SLAVERY: NOT JUST SOMETHING FOR THE SOUTH

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Thanks, Terry, for your input and especially for the comments on McPherson.  Anything the man writes is taken, as I understand it, as being written on leaves of gold by the "other side".  I would appreciate anything further you'd like to add to this thread.  And, also , any of the other members of this forum, I'd appreciate more input.

Belle, what can I say!  You have added so much to my meager beginnings.  Thank you.  I truly appreciate everything you have said.  It has added so much depth to the thread.

Now we are really beginning to see what was happening in the New England states, with their self-righteous attitude & priggish behaviour.  Also I'm still waiting for ANY apology for ANY part that they played: their condescencion, smugness, and anti-South attitude led directly to war.....war that would kill over 600,000 men. 

Moreover the massive cover-up in history books makes me think that the New England states need to wake up, just as the South is waking up to the realization of how very DEEP the North's involvement was in slavery. 

Lincoln knew all of it.  And cared not a whit.  Before I'm through, starting with this thread and going on with another thread concerning "show me the money" I intend to lay before you facts that will make your blood boil.


Certainly other states had opinions on "the peculiar institution" and it would lend credence to the North's position on slavery later on if, in the early years they were joining hands with their black brethren in a show of equality. Of course that is a ludicrous pipedream because no one in those early years considered the blacks as equals.

There's a website that shows some very different attitudes in this, "the land of the free and the home of the brave". I refer to SlaveNorth.com, with annotated sources.

"When the Illinois state constitution was adopted in 1818, it limited the vote to "free white men" and excluded blacks from the militia."

Indiana's anti-immigration rule was challenged in the case of a black man convicted for bringing a black woman into the state to marry her. The state Supreme Court upheld the conviction, noting that, "The policy of the state is ... clearly evolved. It is to exclude any further ingress of negroes, and to remove those already among us as speedily as possible."" [/b]

These are just two examples of dozens of others the website provides about all of the northern States with their institutionalised anti-Black bias and segregation.

Michael F. Holt, Ph.D. states on another website, Getting The Message Out, "Several midwestern free states, including Illinois, even passed laws prohibiting free blacks from entering their borders..."

I'm sure most people here are familiar with Lerone Bennett, Jr., editor of Ebony magazine who wrote a book about Abraham Lincoln being a White supremacist. In it, he details the Black Code laws of Illinois, the absurdly proclaimed "Land of Lincoln". There, it was a crime for a Black to settle in Illinois unless they could prove their freedom and post a $1,000 bond, and if they could do that, they were under constant surveillance and could be arrested by any white.

 They could not vote, sue, or testify in court. These State laws were voted for by Abraham Lincoln while he was a State legislator in January of 1836, according to Mr. Bennett's book, Forced Into Glory. (Naturally here loud cries will be heard of "He changed his opinion later in life." I will even grant that this could be true, but it's also true that it's still on the books what was happening and how Mr. Lincoln voted before "this cruel war" began.)

Hindsight is always 20/20, but I am still looking at the years before the war and I see things a bit differently about the North than the nobility of those marching off "to die to make men free."

Before returning to my original premise of the North and the vast fortunes they were accumulating before the war, almost all having some form of association with the slavery in the South, let me add this:

Whether or not one agreed with human bondage, it was protected in the US Constitution. Therefore, all States were legally obliged to honour those provisions that dealt with their sister States who held slaves.

The northern States abolitionists were the ones who claimed the right to nullify the Constitution. Even though the northern States had no empathy for the Black race, slavery had been abolished there, further proof that a war was unnecessary for the eventual freedom of the Black race here in the States. For the States knew that slavery was a right reserved for the State to deal with. Or, a Constitutional Amendment could be propounded. But, such a one was not required for the northern States to abolish it within their borders, their lack of empathy for the Blacks notwithstanding.

Ending here for now.
-Pie-

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The northern States would not abide with Article IV, Section 2, Paragraph 3; it reflected not a sense of humanity, of moral revulsion to slavery, but instead a growing anti-South hatred & prejudice.

Blacks did not matter to the north, but were pawns by which the north stuck it to the South. So, even when Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, the northern States, reflecting their ethnic-hatred for the South, refused to obey it, again, not because of right and wrong, but because of hatred towards the South. Even that reflected their perceived States Right to nullify any federal law they wanted to.

These sites prove very insightful as to the attitude of the North before the war.
http://www.slavenorth.com/denial.htm Here states are taken one by one so that you can see the attitudes that were held toward slavery and the South up to the point of war.

Now back to the North and their industries and their dependence on slavery at certain levels.

It's difficult to overstate the importance of molasses, or more, specifically, of rum, particularly to the New England states.

At different times, Massachusetts and Rhode Island together had nearly 70 distilleries for rum, and New York City had more than a dozen. The Africa trade, however, took only a fraction of the rivers of molasses and rum flowing into and out of the North.

In 1770, Massachusetts and Rhode Island together imported 3.5 million gallons of molasses, which their distilleries turned into 2.8 million gallons of rum. New Englanders drank up most of the rum themselves, but 1.3 million gallons was re-exported up and down the Atlantic coast, from Newfoundland to the Deep South. New England distilled more rum than all the rest of North America. The volume drunk was astonishing- an average of 1.5 quarts a week for every adult male! So was the amount of molasses smuggled past customs agents --probably more than 1.5 million gallons in 1770. (On that one and a half quarts a week of rum I don't believe that qualifies for medicinal purposes....but that's just my opinion.)

The hogsheads of molasses and rum were transported by water like almost everything the North traded in, and the revenue from shipping rivaled the value of West Indian exports.

Shipbuilding became a major industry both in New York City and in New England. John Winthrop himself financed the construction of the Massachusetts Bay Colony's first ship, The Blessing of the Bay, launched in 1631.

By 1700, Boston and nearby towns were turning out 70 ships a year -- the most in number and tonnage in the Western Hemisphere.This industry employed hundreds of shipwrights, carpenters, sailsmakers, and ironworkers, not to mention lumbermen. Two thousand trees, mainly oak and pine, were cut to build a single decent-sized ship. The ships were sold, often to West Indian buyers, or kept for Massachusetts's own fleet. In the early 1700's, Boston's adult male population had risen to only about 1800. Incredibly, though, nearly one-third of Boston's men owned shares in at least one oceangoing vessel.

End this part.

-Pie-

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I know that I seem to be jumping around on this thread but bear with me.  I am using information from different sources and it's a bit disconcerting, even to me. 

But I will get all the information onto the thread if given some patience.

Thank you for yours.

-Pie-

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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."

-Pie-

[Belle]

Pie:

Thank you for your continued efforts on this topic. 

"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."

Using the South as the scapegoat for something that was once a national sin has become a frustrating but necessary lesson to reverse.  Morality and industry - the powerful and persuasive tools that were essential to completely demoralize and create disquiet within another group of people.  The hypocricy is galling when you think about it, particuarly when the North simply traded one brand of slavery for another - European immigrants.

Belle~

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Several years ago an article ran on a front page of a newspaper, The Hartford Courant: "Aetna 'Regrets' Insuring Slaves"; it concerned an overdue admission and apology from one of Connecticut's oldest, most prestigious companies.

The next day reporters began to investigate the newspaper's own role in slavery. After giving such prominence to the Aetna story, it seemed only fair to see what this newspaper, The Hartford Courant which dates from 1764 had known and was culpable for.

Four months later this title across the front page: "Courant Complicity in an Old Wrong---Newspaper's Founder Published Ads in Support of the Sale and Capture of Slaves."

Within a year, in partial response to a lawsuit seeking reparations that had been filed against Aetna and several other companies (though not against The Courant) people across the US were trying to find the identity of a slave, any slave, who'd been insured, and to write of his/her life.

It became clear that Connecticut's role in slavery was not only huge, it was key to the success of the entire institution. Finding an insured slave suddenly became secondary. They were now looking at nothing less than altered reality.

Thoughts came: Northerners were the good guys in the War, the South was to blame for slavery. Southerners had plantations, the North had the Underground Railroad.


But with a closer look people found unshakeable proof of Connecticut's complicity in slavery. What's more, it quickly became obvious that the economic links to slavery were deeply entwined with religious, political, and educational institutions. Slavery was part of the social contract in Connecticut. And there was more. The year before the American Revolution, more than 5,000 Africans were enslaved in Connecticut. The federal census clearly showed it. But why wasn't it generally known that in 1790 most prosperous merchants owned at least one slave, as did 50 percent of the ministers? Clearly that's nothing in comparison to, say, Virginia, but why wasn't it common knowledge?

Also, some Connecticut slaves actually lived on farms as large as many in the South, and another word for farm could be "plantation".

The story got bigger and more damning. The Triangle Trade between the Americas, Europe and Africa is a staple of the high school curriculum. But as was written in the original "Complicity" issue of this newspaper, The Hartford Courant:

"....somehow in popular perception, slavery has been cut out of the trade triangle and transferred forward to the Civil War, where it became a moral problem confined to the South. Just as Connecticut was thought not to have "had slavery" because it did not have as many slaves or Southern-style plantations, it was thought not to profit from slavery as much as the South did."

"The truth, however, which ought to have been plain, is that Connecticut derived a great part, maybe the greatest part, of its early surplus wealth from slavery."

What was true of Connecticut turned out to be overwhelmingly true of the entire North.

American staples such as corn, wheat, and tobacco have importance in this country's history, as do whale oil, coal, and gold. They were the main characters in defining chapters of American history, but it's true: cotton was king.

Right before the War, the 10 major cotton states were producing 66 percent of the world's cotton; raw cotton accounted for more than half of all U.S. exports.

The numbers are extraordinary: in the season ending August 31, 1860, the U.S. produced close to 5 million bales of cotton, or roughly 2.3 billion pounds. Of that amount, about half (1 billion pounds) was exported to Great Britain's 2,650 cotton factories.

The Industrial Revolution had spread through Europe and, although small compared with G. Britain's, France's textile industry ( centered in Lille) was also fed almost entirely by U.S. cotton, 200 million pounds' worth in 1858. And Southern cotton was important to other countries: the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Russia, Italy, Spain, and Belgium.

However, most of the cotton went through Liverpool, a port nearest Manchester in Lancashire, the heart of textile manufacturing. Up until 1770 Great Britain got most of its cotton elsewhere, but with the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 by Eli Whitney the world changed. "The gin", Whitney wrote Thomas Jefferson, allowed "one negro to clean fifty weight (I mean 50 lbs. after separation from the seed) of the green seed cotton per day."  Jefferson was one of the first plantation owners to order a gin. Suddenly cotton became hugely profitable.


The South switched over to cotton, and within only about 15 years they were supplying more than half of Great Britain's demand. By the eve of the Civil War Great Britain was largely clothing the Western world, using Southern-grown cotton, since well before 1860 the relationship between Great Britain and the South had become ironclad.


In 1848, Solon Robinson, a farmer and writer from Connecticut who became agriculture editor for the New York Tribune visited the nation's largest cotton port, New Orleans. "It must be seen to be believed. Boats are arriving, so piled up with cotton, that the lower tier of bales on deck are in the water; and as the boat is approaching, it looks like a huge raft of cotton bales, with the chimneys and steam pipe of an engine sticking up out of the centre."

From New Orleans and the other major cotton ports--Savannah, Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina' and Mobile, Alabama--most of the cotton was shipped to Liverpool. If it didn't go directly there, it went North: to Boston for use in the domestic textile industry, or to New York City. From New York, it generally went to Liverpool, or elsewhere in Europe.

This only gives the slightest hint of the role of New York City and the rest of the North played in the cotton trade, or of the lengths the New York business community would go to protect its franchise.

The Union Committee of Fifteen called a meeting at the offices of Richard Lathers, a prominent cotton merchant. The organizers had planned to invite 200 people, by written invitation only, but the group that thronged outside of Lather's offices at 33 Pine Street, one block over from Wall Street, surpassed 2,000. In fact, offices across the street had to be quickly commandeered to accomodate the crowd, and even then the bankers, merchants, others spilled into the street.

The worried business community had met to discuss strategies before to smooth relations between North and South, but the Pine Street meeting on 12-15-60 may have represented the group at its most panicky. South Carolina's probable secession vote was expected days away, with talk of Alabama soon to follow. After that, who knew?

The very spine of 19th century money and power attended that meeting. These "merchant princes" included:

A.T. Stewart: cotton merchant (thought to be the wealthiest man in New York) who opened the nation's first department store, called "the marble palace" on Broadway.

Moses Taylor: sugar importer, banker, coal and railroad magnate, whose extensive enterprises made him, for nearly half a century, one of the most influential businessmen in N.Y.City.

Abiel Abbot Low: whose A.A. Low & Brothers was the most important firm in the new and booming China trade.

William B. Astor: son of fur and real estate mogul John Jacob Astor, the nation's first millionaire.

Wall Street banker August Belmont ( whose passion for horse breeding led to the creation of the Belmont Stakes) : American agent for the Rothchilds of Germany, who married the daughter of Commodore Perry .

Also invited were William H. Aspinwall and his partners Robert Minturn and Henry Grinnell; editors of the Journal of Commerce and the New York Herald; and several politicians, including two former and future mayors: future presidential candidate Samuel J.Tilden, and former president Millard Fillmore.

Richard Lathers directed his opening comments to Southern planters, urging them "to consider their duties to that part of their Northern brethren whose sympathies have always been with Southern rights and against Northern aggression."

Charles O'Conor: lawyer and longtime defender of slavery, argued that in considering whether to leave the Union, the South was just struggling "to keep its head above the rapidly advancing waters of this black sea of abolitionism, which threatens to drown it."

O'Conor paused, interrupted by applause, and continued, "There is no source of evil whatever in the North except the honest, conscientious people of the North, who have drank into their bosoms this dreadful error--that it is their duty..to crush out and trample upon the system of Slavery upon which the prosperity of the South and the permanency of this Union in its present form depend."

As the afternoon lengthened entreaties to the South became more emotional and John Dix, New Hampshire native, former N.Y. senator and future N.Y. governor, seemed to sum up the sentiments of the day: "We will not review the dark history of the aggression and insult visited upon you by Abolitionists and their abettors during the last thirty-five years. Our detestation of these acts of hostility is not inferior to your own."

-Pie-

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From 1825 on, in volume and value of imports and exports, the seaport at South Street outdid the combined trade of its two closest competitors in Boston and Philadelphia.

New York's dominance only increased as the 19th century progressed. Long before war loomed, New York, after London and Paris, had become the third major city of the Western world, and its glory was built largely of cotton bricks.

Cotton bales would be tilted on a dolly and wheeled from a dock onto one of thousands of flatboats, sloops, brigs, barks, schooners, clippers, and steamboats, and for over half a century before the War, cotton was the backbone of the American economy; it was the king and the North ruled the kingdom.

From seed to cloth, Northern merchants, shippers, and financial institutions, many based in New York, controlled nearly every aspect of cotton production and trade.

Only large banks, mostly located in Manhattan, or in London, could extend the credit to plantation owners, the credit they needed between planting and selling their crop. If a farmer wanted to expand his operations during those boom decades, he required Northern bankers' deep pockets for the money to buy more equipment, as well as additional labor. Slaves were usually bought on credit.

The power of New York over key aspects of cotton production was wide and deep, and involved many of the most solid and prestigious businessmen of the day.

Looking back over the years leading up to the War one wonders how a country that was so interdependent on one another ended up bloodying fields with fathers, sons, brothers each willing to fight each other over different ideas.

One basic idea stands out, according to Craven's "Civil War in the Making": "The total effect of the Industrial Revolution was vastly to increase the interlocking of human interests and the dependence of man on man."

With the coming of machines, and men to work them, they became dependent on the producers of raw materials going into their products, and on the markets which consumed their mass production. Industry caused cities to grow but no city could feed itself or consume the goods which its industries produced. They became increasingly dependent on the rural areas for food and most of the other necessities of life, and without widespread markets, they'd perish. Nations which became industrialized, as did England, by 1845, ABANDONED their tariffs on foodstuffs, and reached out all over the world for markets and raw materials.

In the US this growth of interdependence was as marked as elsewhere. New England textile mills took a larger percentage of Southern cotton crops each year, while the South, more and more, depended on the North for its plantation supplies. By the 1850's, speakers often referred to New York City as "the prolongation of the South".

Southerners, in June & early July flocked North for their annual supply of dry goods, hardware, boots, shoes, and other merchandise. Many major stores had branch houses in New Orleans, Charleston; stores like Daniel Parish and Company had branches in 5 different Southern cities.

Cotton planting was financed by Northern firms, and paid for at harvest with drafts on New York banks. The cotton was shipped in Northern vessels, insured by Northern companies, and handled by Northern factors. In fact, as Foner says, "Down to the outbreak of the Civil War, New York dominated every single phase of the cotton trade from plantation to market."

Farmers in the Northwest were busily sending enormous quantities of corn, salt pork, flour, and whiskey down rivers to Southern plantations, and the market gardeners of Virginia, each night,m loaded their ships with potatoes, cabbages, fresh vegetables, and berries, according to season, for the morning markets in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.

One of the most glaring realities of the day was interdependence-the unsettling fact that, in an economic sense, this was "One World".

Interestingly historians should also remember that the harshest attacks on slavery in the 1820's came from Virginians, North and South Carolinians, & Tennessee and Kentucky. Their legislative halls were backed by antislavery societies that would have been admired later on by the most rabid Northern Abolitionists.

No one should forget that slavery had existed in Southern states for over 200 years without becoming "too heavy a burden" for many a Northern conscience.

Two great forces fundamentally altered lives around the Atlantic Basin in the decades between 1830 & 1860. As the late Charles A. Beard would say a few clues would offer "a damn dim candle over a damn dark abyss."

The Industrial Revolution requires no comment, but one profound social change needs emphasis: The total effect of the Industrial Revolution was vastly to increase the interlocking of human interests and the dependence of man on man.

The 2nd force, also working towards the same end, was the application of steam and electricity. The first gave the railway, the steamship, and power press while the 2nd gave the telegraph; the effect of both was to cut space and bring men closer together.
Thus began the shrinking of nations.

The dependency of the sections of the United States was vividly expressed by a Southern commercial convention speaker in 1855, who, in a plea for greater home production said (ominously, in hindsight): "From the rattle with which the nurse tickles the ear of the child born in the South to the shroud which covers the cold form of the dead, everything comes from the North. We rise from between sheets made in Northern looms, and pillows of Northern feathers, to wash in basins made in the North, dry our beards on Northern towels, and dress ourselves in garments woven in Northern looms; we eat from Northern plates and dishes; our rooms are swept with Northern brooms, our gardens dug with Northern spades and our bread kneaded in trays or dishes of Northern wood or tin; and the very wood which feeds our fires is cut from Northern axes, helved with hickory brought from Connecticut and New York." This picture was confidently balanced with the assertion that if the cotton supply were cut off from Northern factories, or the Mississippi River closed, the economy of the North would fall in ruin.

The biggest social-economic fact of the period from 1815 to 1860 was bringing men closer together and the increase of interdependence to the point where peace/security all depended on an equal increase of humility and patience to make the democratic process work. This would require tolerance of differences, compromise and rational discussion of problems. No one people could insist that their pattern of existence was best for all. With these elements in place the US could conceivably be called indivisible.

The irony was that two distinct, differing social-economic systems were already evolving: one, primarily agricultural, the other increasingly more commercial, industrialized and involved in finance. One depended on white labor. By 1860, the other contained nearly 4 million slaves.

The spread of agriculture based on the continued employment of Negro slave labor hadn't changed men's reliance on local and state government as Thomas Jefferson had said. Belief in the rural-agricultural life as the only foundation for democracy justified in their minds the continued holding of slaves as good for the Negro, the white man, and society.

This completely new way of life was beginning, to which not a single existing institution, relationship, or old value applied. Even basic concepts were being examined. The thinking which had been dominated by shipping and agriculture didn't meet the needs of the new industrial order. Manufacturers, forced to find their raw materials and markets in all parts of the country, and the merchants and bankers, who marketed and financed wheat and cotton, were bound to be nationalist in outlook.

There were many factors at work in the years leading up to the war: pseudo-religious fanaticism, raw greed and corruption, political folly, rampant ambition, not to mention the cultural misunderstanding that was abundant in those days. Problems had festered for years with interesting features, but war could have been avoided. The generation living in 1860 could have come and gone without major incident if events hadn't been manipulated by interests with sufficient capital to exaggerate destructive personalities and influences all out of proportion to their actual importance.

The divisive antagonisms between North and South weren't just unfortunate historical accidents. These antagonisms were deliberately agitated during the 1850s by great international banking houses.Nothing would suit them better than to provoke secession.

End next part    -Pie-

[Piewacket1861]

From 1861 to 1865 the Southern States were conquered by an overwhelming military assault which deeply injured the economy and culture of the region. After the surrender of the last rebel armies was followed by a long period of reconstruction during which Southern representatives and senators were excluded from Congress, constitutional government was abolished in 10 of the former Confederate States.

The vast majority of white citizens were disenfranchised, and military occupation/martial law were imposed on the defeated people of those States. The age of lawlessness, corruption, and oppression lingered for years to come. The last Federal troops were finally withdrawn from Louisiana in 1877.

Oops!   I need to add something here.
 

Looking back through my notes I find that I have left out something that should have been included much much earlier on. I hope that by putting it in at this late date it won't disrupt the flow. I promise to "get back on track" after this.
____________________________________________

Of the 13 original states, only one plunged into African slave trade in a huge way and that was Rhode Island.

Before Congress voted to ban the slave trade beginning in 1808, Rhode Island, as I have probably stated, launched nearly 1000 voyages to Africa, carrying at least 100,000 slaves back across the Atlantic.
US participation, in sheer volume, may be seen as insignificant since European ships transported nearly all the estimated 11.5 million Africans sold over three centuries into New World slavery, including the approximately 645,000 sent to the American colonies.

The richly elegant Newport, Rhode Island dominated the first and longest period of the state's slave trade and its legacy can still be seen in architectural treasures such as the Francis Malbone mansion, now a lovely inn, & the library founded by Abraham Redwood.

These men were just two among a host of slave merchants in a town where commerce was a family affair.

Aaron Lopez and his father-in-law Jacob Rodriguez Rivera were supremely honorable Jewish businessmen and as "merchant princes", their reputations prospered in the "Triangle Trade".

End this part.  -Pie-

[Piewacket1861]

Lopez was a founder of Touro Synagogue in Newport, the oldest synagogue in America and a site on the National Historic Register.

The Wanton family produced four colonial governors and also launched slave voyages. Two of Newport's most active traders, the Vernon brothers, Samuel and William, found a steady customer in Henry Laurens, the leading slave merchant in Charleston, S.C. During the Revolution, Laurens was a president of the Continental Congress.

Rich Newport traders rarely sailed slave ships: they owned or bankrolled them; slave ships were very risky investments, but a successful voyage could bring ten times the profit of an ordinary New England trading voyage to the West Indies.

Interestingly, the Newport slave traders didn't traffic only in Africans. Successful merchants always diversify their wares and Rhode Islanders became closely identified with one other product in particular: rum. At slave depots on the African coast, the R.I. vessels were known and welcomed as "rum-men".

Just before the Revolution, when the Newport trade first reached a peak, its vessels were carrying 200,000 gallons a year to Africa, where ship captains bartered for slaves by the barrel. An African man in his prime could be bought for about 150 gallons.

Two dozen distilleries operated in Newport alone and in 1772, merchants who owned slave vessels , who traded in molasses and rum, or who operated distilleries occupied 8 of the top 10 positions on Newport's tax rolls. Some, like the Malbone brothers, Evan and Francis, did all three.

In those pre-Revolution years, Newport launched 70% of all American slave voyages, and ushered the town into its first golden age. The rich and famous from distant colonies spent summers there; prosperous ship captains formed the charitable Fellowship Club that had rules against cursing, gambling, and drunkenness. On Sundays, when not on voyages, many of these captains sat in pews at Trinity Church. The elite Anglican Malbones and Wantons welcomed the up and coming captains into their church, and, by marriage, into their families, such as the 3 Wanton sisters who married slave captains.

Orders that Jacob Rivera and Aaron Lopez gave to one of their slave captains as he embarked in 1772 suggest the businesslike attitude with which Newporters conducted their perilous trade: "Lying any considerable time on the (African) coast is not only attended with very heavy expense, but also great risk of the slaves you have on board. We therefore would recommend to you dispatch, even if you are obliged to give a few gallons more or less on each slave," they wrote.

Also they advised the captain to brand one lot of 40 slaves already acquired to keep them separate from the slaves still to be purchased. "To these slaves we desire you'll put some particular mark that may distinguish them from those of the cargo, so that their sales in the West Indies may be kept by itself, for the insurance on these is not blended with the cargo."

Rhode Island, however, on this side of the Atlantic, had no rival. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, R.I. controlled two thirds or more of the colonies' slave trade with Africa and after the Revolution R.I. seized a virtual monopoly, shipping nearly 50,000 new slaves in less than 20 years.

But perhaps more than anything else, R.Island's deep, direct involvement ranks as one of the cruelest forced migrations in history and shows the extent to which slavery penetrated the New World. Although R.I.'s neighbors and R.I.itself found ways to profit by trading first with the slave plantations of the West Indies, then later with the South's cotton plantations, this smallest state went further: she competed with European powers in the slave trade itself. Isolated as she was, R.I. transported more slaves than any other of the original 13 states----North or South!

There are always two sides to every story and the "South and Slavery" has, in my opinion, dominated every forum. The only things I have seen on many of the forums I've been on about the North is that they built ships that brought the slaves. For some reason no one has thought it worthwhile to mention that by the American Revolution, slavery was already a vital part of the entire national economy.

Before the signing of the D. of Independence there were tens of thousands of slaves in the Northern United States, and although precise numbers are impossible to obtain, in 1760 there were at least 41,000 African slaves in the North, which includes New England, the Middle Atlantic States of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware.

As I've probably stated before, after we'd won our independence from Great Britain, slave numbers in the North dropped; Washington had freed many Africans who'd fought for America simply because Britain had promised freedom to blacks who joined the Loyalist cause. But in the 1790s Connecticut and Rhode Island together had more than 6,000 slaves; Pennsylvania had 3,700 and New York had more than 20,000. (However I see a slight discrepancy here: The First U.S. Census shows Conn. and R.I. with a combined slave population of 3,500, but Penn. still with 3,700 and N.Y. still with more than 20,000 black slaves; free and enslaved blacks make up more than 19 % of the U.S. population.)


No matter the numbers it didn't take long for an idealized notion of Northern slavery to take shape and soon become accepted as FACT, that Northern slavery was benign, more a mutually agreed upon indenture. Two centuries of human enslavement was re-cast as a paternalistic, "family-style" arrangement, good for both slave and owner. Forgotten was the fact that owners had the power of life and death over their "property".

In Connecticut, the colony's public records first mention a slave (Louis Berbice) killed by a Hartford man.(1639). Historian Bernard Steiner, late in the 19th century, wrote however "Connecticut had little to apologize for in her treatment of the Negro," a statement most Northerners echoed comfortably.

Closer to the truth were actual experiences of slaves such as Cato, Newport, and Adam, who, in 1758, were sentenced by Jonathan Trumbull, future governor of Connecticut, to be "publicly whipped on the naked body for nightwalking after nine in the evening without an order from their masters." Or:
1765: N.Y. couple (husband and wife) sold by their master for having too many children.
1760: An 11 yr. old boy put up for sale in New London County, Connecticut, by the family of the odious Benedict Arnold. The ad for the sale said he was accustomed to hard work.

Bottom line was this: Slaves in the North, like those in the South, served at the whim of their owners and could be sold/traded. They were housed in unheated attics and basements, in outbuildings and barns, they often slept on the floor, wrapped in coarse blankets and lived under harsh "black codes" which controlled their movements, prohibited their education and limited their social contacts. (In the South they had "row houses", shanties with dirt floors, usually a table of sorts and a small fireplace to cook over. They slept on whatever kind of pallets they could put together out of straw, etc. Some were allowed to grow a small garden. )

Many have read/listened to the Slave narratives of the South. If you have not read of Northern slavery the life story of Venture Smith is a good place to start. I encourage you to do so. Published in 1798 in New London, Connecticut, it's one of only a handful of surviving black narratives telling of life in Africa and colonial enslavement and the 31 page document is horrifying. I found it on line here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2h5.html

End this part

-Pie-

[ole]

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. But you seem to be exonerating the slave-owning, war-starting south by accusing the other side with an earlier complicity.

If your point is to assign equal blame to the north for starting the WBTS, you'd best get on it. So far, you've demonstrated enormous learning pointing nowhere.

By the way, the "blame game" is really quite fruitless. To me, it doesn't really matter who caused what; I'm interested only in the why's and how's. And "how" 1830s shippers' and financiers' profits and modern sinfulness apply to the 1850's whys and hows has not been addressed.

Lovely thread thought.

Ole