exclusively over slavery, and they portray Reconstruction as a noble
struggle by New Englanders to protect the rights of black citizens
from a racist white Southern majority.
---
African slavery is so much the outstanding feature of the South, in
the unthinking view of it, that people often forget there had been
slaves in all the old colonies. Slaves were auctioned openly in the
Market House of Philadelphia; in the shadow of Congregational churches
in Rhode Island; in Boston taverns and warehouses; and weekly,
sometimes daily, in Merchant's Coffee House of New York. Such Northern
heroes of the American Revolution as John Hancock and Benjamin
Franklin bought, sold, and owned black people. William Henry Seward,
Lincoln's anti-slavery Secretary of State during the Civil War, born
in 1801, grew up in Orange County, New York, in a slave-owning family
and amid neighbors who owned slaves if they could afford them. The
family of Abraham Lincoln himself, when it lived in Pennsylvania in
colonial times, owned slaves.[1]
When the minutemen marched off to face the redcoats at Lexington in
1775, the wives, boys and old men they left behind in Framingham took
up axes, clubs, and pitchforks and barred themselves in their homes
because of a widespread, and widely credited, rumor that the local
slaves planned to rise up and massacre the white inhabitants while the
militia was away.[2]
African bondage in the colonies north of the Mason-Dixon Line has left
a legacy in the economics of modern America and in the racial
attitudes of the U.S. working class. Yet comparatively little is
written about the 200-year history of Northern slavery. Robert
Steinfeld's deservedly praised "The Invention of Free Labor" (1991)
states, "By 1804 slavery had been abolished throughout New England,"
ignoring the 1800 census, which shows 1,488 slaves in New England.
Recent archaeological discoveries of slave quarters or cemeteries in
Philadelphia and New York City sometimes are written up in newspaper
headlines as though they were exhibits of evidence in a case not yet
settled (cf. "African Burial Ground Proves Northern Slavery," The City
Sun, Feb. 24, 1993).
I had written one book on Pennsylvania history and was starting a
second before I learned that William Penn had been a slaveowner. The
historian Joanne Pope Melish, who has written a perceptive book on
race relations in ante-bellum New England, recalls how it was possible
to read American history textbooks at the high school level and never
know that there was such a thing as a slave north of the Mason-Dixon
Line:
"In Connecticut in the 1950s, when I was growing up, the only
slavery discussed in my history textbook was southern; New Englanders
had marched south to end slavery. It was in Rhode Island, where I
lived after 1964, that I first stumbled across an obscure reference to
local slavery, but almost no one I asked knew anything about it.
Members of the historical society did, but they assured me that
slavery in Rhode Island had been brief and benign, involving only the
best families, who behaved with genteel kindness. They pointed me in
the direction of several antiquarian histories, which said about the
same thing. Some of the people of color I met knew more."[3]
Slavery in the North never approached the numbers of the South. It
was, numerically, a drop in the bucket compared to the South. But the
South, comparatively, was itself a drop in the bucket of New World
slavery. Roughly a million slaves were brought from Africa to the New
World by the Spanish and Portuguese before the first handful reached
Virginia. Some 500,000 slaves were brought to the United States (or
the colonies it was built from) in the history of the slave trade,
which is a mere fraction of the estimated 10 million Africans forced
to the Americas during that period.
Every New World colony was, in some sense, a slave colony. French
Canada, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Cuba,
Brazil -- all of them made their start in an economic system built
upon slavery based on race. In all of them, slavery enjoyed the
service of the law and the sanction of religion. In all of them the
master class had its moments of doubt, and the slaves plotted to
escape or rebel.
Over time, slavery flourished in the Upper South and failed to do so
in the North. But there were pockets of the North on the eve of the
Revolution where slaves played key roles in the economic and social
order: New York City and northern New Jersey, rural Pennsylvania, and
the shipping towns of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Black populations
in some places were much higher than they would be during the 19th
century. More than 3,000 blacks lived in Rhode Island in 1748,
amounting to 9.1 percent of the population; 4,600 blacks were in New
Jersey in 1745, 7.5 percent of the population; and nearly 20,000
blacks lived in New York in 1771, 12.2 percent of the population.[4]
The North failed to develop large-scale agrarian slavery, such as
later arose in the Deep South, but that had little to do with morality
and much to do with climate and economy.
The elements which characterized Southern slavery in the 19th century,
and which New England abolitionists claimed to view with abhorrence,
all were present from an early date in the North. Practices such as
the breeding of slaves like animals for market, or the crime of slave
mothers killing their infants, testify that slavery's brutalizing
force was at work in New England. Philadelphia brickmaker John Coats
was just one of the Northern masters who kept his slave workers in
iron collars with hackles. Newspaper advertisements in the North offer
abundant evidence of slave families broken up by sales or inheritance.
One Boston ad of 1732, for example, lists a 19-year-old woman and her
6-month-old infant, to be sold either "together or apart."[5]
Advertisements for runaways in New York and Philadelphia newspapers
sometimes mention suspicions that they had gone off to try to find
wives who had been sold to distant purchasers.
Generally, however, as the numbers of slaves were fewer in the North
than in the South, the controls and tactics were less severe. The
Puritan influence in Massachusetts lent a particular character to
slavery there and sometimes eased its severity. On the other hand, the
paternal interest that 19th century Southern owners attempted to
cultivate for their slaves was absent in the North, for the most part,
and the colonies there had to resort to laws to prevent masters from
simply turning their slaves out in the streets when the slaves grew
old or infirm. And across the North an evident pattern emerges: the
more slaves lived in a place, the wider the controls, and the more
brutal the punishments for transgressions.
Slavery was still very much alive, and in some places even expanding,
in the northern colonies of British North America in the generation
before the American Revolution. The spirit of liberty in 1776 and the
rhetoric of rebellion against tyranny made many Americans conscious of
the hypocrisy of claiming natural human rights for themselves, while
at the same time denying them to Africans. Nonetheless, most of the
newly free states managed to postpone dealing with the issue of
slavery, citing the emergency of the war with Britain.
That war, however, proved to be the real liberator of the northern
slaves. Wherever it marched, the British army gave freedom to any
slave who escaped within its lines. This was sound military policy: it
disrupted the economic system that was sustaining the Revolution.
Since the North saw much longer, and more extensive, incursions by
British troops, its slave population drained away at a higher rate
than the South's. At the same time, the governments in northern
American states began to offer financial incentives to slaveowners who
freed their black men, if the emancipated slaves then served in the
state regiments fighting the British.
When the Northern states gave up the last remnants of legal slavery,
in the generation after the Revolution, their motives were a mix of
piety, morality, and ethics; fear of a growing black population;
practical economics; and the fact that the Revolutionary War had
broken the Northern slaveowners' power and drained off much of the
slave population. An exception was New Jersey, where the slave
population actually increased during the war. Slavery lingered there
until the Civil War, with the state reporting 236 slaves in 1850 and
18 as late as 1860.
The business of emancipation in the North amounted to the simple
matters of, 1. determining how to compensate slaveowners for the few
slaves they had left, and, 2. making sure newly freed slaves would be
marginalized economically and politically in their home communities,
and that nothing in the state's constitution would encourage fugitive
slaves from elsewhere to settle there.
But in the generally conservative, local process of emancipating a
small number of Northern slaves, the Northern leadership turned its
back on slavery as a national problem.
State Mass. N.H. N.Y. Conn. R.I. Pa. N.J. Vt.
European settlement 1620 1623 1624 1633 1636 1638 1620 1666
First record of slavery 1629? 1645 1626 1639 1652 1639 1626? c.
1760?
Official end of slavery 1783 1783 1799 1784 1784 1780 1804
1777
Actual end of slavery 1783 c.1845? 1827 1848 1842 c.1845? 1865
1777?
Percent black 1790 1.4% 0.6% 7.6% 2.3% 6.3% 2.4% 7.7% 0.3%
Percent black 1860 0.78% 0.15% 1.26% 1.87% 2.26% 1.95% 3.76%
0.22%
On Dec 5, 8:49 am, Travis <baconl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> **
> New post on *ACGR's "News with Attitude"*
> <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/author/amcogore/> Rewriting Southern
> History<http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/01-821/>by
> Harold <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/author/amcogore/>
>
> Charles G. Mills, The Confederate Lawyer Part I: The Causes of the War
> Between the States 11/28/2011 Many members of the present generation of
> American professional historians are trying to rewrite Southern history in
> a way that discounts over a century of important scholarship and
> substitutes a simplistic view of the past. In particular, they [...]
>
> Read more of this post <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/01-821/>
> *Harold <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/author/amcogore/>* | December 5, 2011
> at 7:00 am | Categories: Corruption <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=22388>,
> Criminal Activity <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=398859>,
> Government<http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=2311>,
> History <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=678>, Police
> State<http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=1955>,
> Politics <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=398>,
> Propaganda<http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=13722>,
> Sovereignty <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=69462>, States
> Rights<http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=280753>| URL:http://wp.me/pmtmV-70i
>
> Comment <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/01-821/#respond> See
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