Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

I know it is well known that slavery was wide-spread in the South and the prevailing theme that is taught in schools is that the South was awash in slaves while the North was whistle-clean.  Actually very few Southerners owned slaves, most Southerners were farmers, and they're the ones who fought the bloodiest war in this country's history;  I believe that includes every war that this country has ever been involved in.

Let me share me with you information that is generally not known, information that the New England states in particular would rather remain hidden.  This is the under-belly of the United States.  And it seems that the North is not as clean as everyone has been led to believe.

Mind you, I am not trying to give the North a black eye (no pun intended), I merely intend to lay before you some information that I feel most people have never heard. 

In the matter of slavery, it is strange indeed that before we even became a tiny nation we already had dipped our hands in dirty water.

In 1641, for example, the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the first of the American colonies to give legal recognition to the institution of slavery. Its Body of Liberties permitted the enslavement of "lawful captives taken in juste wares, and such stranfers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us." (Quoted in A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 62

Although the Virginia colony had already begun the practice of using black slaves, the Massachusetts statute preceded Virginia's legal sanctioning of servitude. It seems ironic that clergy-led Boston, this seventeenth-century "city on a hill," would soon become a bustling port for the trade in human flesh. Religion proved no match for profits. In Rhode Island, in the Narragansett Bay area, large landholdings used sizable numbers of slaves to provision the mono-crop plantations in the Caribbean with foodstuffs. Such cities as Boston, Salem, Providence, and New London, bustled with activity: outgoing ships were loaded with rum, fish, and dairy products, as slaves, along with molasses and sugar, were unloaded from incoming ships. Up until the American War for Independence the slave trade was a profitable element of the New England economy. (On slavery and the slave trade in New England, see Lorenzo Johnson Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England (New York: Atheneum, 1968).

It's little wonder that England looked askance at Americans' demand for independence in the early 1770s, while simultaneously chiding the people of Boston for failing to free her from slavery. "We are much concerned to find that this ingenious young woman is yet a slave," the British admonished the liberty-loving American patriots, and they also asserted that "one such act as the purchase of her freedom, would, in our opinion, have done them more honour than hanging a thousand trees with ribbons and emblems." (The Poems of Phillis Wheatley, Revised and Enlarged Edition. Edited with an Introduction by Julian D. Mason Jr. (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p.25.

In those early yearsof the American Revolution, the Massachusetts legislature was bombarded by the colony's slaves requesting, in no uncertain terms, the right to freedom; this right of petition was part of the "liberties and Christians usages" that the Puritans believed slave owners should allow their slaves and yet, in 1777, in reaction to one such petition, the legislature felt duty bound to emphasize regional conciliation as opposed to black freedom. Sitting in Philadelphia, these descendants of the Puritans opined that "we have such a sacred regard to the union and harmony of the United States as to conceive ourselves under obligation to refrain from every measure that should have a tendency to injure that union which is the basis and foundation of our defense and happiness." (Massachusetts Legislature's letter to the Continental Congress, printed in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 10, pp. 332-33.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts never formally abolished slavery, but rather left it to acts of private manumission and the withering effect of court decisions that questioned the legality of human ownership. To the credit of Massachusetts, however, as of the first federal census in 1790, it was the only state in the new republic to register no slaves in its population.

If New England represented the heart of the antebellum abolitionist movement, it also represented a complex mixture of antislavery sentiment and virulent racism. (On New England antislavery sentiment, see Donald Martin-Jacobs, ed., Courage and Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993).

Examine if you will: Harriet Beecher Stowe portrayed this complexity in her now classic abolitionist novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. This book's designated racist, the pious antislavery New Englander Ophelia, who, while visiting her slave-owning cousin in Louisiana constantly criticizes him for his participation in the evil of slavery, yet cannot bring herself to touch the black "uncivilized" Topsy.

Amused by Ophelia's New England hypocrisy, her cousin offers her a challenge: "If we emancipate, will you educate?" Ophelia eventually accepts but, after adopting and educating Topsy in New England, sends her along with the majority of the novel's major black characters: Liza, George, Harry, Emmaline, and Cassie, to Africa.

That the plot ended with colonization permitted Stowe's readers to advocate the abolition of slavery while forestalling the question of what to do with the ex-slaves. (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, Elizabeth Ammons, ed., (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994). For black responses to the novel and specifically to the colonization plot device, see Dickson D. Bruce, Jr. The Origins of American Literature, 1680-1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001),pp. 285-87

For most Northern whites in the 1850s, the desire to end slave labor did not equate with a belief in racial equality. Thus blacks might be freed, eventually, but they wouldn't be welcome to remain.

The process of black community-building began in the years immediately after the Northern states signaled their complicity in slavery by agreeing to those sections in the Constitution that, in crucial ways, gave tacit support to the "peculiar institution".

With the exception of Massachusetts, and miniscule Vermont, which had joined the union in 1791 with a constitution outlawing slavery, all of the other states in N. England and the Middle Atlantic adopted gradual-emancipation statutes. Such laws made provisions for those freed after a certain date to work as indentured servants for their "masters" until adulthood. Thus, the North's moral repugnance to slavery was compromised by a deeper respect for property rights, even those inclusive of the right to hold men and women of African descent as chattel. (Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1967). Also see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries Of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 233-37.

By Allen (Piewacket1861) He is member in the forum

Part II