Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Part XXXI

There are many many threads under "Slavery Research" that are devoted, I believe, to slavery and the plantation system and I'm sure any thread that you start will be most interesting.

However, if you've been following this thread from the beginning, the point I was trying to make was not about slavery, per se, but rather the lack of anyone mentioning "slave-running", which brought the blacks to our shores in the first place.

 And these blacks were brought by Northern built and Northern owned ships, except for the Southern yacht, Wanderer, which, in 1858, brought the last 400 blacks to the U.S.

I've been informed that anyone could have looked up this information if they just used a search engine, but my point has been this: I did not know that "slave-running" had continued even into 1862 by some Northerners who made vast fortunes from this.  And I have never  seen it told on any forum that I have participated on.  Why the secrecy?  The answer:  Because it's not something the North is proud of.

Schools that I went to, and from what I've gathered from others have never taught anything about Northern slave-running.  Why is it that this was never taught in schools?  The answer is simple: to make the entire South look like slave owners: bad men who beat blacks half to death to get work out of them.

But books are coming out now that will show information that has not been set forth for students to learn about.  Books that will show that of course slavery was absolutely deplorable but that the North did not just sit on their lily-white hands.  They made huge profits bringing those blacks who were turned into slaves to this country.  And when the war was over, history, which is always written by the victors recorded the Southern plantation owners: slavery, and made all Southerners look like evil men.  This is not true.  A tiny percentage of Southern men owned slaves.

Meanwhile, Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island, and any others involved in "slave-running" had an attack of conscience and conveniently saw to it that any mention of who owned those ships that brought blacks to these shores was deliberately omitted from textbooks so that the North could continue to look, in the eyes of the world, as a great savior. 

The main emphasis has always been on the deplorable South and their plantations and their use of slave labor.  It's been suggested that there were very many plantations and that all Southerners owned some slaves, even if they didn't own huge plantations.  This is a lie.

The facts speak for themselves when you look at which Southerners fought the war.  The vast majority of soldiers were ordinary dirt farmers, white men who owned small farms and worked the land themselves with their families.

Now I'd like to continue with this thread which now gets into something entirely different.

As I've mentioned before, there seem to be some who would rather continue to skew the South for slavery that happened over 140 years ago and continue the devisiveness while not "sharing" what they know of what was happening in the North.

Everyone seems to think that the North before the war was all about equality among the races, etc.  It wasn't quite like that at all.
 
Rather than bore you with all that I've learned concerning Connecticut's Prudence Crandall and her school (1833), I suggest you all look it up on the internet. I'm sure you can find references to the doctor who refused to treat her black pupils. An ad in Garrison's Liberator listed 15 sponsors including Garrison, Unitarian minister Samuel May, Simeon Jocelyn, another minister, & Arthur Tappan, a textile merchant. (Tappan and his brother Lewis were two of the few rich New Yorkers who poured their wealth into abolitionist causes.)
 
Andrew Judson, close neighbor and also, like the doctor, a former trustee of the school spoke at a town meeting. No school for "nigger girls" would ever stand across the street from his house; he backed his statement up by saying that if black students showed up he would use a colonial law to have them arrested as paupers. (Remember this was happening in the North!)
 
When May, the Unitarian minister and another abolitionist tried to speak, Judson shouted them down.  The two abolitionists were confronted with "fists doubled in their faces" and driven from the church where the meeting was held.
 
 Frankly, if I'd not read certain books I would never have known about her school in which she tried to integrate and was met with such virulent hostility.
 
Northern hostility to black education wasn't limited to Connecticut.  A Crandall pupil transferred to the integrated Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire, which opened in March 1835.   The Canannites promised that summer to shut it down; a demolition crew hitched a long train of oxen to the academy and dragged it off its foundation; according to one account, there were students still inside.
 
And in Sept. 1831, New Haven, Connecticut, city residents must have felt something about Nat Turner's rebellion when they voted 700-4 against allowing a young black men's school to open near Yale.   The rationale there was

...this from a local editorial.
 
May 1833 saw the Connecticut Legislaure pass the "Black Law" making it illegal for out-of-state students of color to attend a school without local permission.  Lawmakers actually called in a Hartford phrenologist, an expert in the then-credible "science" of determining character from the shape of a person's skull. And although the committee deplored the horrible traffic in human slavery & admitted a need to help

it did conclude:

Canterbury, Conn.'s citizens rang church bells, fired guns, and lit bonfires to celebrate the new law.  A month later, June 27, 1833, authorities arrested Crandall and her sister Almira, who had joined her as a teacher, for breaking the law.
 
This story goes on and on but I'm sure rather than waste your time, you might prefer to look it up on the internet. It's really interesting because the main question appears to have been: Were black people citizens?  And some of the most famous names of the day got involved in this.
 
The arguments presented would eventually lead up to the Dred Scott decision, still nearly a quarter century away.
 
But the catch-22 argument among these illustrious men was intriguing.

Crandall's lead lawyer, William W. Ellsworth, congressman, soon to be Govenor of Connecticut (and married to the daughter of Noah Webster, lexicographer) said that blacks must be considered full citizens under the Constitution because they'd fought in the Continental Army and received war pensions. Judson responded: if blacks couldn't vote--Connecticut's state constitution passed in 1818 specifically denied them the vote--then it followed that they could not be considered full citizens.
 
Chief prosecutor , Andrew Judson, would also become a congressman; a former legislator, he was a director of a county bank and an insurance company.  The chief judge in the 1st trial sat on the committee that had drafted the Black Law, and had banking ties to Judson. 
 
Judson predicted cataclysm if his opponent were to win.  He said,

  In closing he said,

America in the 1830s was filled with proslavery mob activity, and schools that accepted black students--like Prudence Crandall's --were often targets of mob violence.  Anti-Slavery Almanac, 1839.
  Courtesy of the Prudence Crandall Museum
 
More bibliography:
 Prudence Crandall, Welch, p.25.
 Paraphrasing from COMPLICITY, Farrow, Lang, & Frank, pp. 156-161.
A Whole-Souled Woman, Strane, p. 43.
North of Slavery, Litwack,pp. 125-126.
 
After this I have only one other subject that I wish to bring up on this thread and it has to do with as many as 2 million African lives and two small Northern towns and profits galore!

Webmistress Ann, I am merely trying to show "the other side of the coin ".  You've stated that you want to learn about slavery and the Civil War.  I think it only fair that you learn all of it, not just the Northern version, because I get the distinct feeling that there are very few Southerners here who are willing to speak up for fear that they will be ridiculed.

Debate is supposed to be courteous among people so that those who are "trying to learn" will feel that they can participate. I hope that more Southerners will feel that they can join in on your forum and that we can all have an enjoyable time.

To those of us in the United States who are finishing celebrating "Thanksgiving holidays"  I hope you've had a great time watching your favorite football teams.