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 Fourteen, Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes, Part Two

Posted on May 18, 2022May 19, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 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 Fourteen
Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes
Part Two

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

_The_Pro-Slavery_Riot_on_November_7_1837_Death_of_Rev_E_P_Lovejoy--Alton-Illinois-Wikimedia-Commons-59K

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Eight. The picture comes from Wikimedia Commons.

ABOLITIONIST ELIJAH P. LOVEJOY WAS KILLED BY A MOB in Lincoln's Illinois twenty-four years before the War Between the States.

He had been a "schoolteacher and minister from Maine" educated "at Colby College and Princeton" who early on was more concerned about "the evils of blasphemy and drinking" than slavery.¹ In those years, he was living in St. Louis, Missouri and described himself as: not in favor of immediate emancipation, and not an abolitionist.

That changed in April, 1836 when Lovejoy saw the charred remains of a free black man, Francis McIntosh, "a porter on a ship docked in St. Louis," who had been drinking and killed a policeman after an altercation following a fight between two whites.²

McIntosh had been taken to jail but a mob formed that night and came for him. The sheriff "fled, leaving McIntosh alone and locked in a cell." The mob

broke in, carried McIntosh to a locust tree on the commons, and tied him to the tree with a chain. Rails, planking, and wood shavings were piled around his legs. Some of the wood was wet, chosen so it would not burn too quickly.³

An "elderly black man was given 75 cents to keep the fire burning through the night."⁴

The next day Minister Lovejoy "went to the scene" and a few days later, on May 5, 1836, the headline of his newspaper, the Observer, was: "Awful Murder and Savage Barbarity." In the article he wrote:

'We stood and gazed for a moment or two upon the blackened and mutilated trunk---for that was all which remained---of McIntosh before us, and as we turned away, in bitterness of heart, we prayed that we might not live.'⁵

Lovejoy did not question McIntosh's guilt but did not like the mob violence.

A judge whose name was "Luke Lawless," believe it or not, was in charge of an investigation and blamed violent black men and "publications like the Observer." Nobody was charged.⁶

Lovejoy was converted and "began his campaign, calling for the emancipation of all enslaved people, and despite growing public outrage, he would not stop."⁷

St. Louis was a "booming frontier town" and Missouri was a slave state, one of six slave states that would later fight for the Union the entire war.

There was much strong Confederate support in Missouri and duel governments; and Missouri was represented in the Confederate Congress, and had a star in the Confederate flag, but did not secede.

Lincoln and the North were glad to have six slave states fight for them. Three of those Union slave states still had slavery months after the war ended. Those three did not end slavery until the Thirteenth Amendment kicked in, in December, 1865.

The six Union slave states prove the war was not fought over slavery. If it was, the North would have abolished slavery in the Union slave states immediately but they did the opposite. They supported the Corwin Amendment, which left black people in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress, in the places where slavery already existed. Illinois was one of the five Union states ratifying the Corwin Amendment before the war made it moot.

The other Union slave states besides Missouri, were Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and West Virginia, which came into the Union as a slave state, ironically, within weeks of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

The owners of the Observer had asked Lovejoy to stop his antislavery rants but he refused. After several attacks on his home and offices, the owners encouraged him to move "his family and the newspaper across the Mississippi River to Alton, in the free state of Illinois" which he did. He arrived with his family safely but while the Observer's press was on the docks "a small group crossed the river from St. Louis and dumped it into the river."⁸

A "former sea captain from Massachusetts spearheaded the effort to replace the press."⁹

There is a bit of farce in a sea captain from Massachusetts helping to replace Lovejoy's abolitionist press at a time when Boston, Massachusetts was one of the largest slave trading ports on the planet along with New York, and Portland in Lovejoy's home state of Maine. All were carrying on a vigorous illegal slave trade and still making huge fortunes as they had when the slave trade was legal.

W.E.B. Du Bois writes in The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870:

'The number of persons engaged in the slave-trade, and the amount of capital embarked in it, exceed our powers of calculation. The city of New York has been until of late [1862] the principal port of the world for this infamous commerce; although the cities of Portland and Boston are only second to her in that distinction. Slave dealers added largely to the wealth of our commercial metropolis; they contributed liberally to the treasuries of political organizations, and their bank accounts were largely depleted to carry elections in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut.'¹⁰

The above quotation refers to 1862, which was a year into the War Between the States, and 54 years after the slave trade was outlawed by the United States Constitution.

Subscriptions to the Observer increased and Lovejoy received money from other abolitionists around the country. He was now a full-fledged radical abolitionist:

He sent letters to leading newspapers throughout the United States asking for their positions on slavery, then published their answers with his own critical commentary. He published a passionate letter he had written in the voice of a slave. He attacked Alton's Fourth of July festivities with a bitter editorial that anticipated Frederick Douglass's famous address, 15 years later, "What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?" He editorialized against the slave trade in Washington, D.C., saying that slavery in the nation's capital made every man a slaveholder. He became secretary of a local antislavery group, and he proposed establishing an antislavery society in Illinois. A rumor circulated that from his pulpit one Sunday he had sworn that if his wife died, he would 'marry a black woman before Saturday.'¹¹

What is missing from a virtue-signaling abolitionist like Elijah Lovejoy is a realistic plan to end slavery. Even Lincoln admitted he did not know how to end slavery at that time.

Northern states purported to phaseout slavery with gradual, compensated emancipation but most Northern slaves were sold back into slavery in the South just as they were to be freed, such as before the slave's 21st birthday. This is a disgraceful but absolute fact. Alexis de Tocqueville joked that Northerners did not end slavery. They just changed the slave's master from a Northern to a Southern one.

The 1830s was a time of violence against abolitionists who were denounced as "'amalgamationists, dupes, fanatics, foreign agents, and incendiaries,'" according to Leonard L. Richards, "author of a study of antiabolitionist mob action in Jacksonian America."¹²

William Lloyd Garrison "was dragged through Boston at the end of a rope" in 1835. He luckily was rescued by some individuals and put in jail for the night for his own protection.¹³

Alton, Illinois was in a financial crisis in 1837 but Lovejoy showed no sympathy for them. He charged them with being speculators and said we have "'become a nation of gamblers.'" Other publications editorialized against Lovejoy.¹⁴

On September 5, 1837 Lovejoy wrote to his mother that "'my press has again been mobbed down.'"¹⁵

Before dawn on November 7, 1837 "a new press for the Observer arrived on the steamboat Missouri Fulton." It was guarded as "it was hoisted to the top floor of a stone warehouse."¹⁶

That night "about 60 volunteers again guarded the warehouse" but things were quiet so most left after a while.¹⁷

At 10 p.m. the mob arrived: "'We want that printing press!'"

The mob threw rocks and battered the warehouse door. Many were drunk and firing guns. A man was killed which added to the mob's fury.¹⁸

A "makeshift" ladder outside the warehouse allowed James Rock to climb and "set fire to the wooden roof" with flaming pitch. As it burned

Lovejoy and Royal Weller ran from the building and aimed up at Rock, but Dr. Thomas Hope and Dr. Horace Beale, covered by darkness, had perfect sight of the open door, and they shot both.¹⁹

Weller survived but "Lovejoy took five bullets, including three in his chest and one in his stomach. He staggered back into the warehouse and fell dead at the feet of his defenders."²⁰

The fire was put out and the press pushed into the street and destroyed.

By the wee hours, the crowd was mostly gone, and at daylight, Lovejoy's dead body was carried home in a wagon that was mocked by bystanders the whole way.

Two days later, at age 34, Lovejoy was "buried in Alton between two oak trees. A cold, heavy rain fell on the small group that gathered for the funeral."²¹

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 Fifteen
Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes
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 Thirteen, Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes, Part One)

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), 163.

² Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 164.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 165.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ W.E.B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896), 179. Du Bois is quoting the Continental Monthly, January, 1862, p. 87, the article "The Slave-Trade in New York."

¹¹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 166.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 167.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 168.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 169.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

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 Thirteen, Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes, Part One

Posted on May 12, 2022May 12, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 3 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 Thirteen
Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes
Part One

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Eight. The picture comes from page 162.

DESPITE HOW GOOD COMPLICITY IS in proving the North's slave trading and barbarism toward its insurrectionist slaves such as burning them at the stake or tying them to a wagon wheel and beating them to death with crow bars, this book is still written by virtue signaling New Englanders who are determined to establish that the War Between the States was fought over slavery.

It never occurs to those people that their book, Complicity, proves the war was not fought over slavery.

The authors show in great detail that the North was utterly dependent on Southern cotton, "the backbone of the American economy." Southerners grew the cotton and Northerners did everything else:¹

Northern merchants, shippers, and financial institutions, many based in New York City, were crucial players in every phase of the national and international cotton trade. Meanwhile, the rivers and streams of the North, particularly in New England, were crowded with hundreds of textile mills. Well before the Civil War, the economy of the entire North relied heavily on cotton grown by millions of slaves---in the South.²

But it never occurs to them that without Southern cotton their country was dead. The imminent economic devastation already had Northerners calling for war, which Lincoln was glad to give them in March and April, 1861, when he sent five hostile naval missions to Pensacola, Florida and Charleston, South Carolina to get it started.

Several Northern newspapers such as the Providence (R.I.) Daily Post saw exactly what Lincoln was doing. In an editorial entitled "WHY?" published the day after the commencement of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, April 13, 1861, it wrote:

We are to have civil war, if at all, because Abraham Lincoln loves a party better than he loves his country. . . . Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to inaugurate civil war without appearing in the character of an aggressor.

Northerners were about to lose their shipping industry because most of it was cotton, and they would lose their manufacturing industry because most of it manufactured for its captive market in the South.

Southerners wanted to buy higher quality goods from Europe at competitive market prices and not be forced to buy overpriced Northern goods from Northern monopolies with prices jacked up by Yankee tariffs.

So, Complicity's Chapter Eight opening statement that "The start of the Civil War as a political war over slavery..." is as false as their previous statement that America was founded in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620.

I am proud to say that America was founded at Jamestown, Virginia in the South in 1607, thirteen years before the Puritans finally got around to coming here.

Complicity gets back on track stating that immediate abolition of slavery like William Lloyd Garrison wanted "would mean social and economic chaos."³

In 1831

the only kind of abolitionism that had popular support was that promoted by the American Colonization Society, which had chapters in the North and the South. The society's goal was to send freed blacks to Africa. Few white people in America, no matter how strongly they felt about slavery, thought that blacks and whites could or should ever coexist in the same society.⁴

Abraham Lincoln supported the American Colonization Society and believed all his life that blacks should be sent back to Africa or into a climate they could survive. See Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement by Phillip W. Magness (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011); and Forced into Glory, Abraham Lincoln's White Dream by Lerone Bennett, Jr. (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 2000).

This chapter's "Hated Heroes" are radical abolitionists such as Prudence Crandall, Elijah Lovejoy, and John Brown, though John Brown is a murderer who did more than anybody else to cause a war in which 750,000 died and over a million were maimed.

One of the major reasons for Southern secession was the North's support of Brown's violence and plans for wide-scale murder in the South. Their celebrating him as a hero convinced Southerners they would not be safe in a Union dominated by supporters of John Brown.

Nor would they be safe in a Union controlled by the Republican Party. The Republican Party printed hundreds of thousands of Hinton Helper's The Impending Crisis, which called for the throats of Southerners to be slit in the night. It distributed them coast to coast as a campaign document in the election of 1860.

Prudence Crandall in 1831 was a twenty-eight year old Quaker who "opened a school in Canterbury, Connecticut, to which she would soon welcome black girls and, by doing so, invite its destruction."⁵

Crandall's school started all white but a young black woman, Sarah Harris, asked to be admitted and after soul searching, Crandall admitted her.

Whites started leaving Crandall's school so she threw out the remaining whites and advertised in Garrison's Liberator that "her school would reopen 'for the reception of young ladies and little misses of color.'"⁶

Most in Canterbury opposed Crandall:

Andrew Harris, a doctor who lived nearby, refused to treat her black students. A week after the Liberator ad appeared, gubernatorial hopeful Andrew Judson, also a close neighbor and, like Harris, a former trustee of Crandall's school, spoke at a hastily called town meeting. No school for 'nigger girls' would ever stand across the street from his house, he reportedly vowed, promising that if black students did show up he would use a colonial law to have them arrested as paupers.⁷

Two abolitionists wanted to speak but were shouted down and "confronted with 'fists doubled in their faces' and driven from the church where the meeting was held."⁸

In the next year there were attempts to "crush the school" that went from "town meetings to court trials to the appeals court" and

Crandall and her students increasingly became targets of community anger. Local merchants would not do business with the school, and the stage driver refused to transport its students. Boys threw manure into the school's well; neighbors refused requests for pails of fresh water. Rotten eggs and rocks were thrown at the school building---Crandall kept one of the rocks on her mantel---and its students were followed through the streets, hooted at and harassed.⁹

There was hostility to black education across the North.

The Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire opened in March 1835 and by the summer a "demolition crew hitched a long train of oxen to the academy and dragged it off its foundation" reportedly with students still inside.¹⁰

In New Haven, Connecticut in September 1831, residents "voted 700-4 against allowing a school for young black men to open near Yale." Their rationale was:

'What benefit can it be to a waiter or coachman to read Horace, or be a profound mathematician?'¹¹

In May 1833 "The Connecticut legislature passed the 'Black Law,' making it illegal for out-of-state students of color to attend a school without local permission."¹²

Legislators

called in a Hartford phrenologist, an expert in the then-credible "science" of determining character from the shape of a person's skull. The phrenologist testified that Negroes could not be educated beyond a certain level and could never be fit citizens. Although the committee report that backed the law decried the 'horrid traffic' in human slavery and admitted a need to help 'the unhappy class of beings, whose race has been degraded by unjust bondage,' it concluded: 'We are under no obligations, moral or political, to incur the incalculable evils of bringing into our own state colored immigrants from abroad.'¹³

Canterbury's "citizens rang church bells, fired guns, and lit bonfires to celebrate the new law" then a month later "on June 27, 1833, authorities arrested Crandall and her younger sister Almira, who had joined her as a teacher, for breaking the law."¹⁴

Almira was let out as a minor and Crandall was offered bail by numerous supporters but she would not accept it and dared them to put her in jail.

She only spent one night because "Respectable white women did not go to jail." Townspeople

complained bitterly that abolitionists spread the lie that Crandall had been placed in the cell that a notorious wife strangler had recently occupied. Later, Crandall explained that she'd been put in a room that the condemned man had stopped in on his way to being hanged.¹⁵

She said the jailer had been "'very polite.'"

There were two more court actions. In the first, there was a hung jury.

In the second, Crandall was found guilty, but appealed.

Prominent citizens were part of the trial on both sides and it ended up being an important case because it was decided that blacks could not be citizens. It was quoted later as a precedent in the Dred Scott case.

There was much rhetoric in the appeal in July 1834. The law was called "'obnoxious'" by Crandall's lawyer, William W. Ellsworth, because, supposedly, only Southern states had laws like it: "'It rivets the chains of grinding bondage and makes our State an ally in the unholy cause of slavery itself.'"

The hypocrisy of New Englanders even in this time period is breathtaking. Apparently Ellsworth did not know that Connecticut and the rest of New England were enthusiastic slave traders who had, until recently, been sending their ships to Africa to return with poor Africans chained to their decks in vomit and feces to make the money that built New England and the North.

And after the slave trade was outlawed by the U.S. Constitution in 1808, New Englanders carried on a vigorous illegal slave trade, so much so that W.E.B. Du Bois said Boston and New York were the largest slave trading ports on the planet in 1862, a year into the War Between the States.

Also Ellsworth, on his hypocritical high horse, apparently hadn't heard about the Northern and Western states that had "obnoxious" laws forbidding blacks from even visiting much less living there.

Ellsworth's opposing attorney, chief prosecutor Andrew Judson said:

'The consequences will inevitably destroy the government itself, and this American nation---this nation of white men---may be taken from us and given to the African race!'¹⁶

The Appeals Court dismissed the case on technicalities.

Crandall "held on to her school" during the trials. After she lost she said:

'It is my opinion that the colored scholars under my care made as good, if not better progress than the same number of whites taken from the same position in life.'¹⁷

Crandall had a lot of courage and determination but:

On the night of September 9, 1834, Crandall, her husband, and some of her students were inside the Canterbury schoolhouse when they heard loud voices outside and then banging on the doors. Glass was shattered and windows were ripped from their frames. Men invaded the first floor of the school and started overturning furniture.¹⁸

The attackers "may have tried to set the building on fire."

Crandall gave up and moved west "following in the path of her father, who, threatened for supporting her and her school, had already moved west."

She settled in Elk Falls, Kansas, and died in 1890.¹⁹

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 Fourteen
Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes
Part Two

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

NOTES:

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

² Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxvi.

³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 155.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 157.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 158.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 159.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 160.

¹⁶ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 161.

¹⁷ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 163.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Ibid.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

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 Twelve, Chapter Seven: The Other Underground Railroad

Posted on May 4, 2022May 4, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 5 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 Twelve
Chapter Seven: The Other Underground Railroad

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Seven. The picture come from page 138.

NORTHERN KIDNAPPING GANGS were "organized gangs who, like outlaws from the Old West, became legends in their own time."¹ Their prey were free blacks in the North whom they would kidnap in various ways and sell into slavery in slave states.

One of the most notorious gangs was led by a woman, Patty Cannon, "said to be so strong she could jerk a 300-pound sack of grain to her shoulders, or a grown man off his feet." Her chief accomplice was her son-in-law identified as "'the celebrated Joseph Johnson, negro trader.'"²

They operated "from the Delmarva Peninsula of Maryland and Delaware, both [Union] slaves states, to free Pennsylvania where the Philadelphia waterfront was one of their favorite hunting grounds."³

Kidnappers, like slave ship captains, murdered their victims when they thought they needed to. In April, 1829, "the skeletons of one adult and three children were discovered on a farm that Patty Cannon had occupied. One of the children, thought to be about seven years old, had a crushed skull."⁴ Cannon had clubbed "the child to death in an effort to get rid of incriminating evidence" according to the testimony of a former gang member.⁵

In New York, in 1835, kidnappings "led to the creation of the first important black self-defense association." It was led by David Ruggles who later provided "the most famous fugitive slave in American history, Frederick Douglass" shelter.⁶

The Fugitive Slave Act, which was part of the Compromise of 1850, "gave new federal protections to slave catchers and, by extension, better cover to kidnappers posing as slave catchers." As a result, many free blacks in the North left for Canada.

Another gang, the vigilante "'Gap Gang'" in Lancaster, Pennsylvania "terrorized free blacks for years" and participated in an 1851 gun battle known as the Christiana Riot that left a slave owner and three blacks dead.⁷

The opposition to the Gap Gang was led by William Parker, an escaped slave, who had lived in Pennsylvania for a decade and "had begun to fight back against the Gap Gang." In his memoir, he wrote:

Kidnapping was so common . . . that we were kept in constant fear. We would hear of slaveholders or kidnappers every two or three weeks; sometimes a party of white men would break into a house and take a man away, no one knew where; again a whole family might be carried off. There was no power to protect them, nor prevent it.⁸

Parker thought most whites in the area were "'negro-haters' who didn't much care who the Gap Gang seized."⁹

In Cincinnati in January 1856:

[A] Kentucky slave owner and federal agents cornered a group of fugitives, including a mother named Margaret Garner who had vowed never to let her children return to slavery. As the agents broke into their hiding place, Garner cut her young daughter's throat and was trying to kill two of her boys.¹⁰

A "federal magistrate ruled that Garner and her surviving children should be returned to their owner" who sold them South. Tragically:

On the journey, literally down the river into slavery, Garner's youngest child died along with two dozen other people in a boat accident. Garner eventually was sold in New Orleans.¹¹

More common methods of kidnapping were to lure victims "under the guise of law. Kidnappers might accuse their victims of petty crimes or enlist accomplices to testify, falsely, that they were escaped slaves." Blacks "accused of being runaways had almost no legal recourse."¹²

Blacks in Philadelphia in 1799:

felt sufficiently threatened by kidnappings that they submitted a petition to Congress equating them with the African slave trade. Callous men, it said, 'are employed in kidnappings those of our Brethren that are free' and 'these poor, helpless victims like droves of cattle are seized, fettered and hurried into places provided for this horrid traffic, such as dark cellars and garrets, as is notorious at Northurst, Chester-town, Eastown and divers other places.¹³

Patty Cannon, mentioned earlier, "became locally famous as 'the fascinating hostess' at the tavern owned by her daughter's second husband, Joe Johnson." A Cannon biographer wrote that "'Patty Cannon was fond of music, dancing and sensual pleasures'" and was "'As strong as a man, she was witty, black-eyed and the reputed brains and accomplice of a notorious kidnapping ring.'"¹⁴

Her husband, Jesse Cannon, "was rumored to have been sentenced to have his ears nailed to a pillory, and upon release to have his earlobes cut off."¹⁵

In 1826, Joseph Watson, mayor of Philadelphia:

received letters from two plantation owners in Rocky Springs, Mississippi. A man named Ebenezer Johnson had shown up there weeks earlier trying to sell several youths. One of the plantation owners, John Hamilton, told the mayor he'd become suspicious of Johnson after sixteen-year-old Samuel Scomp secretly told him he'd been kidnapped from Philadelphia. As proof, Scomp removed his shirt to show Hamilton the scars from beatings he said he'd suffered on his journey south.¹⁶

Hamilton got a magistrate "who demanded to see Johnson's ownership papers" which consisted of a bill of sale from his brother Joe. Both Johnsons were part of the Cannon gang.¹⁷

The Mississippians, "more suspicious than ever"

let Ebenezer leave, supposedly to get better proof of ownership. But Hamilton kept the young slaves and, while Johnson was gone, he and a neighbor questioned them more closely. They took a sworn statement from Scomp and included it in their letter to Mayor Watson, urging him to publish the details and start an investigation. Watson did both, and later took his own deposition from Scomp.¹⁸

Scomp said he was never a slave but an apprentice in New Jersey who ran away to Philadelphia to find work.

A "mulatto man" named Smith offered him a quarter to "help unload watermelons."

Scomp was led to a sloop where two other men tied his hands. One said Scomp was an escaped slave. The other was Joseph Johnson, a member of the Cannon gang and Smith's accomplice in this scheme.¹⁹

Smith brought in four more captives that day, and that night, the sloop sailed. A woman was added and the now-six captives ended up at Patty Cannon's house then on another ship for Alabama then headed 600 miles to Mississippi.

Along the way a small boy died from frostbite and beatings.

Hamilton could easily have kept all the captives but he was a wealthy planter who "disapproved of illegal slave dealings."

Mayor Watson, in Philadelphia, "obtained indictments against the Johnson brothers and two accomplices" but back in Mississippi, Ebenezer Johnson sued Hamilton for the return of his supposed property.

Ultimately, Scomp and "another of the originally kidnapped boys" got back to Philadelphia.

In December, 1826, Mayor Watson "received another letter from Mississippi, this one from Natchez, sent by former governor David Holmes and a friend. It said new slaves in the neighborhood were claiming to have been kidnapped from Philadelphia by Joseph and Ebenezer Johnson. Enclosed was a statement from one of the victims, a boy named Peter Hook."²⁰

Hook's story mirrored Scomp's.

Hook said "he was born in Philadelphia and in June 1825 had been lured aboard Joe Johnson's boat by a black man. He'd soon found himself chained in the hold with four other boys" and later "they were chained to the floor of an attic." Two girls were captives "elsewhere in the attic."

They were in the attic for six months.

Hook said he was sold in the Natchez area with three other boys "for $450 apiece."

Watson "got more arrest warrants" but by 1828, "only 10 of the three dozen kidnap victims eventually identified had been returned."²¹

The black man who had lured Scomp and Hook onto Johnson's boat was John Purnell. He was convicted of "two counts of kidnapping," fined $4,000 and "sentenced to 42 years in jail." Another black man died waiting on his trial.

The Johnson brothers escaped with their kidnapping loot to start their own plantations.

Patty Cannon stayed in the area but the skeletons of some of her victims were discovered on her former farm.

She was indicted with Joe and Ebenezer but only Patty was jailed. She died "amid rumors that she'd poisoned herself." One account said she had admitted to "killing 11 people with her own hands, and to poisoning her husband."

In 1841, in a book The Narrative and Confessions of Lucretia P. Cannon, the "first murder was of an infant girl killed in April 1822. In its formal language, the indictment noted, 'Patty Cannon with both her hands about the neck of the said infant . . . did choke and strangle, of which said choking and strangling the said female child . . . then and there instantly died.'"²²

Cannon "was buried in a pauper's grave," her body exhumed later and "her skull studied by phrenologists." Her skull was later "passed on to the public library in Dover, Delaware."²³

Other kidnapping gangs continued to operate such as George V. Alberti's that was "more cunning."

Alberti was eventually convicted of fraud because he tried to deliver a victim "to an apparently honest slave owner" who said the victim was not who Alberti said he was.

That didn't end his career but later he was convicted in another case and the judge said at his sentencing:

'Think for a moment how great the magnitude of stealing an infant, born in a free state, and binding it in the galling chains of slavery for a little money . . . This case is without parallel in atrocity, and is the most aggravated, legally, of any of its kind that has been presented to an American court of justice.'²⁴

He was fined $1,000 and sentence to ten years hard labor but later the Democrat governor of Pennsylvania, William Bigler, pardoned him.

Alberti "said that he'd captured more than 100 blacks" in his kidnapping career.

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 Thirteen
Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes
Part One

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

NOTES:

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

² Ibid.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 139-140.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 141-142.

⁸ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 142.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 142-43.

¹³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 143.

¹⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 145.

¹⁵ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 146.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 147.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 148.

²¹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 149.

²² Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 151.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 152.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

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 Eleven, Chapter Six: New York’s Slave Pirates, Part Two

Posted on April 27, 2022April 27, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | No 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 Eleven
Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates
Part Two

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Six. The picture come from page 133.

TYPICAL OF THE UTTER BRUTALITY of the New England and New York slave trade carried on under the same American flag Yankees carried in the War Between the States, was "a flotilla of illegal slave ships" from the North to Rio de Janeiro around 1843.

One ship:

[A] New York brig named the Kentucky, arrived in Brazil drenched in blood from one of the most gruesome revolts ever recorded.¹

It started "when the Kentucky's accomplice ship, the Porpoise, sailed into Rio with two child slaves on board, both boys branded on the chest with the mark of their Brazilian owner."

The Porpoise "though registered in Maine, had been turned over to Maxwell, Wright & Company, U.S. coffee traders in Rio who chartered her out, though an English broker, to one of Rio's wealthiest slave merchants, Manoel Pinto da Fonseca."²

Fonseca got control of the Kentucky in January, 1844 and "sent it to the east coast of Africa to rendezvous with the Porpoise." The two ships demonstrate the "depth of U.S. involvement in the illegal slave trade."³

Both ships were trying to get a full cargo but slaves were in short supply right then so "Fonseca's agent settled for 500."⁴

The two crews "working quickly" began to "build a slave deck in the hold of the Kentucky" with the Porpoise next to her.

Boston's Thomas Boyle, "second mate of the Kentucky," testified that the Kentucky had been turned over to a Portuguese captain but its American captain, George Douglass of Philadelphia "purposely left the American colors behind [with the Portuguese captain] when the two ships left Africa."⁵ They had painted over "Kentucky of New York" and renamed it "Franklyn of Salem" in Rio.

The now-named Franklyn of Salem, with a Portuguese captain, delivered its slaves.

Later, that captain told Boyle there had been a slave revolt and 27 slaves were killed but that was a lie. A lot more had been killed, not in a revolt, but executed.

A revolt had taken place and nobody died, but in the days that followed, 47 of the rebellious slaves, "46 men and a woman had been strung from the yardarms, shot, and thrown overboard. If one of the rebels happened to be shackled to a slave whom the crew wanted to save, the execution was especially gruesome." This is the account of "William Page, an English sailor on the Kentucky" from a deposition:⁶

If only one of two that were ironed together was to be hung, a rope was put round his neck and he was drawn up clear of the deck, beside the bulwarks, and his leg laid across the rail and chopped off, to save the irons and release him from his companion. . . . The bleeding negro was then drawn up, shot in the breast, and thrown overboard.
The legs of about one dozen were chopped off in this way. When the feet fell on deck, they were picked up by the Brazilian crew and thrown overboard, and sometimes at the body, while it still hung living; and all kinds of sport were made of the business. When two that were chained together were both to be hung, they were hung up together by their necks, shot and thrown overboard, irons and all.
When the woman was hung up and shot, the ball did not take effect and she was thrown overboard living, and was seen to struggle some in the water before she sunk.⁷

Page said there were horrible floggings ordered for other of the slaves that revolted. They were "stretched flat on the deck and tied hand and foot":

They were then whipped by two men at a time, by the one with a stick about two feet long, and with five or six strands of rawhide secured to the end of it . . . and by the other with a piece of hide . . . as thick as one's finger, or thicker, and hard as whalebone, but more flexible.⁸

The "20 men whipped survived in agony, but all 6 of the women who were whipped soon died."⁹

Page testified that the Philadelphian, Capt. Douglass, rushed from the Porpoise to the Kentucky when necessary to give the Kentucky the legitimacy of an American captain under the protection of the American flag:

Page said the American flags that Douglass left on the Kentucky [with the Portuguese captain] flew constantly. Such testimony prompted the U.S. ambassador to Brazil, Henry Wise, to comment, 'Without the aid of our citizens and our flag, [the slave trade] could not be carried on with success at all.'¹⁰

NO Confederate battle flag every flew over a slave ship.

The Confederate battle flag was a soldier's flag used on some of the bloodiest battlefields in history by men defending their homes from a barbaric invasion.

The Confederate battle flag has more honor, valor and glory attached to it than most flags in history, and no flag has more.

That is the reason certain groups, which have no right to the Confederate battle flag, use it as their own. They want to be associated with the courage and honor the battle flag represents.

Most Yankees had great respect for the Confederate battle flag and said so constantly.

British diplomats in Rio:

noted that 43 vessels of various nations had brought 16,200 new slaves to Brazil, and that the most successful slave voyages were those of ships that flew the American flag.¹¹

Slaves were needed in Brazil to satisfy the enormous worldwide demand for coffee.

The Mary E. Smith "began its voyage in Boston in August, 1855." A deputy U.S. marshal "tried to arrest its defiant owners, who gave him a choice: Get off the ship, or go to Africa. He got off the ship."¹²

The ship was later seized off the coast of Brazil with a cargo of "Africans dying of thirst and hunger" because the ship could find no safe place to land.¹³

Brazil cracked down on slave trading in the 1850s which sent New England and New York's slave traders, with others, to the sugar plantations of Cuba.

The Wanderer, "a racing yacht built on Long Island" was notorious. It was owned by "Southern members of the New York Yacht Club allied with Charles A. L. Lamar" of Georgia. It landed 400 slaves on a private island off the coast of Georgia around 1858.

Lamar and others were tried but there were no convictions. A "special prosecutor appointed to the cases later claimed the entire voyage was a conspiracy organized in New York."¹⁴

The Nightingale, "a yacht bigger and more exotic than the Wanderer" was seized by the U.S. Navy with "nearly 1,000 Africans on board and another 600 waiting on the beach" just days before the War Between the States began.¹⁵

The Nightingale was named for Swedish singer Jenny Lind and "had been built a decade before in Maine, across the Piscataqua River from Portsmouth, New Hampshire." It had been sold in New York in January 1860 to Francis Bowen, "'the Prince of Slavers.'" ¹⁶

After it was seized, its third mate, "Minthorne Westervelt, a young man from one of New York's wealthiest families" was tried but the jury deadlocked.¹⁷

Authorities tried to catch the Ocilla out of Mystic, Connecticut but it got away with landing slaves in Cuba. It's crew were identified as Philadelphians.

The Huntress "of New York, owned by a New Yorker and a New Bedford, Massachusetts, native, was found burned after landing 500 slaves" in Cuba. A crew member said 250 other slaves had died of thirst and their bodies were thrown overboard.¹⁸

The illegal slave trade "catered to an international plantation economy."

W.E.B. Du Bois, whose book The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 is still authoritative, regretted he didn't look at the economics of the slave trade further: "Laws codify morality; economics ignore both."

That is a true statement as proven by the War Between the States that was fought because the Northern economy faced economic annihilation when the Southern states seceded and suddenly the North could not count on the rivers of cotton it had to have constantly.

Instead, Lincoln and the North would have to face the South as a powerful competitor with 100% control of King Cotton and a low 10% tariff viz-a-viz the North's astronomical Morrill Tariff that was 47 to 60% higher.

The South, once military and trade alliances with Great Britain were signed, could not be beaten by the North in a war, and Lincoln knew it.

That's why Lincoln sent five hostile military missions into Southern waters in March and April, 1861.

He wanted the war started as quickly as he could so he could throw up his blockade and chill relations between the South and Great Britain.

Lincoln announced his blockade before the smoke had cleared from the bombardment of Fort Sumter.

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 Twelve
Chapter Seven: The Other Underground Railroad
Part One

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

NOTES:

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

¹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 128.

² Ibid.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 129.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 130.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 131.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 132.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Ibid.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

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 Ten, Chapter Six: New York’s Slave Pirates, Part One

Posted on April 20, 2022April 20, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 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 Ten
Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates
Part One

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

SLAVE-Pict-Beginning-of-Chap-Six p120 44K

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Six. The picture come from page 120.

NEW YORK CITY was the slave trading capital of the planet along with Boston in the 1860s as the War Between the States raged.

New York was "the hub of an international illegal slave trade that, like the latter-day traffic in drugs, was too lucrative and too corrupt to stop."¹

Slave ships were built, sold and outfitted in New York "with crates of shackles and the supersized water tanks needed for their human cargo." Officials

uncaring or bribed, look the other way as slave ships sailed from New York harbor under the flimsiest of disguises. The traffickers relied on fake owners, forged documents, and, most shamefully, the American flag's guarantee of immunity from seizure by foreign nations.²

The trade was so flagrant and accepted that "New York newspapers reported the names of ships leaving for slave voyages." The New York slave trade went on until the 1880s:

During the peak years in 1859 and 1860, at least two slave ships left from New York every month, according to one cautions estimate. Most could hold between 600 and 1,000 slaves. So in each of those years, News York ships might have carried as many as 20,000 new Africans into bondage.³

As previously stated, slave traders were much more brutal than slave masters because slave traders did not have to live with their slaves. All they did was drop them off and collect their money.

Most of the illegal slave trading in the 1860s and beyond was with "Spanish-controlled Cuba, one of the last open slave markets in the Western Hemisphere."⁴

In August 1860, the U.S. Navy intercepted the Erie that was "sailing suspiciously close to the mouth of the Congo." It was flying an American flag but when boarded officers found "900 newly purchased Africans." Half were children already in bad shape and 30 would die in the next two weeks before they could be delivered to Liberia, "the sanctuary and dumping ground for slavery's refugees."⁵

The Erie and her crew were sent back to New York, where they had started, to face charges.

A second ship at the same time and place as the Erie, the Storm King, was seized with

620 Africans, half of them children. The next month the Cora loaded with 700 Africans, was captured. All three were New York ships.⁶

The Erie's captain was Nathaniel Gordon, "son of a Portland, Maine, sea captain and a seasoned slave trader."

Most slave ship captains "hailed from the North, especially New England, which had dominated American shipping since colonial times."⁷

In the 1850s, "the coffee plantations of Brazil were a market." U.S. diplomats "reported that Gordon had landed 500 slaves near Rio de Janeiro, then burned his ship to escape capture."

Most captains did not have as long a career as Gordon. Their biggest threats were the diseases of the African coast, and slave insurrection.

In 1820:

[T]rafficking in slaves was made an act of piracy and a capital crime for U.S. citizens, though the law was hardly a deterrent. For the next four decades, prosecutions for piracy were rare, and convictions were nonexistent.⁸

Gordon was prosecuted and it took two trials but he was convicted and hanged on February 21, 1862 "despite a petition for mercy signed by 11,000 sympathetic New Yorkers." He was "the first and only American ever executed for participating in the African slave trade."⁹

The illegal New York slave trade involved all kinds of subterfuge such as switching "from legitimate merchant vessel to slave ship and back again" as well as "duplicate sets of ownership papers, and even duplicate captains and crews---one American and one foreign."¹⁰

Illegal slave ships blended easily with New York's legitimate commerce, and "official indifference" encouraged it. A captain who was arrested then released in New York to go to Rio "to gather information for his defense" never returned and bragged "'You don't have to worry about facing trial in New York City. . . . I can get any man off in New York for $1,000.'"¹¹

The British were the most determined to stop illegal slave trading --- probably because of their enormous guilt in establishing the slave trade worldwide and carrying it on for over a century and a half --- but American slave ships were protected from the Brits. The British were not allowed to board ships flying the American flag.

Funny how New York and New England liberals hate the Confederate battle flag but it never flew over slave ships like the American flag did.

The American flag flew over New York and New England slave ships for over 200 years.

The Confederate battle flag was always a soldiers flag carried on some of the bloodiest battlefields in history by hungry, often barefoot Confederate boys defending their homes from the Northern invasion.

In truth, the Confederate battle flag is one of the greatest symbols of valor and virtue in all of history. The victories achieved under it against a more numerous, better armed enemy make it as glorious as any great flag in the annals of war.

Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in 1833 then "begun to negotiate treaties that gave its vaunted navy the right to police the slave trade. By the 1850s, the only holdout that mattered was the United States," which did not allow the Brits to detain American ships. Only the American navy could do that.¹²

The U.S. Navy did assign a squadron that was never any larger than five ships to patrol thousands of miles of African coast:

In the two decades before the Erie was seized, the U.S. Africa squadron had caught exactly two ships actually loaded with slaves. British commanders complained that their U.S. counterparts let blatant slave ships pass unchallenged.¹³

In 1862, Lincoln signed a treaty that was approved by the Senate in secret because of fear of a backlash. It allowed the Brits to board and search American ships.

American diplomats did complain about Britain because it "allowed its own merchants to export goods to Africa that they knew supported the slave economy."¹⁴

Britain's behavior was worse than that.

It appears they were running a con game that allowed them to continue slave trading at least to a degree:

[W]hen its navy captured slave ships, Britain didn't always return the "liberated" slaves to Africa. Often it delivered them to years of indentured labor on plantations in its Caribbean colonies.¹⁵

Slave traders went to New York when they couldn't get away with slave trading in other places:

In June, 1860, one of [John Albert] Machado's whalers, the Thomas Watson, aroused such suspicion while outfitting for an African voyage in new London, Connecticut, that customs officials there denied it clearance. So the Thomas Watson sailed to New York and left from there. Months later it landed 800 slaves in Cuba.¹⁶

There was an entire industry that supported the illegal slave trade in New York in the 1860s:

It included ship fitters, suppliers, recruiters of crews, and bribed marshals and customs agents. Ship owners and captains accused of violating slave trade laws often were defended by Beebe, Dean & Donohue, leading admiralty lawyers with offices at 76 Wall Street.¹⁷

Horace Greeley's New-York Daily Tribune in June, 1861, two months into the War Between the States, complained that "'the slave-traders in this city have matured their arrangements so thoroughly that they almost invariably manage to elude the meshes of the law. Now they bribe a jury, another time their counsel or agents spirit away a vital witness. . . . Fortunately, however, a new class of men [Lincoln appointees] now have direction of affairs, and a stop will be put to this iniquitous complicity with crime. . . . To effect this it will be necessary to purge the courts and offices of these pimps of piracy, who are well known, and at the proper time will receive their desserts.'"¹⁸

Greeley was a virtue signaling hypocrite who shows that the press in 1860 in New York was as big a fraud as it is today.

During President Trump's administration the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for the Russia Hoax which turned out to be a lie paid for by the Democrat Party and its operatives.

The racist New York Times birthed another fraud, the 1619 Project, with its primary theme that the American Revolution was fought because the British were about to abolish slavery.

There is no evidence whatsoever for that absurd claim. Not a letter, statement, document, speech, nothing. The American Revolution was fought because the colonies were fed up with being controlled and taxed by Great Britain like Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence.

It was worse for the South in 1860. Southerners were paying 85% of the taxes while 80% of the tax money was being spent in the North.¹⁹ South Carolinians stated in one of their documents:

The Southern States now stand exactly in the same position towards the Northern States that the Colonies did toward Great Britain. The Northern States, having the majority in Congress, claim the same power of omnipotence in legislation as the British Parliament.²⁰

That address ends with "No man can, for a moment, believe that our ancestors intended to establish over their posterity, exactly the same sort of Government they had overthrown."

The hypocrite Greeley in slave-trading New York published a long emotional editorial entitled "The Right of Secession" on December 17, 1860, the day South Carolina's secession convention convened. Greeley was known for saying that our "erring sisters should be allowed to depart in peace."

This was before he realized that an independent South with 100% control of King Cotton and committed to free trade would bury the North economically.

In "The Right of Secession," Greeley writes:

--- We have repeatedly asked those who dissent from our view of this matter to tell us frankly whether they do or do not assent to Mr. Jefferson's statement in the Declaration of Independence that governments "derive their just powers from the consent of the governed: and that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government," &c., &c. We do heartily accept this doctrine, believing it intrinsically sound, beneficent, and one that, universally accepted, is calculated to prevent the shedding of seas of human blood. And, if it justified the secession from the British Empire of Three Millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861. If we are mistaken on this point, why does not some one attempt to show wherein and why? . . . ---we could not stand up for coercion, for subjugation, for we do not think it would be just. We hold the right of Self-Government sacred, even when invoked in behalf of those who deny it to others . . . if ever 'seven or eight States' send agents to Washington to say 'We want to get out of the Union,' we shall feel constrained by our devotion to Human Liberty to say Let Them Go! And we do not see how we could take the other side without coming in direct conflict with those Rights of Man which we hold paramount to all political arrangements, however convenient and advantageous.²¹

Horace Greeley and those like him are cowardly dishonorable men.

Three months after writing this, with the Northern economy collapsing all around him, he wanted war like the rest of the North.

So much for his preventing the "shedding of seas of human blood." Greeley got 750,000 dead and a million wounded and he didn't care a damn.

The slave trade in 1861 in New York "had grown so brazen that anyone who read a New York newspaper would have known how it worked."²²

New York ships "sailed to Rio de Janeiro or, later, Havana, where they might take aboard a second captain and crew" whom they would list as passengers.

When on the African coast "came a sudden switch in nationality. Just before or even while slaves were being loaded, the foreigners would declare themselves owners and commanders of what---moments before---had been a U.S. vessel."

The American crew "made the return voyage as working passengers on the now-foreign slave ship" or they returned on a ship that "was the slave ship's accomplice."²³

Abolition "threatened entire national economies that were still dependent on slave labor." At this point "the illegal slave trade became more profitable and, if possible, more horrific" because ships "grew larger, able to stow close to 1,000 Africans chained in pairs between their narrow decks."²⁴

Some slave traders built steam ships but "those new vessels led to new kinds of suffering on the centuries-old Middle Passage. The hot boilers could cause skin ulcers. Water-distilling machines that malfunctioned could poison an entire cargo of slaves."²⁵

Wooden vessels became disposable and would often be destroyed so there was no evidence.

The profits were enormous:

In 1861, a British diplomat estimated that a single successful voyage might yield a 250 percent profit to the owners of an average slave ship. The asking price for slaves in Africa at that point was about $50, while the selling price in Cuba was more than $1,000. The diplomat's calculations included deductions for bribes fixed at $120 per slave, $25,000 for the vessel, and $30,000 for the crew. Captains were probably paid close to $4,000, enough to make a man rich.²⁶

Slave traders counted on 10% of the slaves dying though that number could be higher:

On its way to Cuba in 1857, one of the largest New York slave ships, the Haidee, lost 200 of its 1,100 slaves.²⁷

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 Eleven
Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates
Part Two

(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 Nine, Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves, Part Two)

NOTES:

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

² Ibid.

³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 122.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 121.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 122.

⁸ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 123.

⁹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 123-124.

¹⁰ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 124.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 125.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 125-126.

¹⁹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 111.

²⁰ The Address of the People of South Carolina, Assembled in Convention, to the People of the Slaveholding States of the United States, December, 1860.

²¹ "The Right of Secession," The New-York Daily Tribune, December 17, 1860 in Howard Cecil Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964), 199-201.

²² Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 126.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 126-127.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

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 Nine, Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves, Part Two

Posted on April 14, 2022April 14, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | No 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 Nine
Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves
Part Two

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Five. The three pictures come from Pages 100, 107 and 99.

THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION ban on the slave trade went into effect January 1, 1808 and at that point, Bristol, Rhode Island had "outstripped Newport" as Rhode Island's slave trading capital.¹

Of course, that ban was on the previously legal slave trade. Illegal slave trading would continue.

Many New England ports along with New York traded in African slaves most of the nineteenth century, which included the War Between the States and afterward. As W. E. B. DuBois wrote in The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870,² Boston and New York were the largest slave trading ports on the planet in 1862, a year into the war.

John Brown of Providence, Rhode Island, and Captain James DeWolf of Bristol are "two of America's most audacious slave merchants."³

Brown entered Congress in 1799, a few years after he became the first American indicted for violating the federal government's earliest attempt to restrict the slave trade. DeWolf served a term in the Senate, even though, during his years as a slave ship captain, he had been accused of drowning a female slave infected with smallpox.⁴

Breaking slave trading laws was routine. They were viewed as "annoyances made to be broken."

Captains routinely ordered sick slaves thrown overboard, almost as a matter of hygiene, to keep them from contaminating the whole ship.⁵

It was rumored that one of DeWolf's captains "cut off the hands of two sick slaves who were clinging to his ship's railing."⁶

John Brown, who was also a fiery Revolutionary War patriot, founded Brown University with his brothers:

John himself laid the cornerstone of its first building. His still-standing home on the Brown campus in Providence was once described as 'the most magnificent and elegant private mansion' in America.⁷

The patriot Brown "led one of the first violent acts of rebellion, the 1772 attack on the British customs schooner Gaspee that patrolled Narragansett Bay."⁸

Slave trading was full of risk and many traders went out of business.

A Brown ship, the Sally, left behind the fullest records of any American slave ship from her voyage of "September 1764 to October 1765."

For that voyage, the Browns had chosen Esek Hopkins as captain. Hopkins would later command, for a while, "the Continental Navy, flying a 'Don't Tread on Me' flag as his ensign. Before the war, he commanded privateers...".⁹

The Sally was "loaded with 17,000 gallons of rum" and "goods to barter, including crates of spermaceti candles; a small armory of muskets and cutlasses; and 40 sets of manacles and shackles." She needed to return with 140 slaves to make a profit.¹⁰

Hopkins worked on commission like many captains. As captain of the Sally:

The Browns promised he could have 10 'privilege' slaves to sell himself, 4 more slaves for every 100 he delivered to market, and 5 percent of the gross sales. . . .
The Browns also ordered Hopkins to set aside, if available, 4 healthy young slaves 'about 15 years old' for their own use.¹¹

Rhode Island slave ships were smaller than European ships but they "poked into river villages and shopped at the slave 'factories,' or warehouses, strung along nearly 2,000 miles of coast. At each stop, bribes or gifts had to be dispensed before the real bargaining for slaves could begin."¹²

Hopkins got to Africa in mid-November 1764 and immediately had trouble. Slave captains try to get away from the African coast and the high risk of disease but:

Hopkins lingered. On May 1, he recorded the first death of a slave, a boy. A few weeks later, a woman slave hanged herself below deck. Another 20 slaves died, presumably of natural causes, before Hopkins finally escaped the coast in late August with a cargo of about 170 Africans.¹³

A few days later the slaves revolted despite Hopkins and all captains knowing "from experience that the danger of revolt was greatest when the ship was close to the coast and slaves still hoped they could regain their homeland."¹⁴

Hopkins wrote:

Slaves rose on us was obliged [to] fire on them and destroyed 8 and several more wounded badly 1 thye & ones ribs broke."¹⁵

In October, "Hopkins landed at Antigua after stopping at Barbados" and reported that "half his slaves had died." Some had drowned themselves and others starved themselves. The 90 survivors were in a "'very sickly & disordered manner.'"

The voyage lost a fortune. One friend "wrote that the voyage was the most disastrous he'd every heard of by a Providence vessel."¹⁶

Insurance policies covered some things: "A policy written for a DeWolf ship covered losses from 'risks of the Seas, Men or War, Fires, Enemies, Pirates, Rovers, Thieves, Jettisons . . . Captures at Sea by American cruisers and Insurrection of slaves but not of common mortality.'¹⁷

Loading a slave ship was dangerous:

[S]hips waited at anchor for small boats to ferry their cargoes from shore. The loading process could be brutal and dangerous. Africans who balked on the beach might be whipped. Slaves and captors alike drowned in heavy surf that capsized their ferries.¹⁸

On board, slaves might be stripped and branded but:

They had to be brought above deck to eat . . . . Meals were cooked in enormous vats that fueled a common African fear: many had heard that white people were cannibals.¹⁹

The African coast was called "'the White Man's Grave'" because of "smallpox, dysentery, malaria, ophthalmia (an infection that caused blindness)" and other diseases.²⁰

Slaves became depressed and "had to be forced to exercise and sometimes even to eat. Their aerobics in chains became a ritual 'dance' practiced to the very end of the slave trade."²¹

A slave attempting to starve himself might be "force-fed, their mouths pried open with a speculum oris---a plierslike instrument."

These things prove the greater brutality of the slave trader who, unlike the master, did not have to live with his slaves but just deliver them and collect his profits.

Thomas Jefferson in a draft of the Declaration of Independence had protested the slave trade and stated that King George III had forced it on the colonies. Jefferson wrote that the English king had:

'waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's [sic] most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.'²²

That language was not in the final rendition of the Declaration of Independence "in deference to proponents of slavery" such as New England and New York slave traders, and those who wanted to buy slaves for labor.²³

John Brown testified in Congress that Americans should not leave the enormous profits from slave trading to Europeans:

'Mr. B said our distilleries and manufactories were all lying idle for want of extended commerce. He had been well-informed that on those [African] coasts New England rum was much preferred to the best Jamaica spirits, and would fetch a better price. Whey then should it not be sent there, and a profitable return be made?'²⁴

Brown had famously said:

'there was no more crime in bringing off a cargo of slaves than in bringing off a cargo of jackasses.'²⁵

The premier historian of the Rhode Island slave merchants wrote that "'in the annals of the American slave trade, the deWolfs are without peer."

The DeWolfs launches 88 slave voyages between 1784 and 1807, four times more than their closest Rhode Island rivals. DeWolfs personally commanded many of these voyages. Captain James DeWolf is supposed to have made a farewell voyage in 1807 aboard the Andromache, the pride of the DeWolf fleet.²⁶

The DeWolfs "ran an integrated business, shipping molasses from their Cuban sugar plantations to their distilleries in Bristol." They founded a bank and insurance company to support their slave trading.²⁷

They set up an office in Charleston in 1804 with a young DeWolf running it. When Congress voted to end the slave trade:

the DeWolfs rushed 18 ships filled with Africans to South Carolina alone in just seven months. The Traffic became so heavy that Charleston newspapers ran articles worrying about the health threat from dead slaves floating in the harbor.²⁸

Rhode Island and New England hypocrisy was on full display in 1820 when they opposed admitting Missouri as a slave state. James DeWolf was then "newly elected to the Senate" and had to listen to South Carolina Senator William Smith confront him and set the record straight:

'The people of Rhode Island have lately shown bitterness against slaveholders, and especially against the admission of Missouri . . . This, however, cannot, I believe, be the temper or opinion of the majority, from the late election of James deWolf as a member of this house, as he has accumulated an immense fortune in the slave trade.'²⁹

Smith went on:

[I] would show the Senate that those people who most deprecate the evils of slavery and traffic in human flesh, when a profitable market can be found, can sell human flesh with as easy a conscience as they sell other articles.'³⁰

Today, New England's massive participation in the slave trade is deliberately hidden so they can falsely claim to be the heroes of American history, though so much of their history is a lie.

Senator Smith, when he exposed New England hypocrisy in the United States Senate, also

submitted records he'd collected from the Charleston customshouse for the years 1804 to 1808. The 'black catalog,' as he called it, showed that of 12,000 slaves imported on U.S. ships, nearly 8,000 were shipped on Rhode Island vessels.³¹

Southerners in antebellum times correctly pointed out that the British, then Northerners, especially New Englanders and New Yorkers, had forced slavery on the South.

DeWolf helped with a treaty that "allowed the British and U.S. navies to jointly patrol the African coast for illegal slave ships." It also forbid the British from searching American ships so, by 1860, the year before the war:

the fact that the British could not board U.S. ships helped give New York City the freedom to become the criminal headquarters of a massive illegal slave trade to markets in Brazil and Cuba.³²

It was not just New York but also Boston and other New England ports that W. E. B. DuBois said, in 1862, were the largest slave trading ports on the planet.

New Englanders were always clever slave traders and smugglers from the colonial era on but "Rhode Islanders were masters." They

anticipated many of the illegal slave traders' methods. They disguised their ships with foreign flags and landed illicit cargoes in remote coves. They bought back confiscated ships for a fraction of their value.³³

The slave trade made the DeWolfs, New England and New York rich and powerful but in 1820 "Congress passed a law mandating the death penalty for those trafficking in African slaves."

As a result, by 1825, George DeWolf went bankrupt as did the economy of Bristol, Rhode Island, itself.

Newport, Rhode Island followed.

Slave trading with its enormous profits was in the blood of New Englanders. As customs collector and signer of the Declaration of Independence, William Ellery, wrote:

'An Ethiopian could as soon change his skin as a Newport merchant could be induced to change so lucrative a trade.'³⁴

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 Ten
Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates

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

NOTES:

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

² W.E.B. DuBois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 178-80.

³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 101.

⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 101-102.

⁵ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 102.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 101.

⁹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 104.

¹⁰ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 103.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 105.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 105-106.

¹⁹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 106-107.

²⁰ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 107.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 108-109.

²³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 109.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 110.

²⁶ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 111.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Ibid.

²⁹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 112.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Ibid.

³² Ibid.

³³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 112-113.

³⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 113.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

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 Eight, Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves, Part One

Posted on April 6, 2022April 8, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 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 Eight
Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves
Part One

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Five. The two pictures come from Pages 96 and 106.

RHODE ISLAND DOMINATED SLAVE TRADING more than any other of the thirteen original American states:

In the century before Congress voted to ban the slave trade beginning in 1808, Rhode Island launched nearly 1,000 voyages to Africa, carrying at least 100,000 slaves back across the Atlantic.¹

Despite the enthusiastic slave trading of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and other Northern ports, it was small compared to Europeans who "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."²

Rhode Island was also one of three states to reserve the Right of Secession before acceding to the Constitution. The other two were New York and Virginia.

That is extremely important because it, alone, proves the right of secession. There is much other irrefutable evidence of the right of secession but the reserved right of secession demanded by Rhode Island, New York and Virginia, was granted by all the other states, which means they had it too because all states entered the Union as exact equals.

Rhode Island's slave trading was so aggressive and successful they competed "with European powers."³ It brought great wealth into the state and often was a family affair:

The reputation of Aaron Lopez and his father-in-law Jacob Rodriguez Rivera as wealthy and supremely honorable Jewish businessmen spread far beyond Rhode Island. Lopez, a 'merchant prince' who prospered in the Triangle Trade, 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, South Carolina. During the Revolution, Laurens was a president of the Continental Congress.⁴

Most of the Newport slave traders were not captains. They financed voyages or owned slave ships.

They branched out too and became known as "rum-men" to the black tribal chieftains who took their captives to the 40 or so slave forts and castles along the African coast:

When the Newport trade first reached a peak just before the Revolution, 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.⁵

As stated many times in the past, slave trading via the Triangle Trade financed much of the infrastructure of the Old North:

Two dozen distilleries operated in Newport alone. In 1772, merchants who owned slaving vessels, who traded in molasses and rum, or who operated distilleries occupied 8 of the top 10 positions on Newport's tax rolls.⁶

This was true not only in Rhode Island but also in Massachusetts, Connecticut and other places.

All of this slave trading wealth "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."⁷ Many slave trading captains attended Trinity Church.

Those people who demand the public pay them reparations for slavery should go to Newport, Boston, New York and the other Northern slave trading ports and get them to pay it since they brought so many of the slaves here.

Perhaps they should get guilty Europeans, the British, Spanish, Portuguese and other slave traders as well to pay.

Of course, the good folks alive today in Newport, Boston, New York and in Europe, never owned a slave or supported slavery in any way. Most are undoubtedly appalled by slavery. They have no debt to anybody alive today for things some people's ancestors did hundreds of years ago.

Everybody's ancestors went through some kind of hell in those times whether it was women dying in child birth, thousands killed by diseases we cure easily today, Southerners who died fighting for their homes and families when the South was invaded by murdering, raping incendiaries for wanting to govern themselves as the Declaration of Independence guaranteed.

The most widely quoted phrase in the secession debate in the South in the year before Southern states started seceding came from the Declaration of Independence:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

If you must make somebody pay reparations today then make those whose ancestors are most responsible: The descendants of African tribal chieftains who captured other Africans and sold them into slavery.

Of course, even those folks owe nothing to people alive today. Many of them probably wish their ancestors had bequeathed American citizenship to them.

Orders given by Jacob Rivera and Aaron Lopez in 1772 to one of their slave ship captains make their barbaric trade sound like business as usual:

'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.'⁸

They wanted the captain to brand a group of 40 slaves they already had and keep them separate from new purchases:

'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.'⁹

Rhode Island's Reverend Samuel Hopkins preached against slave trading after the Revolution:

'The inhabitants of Rhode Island, especially those of Newport, have had by far the greater share of this traffic, of all these United States. This trade in human species has been the first wheel of commerce in Newport, on which every other movement in business has chiefly depended.'¹⁰

Newport was occupied by the British in the Revolution which lulled its slave trading but once the Revolution was one, Newport started back with a vengeance. Before the Revolution they had traded mostly with the West Indies sugar islands but after the Revolution it was the Deep South.

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 Nine
Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves
Part Two

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

NOTES:

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

² Ibid.

³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 95-97.

⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 98.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 98-99.

⁷ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 99.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 99-100.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

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

Posted on March 31, 2022March 31, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 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 Seven
Chapter Four: Rebellion in Manhattan

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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 Two ¹ and Three ² 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:

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

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

Posted on March 23, 2022March 25, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 3 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 Six
Chapter Three: A Connecticut Slave

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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:

NOTES:

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

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

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 March 17, 2022March 17, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 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

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

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.

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.

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)

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

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 Fourteen Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes Part Two

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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 Fifteen Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes Part Three

NOTES:

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

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 Thirteen Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes Part One

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

NOTES:

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

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 Twelve Chapter Seven: The Other Underground Railroad

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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 Thirteen Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes Part One

NOTES:

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

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 Eleven Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates Part Two

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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 Twelve Chapter Seven: The Other Underground Railroad Part One

NOTES:

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

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 Ten Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates Part One

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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 Eleven Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates Part Two

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 Nine, Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves, Part Two)

NOTES:

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

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 Nine Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves Part Two

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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 Ten Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates

NOTES:

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

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Fourteen
Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes
Part Two

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

Part Fifteen
Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes
Part Three

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

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

Part Thirteen
Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes
Part One

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

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

Part Twelve
Chapter Seven: The Other Underground Railroad

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

Part Thirteen
Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes
Part One

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

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

Part Eleven
Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates
Part Two

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

Part Twelve
Chapter Seven: The Other Underground Railroad
Part One

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

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

Part Ten
Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates
Part One

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

Part Eleven
Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates
Part Two

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

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

Part Nine
Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves
Part Two

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

Part Ten
Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates

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

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

Part Eight
Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves
Part One

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

Part Nine
Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves
Part Two

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

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

Part Seven
Chapter Four: Rebellion in Manhattan

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

Part Eight
Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves

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

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

Part Six
Chapter Three: A Connecticut Slave

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

Part Seven
Chapter Four: Rebellion in Manhattan

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

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

Virginia First
by Dr. Lyon G. Tyler

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Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)