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."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."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.
This is a revelation to me. The Fanueils? As in, Faneuil Hall, cradle of liberty? Are you telling me that that hall was built with profits from slaving?
Is that Brown, as in Brown University? As in, the PhD mineralogist who lowered my grad-school X-Ray Diffraction grade from an "A" to a "B" (another guy and I, co-leaders of the class, got this "review") because, while we'd nominally scored "A" in the course by the standards he'd announced at the start of the course, our work wasn't up to what was considered "A" work at his Yankee alma mater, Brown? That Brown?
The Cabots? As in, "Where Lodges speak only to Cabots/ And Cabots speak only to God"?
And after all we've heard about Bedford Forrest.....no wonder those pages disappeared from the Net! Good find, man.
I'm familiar with Harper's site. And while he makes some valid points, it still doesn't quite support your point that "millions" of yankees invested capital in the slave trade, unless by "invested capital" you count, for example, making barrels that might be used to transport rum that might be used to purchase slaves. Maybe to you there's no difference between investing capital and producing goods that may or may not be used as an element of the slave trade. I guess I just have a stricter definition of "investing capital." Of course, by your definition, every southerner, including your non-slaveowning ancestors, were just as hip deep in the slave biz, since every good produced in an economy that includes slavery goes to support slavery, at least tangentially. Your definition would also mean that, say, gun manufacturers have invested capital in the drug trade, since some guns are used by drug dealers.
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.
Well, it's the #1 hit today.