO VIETNAM'Bill Ong Hing, a professor of law at the University of San Francisco who specializes in immigration law and policy, said that agreements such as the one between the U.S. and Vietnam that should exempt certain individuals from deportation are not law, but rather serve as guidelines that don't necessarily need to be followed.“In spite of the agreement, it's entirely up to Vietnam,” he said. “What usually happens is that the receiving country is not willing to take the people. But if the receiving country is willing to take the person, then there's not much that can be done about that.”A receiving country could be pressured into accepting or decide to accept deportees for various reasons, Hing noted.'Never too late to change': In deportation limbo, Tung Nguyen wants to help fellow felonsHe said it has been and remains uncommon for the repatriation of individuals protected under such agreements to be deported. Whether or not this trend continues is dependent on the Trump administration and ICE offices that prioritize which individuals to deport, he said.As of December 2017, there were more than 8,600 Vietnamese nationals residing in the United States subject to a final order of removal, 7,821 of who have criminal convictions, according to ICE. As of April 12, ICE has removed 76 Vietnamese nationals to Vietnam in fiscal year 2018 and had 156 Vietnamese nationals in detention.Raedy said that in calculating these figures, ICE does not track the year that immigrants with final orders of removal came to the United States.In fiscal years 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017, the United States deported a total of 186 Vietnamese nationals, according to ICE data.Vietnamese deportee and Amerasian Cuong Pham , 47, who was deported from the U.S., uses his mobile phone while having a coffee in central Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam on April 20, 2018.Kham / ReutersNguyen, the litigation director, said it is uncertain whether this is the first time Vietnamese nationals who arrived prior to 1995 have been deported, but that it is the first time her organization is aware of an effort to deport the individuals in large numbers since the 2008 agreement.Despite the group that has been deported, it does not appear as though Vietnam is willing to accept all pre-1995 Vietnamese nationals who have final orders of removal, Nguyen said.The lawsuit filed by Advancing Justice-Atlanta — along with Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Los Angeles, Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus, and the law firm Reed Smith LLP — alleges that at least 45 pre-1995 Vietnamese nationals are being detained without due process.It also stated that "the U.S. government claims that Vietnam is now 'willing to consider' repatriation of Vietnamese who came to the United States before July 12, 1995.”The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vietnam did not respond to a request for comment.Nonprofits sue over immigration detention of Vietnamese nationals who came as refugeesDeportations of the seven pre-1995 Vietnamese nationals follow detentions in the community that took place last year.In early 2017, community organizations sent out an alert following the detention of about 40 Vietnamese nationals, Nancy Nguyen — the executive director of of the nonprofit VietLead, who is unrelated to Phi Nguyen — said.Pham was among those redetained early last year.The roundups prompted VietLead and several other groups to organize visits in November and December 2017 to a detention center in Georgia, Nancy Nguyen said. Through these visits, the organizations found that both pre- and post-1995 Vietnamese were being detained for prolonged periods of time. They also learned of six pre-1995 Vietnamese who had been deported.Phi Nguyen said ICE’s routine practice for decades was to release pre-1995 Vietnamese immigrants within 90 days of their order of removal because the agency knew it could not deport them.The idea of being returned to a place that they are no longer connected to is causing a lot of fear in the community.But beginning in March 2017, ICE began re-arresting those nationals, the lawsuit said. In March and late October to early November, detainees arrested from across the country were sent to detention centers to be interviewed by the Vietnamese Consulate, the suit alleges.A possible victory came on April 17 for some Vietnamese class members represented in the lawsuit when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a provision in a federal law that makes it easier to deport immigrants convicted of certain crimes.“If someone got their deportation order based on one of the crimes covered, then they have the ability to re-visit their removal order,” Phi Nguyen noted.She added that the court's decision will have an impact on class members, but that their cases still need to be examined more closely.“The U.S. not following the agreement is just another sign of it breaking rules and breaking our families apart,” Nancy Nguyen said. “As an organization, we’re working to hold the U.S. accountable to its promises.”Once shunned by many, Vietnamese Amerasians now celebrate their heritage (a San Jose gala in 2008). At a similar gathering, many in the audience wept when an Amerasian family that had just arrived in the United States was introduced. (Catherine Karnow)Read more: Children of the Vietnam WarChildren of Vietnam War servicemen seek U.S. citizenshipRandy Tran walked quickly past the majestic domes and marble statues of Capitol Hill, looking for the Cannon House Office building and the people he believed could help him.Tran, a Vietnamese pop singer who lives in a Bay Area suburb and sleeps on a friend's couch, flew 2,900 miles to be here. He rehearsed what he wanted to say. His English was not perfect. He was afraid he would have just a few minutes to make his case.He had a 3 p.m. appointment in the office of a Wisconsin congressman. He was not exactly sure what the congressman did, but he was certain that this was a powerful man who could help untangle a political process that had ensnared him and thousands like him.Tran came to Washington on behalf of abandoned children of American soldiers and Vietnamese women, born during the Vietnam War and, like him, seeking citizenship in the country their fathers fought for.Called Amerasians, many were left to grow up in the rough streets and rural rice fields of Vietnam where they stood out, looked different, were taunted as "dust of life." Most were brought to the United States 20 years ago after Congress passed the Amerasian Homecoming Act, which allowed the children of American soldiers living in Vietnam to immigrate. But citizenship was not guaranteed, and today about half of the estimated 25,000 Amerasians living in the U.S. are resident aliens.Tran lives in Hayward and travels the country crooning pop songs to Vietnamese fans at restaurants and concert halls. But he feels unsettled."I feel like I belong nowhere," said Tran, whose father was an African American whose name he likely will never know, but who gave him the mocha-colored skin so different from other Vietnamese."If I go to Little Saigon, they say, 'Are you Vietnamese? You look black.' If I go to the American community, they say, 'You're not one of us. You're Vietnamese.' "But most wrenching for Tran is his lack of citizenship, a constant reminder of being an outsider in what he considers his fatherland."Our fathers served for the country, fought for freedom," Tran said. "I am not a refugee, but I am being treated as one. We are Americans."Tran and 21 other Amerasians flew to Washington, D.C., for three days in July to lobby for the Amerasian Paternity Act. It would give Amerasians born during the Vietnam and Korean wars automatic citizenship, rather than requiring them to pass tests in English.Most of them had never been to Washington. Some purchased their first suits for the trip. Some spoke no English at all.Tran does not know his age. On paper he is 34, but he guesses he is closer to 37.His mother left him in an orphanage in Da Nang when he was days old. A few years later, a woman in a nearby village adopted him to help care for her cows. She refused to let him call her "mother."The neighbors gawked at his dark skin; the village children yanked his curly hair. At night he would dream that his hair had turned straight and that he could pour a liquid over his body to turn his face pale. He would hide behind the bamboo mat he slept on."They looked at us like we were wild animals, not people," Tran said.When the Homecoming Act passed in 1988, thousands of Vietnamese who wanted to escape the Communist government used the Amerasians as a device to flee. At 17, Tran was sold to a family for three gold bars. When the family got to America, they asked Tran to leave their home. He moved in with a friend's family.Like Tran, many Amerasians lacked the English skills, education and family connections that had helped other Vietnamese refugees assimilate. Many did not attend school in Vietnam and arrived in America illiterate. Many migrated to Vietnamese communities where they were once again shunned. Some turned to drugs or gangs.They received eight months of government assistance, including healthcare, English lessons and some job training. But the government did not help Amerasians locate their fathers, and funding for the program ended in 1995.In Washington, Tran and the other Amerasians crowded into a friend's house. There was Vivian Preziose from Queens, whose father brought her to the U.S. when she was 10. There was Jimmy "Nhat Tung" Miller from Seattle, who found his father a couple of years before the man died. There was Huy Duc Nguyen from Dallas, whose only clue about his father is that his last name sounds something like "Sheffer."They mapped out their plans. Preziose passed out 435 folders containing a letter she wrote. The next day they would deliver a folder to every congressional office. They also had appointments on Capitol Hill, so they rehearsed what they would say.Some stumbled over their words. Preziose encouraged them to speak from their hearts. Nguyen reminded them not to wear jeans. Tran advised them to speak slowly.A year ago, few of the Amerasians knew one another. That changed when Nguyen went to a screening of a documentary about Amerasians stuck in Vietnam and met others like him. They talked about helping those still in Vietnam and started reaching out to Amerasians across the country. They knew of Tran from his singing.Tran urged them to lobby for the citizenship bill, sponsored by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose). In September 2007, they formed the Amerasian Fellowship Assn., which now has 5,000 members.They had grown up haunted by a raw sense of being thrown away by their parents. Now mostly in their 30s and 40s, they came together for political reform, and along the way formed a community for those who felt invisible.The day after they handed out the folders, Tran anxiously waited on the marble steps of the Cannon building for his team to arrive.By the time they got to Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner's office (R-Wisconsin), they were five minutes late.They met a man in a tan suit with a faint smile.Tran introduced himself and began describing the difficulties faced by Amerasians. Many cannot speak English, he said, making it difficult to pass the citizenship test.The meeting lasted less than 25 minutes -- not enough time for Tran to say that he was not allowed to go to school in Vietnam, that while he tended to the cows he would peer through the schoolhouse windows at the students learning to read.Tran thought the man seemed confused why they were there. But he promised to do what he could to help.It wasn't until the man handed out his business card that Tran realized he wasn't talking to the congressman from Wisconsin. He was talking to a staffer."I didn't know who he was," Tran said. "I just knew we wanted to meet him. I wanted to tell our story."There is a lot Tran does not understand. He's not sure which of the two houses of Congress the bill is stuck in or why it is taking so long to become law. When he and other Amerasians met with Lofgren in the Capitol building, he thought they were in the White House.Lofgren warned the group that it was unlikely the bill would pass this year. But she promised to reintroduce it next year.Some of the Amerasians decided to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, believing the names of their fathers might be inscribed on the wall.Tran decided not to go. He has no clues as to who his father is. When Tran walked past an older black man on the street, he turned and looked.He still wonders why his mother left him to suffer in Vietnam. Once, it was a source of deep anger. But his fury turned to sympathy when he learned about the harsh conditions during the war, the stigma of having a child out of wedlock with an American.Perhaps she gave him away hoping he would have a better life. He once wrote a song called "After the War." When he performs it before Vietnamese audiences, they are often brought to tears.Tran later wrote an e-mail to the staffer. He mistakenly identified the man as "Mrs." He also sent along an English translation of the lyrics of "After the War."He has yet to hear back. But he has faith that America will come through, [email protected]

The Pious Cause Narrative claims the North’s anti-slavery was motivated by a moral humanitarian concern for the black race. Hear the words of the movers and shakers in the antebellum North:“By God, sir, men born and nursed of white women are not going to be ruled by men who were brought up on the milk of some damn Negro wench!” Congressman David Wilmont of Pennsylvania. Famous for the Wilmont Proviso.“The dark man, the black man declines, it will happen by and by that the black man will only be destined for museums like the DoDo.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Northern writer, abolitionist, and humanitarian. Expressing his desire that blacks “die out.”“Southerners have retarded progress because of the direct influence of so large a population of half barbarous Africans interspersed among them, GT and who had instructed them in the structures and principles of African despotism.” Thomas Goodwin, Northern author and abolitionist.“I’ve heard you have abolitionists here, we have a few in Illinois and we shot one the other day.” Abraham Lincoln, 9/1848. Spoken in a jocular tone revealing his disdain for abolitionists.“Canada is just to our North, and offers a fine market for wool.” Gov of Conn. William Alfred Buckingham. His response to the need to take in black war contrabands.“There is in the great masses of the people a natural and proper loathing of the negro, which forbids contact with him as with a leper.” Chicago Times.“Confine the negro to the smallest possible area, hem him in, coup him up, sloth him off, preserve just so much of North America as it possible for the white man and to free institutions.“ The Atlantic Monthly.“I went through the State of Illinois for the purpose of getting signers to a petition, asking the Legislature to repeal the Testimony Law, so as to permit colored men to testify against white men. I went to prominent Republicans, and among others to Abraham Lincoln and Lyman Trumbull, and neither of them dared to sign that petition to give me the right to testify in a court of justice! If we sent our children to school, Abraham Lincoln would kick them out, in the name of Republicanism and anti-slavery!… I care nothing about that anti-slavery which wants to make the Territories free, while it is unwilling to extend to me, as a man, in the free States, all the rights of a man.” H. Ford Douglas, free negro abolitionist in Chicago, Illinois.“The white man needs this continent to labor upon. His head is clear, his arm is strong, and his necessities are fixed. He must and will have it. To secure it, he will oblige the Government of the United States to abandon intervention in favor of slave labor and slave States, and go backward forty years, and resume the original policy of intervention in favor of free labor and free States...Mr. President, this expansion of the empire of free white men is to be conducted through the process of admitting new States, and not other- wise. The white man, whether you consent or not, will make the States to be admitted, and he will make them all free States. Sec of State William Seward, Speech before the US Senate 3/3/1858.“The negro is a foreign and feeble element like the Indians, incapable of assimilation, a pitiful exotic unnecessarily and unwisely transplanted into our field, and which it is unprofitable to cultivate at the cost of the desolation of the native vineyard.” William Seward, in a speech at an 1860 political rally.“In the State where I live we do not like Negroes. We do not disguise our dislike. As my friend from Indiana (Mr. Wright) said yesterday, ‘The whole people of the Northwestern States are, for reasons, whether correct or not, opposed to having man among them, and that principle or prejudice has been engraved in the legislation of nearly all the Northwestern States.’ “ Ohio Senator John Sherman, on April 2, 1862. “Keeping slaves out of the West will confine the negro to the South.” Abolitionist Charles Elliot of Massachusetts.This is just a sampling of Northern quotes, revealing that “anti-slavery” in the North meant “anti-black.” A neutral anti-slavery Englishman you may have heard of had this to say about Northern “anti-slavery” -“I take the facts of the American quarrel to stand thus. Slavery has in reality nothing on earth to do with it…that the North hates the negro, and until it was convenient to make a pretense that sympathy with him was the cause of the war, it hated the Abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale.” Charles Dickens, 1862.Forgotten Connections to Slavery: the North’s Dirty Little Secret.Several years ago the Hartford Connecticut Courant published a story titled “Aetna Regrets Insuring Slaves”. Courant’s reporters began to investigate the newspapers role in slavery. The Sunday magazine staff investigated slavery roots in the northern states and found “ what appeared to be unshakable proof of Connecticuts complicity in slavery. What’s more, it quickly became obvious that our economic links to slavery were deeply entwined with our religious, political and educational institutions. Slavery was a part of the social contract in Connecticut. It was the air that we breathed”.“For most Northern whites in the 1850’s, the desire to end slave labor did not equate with a belief in racial equality. Thus blacks might be freed, eventually, but they would not be welcome to remain.” In Connecticut and New York state laws enlarged the male electorate while reducing the black male voters by property requirements and harsh residency laws. Scholar David Roediger revealed that Northern free blacks stood alienated both literally and figuratively with white workers who violently chased them from public parks. It is worth remembering that In the Supreme Court in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 brought charges of national, not just southern discrimination, suing establishments in NY, San Francisco, Kansas and Tennessee. In the 1940’s thru the 1960’s the fight to end Jim Crow and disenfranchisement would be fought not only in Southern cities but also in northern cities.“Somehow In popular perception, slavery has been cut out of the trade triangle transferred forward to the Civil War, where it became a moral problem confined to the south. Just as Connecticut was thought not to have had slavery because it did not have many slaves or Southern style plantations, it was thought not to profit from slavery as much as the south did. The truth, however, which out to have been plain, is that Connecticut derived a great part, maybe greatest part of its early surplus wealth from slavery.” Hartford Courant.“The truth is that slavery was a national phenomenon. The North shared in the wealth it created and the oppression it required.” The nations financial institutions and manufacturing centers like New York and Massachusetts spun gold from them slave fields in of the south.In 1775 Connecticut held 5,000 Africans as slaves. In 1790 most prosperous merchants owned at least one slave and 50% of the clergy owned at least one slave according to census records. While in the south a few people owned a lot of slaves, in the North a lot of people owned a few slaves.“The effects of the New England slave trade were momentous. It was one of the foundations of New England’s economic structure, it created a wealthy class of slave trading merchants, while profits derived from this commerce stimulated cultural development and philanthropy.” ..The Negro in Colonial New England, page 3“Horses and barrels, fish and flour-the Norths earliest traffic in slavery commerce ran from Plymouth Rock to the West Indies.” ....Connecticut CourantNew England gained their economic rise because regions grew and shipped food to help feed millions of slaves in the West Indies. What’s more, Northern merchants, shippers and financial institutions were crucial players in every phase of the national and international cotton trade. Land all over New England were crowded With textile mills. Well before the Civil War, the economy of the entire North relied heavily on cotton grown by slaves. Starting before the Civil War and lasting until the 20th century two Connecticut towns were international centers for the production of ivory milling hundreds of thousands of tons of elephant tusks procured through enslavement of Africans and caused the death of as many as 2 million people in Africa.Harriet Beecher Stowe said this was the way the northerners liked it...all of the benefits and none of the screams.In America’s infancy it was discovered that the West Indies and Caribbean were perfect for growing sugar. Island were stripped of forests and all land was used to grow sugar cane.Between 1640 and 1650 19,000 Africans were brought to the West Indies. By 1700 there were 134,000 in Barbados alone.In 1645 the son of John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony saw riches in the slave trade. That year a Boston ship made the first known slave voyage to Africa, picking up slaves and delivering them to Barbados. This began what’s known as the Triangle Slave Trade. Northern colonies sent food, livestock and wood to West Indian sugar plantations where slaves harvested sugar cane that fed the refining mills. Sugar, molasses and slaves were shipped north. Northern distilleries turned molasses into rum to trade for Africans who were then shipped to sugar plantations. The triangle trade was complete.The scale of trade from New England was astonishing. In 1775 80% of New England exports went to the West Indies. Flour, corn, potatoes, dried fish, onions, cattle and horses were all exported because the West Indies only grew sugar, they grew little food. When ships could not get through during the Revolution a famine swept across the Caribbean starving tens of thousands.The Narragansett areas of Rhode Island developed its own plantation system using slave labor to keep up demand of supplying the West Indies. Both in acreage and in number of slaves they matched the plantations of Virginia in the 19th century. Connecticut also had plantations. In New London archaeologists are surveying one plantation that was 4,000 acres in size. The owners of small farms in New Jersey, New York including Westchester, Long Island, Staten Island all used slaves to grow crops to supply sugar plantations in the West Indies. West Indian sugar was distilled into rum in New England and traded for Africans who were then dropped off in the West Indies and America. The survival of a slave on a sugar plantation in the West Indies was less than a year. But Africans sold into slavery were plentiful and New England ships were bringing in a constant supply of replacements.By the Revolution there were at least 41,000 slaves in New York and Pennsylvania and Delaware. It soon became accepted that slavery was benign, loosely defined like a mutually agreed upon indenture, the attitude was that slavery was as beneficial to the slave as the owner. Slaves of the North served at the whims of their masters and could be sold or traded. They lived in unheated attics, basements, outbuildings and barns. They often slept on floors and were subject to a harsh system of black codes that controlled their movements, prohibited them from being educated and limited their social contracts.Lining the New England Coast were 40 “slave castles” or “slave factories” that were warehouses where traders could select and buy captive human beings.John Atkins was a British surgeon on a slave ship. He describes the captives of Cape Coast Castle....”In the areas of the Quadrangle are large vaults with an iron grate at the surface to let light and air on these poor wretches, the slaves who are chained and confined there til a demand comes. They are all marked with a burning iron on their breast.”Among the 13 colonies only one plunged into the slave trade in a huge way...Rhode Island. In sheer volume US participation in the slave trade may have seemed insignificant. European ships transported 11.5 million Africans sold over 3 centuries into New World Slavery with only a small percentage sent to the colonies. On this side of the Atlantic, however Rhode Island was the leader. In 1775 it controlled two thirds or more of the colonies slave trade with Africa. After the Revolutionary War Rhode Island had a monopoly in the slave trade.While Rhode Island and its neighbors found ways to profit by trading with slave plantations in the West Indies, Rhode Island went further, competing with European powers in the slave trade itself. Rhode Island shipped more slaves than any of the 13 other colonies combined. In 1772 merchants who owned slaving vessels occupied 8 of the top 10 positions on Newport’s tax rolls. Newport launched 70 percent of all American slave voyages.In the last years the slave trade was legal, John Brown and Captain James DeWolf joined forces to protect the slave trade. Brown entered Congress in 1799. But DeWolf had a reputation as especially cruel on his ships. He once threw a slave tied to a chair overboard then complained about losing a good chair. One of his captains cut off the hands if two slaves clinging to the railing. But it was Brown who would become famous in New England for starting Brown University.“After Congress outlawed the importation of slaves, ship captains began to hide their boxes of shackles but little else about the slave trade changed except that it’s center shifted to Manhattan and it’s conditions became even more horrific. “ Connecticut CourantBy the eve of the war hundreds of businesses in New York and countless more businesses throughout the North were connected to or dependent on cotton. As New York became the center of the US cotton trade, merchants , shippers, auctioneers, bankers, brokers, insurers and thousands of others made their living off the backs of southern slaves growing cotton. New York City became the center of the cotton trade for thee world. The Lehman brothers, Junius Morgan (father of J Pierpont Morgan), John Jacob Astor, Charles Tiffany all had their wealth begin in the cotton trade.On the eve of secession New York City Mayor declared that his city should also secede, for the most part because New York’s economy depended on the cotton trade. Before the election of 1860 Boston area manufacturers were desperately currying favor with southern politicians and planters. Their financial survival depended on slavery.New England was home to almost 500 textile mills scattered through New York State, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The powerful group of Massachusetts businessmen historians call the Boston Associates established Americans own industrial revolution. By the 1850’s their enormous profits had been poured into a complex network of banks, insurance companies, and railroads. Their wealth was anchored to the mammoth textile mills in Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire.In the 1850’s 10 major cotton states were producing 66 percent of the world’s cotton. Raw cotton accounted for more than half of all US exports, all exports that benefitted New York brokers, New York banks, northern ship builders, exporters, ship crews. All business involved in the export of cotton ran through the north. In 1860 the US produced 2.3 billion pounds of cotton. Of that amount, half was exported. The other half fed northern textile mills.On the eve of secession New York City Mayor declared that his city should also secede, for the most part because New York’s economy depended on the cotton trade. Before the election of 1860 Boston area manufacturers were desperately currying favor with southern politicians and planters. Their financial survival depended on slavery.At the same time the Union Committee called a meeting for 200 people to discuss what could be done to stop the south. Two thousand people showed up. The office building across the street was commandeered to hold the overflow, but merchants and bankers, politicians and shipping magnates spilled into the street. This was not the first time a worried business community had met, but this meeting was the most panicky by far. The south had to be persuaded to stay. They very spine of 19th century business, money and power attended the meeting includingAT Stewart, owner of the nations first department store and the wealthiest man in New YorkMoses Taylor, sugar importer, bankers and coal and railroad magnate and for nearly half a century, the most influential businessman in New York.Ariel Abbot Low, whose A.A. Low and Brothers was the most important firm in the China trade.William B Astor, son of John Jacob Astor, the nation’s first millionaire.August Belmont, American agent for the Rothchilds of Germany, and creator of the Belmont Stakes.Wlilliam H. Aspinwall and his partners Robert Minturn and Henry Grinnell, editors of the Journal of Commerce and the New York Herald.Also in attendance were politicians who included two former mayors, presidential candidate Samuel J Tilden, and former president Millard Fillmore.For half a century before the war cotton was the backbone of the economy of America. Cotton was king and the North ruled cotton. From seed to cloth Northern business was involved. Only large banks, located mostly in New York could extend credit to plantation owners needed between planting and selling their crops. Any plantation owners wishing to expand depended on Northern Banks to lend him money for additional equipment and additional labor. Slaves were usually bought on credit. Other Northerners made up the long chain between planter and manufacturer.the “factor” helped the planter get the best price, advised him, and often took care of his finances. Ships that carried cotton to market were Northern owned, northern built, captained and crewed by northerners.But that was not the only use of northern ships. By 1860 New York was notorious as the hub of an international illegal slave trade. It was too lucrative and too corrupt to stop. Ships to carry slaves were built and sold in New York complete with crates of shackles and supersized water tanks. During its peak in 1859 and 1860 at least 2 slave ships left from New York harbor every month , able to hold 600- 1,000 slaves each. At this point most slaves were sold to Bermuda and Cuba. In the summer of 1860 the traffic from Africa was so heavy that the US Navy seized The Storm King, carrying 620 Africans, half of which were children and the Cora loaded with 700 Africans along with the Erie with a hold filled with 900 Africans. All three ships were New York ships.By 1861 the illegal trade had grown so daring that anyone who read a NY paper knew how it worked. NY ships sailed to Rio or Later, Havana where they might take aboard a second captain or crew. For the crossing to Africa the US ship would list foreigners as passengers. On the African Coast came a switch in nationality. Just before slaves were loaded the foreigners would declare themselves owners of what had been only moments before a US vessel. The American captain and crew made the return voyage as working passengers on the now foreign slave ship. In its final years as abolition threatened national economies dependent on slave labor, the illegal slave trade became more profitable and more horrific. Ships grew larger, able to hold 1,000 Africans chained in pairs to its decks. Slave ships were insured to lose 10% of their slaves but the actual rate was much higher, usually topping 20% or more.After the Revolution white prejudice against blacks began to harden into an aggressive racist ideology. Shortly before the Civil War the science of the “American School of Ethnology “. It’s reining geniuses enjoyed the prestige rained upon them by elite Northern scholars and colleges. Nineteenth century race scientists made the slavery circle more vicious by equating blacks with subhuman biology. Their cutting ideas of racial purity supported the self image of the nations white supremacist majority. Samuel Morton was a leading race scientist who used measurements from his famous skull collection to show that black people had the smallest “cranial capacity” of all humans and were therefore doomed to inferiority.By this death on 1851, Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton Hans achieved international fame for his reserach on skulls that seemed to prove that blacks were mentally inferior to whites and not even of the same species as whites. In 1854 Types of Mankind, a book based on his work the respected Putnam’s monthly Magazine noted that Morton’s investigations “evinced a scientific sagacity of the most extraordinary research and penetration, coupled with a judicial severity of judgement”...Ewell Sale Library, The Academy of Natural Sciences Of Philadelphia.Close behind Morton were Josiah Mott, a University of Pennsylvania graduate and Louis Agassiz, a professor at a Harvard. In the 1850’s they collaborated on “Types of Mankind”. All three were considered among the brightest minds of their times.. “Seeing their black faces with their fat lips and their grimacing teeth, the wool on the heads, their bent knees, their elongated hands, their large, curved fingernails and above all the livid color of their palms, I could not turn my eyes from their face in order to tell them to keep their distance” wrote Agassiz upon first encountering Africans.The federal government sought the advice of Agassiz during the Civil War on the best way to deal with millions of freed slaves, he said the first priority should be to avoid the catastrophe of increased mixing with blacks, “Beware of any policy which may bring about our own race to their level” he wrote. Nearly a century earlier Dr Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, a leading abolitionist believed that Africans were effected with a mild strain of leprosy that made their noses flat and their skin black. He also thought it made blacks less sensitive to pain. When a sideshow sensation named Henry Moss became a sensation by exhibiting himself as a black man turning white, Rush held out hope that a cure could be found for blackness. He recommended as treatment the juice of unripe peaches, tight fitting clothing and bleeding, purging and abstinence.Morton published a sequel to his first book called “Crania Aegyptiaca” in 1844. In it Morton added that data from the embalmed heads of Egyptians that, according to home, proved racial differences. Morton was achieving international fame. Among scientists who praised Morton was a Swede who wrote that Morton did “more for ethnography than any other living physiologist.”By this death on 1851, Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton Hans achieved international fame for his reserach on skull that seemed to prove that blacks were mentally inferior to whites. In 1854 Tyoes of Mankind, a book based on his work the respected Putnam’s monthly Magazine noted that Morton’s investigations “evinced a scientific sagacity of the most extraordinary research and penetration, coupled with a judicial severity of judgement”...Ewell Sale Library, The Academy of Natural Sciences Of Philadelphia. Dr Samuel Morton’s collection of 600 skulls provided what may be the Norths most insidious contribution to slavery...the “proof of black inferiority”In 1831 the only kind of abolitionism that had popular support was the American Colonization Society with chapters in the north and the south. The society’s goal was to send freed blacks to Africa. Few white people in America thought blacks and whites could coexist in the same society. Prudence Crandall wanted to educate young black women in rural Connecticut. The violence she encountered was life threatening. White parents withdrew their daughters from her school. In Canterbury, nearly everyone opposed Mrs Crandall and her belief that education would prove blacks equal to whites. Andrew Harris, a doctor who lived nearby refused to treat her black students. Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Judson spoke at a town meeting . No school for “nigger girls” would ever be across the street from his house, he promised that if black students showed up he would, use the law to have them arrested. When abolitionist Samuel May asked to speak he was confronted with fists and driven from the meeting. Through the next year and a half Crandall and her students increasinglybecame targets of community anger, local merchants refused to do business with the school and the stage driver refused to transport its students, boys threw manure in the schools while neighbors refused requests for pails of fresh water, Rotten eggs and rocks were thrown at the school building. Prudence Crandell was forced to give up her school.Northern hostility to black education was not limited to Connecticut. Noyes Academy in Canaan was not only shut down, but a demolition crew hitched a train of oxen to the school and pulled it off its foundation. In New Haven residents voted 700-4 against allowing a school for young black men to open near Yale. One of the rationales was that the education would do blacks more harm than good. “ What benefit can it be to a waiter or coachman to read Horace, or be a profound mathematician.” Read a local editorial.In May 1833 the Connecticut legislature passed black law making it illegal for out of state students of color to attend school without local permission. A phrenologist testified that Negroes could not be educated beyond a certain level and could never be fit citizens.New England slave trading went on to supply slaves to Bermuda and Cuba until almost 1890. But transporting slaves between countries was hardly the only connection New Englanders has to slavery.“. Two little Connecticut river towns helped produce music for the middle class, at a cost of as many as 2 million African lives, sacrificed to harvest elephant ivory”. Hartford CourantIvorytown, Connecticut, situated between two Connecticut river towns shaped, refined and turned ivory into the stuff and substance of everyday life. Starting with piano keys, baubles, combs, ivory refinement also made billiard balls, hair combs, shaving kits. New England merchants sailed to Africa then traveled inland to Zanzibar where “it is custom to buy a tooth of ivory and slave to carry it to the seashore” wrote Michael W Shepard, a merchant who visited Zanzibar and communicated with Connecticut’s ivory merchants. “Then the ivory and slaves are carried to to Zanzibar and sold”. The ivory going to America and the slave were usually sold to Arab slavery traders or slave traders headed for Cuba or Bermuda. During the second half of the 19th century and well into the 20th 75% of the ivory exported from Zanzibar on the backs of slaves went to only two piano key manufacturing centers in Connecticut. (Deep River Historical Society)Alfred J Swan, a English missionary described the horrors if the ivory caravans he saw in 1880’s. He describes “the feet and shoulders of ivory’s black porters were a mass of open sores, made more painful by the swarms of flies that followed the march and lived on the flowing blood”.. Swan said the porters were “a picture of utter misery” and were covered in scars left by the chipotle, a leather whip made of rhinoceros hide.In 1843 a New England buyer describes seeing “several gangs of slaves just as they came in from the interior of Africa “thin almost as skeletons. They had an iron ring around the neck and a chain went through it, thus connecting 50 or 50 in a line.”Explorer David Livingstone describes what he saw while exploring the Zambesi River in Southeast Africa. “A long line of manacled men, women and children came winding their way round the hill and into the valley, on the side where the village stood. The black drivers, armed with muskets, and bedecked with various articles of finery marched jauntily in the front, middle and rear of the line; some blowing exultantnotes out of long tin horns”.Joseph Conrad worked as a steamboat captain in the Belgian Congo and invented his plot line for “Heart of Darkness”, his classic novel of the search for a doomed ivory trader up river. He insisted that his description of what he saw in the Congo were accurate. “Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half e faced within the dim light, in all attitudes of pain, abandonment and despair....They were dying very slowly-it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now-nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom”.The suffering that accompanied ivory fills more than half a century of eyewitness accounts for the 1830’s to the 1890’s. The Civil War ended slave labor in the US but not the notion that black people were inherently suited only to hard labor. In his address to the New Haven Historical Society in 1875, scholar William C Fowler discussed the status of black people on Connecticut since their introduction into the colony in the 17th century. Fowler said that blacks “being an imitative race readily adopted the customs of the whites” and that the New World slavery was an improvement over the “moral degradation” of their African homeland. Fowler’s views were not regarded as racism but common sense. The America these men knew was in the process of freeing itself from the system of slavery , but the reality of involuntary labor was familiar to them, particularly the involuntary labor of black people.Hard work was what one historian calls “the bifurcated mind” of the 19th century commerce. Human rights were good, but a successful business always rested on somebody’s back and even abolitionists like Read and Pratt understood that. An inferior people, living in untamed wilds were part of ivory’s African supply system and was instrumental in maintaining the flow of high quality ivory.Enslaved Africans who managed to survive the trek carrying 100 pound ivory tusks on their shoulders for New England ivory merchants up the Ivory Coast ended up in the slave marketplace in Zanzibar. They were then sold into forced labor on plantations in Indian Ocean Islands or on huge sugar plantations in Brazil where the life expectancy was less than a year. Or they were sold into agricultural slavery in Arabia and North Africa.Abolitionists like Julius Pratt and George Read went to Zanzibar to promote slave trade to help build a market that would make his fellow New Englanders rich. As elephant populations dwindled, ivory had to be harvested farther from coastal Africa and the trek for enslaved Africans became longer. Under the weight of the tusks they were forced to carry men and women taken from their villages by force walked hundreds of miles to the coast.Ernst D Moore, native New Englanders and ivory merchant lived in luxury for years in Africa. Moore wrote that at the height of the ivory trade the ships that lay at anchor off the town were packed with slave awaiting transport to Arabia and Persia after New England merchants had bought them and forced them to walk 700 plus miles with 100 pound ivory tusks on their backs. This only stopped when the demand for ivory stopped.The south’s connection to slavery ended with the Civil War. The north’s connection to slavery and the money made off the backs of slaves continued for at least another 40 years. This article list only a minute portion of the severity and size of the Northern United States connections to profiting on the backs of enslaved Africans, nor does it delve into the horrors those enslaved in the North suffered.“Slavery has long been identified in the national consciousnesses a Southern institution. The time to bury that myth is long overdue. Slavery is a story about America, all of America. The nations wealth, from the very beginning depended upon the exploitation of black peoples on three continents. Together, over the lives of the millions of enslaved men and women, Northerners and Southerners shook hands and made a country. “ Hartford Courant.Here is an article I wrote for an online history community. Hope you’ll learn a little history from it.Forgotten Connections to Slavery: the North’s Dirty Little Secret.Several years ago the Hartford Connecticut Courant published a story titled “Aetna Regrets Insuring Slaves”. Courant’s reporters began to investigate the newspapers role in slavery. The Sunday magazine staff investigated slavery roots in the northern states and found “ what appeared to be unshakable proof of Connecticuts complicity in slavery. What’s more, it quickly became obvious that our economic links to slavery were deeply entwined with our religious, political and educational institutions. Slavery was a part of the social contract in Connecticut. It was the air that we breathed”.“For most Northern whites in the 1850’s, the desire to end slave labor did not equate with a belief in racial equality. Thus blacks might be freed, eventually, but they would not be welcome to remain.” In Connecticut and New York state laws enlarged the male electorate while reducing the black male voters by property requirements and harsh residency laws. Scholar David Roediger revealed that Northern free blacks stood alienated both literally and figuratively with white workers who violently chased them from public parks. It is worth remembering that In the Supreme Court in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 brought charges of national, not just southern discrimination, suing establishments in NY, San Francisco, Kansas and Tennessee. In the 1940’s thru the 1960’s the fight to end Jim Crow and disenfranchisement would be fought not only in Southern cities but also in northern cities.“Somehow In popular perception, slavery has been cut out of the trade triangle transferred forward to the Civil War, where it became a moral problem confined to the south. Just as Connecticut was thought not to have had slavery because it did not have many slaves or Southern style plantations, it was thought not to profit from slavery as much as the south did. The truth, however, which out to have been plain, is that Connecticut derived a great part, maybe greatest part of its early surplus wealth from slavery.” Hartford Courant.“The truth is that slavery was a national phenomenon. The North shared in the wealth it created and the oppression it required.” The nations financial institutions and manufacturing centers like New York and Massachusetts spun gold from them slave fields in of the south.In 1775 Connecticut held 5,000 Africans as slaves. In 1790 most prosperous merchants owned at least one slave and 50% of the clergy owned at least one slave according to census records. While in the south a few people owned a lot of slaves, in the North a lot of people owned a few slaves.“The effects of the New England slave trade were momentous. It was one of the foundations of New England’s economic structure, it created a wealthy class of slave trading merchants, while profits derived from this commerce stimulated cultural development and philanthropy.” ..The Negro in Colonial New England, page 3“Horses and barrels, fish and flour-the Norths earliest traffic in slavery commerce ran from Plymouth Rock to the West Indies.” ....Connecticut CourantNew England gained their economic rise because regions grew and shipped food to help feed millions of slaves in the West Indies. What’s more, Northern merchants, shippers and financial institutions were crucial players in every phase of the national and international cotton trade. Land all over New England were crowded With textile mills. Well before the Civil War, the economy of the entire North relied heavily on cotton grown by slaves. Starting before the Civil War and lasting until the 20th century two Connecticut towns were international centers for the production of ivory milling hundreds of thousands of tons of elephant tusks procured through enslavement of Africans and caused the death of as many as 2 million people in Africa.Harriet Beecher Stowe said this was the way the northerners liked it...all of the benefits and none of the screams.In America’s infancy it was discovered that the West Indies and Caribbean were perfect for growing sugar. Island were stripped of forests and all land was used to grow sugar cane.Between 1640 and 1650 19,000 Africans were brought to the West Indies. By 1700 there were 134,000 in Barbados alone.In 1645 the son of John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony saw riches in the slave trade. That year a Boston ship made the first known slave voyage to Africa, picking up slaves and delivering them to Barbados. This began what’s known as the Triangle Slave Trade. Northern colonies sent food, livestock and wood to West Indian sugar plantations where slaves harvested sugar cane that fed the refining mills. Sugar, molasses and slaves were shipped north. Northern distilleries turned molasses into rum to trade for Africans who were then shipped to sugar plantations. The triangle trade was complete.The scale of trade from New England was astonishing. In 1775 80% of New England exports went to the West Indies. Flour, corn, potatoes, dried fish, onions, cattle and horses were all exported because the West Indies only grew sugar, they grew little food. When ships could not get through during the Revolution a famine swept across the Caribbean starving tens of thousands.The Narragansett areas of Rhode Island developed its own plantation system using slave labor to keep up demand of supplying the West Indies. Both in acreage and in number of slaves they matched the plantations of Virginia in the 19th century. Connecticut also had plantations. In New London archaeologists are surveying one plantation that was 4,000 acres in size. The owners of small farms in New Jersey, New York including Westchester, Long Island, Staten Island all used slaves to grow crops to supply sugar plantations in the West Indies. West Indian sugar was distilled into rum in New England and traded for Africans who were then dropped off in the West Indies and America. The survival of a slave on a sugar plantation in the West Indies was less than a year. But Africans sold into slavery were plentiful and New England ships were bringing in a constant supply of replacements.By the Revolution there were at least 41,000 slaves in New York and Pennsylvania and Delaware. It soon became accepted that slavery was benign, loosely defined like a mutually agreed upon indenture, the attitude was that slavery was as beneficial to the slave as the owner. Slaves of the North served at the whims of their masters and could be sold or traded. They lived in unheated attics, basements, outbuildings and barns. They often slept on floors and were subject to a harsh system of black codes that controlled their movements, prohibited them from being educated and limited their social contracts.Lining the New England Coast were 40 “slave castles” or “slave factories” that were warehouses where traders could select and buy captive human beings.John Atkins was a British surgeon on a slave ship. He describes the captives of Cape Coast Castle....”In the areas of the Quadrangle are large vaults with an iron grate at the surface to let light and air on these poor wretches, the slaves who are chained and confined there til a demand comes. They are all marked with a burning iron on their breast.”Among the 13 colonies only one plunged into the slave trade in a huge way...Rhode Island. In sheer volume US participation in the slave trade may have seemed insignificant. European ships transported 11.5 million Africans sold over 3 centuries into New World Slavery with only a small percentage sent to the colonies. On this side of the Atlantic, however Rhode Island was the leader. In 1775 it controlled two thirds or more of the colonies slave trade with Africa. After the Revolutionary War Rhode Island had a monopoly in the slave trade.While Rhode Island and its neighbors found ways to profit by trading with slave plantations in the West Indies, Rhode Island went further, competing with European powers in the slave trade itself. Rhode Island shipped more slaves than any of the 13 other colonies combined. In 1772 merchants who owned slaving vessels occupied 8 of the top 10 positions on Newport’s tax rolls. Newport launched 70 percent of all American slave voyages.In the last years the slave trade was legal, John Brown and Captain James DeWolf joined forces to protect the slave trade. Brown entered Congress in 1799. But DeWolf had a reputation as especially cruel on his ships. He once threw a slave tied to a chair overboard then complained about losing a good chair. One of his captains cut off the hands if two slaves clinging to the railing. But it was Brown who would become famous in New England for starting Brown University.“After Congress outlawed the importation of slaves, ship captains began to hide their boxes of shackles but little else about the slave trade changed except that it’s center shifted to Manhattan and it’s conditions became even more horrific. “ Connecticut CourantBy the eve of the war hundreds of businesses in New York and countless more businesses throughout the North were connected to or dependent on cotton. As New York became the center of the US cotton trade, merchants , shippers, auctioneers, bankers, brokers, insurers and thousands of others made their living off the backs of southern slaves growing cotton. New York City became the center of the cotton trade for thee world. The Lehman brothers, Junius Morgan (father of J Pierpont Morgan), John Jacob Astor, Charles Tiffany all had their wealth begin in the cotton trade.On the eve of secession New York City Mayor declared that his city should also secede, for the most part because New York’s economy depended on the cotton trade. Before the election of 1860 Boston area manufacturers were desperately currying favor with southern politicians and planters. Their financial survival depended on slavery.New England was home to almost 500 textile mills scattered through New York State, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The powerful group of Massachusetts businessmen historians call the Boston Associates established Americans own industrial revolution. By the 1850’s their enormous profits had been poured into a complex network of banks, insurance companies, and railroads. Their wealth was anchored to the mammoth textile mills in Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire.In the 1850’s 10 major cotton states were producing 66 percent of the world’s cotton. Raw cotton accounted for more than half of all US exports, all exports that benefitted New York brokers, New York banks, northern ship builders, exporters, ship crews. All business involved in the export of cotton ran through the north. In 1860 the US produced 2.3 billion pounds of cotton. Of that amount, half was exported. The other half fed northern textile mills.On the eve of secession New York City Mayor declared that his city should also secede, for the most part because New York’s economy depended on the cotton trade. Before the election of 1860 Boston area manufacturers were desperately currying favor with southern politicians and planters. Their financial survival depended on slavery.At the same time the Union Committee called a meeting for 200 people to discuss what could be done to stop the south. Two thousand people showed up. The office building across the street was commandeered to hold the overflow, but merchants and bankers, politicians and shipping magnates spilled into the street. This was not the first time a worried business community had met, but this meeting was the most panicky by far. The south had to be persuaded to stay. They very spine of 19th century business, money and power attended the meeting includingAT Stewart, owner of the nations first department store and the wealthiest man in New YorkMoses Taylor, sugar importer, bankers and coal and railroad magnate and for nearly half a century, the most influential businessman in New York.Ariel Abbot Low, whose A.A. Low and Brothers was the most important firm in the China trade.William B Astor, son of John Jacob Astor, the nation’s first millionaire.August Belmont, American agent for the Rothchilds of Germany, and creator of the Belmont Stakes.Wlilliam H. Aspinwall and his partners Robert Minturn and Henry Grinnell, editors of the Journal of Commerce and the New York Herald.Also in attendance were politicians who included two former mayors, presidential candidate Samuel J Tilden, and former president Millard Fillmore.For half a century before the war cotton was the backbone of the economy of America. Cotton was king and the North ruled cotton. From seed to cloth Northern business was involved. Only large banks, located mostly in New York could extend credit to plantation owners needed between planting and selling their crops. Any plantation owners wishing to expand depended on Northern Banks to lend him money for additional equipment and additional labor. Slaves were usually bought on credit. Other Northerners made up the long chain between planter and manufacturer.the “factor” helped the planter get the best price, advised him, and often took care of his finances. Ships that carried cotton to market were Northern owned, northern built, captained and crewed by northerners.But that was not the only use of northern ships. By 1860 New York was notorious as the hub of an international illegal slave trade. It was too lucrative and too corrupt to stop. Ships to carry slaves were built and sold in New York complete with crates of shackles and supersized water tanks. During its peak in 1859 and 1860 at least 2 slave ships left from New York harbor every month , able to hold 600- 1,000 slaves each. At this point most slaves were sold to Bermuda and Cuba. In the summer of 1860 the traffic from Africa was so heavy that the US Navy seized The Storm King, carrying 620 Africans, half of which were children and the Cora loaded with 700 Africans along with the Erie with a hold filled with 900 Africans. All three ships were New York ships.By 1861 the illegal trade had grown so daring that anyone who read a NY paper knew how it worked. NY ships sailed to Rio or Later, Havana where they might take aboard a second captain or crew. For the crossing to Africa the US ship would list foreigners as passengers. On the African Coast came a switch in nationality. Just before slaves were loaded the foreigners would declare themselves owners of what had been only moments before a US vessel. The American captain and crew made the return voyage as working passengers on the now foreign slave ship. In its final years as abolition threatened national economies dependent on slave labor, the illegal slave trade became more profitable and more horrific. Ships grew larger, able to hold 1,000 Africans chained in pairs to its decks. Slave ships were insured to lose 10% of their slaves but the actual rate was much higher, usually topping 20% or more.After the Revolution white prejudice against blacks began to harden into an aggressive racist ideology. Shortly before the Civil War the science of the “American School of Ethnology “. It’s reining geniuses enjoyed the prestige rained upon them by elite Northern scholars and colleges. Nineteenth century race scientists made the slavery circle more vicious by equating blacks with subhuman biology. Their cutting ideas of racial purity supported the self image of the nations white supremacist majority. Samuel Morton was a leading race scientist who used measurements from his famous skull collection to show that black people had the smallest “cranial capacity” of all humans and were therefore doomed to inferiority.By this death on 1851, Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton Hans achieved international fame for his reserach on skulls that seemed to prove that blacks were mentally inferior to whites and not even of the same species as whites. In 1854 Types of Mankind, a book based on his work the respected Putnam’s monthly Magazine noted that Morton’s investigations “evinced a scientific sagacity of the most extraordinary research and penetration, coupled with a judicial severity of judgement”...Ewell Sale Library, The Academy of Natural Sciences Of Philadelphia.Close behind Morton were Josiah Mott, a University of Pennsylvania graduate and Louis Agassiz, a professor at a Harvard. In the 1850’s they collaborated on “Types of Mankind”. All three were considered among the brightest minds of their times.. “Seeing their black faces with their fat lips and their grimacing teeth, the wool on the heads, their bent knees, their elongated hands, their large, curved fingernails and above all the livid color of their palms, I could not turn my eyes from their face in order to tell them to keep their distance” wrote Agassiz upon first encountering Africans.The federal government sought the advice of Agassiz during the Civil War on the best way to deal with millions of freed slaves, he said the first priority should be to avoid the catastrophe of increased mixing with blacks, “Beware of any policy which may bring about our own race to their level” he wrote. Nearly a century earlier Dr Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, a leading abolitionist believed that Africans were effected with a mild strain of leprosy that made their noses flat and their skin black. He also thought it made blacks less sensitive to pain. When a sideshow sensation named Henry Moss became a sensation by exhibiting himself as a black man turning white, Rush held out hope that a cure could be found for blackness. He recommended as treatment the juice of unripe peaches, tight fitting clothing and bleeding, purging and abstinence.Morton published a sequel to his first book called “Crania Aegyptiaca” in 1844. In it Morton added that data from the embalmed heads of Egyptians that, according to home, proved racial differences. Morton was achieving international fame. Among scientists who praised Morton was a Swede who wrote that Morton did “more for ethnography than any other living physiologist.”By this death on 1851, Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton Hans achieved international fame for his reserach on skull that seemed to prove that blacks were mentally inferior to whites. In 1854 Tyoes of Mankind, a book based on his work the respected Putnam’s monthly Magazine noted that Morton’s investigations “evinced a scientific sagacity of the most extraordinary research and penetration, coupled with a judicial severity of judgement”...Ewell Sale Library, The Academy of Natural Sciences Of Philadelphia. Dr Samuel Morton’s collection of 600 skulls provided what may be the Norths most insidious contribution to slavery...the “proof of black inferiority”In 1831 the only kind of abolitionism that had popular support was the American Colonization Society with chapters in the north and the south. The society’s goal was to send freed blacks to Africa. Few white people in America thought blacks and whites could coexist in the same society. Prudence Crandall wanted to educate young black women in rural Connecticut. The violence she encountered was life threatening. White parents withdrew their daughters from her school. In Canterbury, nearly everyone opposed Mrs Crandall and her belief that education would prove blacks equal to whites. Andrew Harris, a doctor who lived nearby refused to treat her black students. Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Judson spoke at a town meeting . No school for “nigger girls” would ever be across the street from his house, he promised that if black students showed up he would, use the law to have them arrested. When abolitionist Samuel May asked to speak he was confronted with fists and driven from the meeting. Through the next year and a half Crandall and her students increasinglybecame targets of community anger, local merchants refused to do business with the school and the stage driver refused to transport its students, boys threw manure in the schools while neighbors refused requests for pails of fresh water, Rotten eggs and rocks were thrown at the school building. Prudence Crandell was forced to give up her school.Northern hostility to black education was not limited to Connecticut. Noyes Academy in Canaan was not only shut down, but a demolition crew hitched a train of oxen to the school and pulled it off its foundation. In New Haven residents voted 700-4 against allowing a school for young black men to open near Yale. One of the rationales was that the education would do blacks more harm than good. “ What benefit can it be to a waiter or coachman to read Horace, or be a profound mathematician.” Read a local editorial.In May 1833 the Connecticut legislature passed black law making it illegal for out of state students of color to attend school without local permission. A phrenologist testified that Negroes could not be educated beyond a certain level and could never be fit citizens.New England slave trading went on to supply slaves to Bermuda and Cuba until almost 1890. But transporting slaves between countries was hardly the only connection New Englanders has to slavery.“. Two little Connecticut river towns helped produce music for the middle class, at a cost of as many as 2 million African lives, sacrificed to harvest elephant ivory”. Hartford CourantIvorytown, Connecticut, situated between two Connecticut river towns shaped, refined and turned ivory into the stuff and substance of everyday life. Starting with piano keys, baubles, combs, ivory refinement also made billiard balls, hair combs, shaving kits. New England merchants sailed to Africa then traveled inland to Zanzibar where “it is custom to buy a tooth of ivory and slave to carry it to the seashore” wrote Michael W Shepard, a merchant who visited Zanzibar and communicated with Connecticut’s ivory merchants. “Then the ivory and slaves are carried to to Zanzibar and sold”. The ivory going to America and the slave were usually sold to Arab slavery traders or slave traders headed for Cuba or Bermuda. During the second half of the 19th century and well into the 20th