[Bubba Ho-Tep]

It was a question of the number of actual traders. I misunderstood.

Not quite. It was the number of people who had invested capital in the slave trade--in essence, who owned stock in that business--and I seriously doubt that this number was anything like the vast majority of yankees that 4CJ's "millions" number would necessarily indicate.

[4CJ]

It was the number of people who had invested capital in the slave trade--in essence, who owned stock in that business--and I seriously doubt that this number was anything like the vast majority of yankees that 4CJ's "millions" number would necessarily indicate.

See Douglas Harper's Slavery in the North: Northern Profits from Slavery and others. The bulk of the entire yankee economy revolved around the slave trade, from shipbuilders, banking, tanneries, loggers, alcohol and spirits, etc. According to Harper, by 1740 almost 65% of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations economy revolved around the trade.

Interestingly, Mr. Harper notes that Google constantly excises pages indicating Northern culpability from searches:

About the middle of December 2003, I suddenly noticed a dramatic drop in the number of hits to the Northern slavery pages. At first I attributed this to the end of college semesters. But a few days later, I did a Google search of "Northern slavery" and "slavery in the North," and my pages were no longer at the top of the list.

They weren't on the list at all.

It's not unusual for Google page rankings to shift over time. But this was highly unusual. They somehow had been "disappeared:" Purged from the search engine that had handled 99 percent of their search engine traffic.

This aroused my curiosity. The pages were still in the same places. Other pages from the same site, which did not deal with slavery or the Civil War, still turned up in their usual rankings on Google searches. Only these ones were gone.

The pages about slavery in North Carolina still were there on the "results" list. The pages about slavery in northern Sudan still were there. Only mine were missing.

Using Google's electronic "recommend a site" form, I re-submitted the slavery pages to their system. A couple of days later, they were back on the list, at number one on "Northern slavery" and number four on "Slavery in the North." Two days after that, they were gone again.

"A list of the leading slave merchants is almost identical with a list of the region's prominent families: the Fanueils, Royalls, and Cabots of Massachusetts; the Wantons, Browns, and Champlins of Rhode Island; the Whipples of New Hampshire; the Eastons of Connecticut; Willing & Morris of Philadelphia. To this day, it's difficult to find an old North institution of any antiquity that isn't tainted by slavery."