As February is both "Black History Month" and the anniversary of President Lincoln's birthday, we know we will be hearing a lot about slavery as well as the War Between the States. Unfortunately, most of what we hear will be from television and other main stream media as well as the entertainment field – the most unreliable sources. They will present the conventional, easy-to-understand, version of events because many people today cannot deal with an issue that has more than one variable.
We also know from previous Februarys that simplified depictions of slavery will focus primarily on the South. Last year, a letter to the editor of an area newspaper, contained this bizarre sentence: "The South still needs to undergo a catharsis, face up to its sins and admit its guilt in order to rid itself of the dregs of evil left in the wake of a war fought to defend slavery." The letter went on to great lengths to indict the South as being solely responsible for slavery in America.
But thousands of Africans didn't magically appear at Natchez plantations one morning. The story of slavery in America is more complex and involves other players in addition to the Southern planters.
Among the other villains were the New England slave traders, financed by New York bankers, who used specially constructed ships to transport slaves from Africa. These Yankee clippers were designed to hold a maximum number of slaves using a minimum amount of space. Viewing replicas of slave ships at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut will give you an appreciation of Yankee ingenuity.
These ships would depart New England loaded with trinkets, weapons and, of course, rum, which would be traded to tribal chieftains in exchange for the Africans they held as slaves. On return trips, the ships would stop in the West Indies and exchange slaves for sugar and molasses, which were taken to New England to be distilled into rum.
Countless slaves died before the ships reached America and their corpses were unceremoniously tossed into the ocean. Those who survived the harsh crossing were sold primarily to planters in the Caribbean; roughly 90%, and the South; roughly 10%.
New England's exploitation of slaves was one of America's best kept secrets until fairly recently. But now some historians refuse to comply with the conspiracy of silence and they are showing us New England's dirty linen. One of these historians is Joanne Pope Melish and her recent book, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England, 1780-1860 exposes what has been called "a virtual amnesia about slavery in New England."
New England newspapers, operating from a "Chamber of Commerce" mindset, rarely mention the region's history of slave labor. And some residents of the State of Rhode Island & Providence Plantations want the State's official name changed to simply "Rhode Island" in order to eliminate the reminder of slavery connoted by the word "plantations."
America slavery did indeed begin in New England with Massachusetts being the first colony to legalize the use of slaves in 1641. Other colonies quickly followed suit and soon New England's economy was almost dependent upon slave labor. At first, captured American Indians were exchanged for black slaves from the West Indies. But eventually New Englanders realized that slave trading was more profitable than harpooning whales. "At New England slavery’s peak, around 1760, roughly one in four families owned slaves" which is the same percentage of families in the South owning slaves just prior to the War.
In fact, to a greater or lesser degree, slaves were used throughout all the developed regions of the nation and the New England slave traders amassed huge fortunes from the buying and selling of human beings. Although slave trading was outlawed in 1808, the practice continued surreptitiously for several years. But long before it ended, slave traders, like their counterparts in organized crime, began funneling their profits into reputable ventures and these new investments began to prosper.
The immense monetary success of the slave trade created a ripple effect on the entire New England economy. In fact, if you trace the source of wealth of many of the region's old aristocratic families, you will find that its genesis was, directly or indirectly, the slave trade.
As the slave trade gradually ended, what happened to these New England families is best described by the old saying: "First you obtain money and then you obtain morals." The affluent families became respectable and took pride in their newly acquired virtue. Also, their enormous wealth afforded them the wherewithal as well as the leisure for benevolent activities. One of the first causes the New Englanders embraced was the Abolition movement. It offended their sensibilities that Southern planters were using slave labor.
It's easy to picture these distinguished Boston gentlemen and their elegant ladies, dressed in their Sunday finest and comfortably ensconced in their Unitarian pews. Their faces surely reflected the compassion they felt as they listened to one of William Ellery Channing's fiery Abolition sermons. No doubt they wondered if there was a way to lift Southerners up to their moral level.
However, there is one question the Abolitionists never asked: Who is more culpable? Those who sell slaves or those who buy them? Apparently their minds became compartmentalized to the point that such questions didn't arise. However, we know how writers of textbooks answered this question. But textbooks were published primarily in New York and Boston, not Atlanta.
But, to the end, Lady Luck smiled on New Englanders. When they were forced to end their commercial exploitation of slaves, they fared much better than the South did at the same juncture. The federal government didn't take away their assets or their right to vote. Nor did it place them under military rule. And Confederate troops didn't march across New England burning homes, schools and libraries; raping and looting and leaving only the scorched earth.
February 8, 2002
