Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Part XI

Preaching to the choir, Belle and Piewacket. All of the North's involvement in and profit from slavery is well known and not a nice chapter in American History."......from "Ole"

Dear "Ole",
I can assure you this isn't preaching to the choir to ME!  I had not heard this before on other forums.  If it is old news I am quite certain I would know about it. 

I'm quite sure the "blame game" is of no interest to you, "Ole".  That's why it has been so carefully hidden on all the forums I've been on before. I doubt quite seriously if anyone who thought the North was the "right side" in the conflict would want this information known at all!

Also, even though you appear uninterested in who was making all that money in the 1830's on, look around you.  Done any business with Smith/Barney lately?  Like the way the Biltmore estates look as we're allowed to walk through and see how the Northern rich lived in those terribly hot summers that winning a war like this one helps to build?  Does water taste better flowing through an 18 kt. gold tap?

I don't suppose today I could even afford the tie clasp that Audrey Hepburn bought in Breakfast at Tiffany's now, with inflation.  But Tiffany's is still booming.  I wonder if the Astor who went down on the Titanic would have improved his family's lot or just been a "wastrel"?  Even the best of families have them, you know. 

Do you suppose we could look and see if any of those families actually did their "fighting for them" or did they "buy" a replacement.  I can't remember which Northern banker said it, but he told his son that he wasn't going to be "wasted" on something like "that war".  "That war" forever changed the face of this country and ended the family lines of a great many more.

Naturally it is easier to blame the entire war on the South and leave the North lily-white (pun intended.) out of it except to extoll their virtues.  But from what I am reading here a lot of people didn't know this information anymore than I did. 

I think it's time all were enlightened, not just a select few who choose to keep the "North's involvement" quiet.  It makes their victory so much sweeter.

Nevertheless, I will carry on.  You don't need to read any of these posts since you obviously know all this information.  I will understand perfectly.  -Pie-

Continuing with the saga of the slave, VENTURE SMITH.

"The very first salute I had from [the soldiers] was a violent blow on the head with the fore part of a gun, and at the same time a grasp round the neck, I then had a rope put about my neck, as had all the women in the thicket with me, and were immediately led to my father."
 
Venture Smith, born Broteer Furro was about 8, the son of a rich, indulgent father. The soldiers wanted Saungm Furro's money and when he wouldn't give it to them, they tortured him in front of his family until he died, but he was spared seeing his wives and children dragged to a coastal factory where they were held for sale.
 
John Atkins, a British surgeon aboard a slave ship has described where the family was held: "In the Area of this Quadrangle, are large Vaults, with an iron Grate at the Surface to let in Light and Air on those poor Wretches, the Slaves, who are chained and confined there till a Demand comes. They are all marked with a burning Iron upon the right Breast."
 
Venture was bought by a prominent Rhode Island family whose name figures prominently in 18th-century New England. The Mumfords were quintessential Triangle Trade entrepeneurs; they had slave trade ships, owned farms where enslaved blacks worked, and sold captives in the West Indies and American colonies. On Africa's Gold Coast, about 40 miles from where Broteer was imprisoned, there was a city called Mumford.
 
Venture remembered being put in a canoe , rowed to a vessel bound for Barbados; while on board he was bought by Robert Mumford, the ship's steward, for a piece of calico cloth and four gallons of rum. In that moment, he lost his name, country, and his freedom.

During his lifetime he outlived three owners, bought several other black men expecting that they would in turn repay their purchase price and then begin their own lives in freedom. He overcame many obstacles and when he died in 1805, the inscription on his tombstone in East Haddam, Connecticut reads "Sacred to the Memory of Venture Smith, African. Tho the son of a King he was kidnapped and sold as a slave but by his industry he acquired Money to Purchase his Freedom."

In the last sentences of his narrative Venture says that chief among his consolations are Meg, "the wife of my youth, whom I married for love and bought with my money," and his freedom.

Africans have fought back from the beginning and in the North, it was no different than Nat Turner, in Stono, S.C. and in many lesser places.

They fought fiercely in the West Indies in the 1600s and of course "the wall of fire" for three weeks in the 1791 summer in Haiti as 100,000 slaves torched plantations.

By Allen (Piewacket1861) He is member in the forum