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The Status of Blacks in the North Before the War

All of the New England states had abolished the practice of slavery.

Their ships still transported slaves throughout the Caribbean.

Slaves were included in the New England population census for 1840, and as late as 1848 Rhode Island was passing new laws outlawing slavery. New Hampshire passed a new law outlawing slavery there even later – in 1857.

Many of their active citizens, however, stated that they did not believe black people were capable of citizenship and did everything they could to get rid of them.

The American Colonization Society was very active in New England. This organization raised funds to deport blacks to Liberia and other foreign lands. At one point, some 12,000 free blacks had been deported to Liberia, most of whom perished there.

To New Englanders, "abolition" meant the complete absence of black people from their "chosen land." As Emerson stated, "the abolitionist wishes to abolish slavery, but because he wishes to abolish the black man".

One writer said that would "restore New England to an idealized original state as an orderly, homogeneous, white society. A free New England would be a white New England".

In the first half of the nineteenth century New Englanders were bombarded with graphic and literary representations of blacks as being preposterous, stupid, or evil.

Free blacks in New England were lampooned and savagely ridiculed publicly, urged to leave the country, attacked, rioted against, excluded from juries, and even from cemeteries.

Another writer stated that black “graves were dug up so that white cemeteries would not be tainted." The corpses of people of color seem to have become a target of grave robbers.

Black children were excluded from most public schools, even though their working parents were taxpayers.

There was a New England version of the Ku Klux Klan as well, in the form of roving gangs that conducted "terroristic”, armed raids on urban black communities and the institutions that served them. So it turns out the "Klan," like the Black Codes, were not a Southern invention.

All of this violence was motivated by the fundamental New England belief that black people were "anomalous and troublesome strangers."

The ultimate objective of all the violence and harassment was to realize the "promise" that Negroes would slowly diminish in number until finally they would disappear altogether.

The degraded situation of the poor, hapless ex-slaves of New England was a direct result of both slavery and the savage, institutionalized discrimination against them by new Englanders.

By 1853 Frederick Douglas would observe the situation in New England and ask, "What stone has been left unturned to degrade us? What hand has refused to inflame the popular prejudice against us? What whit has not laughed at us in our wretchedness?"

Through the activists of the time, it is known that most New England Yankees did not blame any of this on themselves. The reason given why New England’s black population was in such dire straights, they said, was Southern slavery.

This is how the myth of the morally superior Yankee came into being – by rewriting 200 years of New England history.

By the late 1850s, this Yankee myth pervaded much of the North, especially the Midwest, where New Englanders had been migrating to for generations.

At the time, states like Illinois constitutionally prohibited the emigration of black people into the state, deprived the minuscule number of free blacks there of any semblance of citizenship, and actively attempted deportation with the help of state colonization societies.

Abraham Lincoln had been the head of the Illinois Colonization Society and he supported the allocation of tax funds to be used to deport free blacks from Illinois.

When the extension of slavery into the new territories became a big issue, one of the chief reasons Northerners were opposed to it was that they intended to New England-ize the territories, and that meant keeping them all white. That could never occur with either slaves or free blacks there. This policy – and Lincoln’s support of it – is one reason why
some states seceded from the Union.

This is evidence that racism in Northern states led to secession.

This sort of confirms what I have experienced in my life and has validated my "gut" feeling about the matter. But the "powers that be" frame things in a different manner and people are influenced, inundated, and confirm to that belief over time. If you look at the world today, it's in the state it is due to the effects of that Darwinistic elitist philosophy of England and the actions that were taken over time. The US South were rebels against this "force" and have stood and fought for that freedom over time, against England and their surrogate in America, the North. It's sad really, as the party of the people, freedom, independence, individuality, and the "spark" that changed the world forever are portrayed as just the opposite. I just hope 140 years of manipulation can be studied and the Spirit of Human Freedom can be returned to its rightful owner, the Rebels in the South.