Monthly Archives: March 2022

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Seven, Chapter Four: Rebellion in Manhattan

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A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Seven
Chapter Four: Rebellion in Manhattan
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
MAIN-Chap-Four-3-31-22-94K

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Four.

SO MANY BLACKS were burned at the stake, hanged, beat to death by breaking every bone in their bodies, and killed in other ways by New Yorkers because they were afraid of slave uprisings. New Yorkers wanted to send a clear message that there would be no tolerating that kind of thing.

Too bad Northerners a hundred years later were ignorant of their own history.

If they had known their own history, maybe they would not have sent murderers like John Brown into the South to kill, rape and destroy then celebrate him as a hero for doing exactly what they had burned people at the stake for doing.

So much of the history that Northerners have believed about themselves with all their hearts is a lie as admitted by the New England authors of Complicity.

The Northern mythology about them being good to their slaves was quoted in Parts Two1 and Three2 of this series. As a refresher here's Boston Globe columnist Francie Latour in Part Three from her article, "New England's hidden history, More than we like to think, the North was built on slavery":

Slavery happened in the South, and it ended thanks to the North. Maybe we had a little slavery, early on. But it wasn't real slavery. We never had many slaves, and the ones we did have were practically family. We let them marry, we taught them to read, and soon enough, we freed them. New England is the home of abolitionists and underground railroads. In the story of slavery --- and by extension, the story of race and racism in modern-day America --- we're the heroes. Aren't we?3

What makes this so hypocritical is that Northerners brought all the slaves here with the Brits before them. Northern slave traders sailed from New York and New England, from Boston and other places to buy blacks captured by other blacks in never ending tribal warfare who were rounded up and waiting in the 40 plus slave forts on Africa's west coast, places like Bunce Island off modern Sierra Leone.

New Englanders packed them tight into ships hoping enough would survive to make them a profit. They chained them side by side to decks in the bowels of their burning hot ships with the stench of vomit, feces, urine and death, cooked in burning heat with no ventilation, no fresh air. That's what captured Africans had to smell and breathe-in for months through the long Middle Passage through Hell and into slavery.

Blacks themselves began this trade of their own race in Africa. They held captives, chained in vaults in slave forts or castles, until ships came by to buy them.

Remember, slavery was so big a part of the North's economy they were still vigorously slave trading throughout most of the nineteenth century despite it being outlawed by the U.S. Constitution in 1808.

W. E. B. Du Bois in his book The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 178-80 said Boston and New York were the largest slave trading ports on the planet in 1862, a year into the War Between the States.

In 1712, there were approximately 4,000 whites and 600 blacks, mostly slaves, in New York City:

Slavery was the bedrock of the city's developing economy, and the labor of Africans who hauled wood and water, who worked on the waterfront, in warehouses, in bakeries, and in cooperages, making barrels and casks, was helping the young colony prosper.4

On April 6, 1712, in the early morning, 24 black men gathered, most of whom were "Coromantees, named for the slave fortress at Coromantine on the west coast of Africa, in what is now Ghana." They had "axes, hatchets, guns and pistols."5

Two lit an outhouse on fire and when whites came to put it out, the blacks attacked them, killed one and wounded eight.

The slaves "thought the witch doctor's dust would make them invisible" but most were captured the next day. Six committed suicide but:

The city was in a panic. Seventy black men were arrested immediately and the Boston Weekly News-Letter reported that the uprising had put the 'whole town . . . under arms.'6

The usual punishment was hanging "but because a slave insurrection---or even an act of rebellion by one or two enslaved people---posed such a threat to the social order, courts had almost unlimited latitude in deciding punishment. [Gov.] Hunter knew that the colony could not let the rebels off lightly".7

Hunter assured his supervisors in London, the Lords of Trade, that "'There has been the most exemplary punishment inflicted that could possibly be thought of.'"

Three slaves, Clause, Robin, and Quoco, were convicted of murdering Robin's master, Adrian Hoghlandt:

Clause was tied to a wheel and, over a period of hours, his bones were smashed, one by one, with a crowbar, until he died. Robin was chained, strung up, and kept hanging without food or water until he died. Quaco was burned alive---in a slow fire so that his death took hours.8

Fort Amsterdam, later Fort George, "was built in the late 1620s with the labor of some of the first slaves who were brought to the colony."9

Between 1712 and 1741, slaves doubled and slave laws got tougher:

In 1735, when a slave who violated his curfew was horsewhipped to death by his owner, an all-white jury declared that the cause of death was not the beating, but 'Visitation by God.'10

By 1741, there were 1,800 slaves out of a total population of 10,000 with "new slave markets, named after prominent city slave traders" springing up on Wall Street.11

Fort George was important to the city's defenses because there were threats from Spain and France but it was deliberately burned in March 1741. Several other fires followed.

A notorious thief, the slave "Caesar Vaarck, or 'Vaarck's negro'" with a slave named Prince "stole silver candlesticks, coins, and some fancy cloth from a shop belonging to Robert and Rebecca Hogg." Vaarck used to hang out at Hughson's tavern owned by "John Hughson and his wife." Vaarck had a "beautiful white mistress with red hair," Peggy Kerry.12

A sixteen-year-old indentured servant working in Hughson's, Mary Burton, testified against the slaves and Hughson. The prosecutor, Justice Daniel Horsmanden, "was trained for the law in England." He was an English minister's son.13

Horsmanden described Peggy Kerry as "'a notorious prostitute, and also of the worst sort, a prostitute to Negroes.'" He castigated Hughson too for "confederating" with slaves.14

Another slave, Cuffee, was arrested as a conspirator and a jail informant got from him the name of the slave who had set the Fort George fire: Quack Roosevelt. Quack had become enraged when he was denied permission to see his wife who was a slave cook for the governor.

The slaves were tried without counsel but were allowed to call witnesses.

Caesar and Prince were found guilty and sentenced to hang. Caesar's body, since he was ring leader, "was to hang in chains until it rotted."15

Cuffee and Quack were tried together. Mary Burton's testimony resulted in more slaves being brought in and more accusations:

As the court began to collect names and confessions, a teenage slave, Niblet's Sandy, dropped a bombshell: the plan had been to burn the property of white men, then kill the whites as they tried to put down the fires. Sandy also claimed that Hughson was to become king, Caesar governor, and the black men were to take the murdered white men's wives as their own.16

The conviction rate was 100% for the slaves on trial.

Attorney William Smith wrapped up the case:

'Gentlemen, no scheme more monstrous could have been invented. . . . That the white men should all be killed, and the women become prey to the rapacious lust of these villains.!'17

The same thing as above is exactly what Denmark Vesey in Charleston was said to have planned. He was to have burned Charleston to the ground, killed all the white men and taken all the white women for himself and his plotters. He was executed July 2, 1822.

In less than a day, Quack and Cuffee were convicted and sentenced "to be burned at the stake the next afternoon." It was said that, around three, "the two slaves were led to the stake. Upon seeing the huge piles of wood to be burned, the slaves 'showed great terror in their countenances.'"18

The trials of John and Sarah Hughson and Peggy Kerry ended with convictions. Prosecutor William Smith said "Hughson's crimes made him 'blacker than a Negro'" They were all hanged.19

The total after the first week in July:

11 black men had been burned at the stake, and 10 blacks and 3 whites had been hanged. By the end of the month, 7 more black men would die."20

Mrs. Bradt's Tom was the last death. He was "convicted of setting fire to an outhouse." On March 13, 1742, he was hanged.

The prosecutor, Horsmanden, "wanted to burn Tom, but the other justices seem to have said 'Enough.'"

 

Next Week:
A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Eight
Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves

 

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Six, Chapter Three: A Connecticut Slave)

NOTES:
(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

1 https://www.charlestonathenaeumpress.com/complicity-how-the-north-promoted-prolonged-and-profited-from-slavery-by-anne-farrow-joel-lang-and-jenifer-frank-of-the-hartford-courant-a-comprehensive-review-by-gene-kizer-jr-part-two-in/

2 https://www.charlestonathenaeumpress.com/complicity-how-the-north-promoted-prolonged-and-profited-from-slavery-by-anne-farrow-joel-lang-and-jenifer-frank-of-the-hartford-courant-a-comprehensive-review-by-gene-kizer-jr-part-three/

3 Francie Latour, "New England's hidden history, More than we like to think, the North was built on slavery," September 26, 2010, http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/09/26/new_englands_hidden_history/?page=full, pages 1-7, accessed 2-28-22.

4 Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 80.

5 Ibid.

6 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 80-81.

7 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 81.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 82.

11 Ibid.

12 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 84.

13 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 86.

14 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 86-87.

15 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 88.

16 Ibid.

17 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 89.

18 Ibid.

19 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 91.

20 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 92.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

NOTES-Chap-Four-3-31-22-61K

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Six, Chapter Three: A Connecticut Slave

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A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery 
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Six
Chapter Three: A Connecticut Slave
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
British-Slave-Fort-CHAP-THREE 49K

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Three.

A CONNECTICUT SLAVE opens with a New England slave owner beating a black slave woman with her fists. The slave's husband rushes to her aid and receives blows from a whip.

This chapter is about Venture Smith who "was captured in Africa, shipped to Rhode Island, and bought, beaten, and sold in colonial Connecticut where there were 5,000 others like him."1

New England by the 1750s and "other Northern colonies were already becoming wealthy feeding slaves on the sugar plantations that covered the islands of the West Indies. The trade system that swept those Africans into permanent bondage also carried thousands of other Africans into forced labor in the American colonies."2

Before 1776 "there were tens of thousands of people in bondage in the Northern United States." 3

In the 1790s, New York alone "had more than 20,000."4

A historian in the late 1800s wrote: "'Connecticut had little to apologize for in her treatment of the Negro,'" but the truth was more like what happened to "Cato, Newport, and Adam."5

In 1758, a future governor "sentenced the three 'to be publicly whipped on the naked body for nightwalking after nine in the evening without an order from their masters.'"6

Slaves in the North were denigrated, faced hard punishment and fear:

They served at the whim of their owners and could be sold or traded. They were housed in unheated attics and basements, in outbuildings and barns. They often slept on the floor, wrapped in coarse blankets. They lived under a harsh system of 'black codes' that controlled their movements, prohibited their education, and limited their social contacts. Laws governing the rights and behaviors of slaves varied slightly from colony to colony, but they were updated in reaction to each new real or perceived threat. The two defining assumptions of all the codes were that blacks were dangerous in groups and that they were, at a basic human level, inferior.7

Venture Smith suffered greatly but overcame it all to achieve great success. He dictated his story to Elisha Niles, "a school teacher and Revolutionary War soldier." It was published in 1798 in New London, Connecticut and is "one of only a handful of surviving black narratives encompassing life in Africa and colonial enslavement."

Other accounts of slavery, much more recent, come from Zora Neale Hurston, the black anthropologist who wrote Barracoon, The Story of the Last Black Cargo and other books.

A barracoon is a slave fort on the coast of Africa where New England slave traders, and the British before them, pulled up their ships and hauled off the unfortunate black captives of incessant tribal warfare. Black tribal chieftains made slavery easy for the New Englanders and Brits.

Hurston at first believed the slave ships pulled up and a crew member waved a red handkerchief and the curious Africans went on board to see what it was, and were captured.

She was devastated to find out that her own people had sold her ancestors into slavery to face the Middle Passage.

She goes into great detail about how Cudjoe Lewis and his relatives were  captured by women warriors. Their tribe was just about wiped out. Survivors were forced to march in slave coffles for days. Their captors stopped to smoke the severed heads of their murdered relatives on poles because they had begun to stink.

Hurston interviewed Lewis in the early 20th century. He had been sold off of a slave ship in Alabama in 1865, the last year of the War Between the States.

New Englanders vigorously carried on the slave trade through most of the antebellum period despite it being outlawed by the U.S. Constitution in 1808.

In 1862, a year into the war, according to W.E.B DuBois, Boston and New York were the largest slave trading ports on the planet.

Before the 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.8

Venture Smith "was raised Broteer Furro in the west of Africa."9

West Africa was a "battleground with thousands kidnapped and sold into slavery every year." It had been this way since the sixteenth century "when Africans were first stolen to provide labor in the New World."10

Along the coast of West Africa

were about 40 'slave castles,' or 'slave factories,' that were, in effect, warehouses, established largely by Europeans, where traders from Europe and the colonies could select and buy captive human beings.11

Venture was eight when knocked on the head with the barrel of a gun. He watched his father tortured to death. He and the survivors "were dragged hundreds of miles to a coastal factory" then held for sale.

A British surgeon described the Cape Coast Castle like this:

'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 til a Demand comes. They are all marked with a burning Iron upon the right Breast.'12

Venture became the property of a Rhode Island family, the Mumfords who

were quintessential Triangle Trade entrepreneurs: they commanded slave trade ships, owned farms where enslaved blacks worked, and sold captives in the West Indies and American colonies.13

There was a city nearby on Africa's Gold Coast named Mumford.

Venture had been sold for "a piece of calico cloth and four gallons of rum."14

Mortality on the Middle Passage was high "among the captives, pinioned cheek by jowl with the dead and dying" and could be "15 to 20 percent." Sixty of the 260 on Venture's slave ship died of smallpox.15

Another slave, Sojourner Truth, "was sold, beaten, and abused in New York, and she saw her parents die of hunger and cold there."16 She and her family lived in the cellar of Colonel Johannes Hardenburgh. She was sold at age nine for $100:

'They gave her plenty to eat,' she recalled in her third-person narrative, 'and also plenty of whippings.' One Sunday morning, Sojourner's owner beat the child severely, until blood streamed from her wounds. 'And now,' she says, 'when I hear 'em tell of whipping women on the bare flesh, it makes my flesh crawl, and my very hair rise on my head! Oh! My God!'17

A slave running away "baffled most slave owners, who believed blacks, as inferior and passive, were naturally suited to slavery."18

Venture "ran away from the Mumfords' Fishers Island property with two other enslaved black men and a white indentured servant named Joseph Heday, who had devised the plan." Smith states:

'We privately collected out of our master's store, six great old cheeses, two firkins of butter, and one whole batch of new bread. When we had gathered all our clothes and some more, we took them all about midnight, and went to the boat, embarked, and then directed our course for the Mississippi.'19

The white man ran off with the gear and was chased and caught by the three blacks but they all decided to go back and confess. The white man was supposedly punished and Venture was sold away from his family to Thomas Stanton though Stanton eventually bought his family.

There were violent episodes with Venture Smith and the Stantons. Smith was a big man and strong. He fought back when treated bad so the Stantons gave up and sold Smith to be rid of him.

Slaves often resisted in various ways but some turned to murder:

As early as 1708, a New York couple and their three children were murdered by the family's two slaves. In New Jersey, a slave struck off his owner's head with an axe, and in Newport, Rhode Island, a black man murdered the white woman who had beaten him. Connecticut's colonial diarist Joshua Hempstead wrote of the New London slave who slipped ratsbane into the family "coffy." Other poisonings or attempts to poison owners appear frequently in records."20

Slavery had become "indispensable" for the North. Northern slaves

had to adapt to the diverse requirements of their owner's household, or farm, or other business. Slaves in the North worked in agriculture and in the maritime trades, but they also had tasks as varied as operating printing presses, shoeing horses, and constructing houses and barns.21

Joshua Hempstead's long-time slave, Adam, must have enjoyed his work and gotten along well with his owner. Hempstead wrote about Adam who

worked on his land in New London and Stonington for 40 years, labored all day, every day. Hempstead mentions Adam's threshing hay and wheat, tending livestock, building and repairing stone walls, cutting wood, harvesting apples and other crops, fixing broken wagons and farm equipment, and carting loads of seaweed.22

At thirty-six, Venture Smith said "I left Col. Smith once for all. . . . I had already been sold three times, made considerable money with seemingly nothing to derive [from it], . . . lost much by misfortunes, and paid an enormous sum for my freedom."23

It took him ten years but he bought his family, sons first so they could help earn enough for the others. One son, Cuff, fought for the colonists in the American Revolution and another, Solomon, was lost to scurvy.

Venture Smith ended up doing well. His son, Cuff, "worked with his father on Long Island, farming, chopping wood, fishing for eels and lobsters, and making a homestead. They owned a 30-ton sloop and used it to ferry wood to Rhode Island; this was one of Venture's most lucrative endeavors."24

Smith "eventually owned several dwellings and boats, and had substantial landholdings. 'My temporal affairs were in a pretty prosperous condition.' he said."25

Smith "moved to Haddam Neck on the Connecticut River, establishing a homestead on 100 riverfront acres. He made enough money farming, fishing, and shipping wood to buy several other black men, expecting that they would repay their purchase price and then begin their own lives in freedom."26

He died in 1805.

 

Next Week:
A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Seven
Chapter Four: Rebellion in Manhattan

 

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Five, Chapter Two: First Fortunes)

 

NOTES:
(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

1 Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 60-61.

2 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 61.

3 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 62.

4 Ibid.

5 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 63.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxviii.

9 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 63.

10 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 64.

11 Ibid.

12 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 64-65.

13 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 65.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 67.

17 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 66.

18 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 68.

19 Ibid.

20 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 71.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 73.

24 Ibid.

25 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 74.

26 Ibid.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

NOTES-Chap-Three-1-50K
NOTES-Chap-Three-2-31K

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Five, Chapter Two: First Fortunes

Posted on by | 1 Comment
A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
 by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Five
Chapter Two: First Fortunes
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
Triangle-Trade-Drawing-CHAP-TWO 3-17-22 79K
VIRGINIA-FIRST-Cover-Pg-3-17-22 47K

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Two.

COMPLICITY ERRONEOUSLY STATES that "Virginia may have been settled first, but the United States was born in New England."1

The only thing that was born in New England is a particularly nauseating kind of virtue signaling of the type practiced by "Native American" Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Chappaquiddick Ted.

Dr. Lyon Gardiner Tyler, son of President John Tyler, our 10th president, can help the New Englanders understand America's birth. Lyon Gardiner Tyler is savior of the College of William and Mary which was devastated after the War Between the States. He was president from 1888 to 1919.2

He wrote a piece in 1921, Virginia First, that explains all the details of America's founding. He writes that New England opposed expansion including the Louisiana Purchase and the admission of Texas so, if it had been up to New England, America would be a little strip along the east coast.

America was not only born in the South at Jamestown, Virginia May 13, 1607, a Southerner is the Father of Our Country, another wrote the Declaration of Independence and another is Father of the Constitution, all Virginians. It is hard for Massachusetts to claim to be the birthplace of America when Virginians did all that.

This is like a case of stolen valor by Massachusetts.

See Virginia First below, especially Section VII which includes:

VII.

Virginia Founded New England. In 1613 a Virginia Governor, Sir Thomas Gates, drove the French away from Maine and Nova Scotia and saved to English colonization the shores of Massachusetts and Connecticut. In 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers were inspired to go to North America by the successful settlement at Jamestown. They sailed under a patent given them by the Virginia Company of London, and it was only the accident of a storm that caused them to settle outside of the limits of the territory of the London Company, though still in Virginia. The Mayflower compact, under which the 41 emigrants united themselves at Cape Cod followed pretty nearly the terms of the original Virginia Company's patent.

In 1622 the people at Plymouth were saved from starvation by the opportune arrival of two ships from Jamestown, which  divided their provisions with them. Without this help the Plymouth settlement would have been abandoned.

Though New England did not birth America, they were entrepreneurial as England had intended: "the first colonies were essentially start-up business ventures, scattered from Canada to South America, intended to make a profit."

The Caribbean "not raw New England, was quickly taking shape as the area of real economic promise, and this promise was fulfilled when the English eventually struck the sweet mother lode of sugar."3

Sugar "roared across the Caribbean like an agricultural hurricane" and "siphoned hundreds of thousands of Africans into slavery to feed a boundless, addicted market."4

One observer in 1643 "raved that Barbados was 'the most flourishing Island in all those American parts, and I believe in all the world for the producing of sugar.'"5

Producing that "'white gold'" needed labor:

Between 1640 and 1650, English ships delivered nearly 19,000 Africans to work the fields in Barbados. By 1700, the cumulative total had reached 134,000. The pattern was repeated on other islands. Jamaica, barely populated when the English invaded it in 1655, had absorbed 85,000 African slaves by 1700. The Leeward Islands, including Antigua, took 44,000.6

Puritan John Winthrop, "founding governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony," stated in 1630: "We shall be as a City upon a Hill."7

In 1645, he heard from "a nephew vising Barbados that its planters that year had bought 'a thousand Negroes; and the more they buy, the better able they are to buy, for in a year and a half they will earn (with gods blessing) as much as they cost.'"

Winthrop's brother-in-law told him: "'I do not see how we can thrive until we get a stock of slaves sufficient to do all our business.'"8

Harvard professor, Bernard Bailyn, "dean of colonial historians," wrote:

the main factor in New England's phenomenal economic success, 'the key dynamic force,' was slavery.9

New Englanders and residents of the Middle Atlantic States "owned slaves and trafficked in slaves [but] they profited more from feeding the increasingly large numbers of Africans in the West Indies and providing the materials to operate the sugar plantations and mills."10

The Triangle Trade---between America, Africa, and the West Indies---was how it happened:

Northern colonies sent food, livestock, and wood (especially for barrels) to West Indian sugar plantations, where enslaved Africans harvested the cane that fed the refining mills. Sugar, and its by-product molasses, was then shipped back North, usually in barrels made of New England wood and sometimes accompanied by slaves. Finally, scores of Northern distilleries turned the molasses into rum to trade in Africa for new slaves, who were, in turn, shipped to the sugar plantations.11

Every acre was planted in sugar because profits were astronomical. Plantations "operated like factories, with sugar-boiling houses running around the clock."

Just before the Revolution, "almost 80 percent of New England's overseas exports went to the British West Indies. . . . a steady stream of flour, dried fish, corn, potatoes, onions, cattle, and horses as well as the fruits of Northern forests."12

There were big plantations in Rhode Island and Connecticut that rivaled "the plantations of Virginia's famed Tidewater region in the same period" but:

owners of small plots and farms in New Jersey and throughout rural areas of New York---including Long Island, Westchester, and Staten Island---also used slaves to grow crops to supply the sugar plantations.13

Families bound together by the "West Indies slave islands would include hundreds or thousands of names, depending on where the qualifying bar is set. In the eighteenth 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. And, of course, the Winthrop family did very well."14

The bottom line is that:

Plantation slavery created tremendous wealth in the New World and the Old. It was the engine of the colonial Atlantic economy.15

 

Virginia First
by Dr. Lyon G. Tyler

I.

The name First given to the territory occupied by the present United States was Virginia. It was bestowed upon the Country by Elizabeth, greatest of English queens. The United States of America are mere words of description. They are not a name. The rightful and historic name of this great Republic is "Virginia." We must get back to it, if the Country's name is to have any real significance.

II.

Virginia was the First colony of Great Britain, and her successful settlement furnished the inspiration to English colonization everywhere. For it was the wise Lord Bacon who said that, "As in the arts and sciences the 'first invention' is of more consequence than all the improvements afterwards, so in kingdoms or plantations, the first foundation or plantation is of more dignity than all that followeth."

III.

On May 13, 1607, the pioneers brought over by the Sarah Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery arrived at Jamestown on James River, and Founded the Republic of the United States based on English conceptions of Justice and Liberty. The story of this little settlement is the story of a great nation expanding from small beginnings into one of more than 100,000,000 people inhabiting a land reaching finally from ocean to ocean and abounding in riches and power, till when the liberties of all mankind were endangered [in World War I] the descendants of the old Jamestown settlers did in their turn cross the ocean and helped to save the land from which their fathers came.

IV.

Before any other English settlement was made on this continent, democracy was born at Jamestown by the establishment of England's free institutions---Jury trial, courts for the administration of justice, popular elections in which all the "inhabitants" took part, and a representative Assembly  which met at Jamestown, July 30, 1619, and digested the first laws for the new commonwealth.

V.

There at Jamestown and on James River was the cradle of the Union---The first church, the first blockhouse, the first wharf, the first glass factory, the first windmill, the first iron works, the first silk worms reared, the first wheat and tobacco raised, the first peaches grown, the first brick house, the first State house, and the first free school (that of Benjamin Syms, 1635).

VI.

In Virginia was the First assertion on this continent of the indissoluble connection of representation and taxation.

In 1624 a law was passed inhibiting the governors from laying any taxes on the people without the consent of the General Assembly, and this law was reenacted several times afterwards. In 1635 when Sir John Harvey refused to send to England a petition against the King's proposed monopoly of tobacco, which would have imposed an arbitrary tax, the people deposed him from the government and sent him back to England, an act without precedent in America. In 1652 when the people feared that Parliament would deprive them of that liberty they had enjoyed under King Charles I, they resisted, and would only submit when the Parliamentary Commissioners signed a writing guaranteeing to them all the rights of a self-governing dominion. And when after the restoration of King Charles II, the country was outraged by extensive grants of land to certain court favorites, the agents of Virginia, in an effort to obtain a charter to avoid these grants, made the finest argument in 1674 for the right of self-taxation to be found in the annals of the 17th century. Claiborne's Rebellion and Bacon's Rebellion prove that Virginia was always a Land of Liberty.

During the 18th century the royal governors often reproached the people for their "Republican Spirit," until on May 29, 1765, the reproach received a dramatic interpretation by Patrick Henry, arousing a whole continent to resistance against the Stamp Act.

VII.

Virginia Founded New England. In 1613 a Virginia Governor, Sir Thomas Gates, drove the French away from Maine and Nova Scotia and saved to English colonization the shores of Massachusetts and Connecticut. In 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers were inspired to go to North America by the successful settlement at Jamestown. They sailed under a patent given them by the Virginia Company of London, and it was only the accident of a storm that caused them to settle outside of the limits of the territory of the London Company, though still in Virginia. The Mayflower compact, under which the 41 emigrants united themselves at Cape Cod followed pretty nearly the terms of the original Virginia Company's patent.

In 1622 the people at Plymouth were saved from starvation by the opportune arrival of two ships from Jamestown, which  divided their provisions with them. Without this help the Plymouth settlement would have been abandoned.

The 41 Pilgrim Fathers established an aristocracy or oligarchy at Plymouth, for they constituted an exclusive body and only cautiously admitted any newcomers to partnership with them in authority. As time went on, the great body of the people had nothing to say as to taxes or government.

Citizenship at Plymouth and in all New England was a matter of special selection in the case of each individual. The terms of the magistrates were made permanent by a law affording them "precedency of all others in nomination on the election day." The towns of New England were little oligarchies, not democracies. It was different in Virginia. There the House of Burgesses, which was the great controlling body, rested for more than a hundred years upon what was practically universal suffrage (1619-1736), and even after 1736 many more people voted in Virginia than in Massachusetts. There was a splendid and spectacular body of aristocrats in Virginia, but they had nothing like the power and prestige of the New England preachers and magistrates.

"By no stretch of the imagination," says Dr. Charles M. Andrews, Professor of History in Yale University, "can the political condition on any of the New England Colonies be called popular or democratic. Government was in the hands of a very few men."

VIII.

Virginia led in all the measures that established the independence of the United States. Beginning with the French and Indian War, out of which sprang the taxation measures that subsequently provoked the American Revolution, Virginia under Washington, struck the first blow against the French, and Virginian blood was the first American blood to flow in that war. Then, when, after the war, the British Parliament proposed to tax America by the Stamp Act, it was the Colony of Virginia that rang "the alarm bell" and rallied all the to her colonies against the measure by the celebrated resolutions of Patrick Henry, May 29, 1765, which brought about its repeal.

Later when the British Parliament revived its policy of taxation of 1767 by the Revenue Act, though circumstances made the occasion for the first movements elsewhere, it was always Virginia that by some resolute and determined action of leadership solved the crisis that arose.

There were four of these crises:

(1) The first occurred when Massachusetts, by her protest, in 1768, against the Revenue Act, stirred up Parliament to demand that her patriot leaders be sent to England for trial. Massachusetts was left quite alone and she remained quiescent. Virginia stepped to the front and by her ringing resolutions of May 16, 1769, aroused the whole continent to resistance, which forced Parliament to compromise, leave the Massachusetts men alone, and repeal all the taxes except a small one on tea. After the Assembly, "The Brave Virginians" was the common toast throughout New England.

(2) The next crisis occurred in 1772. In that year the occasion for action occurred in the smallest of the colonies, Rhode Island, by an attack of some unauthorized persons on the sloop Gaspee, which was engaged in suppressing smuggling. The King imitated Parliament by trying to renew the policy of transporting American to England for trial, but Virginia caused the King and his Counselors to desist from their purpose by her system of inter-colonial committees, which brought about a real continental union of the colonies for the first time.

(3) The third crisis occurred in 1774, after a mob of disguised persons threw the tea overboard in Boston harbor. Though Boston did not authorize this proceeding, Parliament held her responsible and shut up her port. Virginia thought this unjust, and was the first colony to declare her sympathy with Boston, and the first, in any representative character for an entire colony, to call for a Congress of all the colonies.

And to that Congress which met September 5, 1774, she furnished the first president, Peyton Randolph, and the greatest orators, Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee.

The remedy proposed by this Congress was a plan of non-intercourse already adopted in Virginia, to be enforced by committees appointed in every county, city and town in America.

(4) The fourth crisis began in 1775 with the laws passed by the British Parliament to cut off the trade of the colonies, intended as retaliatory to the American non-intercourse. This led to hostilities, and for a year, during which time the war was waged in New England, the colonists held the attitude of confessed rebels, fighting their sovereign and yet professing allegiance to him. When the war was transferred to the South with the burning of Norfolk and the battle of Moore's Creek Bridge, this attitude became intolerable to the Southerners, and they sought for a solution of the difficulty in Independence.

While Boston was professing through her town meeting her willingness "to wait, most patiently to wait" for Congress to act, and the Assembly of the province deferred action till the towns were heard from, it was North Carolina, largely settled by Virginians, that on April 12, 1776, instructed her delegates in Congress to concur with the delegates from the other Colonies in declaring independence, and it was Virginia that on May 15, 1776, commanded her delegates to propose independence. The first explicit and direct instructions for independence anywhere in the United States were given by Cumberland County, in Virginia, April 22, 1776. Unlike the tumultuary, unauthorized, and accidental nature of the leading revolutionary incidents in New England, such as the Boston Tea Party and the Battle of Lexington, the proceedings in Virginia were always the authoritative and official acts of the Colony.

All the world should know that it was Richard Henry Lee, a Virginian, who drew the resolutions for independence adopted by Congress July 2, 1776, and that it was Thomas Jefferson, a Virginian, who wrote "the Declaration of Independence" adopted July 4, 1776, a paper styled by a well known New England writer as "the most commanding and most pathetic utterance in any age of national grievances and national purposes."

IX.

During the war that ensued Virginia contributed to the war what all must allow was the soul of the war---the immortal George Washington, whose immense moral personality accomplished more in bringing success than all the money employed and all the armies place in the field; and the war had its ending at Yorktown, only a few miles from the original settlement at Jamestown. The Father of this great Republic was a Virginian.

X.

Virginia led in the work of organizing the Government of the United States. She called the Annapolis Convention in 1786, and furnished to the Federal Convention at Philadelphia which met, as the result of this action, its chief constructor---James Madison---who has been aptly described as Father of the Constitution. She furnished the two greatest rival interpreters of its powers, Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall, and gave the Union its first President, George Washington.

Click Here to get a free PDF of Virginia First
which includes Parts XI to XV (seven more pages)

 

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Six
Chapter Three: A Connecticut Slave

 

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article: Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Four, Chapter One: Cotton Comes North, Part Three)

NOTES:
(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

1 Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 45.

2 Dr. Lyon Gardiner Tyler was the son of our 10th United States president, John Tyler, who was president from 1841 to 1845. President Tyler was later a member of the Confederate Congress. Lyon Gardiner Tyler is also author of A Confederate Catechism and numerous other books and articles. As stated in the text, he was the 17th president of the College of William and Mary and its savior after the War Between the States. He served for over three decades, from 1888 to 1919. Virginia First establishes clearly that America was founded in the South, at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, and not in New England as is erroneously stated at times.

3 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 46.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 45.

8 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 47.

9 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 48.

10 Ibid.

11 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 48-49.

12 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 49.

13 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 51.

14 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 54.

15 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 55.

 

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

NOTES-CHAP-TWO-3-17-22-1 59K
NOTES-CHAP-TWO-3-17-22-2 50K

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Four, Chapter One: Cotton Comes North, Part Three

Posted on by | 7 Comments
A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
 by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Four
Chapter One: Cotton Comes North,
Part Three
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
Garrison-Almost-Tarred-p32-46K

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter One.

COMPLICITY SHOWS that slavery and slave trading built Northern industrial might. Slavery supplied the rivers of raw cotton that were the lifeblood of the Northern economy.

Northern slave trading had supplied much of the initial capital to get it all going, then supplied a constant infusion of capital throughout most of the nineteenth century to help keep it going. The North traded vigorously in African flesh until 1888.

The Industrial Revolution had started in Great Britain and the British tried to keep it for themselves. They "prohibited the emigration of anyone with knowledge of it, and banned the export of information about the technology" but those laws were "impossible to enforce."1

Clever Americans ended up getting the British technology and improving it with "integrated" operations and by putting "every step of the manufacturing process . . . under one roof."2 That greatly increased efficiency and profits.

A brilliant group of industrialists known as the Boston Associates who had established America's textile industry built other businesses too:

By the 1850s, their enormous profits had been poured into a complex network of banks, insurance companies, and railroads. But their wealth remained anchored to dozens of mammoth textile mills in Massachusetts, southern Maine, and New Hampshire. Some of these places were textile cities, really---like Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts, both named for Boston Associates founders.3

Textile manufacturers were scattered around the country but were mostly in the North and "overwhelmingly in New England."

In 1850 "New England used 150 million pounds of Southern cotton a year."4

In 1860:

mills in Massachusetts and tiny Rhode Island manufactured nearly 50 percent of all the textiles produced in America. Altogether that same year, New England mills produced a full 75 percent of the national total: 850 million yards of cloth.5

The North's industrial success spawned an exciting but chaotic and often brutal culture that attracted immigrants who often arrived with just the shirts on their backs. They had to struggle to survive. The scenes in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York are historically accurate.

But people were drawn to New York, not only for commerce and because they could buy anything there, but for fun. There were theaters and other cultural events. Southerners headed there too and were warmly welcomed.

De Bow's Review was "the most widely circulated Southern commercial journal during the antebellum era." Founded by Charleston-born James D. B. De Bow in New Orleans in 1846, it was published until De Bow's death in 1867.6

The large amount of advertising in De Bow's Review for consumer and commercial goods indicated "a thriving nation."

We had a "highly symbiotic, highly functioning economy." Southerners grew the cotton and Northerners did everything else.7

From 1830 on, America's growing industrial might and westward expansion to fulfill its "manifest destiny" muscled us onto the world stage alongside longtime European powers.

Complicity gives William Lloyd Garrison credit for starting antislavery in the North with his publication, The Liberator. Garrison railed against "gradual emancipation" though that is how the Northern states themselves and every country on earth ended slavery except Haiti.

That's the problem with virtue signalers like Garrison who don't care how much trouble, death or hate they cause, as long as they can feel good about themselves.

Garrison and his ilk wanted slavery to end immediately with no consideration for the enormous social and economic problems that would cause. Not only would no cotton destroy the Northern economy, what was the South going to do with crime and social problems caused by four million freed slaves who had no way to make a living?

Northerners did not want blacks in the North where they would be job competition. Several Northern states had laws forbidding blacks from even visiting much less living there including Lincoln's Illinois.

If Northerners wanted to end slavery, why didn't they offer to compensate slave owners as they themselves had done in their states to end slavery? They didn't because there was no political will to do so. Northerners were not about to spend their hard-earned sweatshop money to free slaves in the South who would then move North and be job competition.

They love virtue signaling but not living in reality.

Besides, slavery was dying out on its own. Private manumissions were ending slavery.

Rapidly advancing technology would have ended slavery inside of a generation before the nineteenth century was over. Nobody was going to buy a black man with a birth to death commitment when they could buy a machine and pick the cotton better and faster.

Historians know that much of anti-slavery in the North was racist. Northerners didn't like slavery because they didn't like blacks and sure didn't want them in the North as neighbors or job competition.

In the early days of Garrison's virtue signaling, only 2 to 5% of the Northern population were abolitionists.

Abolitionists were hated in the North. Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in 1837. Garrison himself was almost lynched in 1835.

Later, in the 1850s, when Republicans were drooling to win elections, anti-slavery became political. It was not a movement to help black people. It was a way to rally Northern votes by promoting the hatred of Southerners so Republicans could win elections and control the federal government.

Republicans never proposed ending slavery. They agitated against slavery in the West because racist Northerners did not want blacks in the West anywhere near them.

Southerners would have ended slavery in a much better way than what happened. It was in the South's best interest to end slavery with good will for all.

Because Southern states refused to be ruled by hatemongers like William Lloyd Garrison and the New Englanders who sent John Brown into the South to murder and rape, they seceded. They expected to live in peace.

But a free trade South with 100% control of King Cotton could not be allowed by the North and that's why Lincoln started his war.

Complicity has made clear the millions of pounds of cotton that New England textile mills had to have constantly. Without the South, New England and the North were dead.

Not only would they lose their manufacturing industry, ignorant, greedy Northern leaders ran their shipping industry out of the North with the astronomical Morrill Tariff. Why would ship captains work out of the North where it was 47 to 60% more expensive than in the South where protective tariffs were unconstitutional? The South had passed a 10% tariff for the operation of a small federal government in a states rights nation.

A lot of ignorant historians in politicized academia discount economic issues because they do not realize how utterly dependent the North was on the South. Without the South, as Complicity shows, the mighty industrial northeast was going to crash and burn.

Lincoln and Northern leaders did not want a powerful free trade nation on their southern border with 100% control of King Cotton.

The North would not be able to beat the South in a war once the South cemented trade and military alliances with Great Britain and the rest of Europe. Lincoln knew this.

That's why he sent his five hostile naval missions into the South in March and April, 1861. There was no benefit to waiting even a second longer. With every minute that went by, Southern prospects grew while Northern prospects sank.

Complicity quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson:

'Cotton thread holds the union together; unites John C. Calhoun [the powerful South Carolina senator] and Abbott Lawrence. Patriotism for holidays and summer evenings, with music and rockets, but cotton thread is the Union.'8

If you are a man thirty feet tall armed to the teeth like the North was with a white population four times that of the South, you would not allow a man five feet tall carrying a musket to cause you trouble.

If you are thirty feet tall and a man five feet tall is causing you trouble you are going to fight. You can not wait to fight. Every man who has ever walked the earth knows this.

New Englanders in Boston, Massachusetts, Portland, Maine and other places along with New York City were still building slave ships and sending them to the coast of Africa to chain poor Africans to the decks and make them live in vomit, urine and feces through the Middle Passage where the stench was cooked in the bowels of burning hot slave ships with no ventilation for months. No description of hell could be worse.

The slave trade was outlawed by the United States Constitution in 1808 but New Englanders carried it on until around 1888 when Brazil, the last major slave country on earth, abolished slavery. W. E. B. Du Bois in The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 178-80, states that Boston, Portland and New York City were the largest slave trading ports in the world in 1862, a year into the War Between the States.

The North and especially New England own the stench and horror of slavery's Middle Passage.

No amount of virtue signaling can change that though many of the lame, politicized, pathetic historians of academia and the news media try constantly.

 

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

 by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Five
Chapter Two: First Fortunes

 

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Three, Chapter One: Cotton Comes North, Part Two)

 

NOTES:
(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

1 Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 28.

2 Ibid.

3 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 6.

4 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 26.

5 Ibid.

6 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 21. De Bow was also a "superintendent of the U.S. Census."

7 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 25.

8 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 37.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

NOTES-Intro-Chap-One-1---p-
NOTES-Intro-Chap-One-2---p-
NOTES-Intro-Chap-One-3---p-

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Three, Chapter One: Cotton Comes North, Part Two

Posted on by | 2 Comments
A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Three
Chapter One: Cotton Comes North,
Part Two
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
Lowell-Mass-MILLS---p-25-73

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter One.

SEVERAL PEOPLE have pointed out an excellent 2010 article on the North's enormous involvement with slavery and the slave trade entitled "New England's hidden history, More than we like to think, the North was built on slavery" by Francie Latour, who, at the time, was with the Boston Globe. There is a link at the end of this blog article in Note 1.

Latour begins with the story of a slave, Mark Codman, in present-day Somerville, Massachusetts who, with two others, were convicted of murdering their master. Codman "was hanged, tarred, and then suspended in a metal gibbet on the main road to town, where his body remained for more than 20 years."1

She knows it was there for more than 20 years because Paul Revere mentioned it in his account when he galloped past "Charlestown Neck, and got nearly opposite where Mark was hung in chains."2

Latour explains the myth that Northerners believe about their history just as it is explained in Complicity and almost verbatim:

Slavery happened in the South, and it ended thanks to the North. Maybe we had a little slavery, early on. But it wasn't real slavery. We never had many slaves, and the ones we did have were practically family. We let them marry, we taught them to read, and soon enough, we freed them. New England is the home of abolitionists and underground railroads. In the story of slavery --- and by extension, the story of race and racism in modern-day America --- we're the heroes. Aren't we?3

Latour writes that researchers are starting to bring out "the hidden stories of New England slavery --- its brutality, its staying power, and its silent presence in the very places that have become synonymous with freedom. With the markers of slavery forgotten even as they lurk beneath our feet --- from graveyards to historic homes, from Lexington and Concord to the halls of Harvard University."4

She quotes Anne Farrow, one of the authors of Complicity, who said "these great seaports and these great historic houses, everywhere you look, you can follow it back to the agricultural trade of the West Indies, to the trade of bodies in Africa, to the unpaid labor of black people."5

A mentor of Farrow's stated that the North "democratized" slavery:

Where in the South a few people owned so many slaves, here in the North, many people owned a few. There was a widespread ownership of black people.6

Latour goes into detail about Rhode Island's huge role in New England slave trading:

Following the Revolution, scholars estimate, slave traders in the tiny Ocean State controlled between two-thirds and 90 percent of America's trade in enslaved Africans. On the rolling farms of Narragansett, nearly one-third of the population was black ---  a proportion not much different from Southern plantations.7

She quotes C. S. Manegold's Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North with its interesting discussion of the symbolism of the pineapple. She says "When New England ships came to port, captains would impale pineapples on a fence post, a sign to everyone that they were home and open for business, bearing the bounty of slave labor and sometimes slaves themselves."

The pineapple came to be a happy symbol of "hospitality and welcome."

John Winthrop, author of the famous sermon "City Upon a Hill" and first Massachusetts governor "not only owned slaves at Ten Hills Farm, but in 1641, he helped pass one of the first laws making chattel slavery legal in North America."

Ten Hills Farm "centers on five generations of slaveholders tied to one Colonial era estate, the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Mass." He writes that the house passed to the Royalls and:

entered a family line whose massive fortune came from slave plantations in Antigua. Members of the Royall family would eventually give land and money that helped establish Harvard Law School. To this day, the law school bears a seal borrowed from the Royall family crest, and for years the Royall Professorship of Law remained the school's most prestigious faculty post, almost always occupied by the law school dean. . . . 8

Supposedly, when Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan was a dean at Harvard, she "quietly turned the title down."

Kagan didn't explain her decision but if she turned down the title because it was associated with slavery yet didn't explain herself, then she is just as guilty as the long line of disgraceful New England historians who, to this day, lie about their history.

In 1860, the South was "producing 66 percent of the world's cotton, and raw cotton accounted for more than  half of all U.S. exports."9

Eli Whitney's cotton gin, patented in 1794, revolutionized cotton production, which led to an "ironclad" relationship between the South and Great Britain:

By the eve of the Civil War, Great Britain was largely clothing the Western world, using Southern-grown, slave-picked cotton.10

The cotton industry was so dynamic it awed observers and was hard to describe. Solon Robinson, the New York Tribune agriculture editor in 1848, wrote of "'acres of cotton bales'" on the docks in New Orleans:

Boats are constantly 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.11

New York, Boston and other Northern cities were deeply involved in the cotton trade. It was the source of their wealth:

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 did not go directly to Liverpool, it was sent to the 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.

But this gives only the slightest hint of the role New York City and the rest of the North played in the cotton trade . . .12

Northerners were making vast sums of money shipping Southern cotton. The majority of their shipping industry was cotton.

That's why the South's low 10% tariff vis-a-vis the North's astronomical Morrill Tariff that was 47 to 60% higher, meant that few would be shipping into the North and paying 37% to 50% more than they had to pay in the South.

Northern ship captains could get cargoes in the South but were far less likely to find them in the North. The Morrill Tariff threatened to re-route the Northern shipping industry into to the South overnight.

When you add that to the obliteration of Northern manufacturing, which was about to lose the huge, wealthy, captive Southern market it had had all to itself, you can see a fast-approaching economic disaster for the North.

That is what Lincoln and Northern leaders saw in March, 1861, when he put together his plan to, hopefully, start a war in Charleston or Pensacola.

He was anxious to put up a blockade and scare Europe away from the South, and that is exactly what happened. Lincoln announced his blockade before the smoke had cleared from the bombardment of Fort Sumter.

The South, with 100% control of King Cotton, buying all its manufactured goods from Europe at lower prices while building its own manufacturing and shipping industries, would quickly become a powerhouse.

Once European military alliances were established, the North would not be able to beat the South in a war.

The idea that the good North fought their bloody war to free the slaves rather than protect their manufacturing and shipping industries and wealth and power, is an absurdity of biblical proportions.

Nobody in the North said they should march armies into the South to free the slaves. All their legislation and documents supported slavery.

The Corwin Amendment, supported by Abraham Lincoln, would have left black people in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress in places where slavery already existed. It passed the Northern Congress and was ratified by five states before the war made it moot.

The Northern War Aims Resolution said the war was about preserving the Union, not ending slavery, as Lincoln himself said over and over.

The North was still deeply involved in the slave trade at wartime. As W.E.B. DuBois wrote, New York and Boston, in 1862, a year into the war, were the largest slave trading ports on the planet.

Several Northern states had laws preventing blacks from even visiting, much less living there, including Lincoln's Illinois.

No wonder so much of Northern history is a flat out lie.

On December 15, 1860, two days before South Carolina's secession convention was to convene, a powerful group of Northern businessmen called the Union Committee of Fifteen met at the offices of Richard Lathers, "a prominent cotton merchant." Two hundred were invited but over 2,000 came. They were in a panic over the thought of Southern secession.13

Lathers implored Southerners to "'consider their duties to that part of their Northern brethren whose sympathies have always been with Southern rights and against Northern aggression.'"14

John A Dix, "New Hampshire native, former New York senator, and future New York governor" summed things up:

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.15

Southerners had legitimate grievances against the North.

Northerners had organized and financed murderers like John Brown and sent him and his cutthroats into the South. They were to foment a slave insurrection, like in Haiti, where whites were raped and murdered for days with few survivors.

When John Brown was brought to justice, his sons were harbored in Ohio and Iowa, and he was celebrated throughout the North as a hero.

Would you allow people to rule over you who had sent murderers into your peaceful communities to kill your families?

No abolitionists had a realistic plan of gradual, compensated emancipation to end slavery such as the Northern states and all other countries on earth had used except Haiti.

Most anti-slavery in the North was political. It was designed to rally Republican votes for the first sectional party in American history, the party of the North pledged against the South as Wendell Phillips said.

Historians know that anti-slavery in the North was not pro-black. It was actually anti-black. They didn't like slavery because they didn't like blacks and did not want blacks near them in the West, and they surely did not want blacks coming North and being job competition.

The mechanics of the antebellum cotton trade are fascinating:

At nearly five feet high and some 500 pounds, a bale of cotton is an impressive presence. In the pre-plastic nineteenth century, bales were bound in tightly woven burlap or held more loosely in place by coarse, large-gapped material from which a sample could easily be sliced and tested for quality. Thin metal bands reinforced the wrapping. But this huge block of soft fibers seemed to burst from its covering, bulging over its tight bands, a muscleman squeezed into a T-shirt.16

Cotton bales could be stacked stories high "and remain stable while being shipped down the Mississippi River or one of its tributaries, up the East Coast, or across the Atlantic." They could be "wheeled from a dock onto one of thousands of flatboats, sloops, brigs, barks, schooners, clippers, and steamboats."17

Cotton was king, "the backbone of the American economy" 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.18

New York's power was enormous. After London and Paris, New York was third in the West. It's banks were instrumental because:

Only large banks, generally located in Manhattan, or in London, could extend 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 the deep pockets of Northern banks to lend him the money to buy additional equipment, as well as additional labor. Slaves were usually bought on credit.19

Northern middlemen such as cotton "factors" performed important functions. A factor would use his contacts to help the:

isolated rural planter earn the best price in the volatile world marketplace. Factors, generally New Englanders, were more than brokers or agents. They often bought a planter's supplies, advised him, and took charge of his finances; frequently they knew more about the condition of a plantation than the owner. A factor's success depended on being indispensable, and that required him to provide a high quality of service in return for his commission on a cotton sale.20

Northerners thoroughly controlled the cotton trade:

Most ships that carried the cotton from plantation to port to market were built in the North, and they were usually owned by Northerners. Their captains and crews were often New Englanders. Northern companies sold the insurance to protect a farmer's crop and all of his property, including his slaves. And hundreds of Northern textile mills clothed those slaves, using what was sometimes referred to as 'negro cloth.'21

The "creation of 'sailing packets,' shuttles that assured the business world on both sides of the Atlantic of regular delivery of goods" was a huge advancement in the cotton trade. A dynamic cotton merchant named Jeremiah Thompson launched his Black Ball Line which in turn:

launched a storied era of transatlantic races and daring, colorful captains. Using ships termed "packets," after the leather mail pouches they carried, Black Ball was the first of more than a dozen shipping lines in the united States that transported products and passengers across the ocean---to Liverpool, and to Le Havre, in France---and up and down  the East Coast. The ships would carry good from Europe and the North to the Atlantic cotton ports of Charleston and Savannah, and to ports on the Gulf of Mexico, including the mammoth New Orleans. They would return north with holds full of raw cotton. The Cotton Triangle had been created.22

So, New York "became the fulcrum of the international cotton trade." Cotton was brought to New York "where it was unloaded and then reloaded onto Liverpool- and Continent-bound vessels" which added thousands of jobs and costs along the way that benefited New Yorkers.23

When ships from Europe were unloaded in New York, those goods were "reloaded onto other ships that brought European and Northern products to coastal and river ports throughout the United States."

The bottom line was that the South with its slave-grown cotton, tobacco and rice, "was providing New York with more than half of its exports."

 

Next Week:
A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Four
Chapter One: Cotton Comes North,
Part Three

 

Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Two, Introduction; Chapter One: Cotton Comes North, Part One

NOTES:
(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

1 Francie Latour, "New England's hidden history, More than we like to think, the North was built on slavery," September 26, 2010, http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/09/26/new_englands_hidden_history/?page=full, pages 1-7, accessed 2-28-22.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 7.

10 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 10.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 10-11.

14 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 11.

15 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 12.

16 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 13.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 14.

21 Ibid.

22 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 18.

23 Ibid.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

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