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Old 03-05-2006, 09:31 PM
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Jerry D Jerry D is offline
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Default More exerpts from Complicity Review:

This definitely helps breakdown the Myth that only evil White Southerns profited by the nasty slave trade... Always amazed me growing up how the New Englanders always conveniently forgot who owned the majority of the Shipping companies before 1861!

More exerpts from Complicity Review:

We like to condemn slavery as an exotic evil perpetrated by plantation Southerners, but two new books and a museum exhibit provide nightmarish reminders that slavery was the norm in the early years of this country, and that up through the eve of the Civil War, Northern bankers, brokers and entrepreneurs were among slavery?s staunchest defenders.

In Complicity, a team of Hartford Courant journalists investigates this history, producing 10 stories that explore how deeply the fortunes of New York and New England were tied to the slave trade. ?Slavery in New York,? an exhibit at the New York Historical Society through March 5, reveals New York as a city substantially built by slaves. The companion book of the same name, elegantly designed and illustrated, anchors the exhibit in a series of scholarly essays. Together, these works echo and amplify each other, providing a kind of surround-sound opportunity for an anguished identity crisis: If our supposedly freedom-loving forebears were not ?good guys,? what were they? And what are we?

From the get-go, Americans were profiteers, and plundering the New World was backbreaking work. Writing in 1645 to John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, his brother-in-law Emanuel Downing complained, ?I do not see how we can thrive until we get a stock of slaves sufficient to do all our business.? Further south, in New Amsterdam, slaves built Wall Street?s wall and cleared what became Harlem and Route 1. When a new shipload of slaves proved insufficiently hardy, Director General Peter Stuyvesant expressed his displeasure to the Dutch West India Company, insisting that the company supply the best slaves to Christian and company enterprises, while unloading the feeble on ?Spaniards and unbelieving Jews.?

For much of the 17th and 18th centuries, New York boasted the largest urban slave population in mainland North America. Slaves made up one-fifth the population. And white New Yorkers lived in terror of slave revolt. An alleged 1741 plot led to the jailing and torture of scores of slaves, 30 of whom were executed, 17 by burning at the stake.

New York slowly and reluctantly abolished slavery; federal census figures showed slaves in the state until 1850. But the death of slavery in New York scarcely impeded the city?s business in the slave trade. In the peak years of 1859 and 1860, two slave ships bound for Africa left New York harbor every month. Although the trade was technically illegal, no one cared: A slave bought for $50 in Africa could be sold for $1,000 in Cuba, a profit margin so high that loss of slave life was easily absorbed. For every hundred slaves purchased in Africa, perhaps 48 survived the trip to the New World. By the end of the voyage, the ships that held the packed, shackled and naked human cargo were so filthy that it was cheaper to burn some vessels than decontaminate them.

Law-abiding Northerners made money off slavery through the cotton trade. ?King Cotton? was to antebellum America what oil is to the Middle East. Whole New England textile cities sprang up to manufacture cloth from cotton picked and processed by millions of slaves. In 1861, the United States produced more than 2 billion pounds of cotton, exporting much of it to Great Britain via New York. No wonder then that as the South began to talk secession, so too did New York Mayor Fernando Wood, who proposed that Manhattan become an independent island nation, its cotton trade intact.

How do we reconcile these facts with our mythology of the Civil War and our convenient conviction that the evils of slavery were contained within the South? Obviously, we can?t. Slavery was such a huge and gruesome enterprise, supported by so many, that it explodes inflated notions of American character. Instead, we might appropriately draw parallels between antebellum America and Nazi Germany.

This is not to assert that ordinary Americans were ?evil,? but rather that our insistent sorting of the world into ?good guys? and ?evildoers? distorts reality. Today, progressives are justly suspicious of the high-flown ?freedom? rhetoric our government deploys to advance American empire. But we need always to be skeptical of reductive, righteous narratives. Far from promoting morality, such fictions allow us to hide our worst impulses from ourselves.

Phyllis Eckhaus is an In These Times contributing editor who has written essays and book reviews for the magazine since 1993

http://www.vernonjohns.org/vernjohns/sthstrct.html

The Pervasiveness of Slavery

A unique feature of the thirteen colonies as compared to Europe was the existence of slavery. While most people are aware of slavery in the South, few are aware of the history of slavery in the North. In The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North, Arthur Zilversmit (1967) notes that during the debates on a constitutional ban on slavery in New York State, an opponent of the ban took the unorthodox point of view that if New Yorkers did not mention slavery, future generations would never learn that the state had ever had slavery. The author says that the prediction proved all too accurate.

The North did, indeed, have slavery. Slavery had existed in Massachusetts at least since 1638. Zilversmit (1967:3) says that by 1715 northerners owned one out of every five slaves in North America. Indeed, there were about 12,500 blacks in New England and the middle colonies. Moreover, New England was intimately involved in the slavery traffic, which in turn was part of a more general pattern known as the "triangular trade." In the triangular trade, Yankee ships carried cargoes of rum for the Guinea trade. In Africa, they would trade one hundred gallons of rum per each black male. The Yankees then set sail for the West Indies. Here they exchanged the slaves for a cargo of molasses. They then took this cargo to the distilleries of Rhode Island and Massachusetts, where they produced more rum for the Guinea trade.

The triangular trade was very important to the wealth of the North, for it supported an entire industry of traders, distillers, and shipbuilders. The primary ports involved were Newport and Bristol, followed by Boston, Salem, and Providence. Other cities included Portsmouth, New London, and New York. Newport at one time had as many as 170 vessels (half its merchant fleet) engaged in slaving (Hofstadter 1971). These ships supplied most of the slaves to the West Indies, while the British brought slaves to the thirteen colonies. Others ships, not involved in the triangle trade, brought fish and other foodstuffs to the Caribbean to feed the slaves. Nevertheless, these ships also engaged in slave trading. They would take some slaves and drop them off at Charleston or in Virginia, while bringing the most domesticated blacks to the northern market to serve as house servants or artisans.

While the proportion of blacks in the New England population never reached more than 2.2 percent, this statistic hides a great deal of variation among the colonies in this region (Zilversmit 1967:4). Just prior to the American Revolution, the Connecticut population was 3 percent black, and Rhode Island was 6 percent black. By contrast, New Hampshire and Vermont had very few slaves.

All the regions set up black codes to control the free black population severely. These laws worked to segregate blacks from whites and to set up a legally separate caste. In Massachusetts, as early as the 1680s, the construction of black codes began with attempts to ban the sale of liquor to blacks (Rice 1975:49-50). In 1703 the colony applied a curfew to this special population, and two years later it passed an act prohibiting miscegenation.

While differing from New England in the pattern of its landownership, every one of the middle colonies permitted slavery. Except for Pennsylvania, slavery in the region was a major problem (Rice 1975:49). New Jersey was 8 percent black overall (with as high as 12 percent in East Jersey). In 1770 New York was as much as 12.5 percent black. New York's 1712 slave law was the harshest of the northern colonial codes. This repressive law originated from the panic reaction of New Yorkers to a major slave revolt in which nine whites had been killed. As punishment, the authorities put to death twenty-one blacks. The fear of insurrection spread to New Jersey, and in 1714 that colony also passed a strict slave code. As part of the restrictive codes, all the middle colonies adopted separate courts to try blacks (which denied this population access to regular jury trials).

How did the North justify this brutal treatment of black Americans? The primary defense came from the religious idea that blacks were "savages" and "heathens" (Moore 1971:81-82). The reasoning was that since slaves were not Christians, they did not deserve the same treatment as whites. As this idea faded with time and the increasing Christian religious education and conversion of blacks, the doctrine of racial inferiority came to the fore.

In addition to forgetting about northern slavery, Americans have tended to forget how poorly northern colonists treated the black freedmen. Tocqueville (1969:343) had concluded that race prejudice was actually stronger in the northern states than in the southern states. In those states that had abolished slavery, northern whites had to rely more directly on an ideology of biological racism in order to reinforce patterns of racial subordination of the blacks. Louis Filler (1960:15) writes that by 1850 there were 434,495 free blacks as against 3,204,313 slaves or approximately one free black in eight. These free blacks found themselves "universally despised" and degraded, facing the constant fear that at any time they could be remanded to slavery. Many of these people found themselves in a worse economic situation than slavery, often being incapable of even providing for themselves. A number of European commentators, such as the actress Frances Kemble (quoted in Zilversmit 1967:222-223), noted how poorly the freedmen were treated in Philadelphia. She compared the free blacks to Hebrew lepers and pariahs, two historically degraded and rejected groups. Many of the complaints of white Americans about the freedmen closely resemble the complaints of today's whites about blacks. They saw free blacks as given to idleness, frolicking, drunkenness, dishonesty, and criminality. This racist stereotype was so widespread that somewhat later even the abolitionists blamed the conduct of the freedmen for the increasingly hostile public opinion towards the idea of abolition.

Fear of Slave Revolts

One of the greatest fears of white society was the possibility of slave revolts. In American Negro Slave Revolts Herbert Aptheker (1943) uncovered about 250 slave revolts where a minimum of ten slaves joined in the activity. Most historians (Wilson 1973:84-85) think that because of the severity of the slavery system, only about a dozen slave revolts actually occurred. But those dozen revolts spread considerable hysteria among the colonists. An additional fear was the possibility of indentured servants and other discontented whites joining in the revolt (see Zinn 1980:37).The first large-scale revolt occurred in New York in 1712.

Indentured Servants

In addition to black slaves, there was a large group of indentured servants, many of whom were virtually treated as slaves. More than half the colonists to North America originally came as servants with as many as 10 to 15 percent of the total population being indentured servants at any given time (Hofstadter 1971:34; Aptheker 1966:36; also see Smith 1971 and Alderman 1975). As late as 1755, 10 percent of the population of Maryland consisted of white servants (Zinn 1980:46).

Abbott Smith in Colonists in Bondage (1971) studied the upward mobility of indentured servants. Around 80 percent of them either died during their servitude or went back to England, or joined the class known as "poor whites." There was upward mobility, but it was rare and primarily for the naturally gifted or the lucky.

Zinn (1980:36) maintains that some of these whites did become involved in slave revolts. One such incident of interracial cooperation occurred in Gloucester County, Virginia, where in 1663 indentured white servants and black slaves conspired to gain their freedom. The plotters were betrayed to the authorities, and many of the rebel leaders subsequently executed.

Considerable Inequality in the Thirteen Colonies

The myth of a satisfied white middle class in the thirteen colonies obscures the fact of substantial inequality in the thirteen colonies. For instance, as much as one-fourth or one-fifth of the population of Massachusetts had little beyond immediate personal belongings. If indentured servants are added to this, the proportion rises to nearly one-third of the white population (Main 1965:41-42; 33). In New Jersey even the richest counties had a large population of landless agricultural laborers. In Maryland some 60 percent of the planters had only enough income from their farms to support the cruder necessities of life (Eddis 1969:xvi- xviii). About a quarter of the white male population in Virginia possessed no land and little personal property. When the slave population is added, the proportion rises to 40 percent. In the richer parishes of South Carolina, the inclusion of slaves in the ranks of unpropertied laborers brings the proportion of the population without property to nearly 90 percent (see Main 1965:57).
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