Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Part VI

Every voyage risked shipwreck or seizure, but it was a business venture and the trade--legal or illegal-- shifted with the tides of war and taxation.

Fortunes and families were bound together by trade. A social register of New England families and families from elsewhere in the North that derived wealth from the West Indies slave islands would include hundreds of thousands of names, depending on where the qualifying bar is set. In the 18th century, Boston merchant Peter Faneuil (endower of Faneuil Hall) had a plantation on French St. Domingue. Before its slaves rebelled, Sainte-Domingue (now Haiti) had supplanted Barbados and Jamaica as the world's richest colony.

The Winthrop family was not left out. John's youngest son, Samuel, eventually acquired a plantation on Antigua and became president of its ruling council. a Winthrop cousin named Turner owned a 400-acre plantation on Barbados.

Plantation slavery created tremendous wealth in the New World and the Old. It was the engine of the colonial Atlantic economy.

The evidence that New England, the cradle of American civilization, was rocked by this slave economy had been there from the start, provided by John Winthrop as early as 1648.

A single entry from the Puritan's journal revealed the origins of New England's wealth and that of much of the rest of the North. In between reporting interruptions to the beaver and fish trade and complaining about New England's reputation as a "poor, barren place," Winthrop gave the real news:

"It pleased the Lord to open us a trade to Barbados and other islands in the West Indies."

A picture (p.54 in Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery,by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant, Ballantine Books, New York, 2006) states:

"This advertisment from the June 6, 1780, The Connecticut Courant and the Weekly Intelligencer (a predecessor of today's Hartford Courant shows the shape of colonial trade in a nutshell.

New England imported molasses, and rum and sugar in lesser amounts, from the West Indies. The Lisbon wine often was exchanged for New England fish. The "negro wench" for sale may not have been bought in Africa with New England rum, but her ancestors likely were.

In 1780, slavery had been practiced in Connecticut for more than a century and the state's slave population had grown to about 5,000. The Connecticut Courant and the Weekly Intelligencer."

 In the decades before the Civil War, New York City's seaport became the hub of an enormously lucrative illegal slave trade. Manhattan shipyards built ships to carry captive blacks, 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.

In those early American years cheap labor was needed. Coming to a wild continent in search of religious freedom, they had to find their way and then, eventually, try to compete with much older and established European nations. How could they not have been in a hurry to settle this wilderness, put together a (workable) way to govern themselves, and earn a living, both as a nation and as individuals?

Slavery has long been identified in the national consciousness as a Southern institution. The idea of the South alone being the culprit has been bandied about since this nation was founded. But the truth is that slavery was a national phenomenon.  The North shared in the wealth it created, and in the oppression it required.

While it might seem incredible that the depth of the North's role in slavery is largely unknown to the general public, only since the civil rights movement have many historians begun to recognize how central slavery was to our whole history, both North and South.

But the time to bury that myth is long overdue. Slavery is part and parcel of American history, all of American history. The nation's wealth, from the very beginning, depended upon 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.

I wish to explore what part the North played inasmuch as we've had the South's part told and re-told to us and to our children and our children's children. It would take years to undo the pattern of learning in this country that the South alone was the evildoer in slavery.

I believe I have mentioned previously that some in New York wanted to secede along with the South, including the Mayor, Fernando Wood. "With our aggrieved brethren of the Slave States, we have friendly relations and a common sympathy. As a free city we would have the whole and united support of the Southern States, as well as all other States to whose interests and rights under the constitution she has always been true," he told the New York Common Council in his States of the City message on January 7, 1861. Although many rolled their eyes and he was slammed in the press, Wood's proposal made a certain kind of sense. The mayor was reacting to tensions with Albany, but there was far more behind his secession proposal, particularly if one understood that New York City's economy was cotton, the product most closely identified with the South.

Slave grown cotton was, in large part, the root of New York's wealth. Forty years before Fernando Wood suggested secession with the South, cotton had already become the nation's #1 exported product. And in the four intervening decades New York had become a commercial and financial behemoth dwarfing any other U.S. city and cotton was more than just a profitable crop. It was the national currency, the product most responsible for America's explosive growth in the decades before the Civil War.

As much as it is linked to the barbaric system of slave labor that raised it, cotton created New York.

By the eve of the war, hundreds of businesses in New York. and countless more throughout the North, were connected to, and dependent upon, cotton. While New York became the fulcrum of the U.S. cotton trade, merchants, shippers, auctioneers, bankers, insurers, and thousands of others were drawn to the burgeoning urban center. They packed lower Manhattan, turning it into the nation's emporium, in which products from all over the world were traded.

In those prewar decades, hundreds of shrewd merchants and smart businessmen made their fortunes in ventures directly or indirectly tied to cotton. The names of some of them reverberate today, as I have stated before: Lehman Brothers, J. Pierpont Morgan, John Jacob Astor, Charles L. Tiffany.

I believe I've mentioned New England's home to 472 cotton mills, but there were hundreds of other mills and not just in New York. Just between 1830 and 1840 Northern mills consumed more than 100 million pounds of Southern cotton, so the economy of much of New England was connected to textiles.

For years, the national dispute over slavery had been growing more and more alarming to the powerful group of Massachusetts businessmen historians refer to as the Boston Associates. When this handful of brilliant industrialists established America's textile industry earlier in the nineteenth century, they also created America's own industrial revolution and by the 1850s their enormous profits had been poured into a complex network of banks, insurance companies, and railroads, but their enormous wealth remained tied to dozens of mammoth textile mills in Massachusetts, southern Maine, and New Hampshire. Some of these places were really textile citys---like Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts, both named for Boston Associate founders.

And as the nation slogged towards war and economic disruption, these industrialists and allied politicians wanted to convince the South that at least some in the North were more than willing to compromise on slavery. A compromise was critical for the good of the Union and business.

 On the night of Oct. 11, 1858, an honored guest received a standing room only audience to hear him speak at a rally at Faneuil Hall, long the center of Boston's public life. The wealthy and powerful of New England's preeminent city praised the "intellectual cultivation" and "eloquence" of the senator from Mississippi , and when Jefferson Davis walked onto the stage, the Brahmins of Boston gave him a standing ovation.  

In Avery Craven's Civil War in the Making, he says in the first chapter,(paraphrasing, capsulizing) in general fashion that attitudes that would play a fateful part in national life lay in the rural belt:
stretching out of New England into Vermont , then westward across New York and along the Great Lakes into the interior were many farms, esp. in N.Y. which had been purchased from large land holders. Wheat, a great frontier cash crop, had, by 1840, already crossed this region. At first, it brought profits, and had built Rochester as a great milling center, but as it moved west, it left disaster in its wake and the need to shift crops constantly. Land agents in Albany and landlords nearby kept them conscious that the living of the many was in the hands of the few.

Even more important than economic factors in shaping attitudes of men in the region was the matter of sin. Revival meetings followed migrating New Englanders westward and so constant and intense was revival fervor that upper N.Y. had become known as the "Burned-Over District." A flow of young revivalists out of Yale, and a steady flow of religious literature changed men and women into revivalists set to rid the world of sin and usher in the millenium. Under intense emotions new churches were formed and became a permanent part of American life. Communities cropped up where sin couldn't exist, and the exact date that Christ would reappear and the world come to an end was set. Never in all American life had a more moral force been set in motion.

Concern for the individual soul kept this force safely away from social reform until the 1830's, when hard times and a growing realization that revival methods hadn't brought the millenium turned disillusioned souls in a different direction. They chose an attack on specific evils and they turned reformers. With great zeal, they turned on war, intemperance, injustice to women, Negro slavery, and a half dozen other social ills. And of course slavery's sinfulness was most apparent and those that practiced it were far enough removed to permit the imagination full play.

Working largely through evangelical churches young preachers lit the "fires of freedom" across New York and on into the upper Northwest. The American Anti-Slavery Society told its agents to especially stir up ministers and others to continually mention the oppressed slaves in all social and public prayers.

A movement that had begun to usher in the millenium in their own neighborhoods was broadened into one directed mainly at the institutions of a rival section. These sinners were to be convicted of their sins and then led to repentence/salvation in the good old revival way. "There is fast rising in New England a moral Democracy, in harmony with Christianity", wrote George Bancroft, the historian. "Democracy" is the cause of Humanity....it is the cause of Christianity...of which it has been well said that its prevailing spirit of democratic equality among men is its highest fact"....said the Democratic Review.

The Panic of 1837 caused hard times and the long aftermath added another item to the Christian-democratic values. The economic pinch enabled industrial capitalism to prove its superiority and to establish its dominance and become the symbol of the Modern Age. So progress in terms of cities, factories, and railroads became a part of the national manifest destiny so energetically demanded. After this, Christianity, democracy, and progress would go hand in hand in an aggressive drive that wouldn't be considered aggression because it is not aggression to fight sin, to demand a more democratic order, or to encourage progress!

Meanwhile, the bitter debates in Congress regarding the receiving of antislavery petitions and the use of the mails seemed to indicate that the real danger to democracy, Christianity and progress was to be found, not at home, but in a rising slave power. And of course looking around with their practiced eyes to detect sinners , they began to shift the blame for what had happened to them and to the old America, to the aristocrats who lived below the Mason-Dixon line in idle luxury. Their abused, exploited slaves toiled constantly while their masters' sinful ways were all on the long list against which these moral crusaders had been preaching and their crusades launched.

The South was obviously out of step with progress even though they expanded with their cotton, never once altering their ways or values. The South was holding back the rest of the nation, and the agricultural disaster that had overtaken the once prosperous wheat farmers of New England and upper New York was the work of the slaveholder!

Anti-slavery groups resolved that "slavery is the grand cause of the pecuniary embarrassments of the country; no real or permanent relief is to be expected by the establishment of a national bank or sub-treasury, until the total abolition of that execrable system."

By Allen (Piewacket1861) He is member in the forum