Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Part II

Slavery was already a vital part of the national economy and in the decades after the Revolution, slavery's importance escalated, and the institution expanded to where, on the eve of the Civil War, there were nearly 4 million people living in bondage in America.
 
However, well before that time, slavery had become the foundation of a network of interdependent economic systems throughout the country , not just the South, that rested on the premise that it was acceptable to view black humans as property. The natural consequences of this deeply racist premise were resistance and violence.
 
But the North was in the perfect position to deal with this. The region's relationship with slavery, though extraordinarily profitable, was a distant one and that distance allowed the North to minimize and even deny its links with the institution that fueled its prosperity.
 
Let's look at what was happening:
 
Northern merchants, shippers, and financial institutions, many based in N.Y. City, were crucial players in every phase of the national and international cotton trade. Meanwhile, the rivers and streams of the North, particularly in New England, were crowded with hundreds of textile mills. Well before the Civil War, the economy of the entire North relied heavily on cotton grown by millions of slaves-in the South.
 
New England and the Mid-Atlantic began their economic ascent in the 18th century because the regions grew and shipped food to help feed millions of slaves - in the West Indies.
 

Even some smaller industries had these distant, but vital, links to slavery. Starting before the Civil War and lasting up to the edge of the 20th century, two Connecticut towns were an international center for ivory production, milling hundreds of thousands of tons of elephant tusks procured through the enslavement or death of as many as 2 million people - in Africa.
 
In the 1640s John Winthrop, governor of the Mass. Bay Colony got a letter from his brother-in-law Emmanuel Downing, who suggested that a "just war" against Indians could provide the colony with captives to exchange in the West Indies for badly needed "Moores", as in the term "blackamoores".
 
So, from the start, the nation's experience with slavery was defined by commerce and violence, in the North as well as the South.
 
Let's begin in the time and place where the fruits of hundreds of years of slave labor may have been the most dramatically realized: in New York, as the country tottered on the edge of war.
 
Abraham Lincoln had just been elected president, pushing the Southern states over the edge to secession. The disintegration of America inspired a most curious response on the part of New York's mayor, Fernando Wood: he publicly declared that his city should secede from the Union along with the Southern states, in large part because of New York's economic dependence on the cotton trade.
 
And even before the 1860 election, Boston-area manufacturers - though some held antislavery views - were desperately currying favor with the Southern politicians and planters whose millions of slaves delivered the product necessary to their wealth and financial survival. These businessmen were, after all, in textiles, and what would they do without cotton?
 
The North grew rich before the Civil War beyond measure bvy agreeing to live, however uneasily at times, with slavery. Perhaps as a consequence of striking that bargain, Northerners have pushed much of their early history into the deepest shadows of repression.
 
 
Many of the facts are shocking:
 
In the first half of the eighteenth century, two major slave revolts occurred in New York City. During the second uprising, with haunting parallels to the hysteria surrounding the Salem witch trials 50 years earlier, 31 black people, all slaves, and 4 white people were either hanged or burned alive at the stake.
 
In the eighteenth century, even after America won its freedom from Great Britain, even after writing the Declaration of Independence, tens of thousands of black people, were living as slaves in the North. Earlier in that century, enslaved blacks made up nearly one-fifth of the population of New York City.
 
At the same time that the North was selling food and other supplies to the sugar plantations that blanketed the islands of the Caribbean, thousands of acres of Connecticut, N.Y. and tiny Rhode Island held plantations that used slave labor.
 
In the century before Congress finally banned the importation of slaves, Rhode Island was America's leader in the transatlantic trade, launching nearly 1,000 voyages to Africa and carrying at least 100,000 captives back across the Atlantic. The captains and crews of these ships were often the veteran seamen of America: New Englanders.
 
In the decades before the Civil War, New York City's bustling seaport became the hub of an enormously lucrative illegal slave trade. Manhattan shipyards built ships to carry captive Africans, the vessels often outfitted with crates of shackles and with the huge water tanks needed for their human cargo. A conservative estimate is that during the illegal trade's peak years, 1859 and 1860, at least two slave ships,each built to hold between 600 and 1,000 slaves - left lower Manhattan every month.  (Note: this was Manhattan, not Atlanta, Georgia.)
 
A Harvard University zoologist was a major figure in the now-discredited field of "race science". His mentor, one of the most eminent physicians in Philadelphia, had a world-famous collection of human skulls that the "ethnologists" said proved that blacks of African descent had the smallest "cranial capacity" among all human s and thus were doomed to inferiority. These influential scientists not only helped justify slavery, they helped solidify the myth of black inferiority. "Race science" could be the most lasting and devastating legacy of the North's involvement in slavery.
 
Slavery has long been identified in the national consciousness as a Southern institution. The time to bury that myth is overdue. Slavery is a story about America, all of America. The nation's wealth, from the very beginning, depended on the exploitation of black people on three continents. Together, over the lives of millions of enslaved men and women, Northerners and Southerners shook hands and made a country.
 
Now we'll take a look at what the North was shaking on.
 
"The ships would rot at her docks; grass would grow in Wall Street and Broadway, and the glory of New York, like that of Babylon and Rome, would be numbered with the things of the past."
 
The answer given by a prominent Southern editor
when asked by The Times (London),
"What would New York be without slavery?"
 
The vast fortunes that were made in the North are not, in my opinion, covered with the same zeal, shall we say, as the South. I want to explore what the North was doing before this war began. There are so many famous names involved as well as those who kept themselves out of the limelight so to speak.
 
I'm sure someone must be thinking of the cotton gin,  and in the supposition that the cotton gin had failed miserably I believe the South would have turned towards industrialization, and eventual emancipation of the slaves. (IMO they would have wanted to see that these slaves knew how to read, how to make a living on their own before just letting them loose with no means of supporting themselves though. This would have taken longer.)  I've always felt that the South was saddled with the "peculiar institution".  But eventually they would have adapted to the industrial revolution, but first they would have had to find a way to let the slaves go, armed with the ability to read and to make a living to support their families, and without completely bankrupting the South.
 

I would like very much for this thread to delve into what was happening in the nation's financial and manufacturing centers, like New York and Massachusetts.

By Allen (Piewacket1861) He is member in the forum

Part III