Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Submitted by piewacket1861 on Thu, 01/31/2008 - 20:36.

Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Part XII

Some chronology here:

1631 Massachusetts launches the "Blessing of the Bay", thus begins the start of the New England trade to West Indies slave plantations.

1641 Massachusetts is the first colony to recognize slavery by statute.

1712 The killing of 8 whites in slave rebellion in New York City leads to the death of 25 slaves.

1741 The Great Negro Plot in New York City results in executions of 31 blacks and 4 whites.

1760 Slave population of New England and the Middle Atlantic States has grown to at least 41,000.

1772 Newport nears peak as Triangle Trade port, as 230,000 gallons of Rhode Island rum are shipped to Africa.

1787 Connecticut and South Carolina delegates to Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia negotiate compromises that count a slave as three-fifths of a person and extend slave trade 20 years. (I had always heard that this was South Carolina alone.)

1790 First U.S. Census shows Connecticut and Rhode Island with a combined slave population of 3,500, Pennsylvania with 3,700 slaves, and New York with more than 20,000 black slaves. (Free and enslaved blacks make up more than 19 percent of the U.S. population.)

1793 Eli Whitney of Massachusetts invents the cotton gin, leading to renewed Southern demand for slave labor. Also no mention here of the textile mills of the New England states that needed more cotton: hence supply and demand.

1793 Congress passes first fugitive slave law, setting stage for kidnapping of Northern blacks.

1798 The narrative of Venture Smith of Connecticut, on of the first and most important American slave narratives, is published.

1807 Rhode Island leads rush to import slaves before transatlantic slave trade becomes illegal on January 1, 1808. The DeWolf family ships an estimated 2,000 Africans to Charleston, S.C. in just seven months.

1810 Nearly 200 cotton mills are in operation in the North.

1811 New York ships 15,000 bales of cotton to Liverpool.

1818 The Black Ball Line begins regular packet ship runs between New York City and Liverpool, signaling New York's emergence as nation's financial and cotton trade capital.

1819 New England Society of Charleston, S.C. is founded.

1822 Cotton, valued at $3.9 million, is 40 percent of New York's domestic exports. Flour, the city's second-most-valuable domestic export, is valued at $794,000.

1826 Lowell, Massachusetts, is incorporated. Its 2,500 population includes 2,000 textile workers. By 1858, its 52 mills use 800,000 pounds of cotton every week.

1833 Slavery abolished in the British Empire, with compensation to slave owners.

1834 Antiabolitionist mob attacks Prudence Crandall's school for black girls, in Canterbury, Connecticut, forcing it to close.

1835 Abolitionist publisher and editor William Lloyd Garrison is chased, roped, and paraded through the streets of Boston by a mob and spends the night in jail, the only place the mayor can guarantee his safety.

1837 Antiabolitionist mob in Alton, Illinois, kills newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy, creating a martyr.

1842 U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story of Massachusetts writes Prigg decision, giving federal protection to slaveholders pursuing runaways in free states.

1850 Passage of the Fugitive Slave Act leads to mass exodus of free blacks who feel unsafe in Northern cities. Many settle in Canada.

Back to the slaves fighting back: In 1657, Hartford , Connecticut there was an uprising.

In 1706 the governor of New York ordered the arrest of slaves (who'd assembled illegally) behaving "in a riotous manner" in Brooklyn. "If any of them refuse to submit, then fire upon them, kill or destroy them, if they cannot otherwise be taken."

1708: Long Island: An Indian slave and 3 Africans murdered an entire family--the man who owned them, his pregnant wife and their 5 children. When captured, the men were hanged and the woman slave was burned alive.

Though risking terrible punishment, rebellion continued through the 18th century and into the 19th century until the decade before the Civil War. In the 1700s, in the North alone, these incidents stand out:

A two-year run of unrelated arsons occurred in New Haven, Connecticut, also in Boston, Mass., between 1721 and 1723. Those in Boston led to the execution of a slave charged with burning down a house.

In 1737, after sentencing an African for a similar arson in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the judge called for the city to pass stronger laws because of slaves' recent hostile behavior.

1741, in Hackensack, New Jersey, two slaves convicted of arson were sentenced to be burned alive. The same punishment was ordered in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in 1750, for two slaves convicted of murder and attempted murder.

New York, however, holds the most important place in the chronicle of Northern slave revolts: two of the most violent uprisings in early colonial America happened there. The first, in 1712, set the stage for the arsons, and then the panic, that seized the city 29 years later.

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