I was talking about the antebellum period of American History.
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.