Shedding light on slavery in the north

CNN ^ | 3/17/2006 | AP

[High Cotton]

Teaching about the slave trade "is the right thing to do," Wright said. "Absent South Carolina, the biggest importer of slaves was New York City."

The New York Historical Society recently presented an exhibition on slavery in New York that featured documents, paintings, video and sculpture.

In lower Manhattan, a long-lost burial ground where thousands of slaves and free blacks were laid to rest during the 18th century was recently declared a national monument by President Bush.

Slavery was abolished in New York in 1827, but when the American Revolution began in 1776, the only city with more slaves than New York was Charleston, South Carolina.

Oyster Bay eighth-grader Fiona Brunner said she was amazed to find out there were slaves buried near Oyster Bay.

"You always think that happened so far away, only in the South, and a lot of it was right here in our town," she said.

[Paige]

And Maryland was considered a slave state until Lincoln arrested the Maryland legislature and stripped them of their Constitutional rights.

[Paige]

I was talking about the antebellum period of American History.

[PeaRidge]

I have seen some of those numbers, but I don't have time now to research for you.

I think "Southern Wealth and Northern Profits" has some data on that.

It seems that there was quite a bit of "unloading of slaves" from North to South. The high activity level of the "slave pens" in Washington, D. C. being the center of activity. Richmond also saw a large population of slaves moving from North to South.

If I come across more specific data over the weekend, I will let you know.

[PeaRidge]

I have seen some of those numbers, but I don't have time now to research for you.

I think "Southern Wealth and Northern Profits" has some data on that.

It seems that there was quite a bit of "unloading of slaves" from North to South. The high activity level of the "slave pens" in Washington, D. C. being the center of activity. Richmond also saw a large population of slaves moving from North to South.

If I come across more specific data over the weekend, I will let you know.

[tkathy]

Those in the North who were involved in pro slavery were
DEMOCRATS!!!!!!!

The Republicans should make a big political issue out of this.

[PeaRidge]

The Republican party was also responsible for sponsoring the Corwin Amendment that would have made slavery permanently legal and protected by the Constitution of the United States. It was passed by the US Congress in March of 1861 and endorsed by Lincoln in his first inaugural speech.

[x]

YOU do know the Emancipation Proclamation did NOT free slaves in the North, don't you? It took the 13th amendment to free the slaves in the North.

That was an amendment that Lincoln promoted and worked hard to have passed. That it was quickly ratified was at least in part a posthumous tribute to him.

It's clear to all who understand the subject that a presidential proclamation couldn't have freed all the slaves. Such an action could only be constitutionally justified as a war measure. An amendment would be necessary to completely abolish slavery.

That yankee education isn't all it is cut out to be, is it?

Neither is second-rate Confederate propaganda.

[PeaRidge]

A piece of information for you:

"Newporters (Rhode Island) had been importing slaves from the West Indies and Africa since the 1690s. By 1755, a fifth of the population was black. Only two other colonial cities -- New York and Charleston, S.C. -- had a greater percentage of slaves."

And this:

"For more than 75 years, Rhode Island ruled the American slave trade. The first recorded departure of a Newport slave ship was in 1709, and regular voyages from Newport to Africa were recorded beginning in 1725.

"There's no Newport without slavery," says James Garman, a professor of historic preservation at Salve Regina University in Newport. "The sheer accumulation of wealth is astonishing and it has everything to do with the African trade. . . "

"On sloops and ships called Endeavor, Success and Wheel of Fortune, slave captains made more than 1,000 voyages to Africa from 1725 to 1807. They chained their human cargo and forced more than 100,000 men, women and children into slavery in the West Indies, Havana and the American colonies.

"The traffic was so lucrative that nearly half the ships that sailed to Africa did so after 1787 -- the year Rhode Island outlawed the trade.

"Rum fueled the business. The colony had nearly 30 distilleries where molasses was boiled into rum. Rhode Island ships carried barrels of it to buy African slaves, who were then traded for more molasses in the West Indies which was returned to Rhode Island.

"By the mid-18th century, 114 years after Roger Williams founded the tiny Colony of Rhode Island, slaves lived in every port and village. In 1755, 11.5 percent of all Rhode Islanders, or about 4,700 people, were black, nearly all of them slaves.

"In Newport, Bristol and Providence, the slave economy provided thousands of jobs for captains, seamen, coopers, sail makers, dock workers, and shop owners, and helped merchants build banks, wharves and mansions. But it was only a small part of a much larger international trade, which some historians call the first global economy.

http://www.projo.com/extra/2006/slavery/day6/

And for our friend Restorer, if you are interested in the moral relativism of North vs South, this should provide food for thought.

[Restorer]

Thanks. It would also be interesting to know whether this trade increased or decreased over time as slavery became more of a "moral" issue over time with more northerners.

IOW, were more slaves sold rather than freed from the first northern states to outlaw slaves than with the later ones?

[TexKat]

The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 freed African Americans in rebel states, and after the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment emancipated all U.S. slaves wherever they were. As a result, the mass of Southern blacks now faced the difficulty Northern blacks had confronted--that of a free people surrounded by many hostile whites. One freedman, Houston Hartsfield Holloway, wrote, "For we colored people did not know how to be free and the white people did not know how to have a free colored person about them."

Even after the Emancipation Proclamation, two more years of war, service by African American troops, and the defeat of the Confederacy, the nation was still unprepared to deal with the question of full citizenship for its newly freed black population. The Reconstruction implemented by Congress, which lasted from 1866 to 1877, was aimed at reorganizing the Southern states after the Civil War, providing the means for readmitting them into the Union, and defining the means by which whites and blacks could live together in a nonslave society. The South, however, saw Reconstruction as a humiliating, even vengeful imposition and did not welcome it.

After the Civil War, with the protection of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, African Americans enjoyed a period when they were allowed to vote, actively participate in the political process, acquire the land of former owners, seek their own employment, and use public accommodations. Opponents of this progress, however, soon rallied against the former slaves' freedom and began to find means for eroding the gains for which many had shed their blood.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart5.html

[x]

If that's true, then Lincoln was a pretty crappy republican. He proved as such when he stated that he'd do whatever he had to to preserve the union. He said that if he could do that by freeing slaves, he would. If he could do it by not freeing slaves, he'd do that. And he said if he could do it by freeing some slaves and not freeing others, that he would also do that.

That's gradualism, taking care of the crisis of the moment and not getting distracted by the next step before you actually come to it. It's a valid response to a country falling into civil war.

The Republican Party wasn't founded to abolish slavery but to restrict its growth. Expansionist slave-owners were a real force in 19th century America. Those who opposed slavery had to concentrate on countering their power. Abolition was distant goal for some Republicans, and many were content to let the South maintain its own "institutions", but it should not be concluded that early Republicans were more pro-slavery than the actual slave-owners, as some jokers like to suggest.

While the first Republicans may not have come up to the moral standards 21st century Americans have come to have, they were fighting a good fight, and deserve some recognition for that.

Lincoln: the original RINO.

And a "real Republican" would have done what? Collapsed before the slave-owners? Let them have everything they demanded? The Republican Party isn't just Dixiecrats. It never was -- and a good thing that. It wasn't a radical abolition party either, and wouldn't have succeeded if it were.

[Ditto]

Little point in talking actual history with the Lou Rockwell cultists, but good points anyway.

[PeaRidge]

That is an interesting concept that you are trying to develop.

In the above article, you can see that in the 1700s, slavery was growing in coastal cities of the North and South about evenly.

That was a function of labor demand and cost.

But to attempt to draw a moral conclusion about relative numbers freed from the "first" states to outlaw slaves would be quite a stretch in logic.

It is clear that sales of slaves continued until the 1860s. As the value of slaves began to increase, it is likely that more were sold South than were released in the North, with economics and demand being the determinants. Census counts of the period probably confirm this.

Of course in saying that, I sound more like our good friend x than I do myself.

In so far regarding morality, I think that resistance to slave ownership as a part of period morality discussion should include Jefferson, Madison, Oglethorpe, as well as generations of Southerners who rejected slavery.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the morality of the hundreds of Boston, Newport, New York, and Philadelphia owned and outfitted slavers that continued in the practice of transporting slaves until the Civil War put an end to their lucrative business.

[Tokra]

I though re-writing history was a tool of the left. Check out the census from 1850 & 1860. Then try to tell me that slavery was rampant in the North.

[tkathy]

To look back 150 years and second guess a great moral struggle according to today's standards is intellectually dishonest.

[Restorer]

You are quite correct that northern and southern attitudes towards the morality of slavery were similar among the Founders from both north and south. They viewed it an evil that would hopefully disappear gradually for economic reasons as it became less profitable. This consensus continued into the early decades of the 19th century.

Thereafter, as slavery became less and less profitable in northern states, it was gradually abolished. Its profitability in southern states grew, and attitudes towards the institution diverged. More and more northerners began to think of the institution as a great moral wrong, while many southerners began to search for ways (or rationalizations, depending on your point of view) to defend it, first as an unavoidable necessity and then as a moral good.

By 1860 attitudes were polarizing, as can be seen by the stark contrast between the ideologies in the famous "Cornerstone Speech" and in Lincoln's speeches on the subject.

The consensus in much or most of the South was that slavery was a positive good. In most of the North, people disagreed on what lengths should be gone to to get rid of the institution, but very few defended it as being a good thing. Increasing numbers were dedicated to its destruction "by whatever means necessary."

No wonder we had a war!

[lunarbicep]

BTTT

[stand watie]

if lincoln would have lived there likely would be NO Blacks or Indians (and perhaps no Jews, Asians or Latinos either) in the USA.

lincoln, the TYRANT, hated and feared "persons of colour".

"reconstruction" under a healthy lincoln might well have been an ETHNIC CLEANSING.

after all he had said (reference the Amerindians) that the "savages must be driven from our dominions OR exterminated".

lincoln wanted the USA to be a "white man's country".

free dixie,sw

[PeaRidge]

The "famous" Cornerstone Speech as you refer to it may or may not be accurate on whatever website you choose, since no copy of it exists, or apparently ever did. What is called 'the speech' was nothing but a hearsay newspaper article from a speech of a politician that did not represent the Confederacy.

If you think quoting Stephen's comments is useful, then it would be more accurate to examine what is actually recorded, officially..:

From the Confederate Convention records as listed in Vol. 1 The Civil History Of The Confederate States :

"With regard to slavery and the slave trade the provisions of the Constitution furnished an effective answer to the assertion so often made that the Confederacy was founded on slavery and intended to perpetuate and extend it.

"Property in slaves already existing was recognized and guaranteed just as it was by the Constitution of the United States, and the rights of such property in the common territories were protected against any such hostile discrimination as had been attempted in the Union.

"But the extension of slavery, in' the only practical sense of that phrase, was more distinctly and effectually precluded by the Confederate than by the Federal Constitution. The further importation of Negroes from any country other than the slave holding States and territories of the United States was peremptorily prohibited, and Congress was further endowed with the power to prohibit the introduction of slaves from any State or territory not belonging to the Confederacy.

"Mr. Stephens, next in official rank, said concerning this constitution,

"The whole document negatives the idea which so many have been active in endeavoring to put in the enduring form of history, that the Convention at Montgomery was nothing but a set of conspirators, whose object was the overthrow of the principles of the Constitution of the United States and the creation of a great slave oligarchy instead of the free institutions thereby secured and guaranteed."

He authored that and that is documented.

[Heyworth]

And Maryland was considered a slave state until Lincoln arrested the Maryland legislature and stripped them of their Constitutional rights.

Yeah, and it was considered one afterward, too. Right up until November 1, 1864, when they abolished it. And by Constutional rights, do you mean the right to repudiate the Constitution and take up arms against the United States?