To even suggest that slavery was a singly "southern" thing is to express a level of un-awareness not rivaled by many.
Yes, its econimcal structure would fall to the grounds if it were abolished, but the fact remains: the North did NOT attack the South with the intent of "freeing the slaves" and the South did NOT leave the Union in hopes of "keeping slaves" ;especially when one considers that Lincoln did NOT intend to free them, only to prohibit it from expanding to the west. And the Western States STILL came to the aid of the South.
And by the way: the "masters" down here were just as represented up there. About 5-6% of fighters on BOTH sides in the ACW were slave owners. I honor the heroic dead on both sides. ANY "master" can go to hell.
"...you can try to gloss over your reasons for ripping this nation apart and killing your countrymen..."
And WHOSE land was the majority of the fighting on? I don't recall reading about the Great Confederate Offensive into New York! "Killing your countrymen" and "defending your home" are different. One is treason, the other is allowed (called for?) by the Constitution. As was the voting of the Southern States that left in the first place.
YOU face it- any moral high ground the North thinks it had durring the Civil War is moot!
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. 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%
1. "RUN away on the 13th of September last from Abraham Lincoln of Springfield in the County of Chester, a Negro Man named Jack, about 30 Years of Age, low Stature, speaks little or no English, has a Scar by the Corner of one Eye, in the Form of a V, his Teeth notched, and the Top of one of his Fore Teeth broke; He had on when he went away an old Hat, a grey Jacket partly like a Sailor's Jacket. Whoever secures the said Negro and brings him to his Master, or to Mordecai Lincoln ... shall have Twenty Shillings Reward and reasonable Charges" [Pennsylvania Gazette, Oct. 15, 1730]. Mordecai Lincoln (1686-1736) was great-great-grandfather of President Lincoln.
2. Josiah H. Temple, History of Framingham, Massachusetts, Framingham, 1887, p.275.
3. Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and 'Race' in New England 1780-1860, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998, preface, page xiii.
4. Stanley L. Engerman, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, "Slavery,” in Susan B. Carter, Scott S. Gartner, Michael Haines, Alan Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, eds., Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2004.
5. "Boston News Letter," May 1, 1732.
YANKEE slavers sailed to Africa to purchase their human cargoes for cheap rum, cloth and trinkets. YANKEES threw thousands of slaves overboard during the Middle Passage. YANKEES ripped infants from their mothers bosoms and turned a profit on their misery - YANKEES made fortunes on the practice. YANKEES - includeing Lincoln - passed and supported an Amendment guaranteeing slavery to exist forever in hopes of luring the seceded states back. YANKEES still had slaves after the war. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Let me tell you something. The north had slaves and most of them landed in northern ports. Some of the families of the slaves sold them in the first place.Some honor in families! Slavery is still going on.My families never owned any slaves because they were busy trying to make a living. I have seen the land they tried to farm and it was a miracle they were able to grow anything. And, remember this was done with horses pulling plows if they were wealthy enough to own some. You try to do what they did. I have been all over the South and it is a wonder they even made it through the foothills of the Appalachians and don't forget the rivers they had to cross. It amazes me that they made it and still lived to their 80's and 90's. Guess that is why my mother will be 101 and believe me she has some tales to tell about growing up in her family of about 13 kids. I, for one, would not have made a good pioneer!
Many of our founding fathers owned slaves. Are they "burning in hell"?