Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Ten, Chapter Six: New York’s Slave Pirates, Part One

Posted on April 20, 2022April 20, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 1 Comment

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Ten
Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates
Part One

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

SLAVE-Pict-Beginning-of-Chap-Six p120 44K

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Six. The picture come from page 120.

NEW YORK CITY was the slave trading capital of the planet along with Boston in the 1860s as the War Between the States raged.

New York was "the hub of an international illegal slave trade that, like the latter-day traffic in drugs, was too lucrative and too corrupt to stop."¹

Slave ships were built, sold and outfitted in New York "with crates of shackles and the supersized water tanks needed for their human cargo." Officials

uncaring or bribed, look the other way as slave ships sailed from New York harbor under the flimsiest of disguises. The traffickers relied on fake owners, forged documents, and, most shamefully, the American flag's guarantee of immunity from seizure by foreign nations.²

The trade was so flagrant and accepted that "New York newspapers reported the names of ships leaving for slave voyages." The New York slave trade went on until the 1880s:

During the peak years in 1859 and 1860, at least two slave ships left from New York every month, according to one cautions estimate. Most could hold between 600 and 1,000 slaves. So in each of those years, News York ships might have carried as many as 20,000 new Africans into bondage.³

As previously stated, slave traders were much more brutal than slave masters because slave traders did not have to live with their slaves. All they did was drop them off and collect their money.

Most of the illegal slave trading in the 1860s and beyond was with "Spanish-controlled Cuba, one of the last open slave markets in the Western Hemisphere."⁴

In August 1860, the U.S. Navy intercepted the Erie that was "sailing suspiciously close to the mouth of the Congo." It was flying an American flag but when boarded officers found "900 newly purchased Africans." Half were children already in bad shape and 30 would die in the next two weeks before they could be delivered to Liberia, "the sanctuary and dumping ground for slavery's refugees."⁵

The Erie and her crew were sent back to New York, where they had started, to face charges.

A second ship at the same time and place as the Erie, the Storm King, was seized with

620 Africans, half of them children. The next month the Cora loaded with 700 Africans, was captured. All three were New York ships.⁶

The Erie's captain was Nathaniel Gordon, "son of a Portland, Maine, sea captain and a seasoned slave trader."

Most slave ship captains "hailed from the North, especially New England, which had dominated American shipping since colonial times."⁷

In the 1850s, "the coffee plantations of Brazil were a market." U.S. diplomats "reported that Gordon had landed 500 slaves near Rio de Janeiro, then burned his ship to escape capture."

Most captains did not have as long a career as Gordon. Their biggest threats were the diseases of the African coast, and slave insurrection.

In 1820:

[T]rafficking in slaves was made an act of piracy and a capital crime for U.S. citizens, though the law was hardly a deterrent. For the next four decades, prosecutions for piracy were rare, and convictions were nonexistent.⁸

Gordon was prosecuted and it took two trials but he was convicted and hanged on February 21, 1862 "despite a petition for mercy signed by 11,000 sympathetic New Yorkers." He was "the first and only American ever executed for participating in the African slave trade."⁹

The illegal New York slave trade involved all kinds of subterfuge such as switching "from legitimate merchant vessel to slave ship and back again" as well as "duplicate sets of ownership papers, and even duplicate captains and crews---one American and one foreign."¹⁰

Illegal slave ships blended easily with New York's legitimate commerce, and "official indifference" encouraged it. A captain who was arrested then released in New York to go to Rio "to gather information for his defense" never returned and bragged "'You don't have to worry about facing trial in New York City. . . . I can get any man off in New York for $1,000.'"¹¹

The British were the most determined to stop illegal slave trading --- probably because of their enormous guilt in establishing the slave trade worldwide and carrying it on for over a century and a half --- but American slave ships were protected from the Brits. The British were not allowed to board ships flying the American flag.

Funny how New York and New England liberals hate the Confederate battle flag but it never flew over slave ships like the American flag did.

The American flag flew over New York and New England slave ships for over 200 years.

The Confederate battle flag was always a soldiers flag carried on some of the bloodiest battlefields in history by hungry, often barefoot Confederate boys defending their homes from the Northern invasion.

In truth, the Confederate battle flag is one of the greatest symbols of valor and virtue in all of history. The victories achieved under it against a more numerous, better armed enemy make it as glorious as any great flag in the annals of war.

Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in 1833 then "begun to negotiate treaties that gave its vaunted navy the right to police the slave trade. By the 1850s, the only holdout that mattered was the United States," which did not allow the Brits to detain American ships. Only the American navy could do that.¹²

The U.S. Navy did assign a squadron that was never any larger than five ships to patrol thousands of miles of African coast:

In the two decades before the Erie was seized, the U.S. Africa squadron had caught exactly two ships actually loaded with slaves. British commanders complained that their U.S. counterparts let blatant slave ships pass unchallenged.¹³

In 1862, Lincoln signed a treaty that was approved by the Senate in secret because of fear of a backlash. It allowed the Brits to board and search American ships.

American diplomats did complain about Britain because it "allowed its own merchants to export goods to Africa that they knew supported the slave economy."¹⁴

Britain's behavior was worse than that.

It appears they were running a con game that allowed them to continue slave trading at least to a degree:

[W]hen its navy captured slave ships, Britain didn't always return the "liberated" slaves to Africa. Often it delivered them to years of indentured labor on plantations in its Caribbean colonies.¹⁵

Slave traders went to New York when they couldn't get away with slave trading in other places:

In June, 1860, one of [John Albert] Machado's whalers, the Thomas Watson, aroused such suspicion while outfitting for an African voyage in new London, Connecticut, that customs officials there denied it clearance. So the Thomas Watson sailed to New York and left from there. Months later it landed 800 slaves in Cuba.¹⁶

There was an entire industry that supported the illegal slave trade in New York in the 1860s:

It included ship fitters, suppliers, recruiters of crews, and bribed marshals and customs agents. Ship owners and captains accused of violating slave trade laws often were defended by Beebe, Dean & Donohue, leading admiralty lawyers with offices at 76 Wall Street.¹⁷

Horace Greeley's New-York Daily Tribune in June, 1861, two months into the War Between the States, complained that "'the slave-traders in this city have matured their arrangements so thoroughly that they almost invariably manage to elude the meshes of the law. Now they bribe a jury, another time their counsel or agents spirit away a vital witness. . . . Fortunately, however, a new class of men [Lincoln appointees] now have direction of affairs, and a stop will be put to this iniquitous complicity with crime. . . . To effect this it will be necessary to purge the courts and offices of these pimps of piracy, who are well known, and at the proper time will receive their desserts.'"¹⁸

Greeley was a virtue signaling hypocrite who shows that the press in 1860 in New York was as big a fraud as it is today.

During President Trump's administration the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for the Russia Hoax which turned out to be a lie paid for by the Democrat Party and its operatives.

The racist New York Times birthed another fraud, the 1619 Project, with its primary theme that the American Revolution was fought because the British were about to abolish slavery.

There is no evidence whatsoever for that absurd claim. Not a letter, statement, document, speech, nothing. The American Revolution was fought because the colonies were fed up with being controlled and taxed by Great Britain like Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence.

It was worse for the South in 1860. Southerners were paying 85% of the taxes while 80% of the tax money was being spent in the North.¹⁹ South Carolinians stated in one of their documents:

The Southern States now stand exactly in the same position towards the Northern States that the Colonies did toward Great Britain. The Northern States, having the majority in Congress, claim the same power of omnipotence in legislation as the British Parliament.²⁰

That address ends with "No man can, for a moment, believe that our ancestors intended to establish over their posterity, exactly the same sort of Government they had overthrown."

The hypocrite Greeley in slave-trading New York published a long emotional editorial entitled "The Right of Secession" on December 17, 1860, the day South Carolina's secession convention convened. Greeley was known for saying that our "erring sisters should be allowed to depart in peace."

This was before he realized that an independent South with 100% control of King Cotton and committed to free trade would bury the North economically.

In "The Right of Secession," Greeley writes:

--- We have repeatedly asked those who dissent from our view of this matter to tell us frankly whether they do or do not assent to Mr. Jefferson's statement in the Declaration of Independence that governments "derive their just powers from the consent of the governed: and that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government," &c., &c. We do heartily accept this doctrine, believing it intrinsically sound, beneficent, and one that, universally accepted, is calculated to prevent the shedding of seas of human blood. And, if it justified the secession from the British Empire of Three Millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861. If we are mistaken on this point, why does not some one attempt to show wherein and why? . . . ---we could not stand up for coercion, for subjugation, for we do not think it would be just. We hold the right of Self-Government sacred, even when invoked in behalf of those who deny it to others . . . if ever 'seven or eight States' send agents to Washington to say 'We want to get out of the Union,' we shall feel constrained by our devotion to Human Liberty to say Let Them Go! And we do not see how we could take the other side without coming in direct conflict with those Rights of Man which we hold paramount to all political arrangements, however convenient and advantageous.²¹

Horace Greeley and those like him are cowardly dishonorable men.

Three months after writing this, with the Northern economy collapsing all around him, he wanted war like the rest of the North.

So much for his preventing the "shedding of seas of human blood." Greeley got 750,000 dead and a million wounded and he didn't care a damn.

The slave trade in 1861 in New York "had grown so brazen that anyone who read a New York newspaper would have known how it worked."²²

New York ships "sailed to Rio de Janeiro or, later, Havana, where they might take aboard a second captain and crew" whom they would list as passengers.

When on the African coast "came a sudden switch in nationality. Just before or even while slaves were being loaded, the foreigners would declare themselves owners and commanders of what---moments before---had been a U.S. vessel."

The American crew "made the return voyage as working passengers on the now-foreign slave ship" or they returned on a ship that "was the slave ship's accomplice."²³

Abolition "threatened entire national economies that were still dependent on slave labor." At this point "the illegal slave trade became more profitable and, if possible, more horrific" because ships "grew larger, able to stow close to 1,000 Africans chained in pairs between their narrow decks."²⁴

Some slave traders built steam ships but "those new vessels led to new kinds of suffering on the centuries-old Middle Passage. The hot boilers could cause skin ulcers. Water-distilling machines that malfunctioned could poison an entire cargo of slaves."²⁵

Wooden vessels became disposable and would often be destroyed so there was no evidence.

The profits were enormous:

In 1861, a British diplomat estimated that a single successful voyage might yield a 250 percent profit to the owners of an average slave ship. The asking price for slaves in Africa at that point was about $50, while the selling price in Cuba was more than $1,000. The diplomat's calculations included deductions for bribes fixed at $120 per slave, $25,000 for the vessel, and $30,000 for the crew. Captains were probably paid close to $4,000, enough to make a man rich.²⁶

Slave traders counted on 10% of the slaves dying though that number could be higher:

On its way to Cuba in 1857, one of the largest New York slave ships, the Haidee, lost 200 of its 1,100 slaves.²⁷

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Eleven
Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates
Part Two

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Nine, Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves, Part Two)

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

¹ Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 121.

² Ibid.

³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 122.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 121.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 122.

⁸ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 123.

⁹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 123-124.

¹⁰ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 124.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 125.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 125-126.

¹⁹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 111.

²⁰ The Address of the People of South Carolina, Assembled in Convention, to the People of the Slaveholding States of the United States, December, 1860.

²¹ "The Right of Secession," The New-York Daily Tribune, December 17, 1860 in Howard Cecil Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964), 199-201.

²² Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 126.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 126-127.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Nine, Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves, Part Two

Posted on April 14, 2022April 14, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | No Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Nine
Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves
Part Two

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Five. The three pictures come from Pages 100, 107 and 99.

THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION ban on the slave trade went into effect January 1, 1808 and at that point, Bristol, Rhode Island had "outstripped Newport" as Rhode Island's slave trading capital.¹

Of course, that ban was on the previously legal slave trade. Illegal slave trading would continue.

Many New England ports along with New York traded in African slaves most of the nineteenth century, which included the War Between the States and afterward. As W. E. B. DuBois wrote in The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870,² Boston and New York were the largest slave trading ports on the planet in 1862, a year into the war.

John Brown of Providence, Rhode Island, and Captain James DeWolf of Bristol are "two of America's most audacious slave merchants."³

Brown entered Congress in 1799, a few years after he became the first American indicted for violating the federal government's earliest attempt to restrict the slave trade. DeWolf served a term in the Senate, even though, during his years as a slave ship captain, he had been accused of drowning a female slave infected with smallpox.⁴

Breaking slave trading laws was routine. They were viewed as "annoyances made to be broken."

Captains routinely ordered sick slaves thrown overboard, almost as a matter of hygiene, to keep them from contaminating the whole ship.⁵

It was rumored that one of DeWolf's captains "cut off the hands of two sick slaves who were clinging to his ship's railing."⁶

John Brown, who was also a fiery Revolutionary War patriot, founded Brown University with his brothers:

John himself laid the cornerstone of its first building. His still-standing home on the Brown campus in Providence was once described as 'the most magnificent and elegant private mansion' in America.⁷

The patriot Brown "led one of the first violent acts of rebellion, the 1772 attack on the British customs schooner Gaspee that patrolled Narragansett Bay."⁸

Slave trading was full of risk and many traders went out of business.

A Brown ship, the Sally, left behind the fullest records of any American slave ship from her voyage of "September 1764 to October 1765."

For that voyage, the Browns had chosen Esek Hopkins as captain. Hopkins would later command, for a while, "the Continental Navy, flying a 'Don't Tread on Me' flag as his ensign. Before the war, he commanded privateers...".⁹

The Sally was "loaded with 17,000 gallons of rum" and "goods to barter, including crates of spermaceti candles; a small armory of muskets and cutlasses; and 40 sets of manacles and shackles." She needed to return with 140 slaves to make a profit.¹⁰

Hopkins worked on commission like many captains. As captain of the Sally:

The Browns promised he could have 10 'privilege' slaves to sell himself, 4 more slaves for every 100 he delivered to market, and 5 percent of the gross sales. . . .
The Browns also ordered Hopkins to set aside, if available, 4 healthy young slaves 'about 15 years old' for their own use.¹¹

Rhode Island slave ships were smaller than European ships but they "poked into river villages and shopped at the slave 'factories,' or warehouses, strung along nearly 2,000 miles of coast. At each stop, bribes or gifts had to be dispensed before the real bargaining for slaves could begin."¹²

Hopkins got to Africa in mid-November 1764 and immediately had trouble. Slave captains try to get away from the African coast and the high risk of disease but:

Hopkins lingered. On May 1, he recorded the first death of a slave, a boy. A few weeks later, a woman slave hanged herself below deck. Another 20 slaves died, presumably of natural causes, before Hopkins finally escaped the coast in late August with a cargo of about 170 Africans.¹³

A few days later the slaves revolted despite Hopkins and all captains knowing "from experience that the danger of revolt was greatest when the ship was close to the coast and slaves still hoped they could regain their homeland."¹⁴

Hopkins wrote:

Slaves rose on us was obliged [to] fire on them and destroyed 8 and several more wounded badly 1 thye & ones ribs broke."¹⁵

In October, "Hopkins landed at Antigua after stopping at Barbados" and reported that "half his slaves had died." Some had drowned themselves and others starved themselves. The 90 survivors were in a "'very sickly & disordered manner.'"

The voyage lost a fortune. One friend "wrote that the voyage was the most disastrous he'd every heard of by a Providence vessel."¹⁶

Insurance policies covered some things: "A policy written for a DeWolf ship covered losses from 'risks of the Seas, Men or War, Fires, Enemies, Pirates, Rovers, Thieves, Jettisons . . . Captures at Sea by American cruisers and Insurrection of slaves but not of common mortality.'¹⁷

Loading a slave ship was dangerous:

[S]hips waited at anchor for small boats to ferry their cargoes from shore. The loading process could be brutal and dangerous. Africans who balked on the beach might be whipped. Slaves and captors alike drowned in heavy surf that capsized their ferries.¹⁸

On board, slaves might be stripped and branded but:

They had to be brought above deck to eat . . . . Meals were cooked in enormous vats that fueled a common African fear: many had heard that white people were cannibals.¹⁹

The African coast was called "'the White Man's Grave'" because of "smallpox, dysentery, malaria, ophthalmia (an infection that caused blindness)" and other diseases.²⁰

Slaves became depressed and "had to be forced to exercise and sometimes even to eat. Their aerobics in chains became a ritual 'dance' practiced to the very end of the slave trade."²¹

A slave attempting to starve himself might be "force-fed, their mouths pried open with a speculum oris---a plierslike instrument."

These things prove the greater brutality of the slave trader who, unlike the master, did not have to live with his slaves but just deliver them and collect his profits.

Thomas Jefferson in a draft of the Declaration of Independence had protested the slave trade and stated that King George III had forced it on the colonies. Jefferson wrote that the English king had:

'waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's [sic] most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.'²²

That language was not in the final rendition of the Declaration of Independence "in deference to proponents of slavery" such as New England and New York slave traders, and those who wanted to buy slaves for labor.²³

John Brown testified in Congress that Americans should not leave the enormous profits from slave trading to Europeans:

'Mr. B said our distilleries and manufactories were all lying idle for want of extended commerce. He had been well-informed that on those [African] coasts New England rum was much preferred to the best Jamaica spirits, and would fetch a better price. Whey then should it not be sent there, and a profitable return be made?'²⁴

Brown had famously said:

'there was no more crime in bringing off a cargo of slaves than in bringing off a cargo of jackasses.'²⁵

The premier historian of the Rhode Island slave merchants wrote that "'in the annals of the American slave trade, the deWolfs are without peer."

The DeWolfs launches 88 slave voyages between 1784 and 1807, four times more than their closest Rhode Island rivals. DeWolfs personally commanded many of these voyages. Captain James DeWolf is supposed to have made a farewell voyage in 1807 aboard the Andromache, the pride of the DeWolf fleet.²⁶

The DeWolfs "ran an integrated business, shipping molasses from their Cuban sugar plantations to their distilleries in Bristol." They founded a bank and insurance company to support their slave trading.²⁷

They set up an office in Charleston in 1804 with a young DeWolf running it. When Congress voted to end the slave trade:

the DeWolfs rushed 18 ships filled with Africans to South Carolina alone in just seven months. The Traffic became so heavy that Charleston newspapers ran articles worrying about the health threat from dead slaves floating in the harbor.²⁸

Rhode Island and New England hypocrisy was on full display in 1820 when they opposed admitting Missouri as a slave state. James DeWolf was then "newly elected to the Senate" and had to listen to South Carolina Senator William Smith confront him and set the record straight:

'The people of Rhode Island have lately shown bitterness against slaveholders, and especially against the admission of Missouri . . . This, however, cannot, I believe, be the temper or opinion of the majority, from the late election of James deWolf as a member of this house, as he has accumulated an immense fortune in the slave trade.'²⁹

Smith went on:

[I] would show the Senate that those people who most deprecate the evils of slavery and traffic in human flesh, when a profitable market can be found, can sell human flesh with as easy a conscience as they sell other articles.'³⁰

Today, New England's massive participation in the slave trade is deliberately hidden so they can falsely claim to be the heroes of American history, though so much of their history is a lie.

Senator Smith, when he exposed New England hypocrisy in the United States Senate, also

submitted records he'd collected from the Charleston customshouse for the years 1804 to 1808. The 'black catalog,' as he called it, showed that of 12,000 slaves imported on U.S. ships, nearly 8,000 were shipped on Rhode Island vessels.³¹

Southerners in antebellum times correctly pointed out that the British, then Northerners, especially New Englanders and New Yorkers, had forced slavery on the South.

DeWolf helped with a treaty that "allowed the British and U.S. navies to jointly patrol the African coast for illegal slave ships." It also forbid the British from searching American ships so, by 1860, the year before the war:

the fact that the British could not board U.S. ships helped give New York City the freedom to become the criminal headquarters of a massive illegal slave trade to markets in Brazil and Cuba.³²

It was not just New York but also Boston and other New England ports that W. E. B. DuBois said, in 1862, were the largest slave trading ports on the planet.

New Englanders were always clever slave traders and smugglers from the colonial era on but "Rhode Islanders were masters." They

anticipated many of the illegal slave traders' methods. They disguised their ships with foreign flags and landed illicit cargoes in remote coves. They bought back confiscated ships for a fraction of their value.³³

The slave trade made the DeWolfs, New England and New York rich and powerful but in 1820 "Congress passed a law mandating the death penalty for those trafficking in African slaves."

As a result, by 1825, George DeWolf went bankrupt as did the economy of Bristol, Rhode Island, itself.

Newport, Rhode Island followed.

Slave trading with its enormous profits was in the blood of New Englanders. As customs collector and signer of the Declaration of Independence, William Ellery, wrote:

'An Ethiopian could as soon change his skin as a Newport merchant could be induced to change so lucrative a trade.'³⁴

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Ten
Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Eight, Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves, Part One)

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

² W.E.B. DuBois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 178-80.

³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 101.

⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 101-102.

⁵ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 102.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 101.

⁹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 104.

¹⁰ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 103.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 105.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 105-106.

¹⁹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 106-107.

²⁰ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 107.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 108-109.

²³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 109.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 110.

²⁶ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 111.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Ibid.

²⁹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 112.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Ibid.

³² Ibid.

³³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 112-113.

³⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 113.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Eight, Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves, Part One

Posted on April 6, 2022April 8, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 1 Comment

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Eight
Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves
Part One

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Five. The two pictures come from Pages 96 and 106.

RHODE ISLAND DOMINATED SLAVE TRADING more than any other of the thirteen original American states:

In the century before Congress voted to ban the slave trade beginning in 1808, Rhode Island launched nearly 1,000 voyages to Africa, carrying at least 100,000 slaves back across the Atlantic.¹

Despite the enthusiastic slave trading of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and other Northern ports, it was small compared to Europeans who "transported nearly all the estimated 11.5 million Africans sold over three centuries into New World slavery, including the approximately 645,000 sent to the American colonies."²

Rhode Island was also one of three states to reserve the Right of Secession before acceding to the Constitution. The other two were New York and Virginia.

That is extremely important because it, alone, proves the right of secession. There is much other irrefutable evidence of the right of secession but the reserved right of secession demanded by Rhode Island, New York and Virginia, was granted by all the other states, which means they had it too because all states entered the Union as exact equals.

Rhode Island's slave trading was so aggressive and successful they competed "with European powers."³ It brought great wealth into the state and often was a family affair:

The reputation of Aaron Lopez and his father-in-law Jacob Rodriguez Rivera as wealthy and supremely honorable Jewish businessmen spread far beyond Rhode Island. Lopez, a 'merchant prince' who prospered in the Triangle Trade, was a founder of Touro Synagogue in Newport, the oldest synagogue in America and a site on the National Historic Register. The Wanton family produced four colonial governors and also launched slave voyages. Two of Newport's most active traders, the Vernon brothers, Samuel and William, found a steady customer in Henry Laurens, the leading slave merchant in Charleston, South Carolina. During the Revolution, Laurens was a president of the Continental Congress.⁴

Most of the Newport slave traders were not captains. They financed voyages or owned slave ships.

They branched out too and became known as "rum-men" to the black tribal chieftains who took their captives to the 40 or so slave forts and castles along the African coast:

When the Newport trade first reached a peak just before the Revolution, its vessels were carrying 200,000 gallons a year to Africa, where ship captains bartered for slaves by the barrel. An African man in his prime could be bought for about 150 gallons.⁵

As stated many times in the past, slave trading via the Triangle Trade financed much of the infrastructure of the Old North:

Two dozen distilleries operated in Newport alone. In 1772, merchants who owned slaving vessels, who traded in molasses and rum, or who operated distilleries occupied 8 of the top 10 positions on Newport's tax rolls.⁶

This was true not only in Rhode Island but also in Massachusetts, Connecticut and other places.

All of this slave trading wealth "ushered the town into its first golden age. The rich and famous from distant colonies spent summers there. Prosperous ship captains formed the charitable Fellowship Club that had rules against cursing, gambling, and drunkenness."⁷ Many slave trading captains attended Trinity Church.

Those people who demand the public pay them reparations for slavery should go to Newport, Boston, New York and the other Northern slave trading ports and get them to pay it since they brought so many of the slaves here.

Perhaps they should get guilty Europeans, the British, Spanish, Portuguese and other slave traders as well to pay.

Of course, the good folks alive today in Newport, Boston, New York and in Europe, never owned a slave or supported slavery in any way. Most are undoubtedly appalled by slavery. They have no debt to anybody alive today for things some people's ancestors did hundreds of years ago.

Everybody's ancestors went through some kind of hell in those times whether it was women dying in child birth, thousands killed by diseases we cure easily today, Southerners who died fighting for their homes and families when the South was invaded by murdering, raping incendiaries for wanting to govern themselves as the Declaration of Independence guaranteed.

The most widely quoted phrase in the secession debate in the South in the year before Southern states started seceding came from the Declaration of Independence:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

If you must make somebody pay reparations today then make those whose ancestors are most responsible: The descendants of African tribal chieftains who captured other Africans and sold them into slavery.

Of course, even those folks owe nothing to people alive today. Many of them probably wish their ancestors had bequeathed American citizenship to them.

Orders given by Jacob Rivera and Aaron Lopez in 1772 to one of their slave ship captains make their barbaric trade sound like business as usual:

'Lying any considerable time on the [African] coast is not only attended with very heavy expense, but also great risk of the slaves you have on board. We therefore would recommend to you dispatch, even if you are obliged to give a few gallons more or less on each slave.'⁸

They wanted the captain to brand a group of 40 slaves they already had and keep them separate from new purchases:

'To these slaves we desire you'll put some particular mark that may distinguish them from those of the cargo, so that their sales in the West Indies may be kept by itself, for the insurance on these is not blended with the cargo.'⁹

Rhode Island's Reverend Samuel Hopkins preached against slave trading after the Revolution:

'The inhabitants of Rhode Island, especially those of Newport, have had by far the greater share of this traffic, of all these United States. This trade in human species has been the first wheel of commerce in Newport, on which every other movement in business has chiefly depended.'¹⁰

Newport was occupied by the British in the Revolution which lulled its slave trading but once the Revolution was one, Newport started back with a vengeance. Before the Revolution they had traded mostly with the West Indies sugar islands but after the Revolution it was the Deep South.

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Nine
Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves
Part Two

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

² Ibid.

³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 95-97.

⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 98.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 98-99.

⁷ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 99.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 99-100.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Seven, Chapter Four: Rebellion in Manhattan

Posted on March 31, 2022March 31, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 2 Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Seven
Chapter Four: Rebellion in Manhattan

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Four.

SO MANY BLACKS were burned at the stake, hanged, beat to death by breaking every bone in their bodies, and killed in other ways by New Yorkers because they were afraid of slave uprisings. New Yorkers wanted to send a clear message that there would be no tolerating that kind of thing.

Too bad Northerners a hundred years later were ignorant of their own history.

If they had known their own history, maybe they would not have sent murderers like John Brown into the South to kill, rape and destroy then celebrate him as a hero for doing exactly what they had burned people at the stake for doing.

So much of the history that Northerners have believed about themselves with all their hearts is a lie as admitted by the New England authors of Complicity.

The Northern mythology about them being good to their slaves was quoted in Parts Two ¹ and Three ² of this series. As a refresher here's Boston Globe columnist Francie Latour in Part Three from her article, "New England's hidden history, More than we like to think, the North was built on slavery":

Slavery happened in the South, and it ended thanks to the North. Maybe we had a little slavery, early on. But it wasn't real slavery. We never had many slaves, and the ones we did have were practically family. We let them marry, we taught them to read, and soon enough, we freed them. New England is the home of abolitionists and underground railroads. In the story of slavery --- and by extension, the story of race and racism in modern-day America --- we're the heroes. Aren't we?³

What makes this so hypocritical is that Northerners brought all the slaves here with the Brits before them. Northern slave traders sailed from New York and New England, from Boston and other places to buy blacks captured by other blacks in never ending tribal warfare who were rounded up and waiting in the 40 plus slave forts on Africa's west coast, places like Bunce Island off modern Sierra Leone.

New Englanders packed them tight into ships hoping enough would survive to make them a profit. They chained them side by side to decks in the bowels of their burning hot ships with the stench of vomit, feces, urine and death, cooked in burning heat with no ventilation, no fresh air. That's what captured Africans had to smell and breathe-in for months through the long Middle Passage through Hell and into slavery.

Blacks themselves began this trade of their own race in Africa. They held captives, chained in vaults in slave forts or castles, until ships came by to buy them.

Remember, slavery was so big a part of the North's economy they were still vigorously slave trading throughout most of the nineteenth century despite it being outlawed by the U.S. Constitution in 1808.

W. E. B. Du Bois in his book The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 178-80 said Boston and New York were the largest slave trading ports on the planet in 1862, a year into the War Between the States.

In 1712, there were approximately 4,000 whites and 600 blacks, mostly slaves, in New York City:

Slavery was the bedrock of the city's developing economy, and the labor of Africans who hauled wood and water, who worked on the waterfront, in warehouses, in bakeries, and in cooperages, making barrels and casks, was helping the young colony prosper.⁴

On April 6, 1712, in the early morning, 24 black men gathered, most of whom were "Coromantees, named for the slave fortress at Coromantine on the west coast of Africa, in what is now Ghana." They had "axes, hatchets, guns and pistols."⁵

Two lit an outhouse on fire and when whites came to put it out, the blacks attacked them, killed one and wounded eight.

The slaves "thought the witch doctor's dust would make them invisible" but most were captured the next day. Six committed suicide but:

The city was in a panic. Seventy black men were arrested immediately and the Boston Weekly News-Letter reported that the uprising had put the 'whole town . . . under arms.'⁶

The usual punishment was hanging "but because a slave insurrection---or even an act of rebellion by one or two enslaved people---posed such a threat to the social order, courts had almost unlimited latitude in deciding punishment. [Gov.] Hunter knew that the colony could not let the rebels off lightly".⁷

Hunter assured his supervisors in London, the Lords of Trade, that "'There has been the most exemplary punishment inflicted that could possibly be thought of.'"

Three slaves, Clause, Robin, and Quoco, were convicted of murdering Robin's master, Adrian Hoghlandt:

Clause was tied to a wheel and, over a period of hours, his bones were smashed, one by one, with a crowbar, until he died. Robin was chained, strung up, and kept hanging without food or water until he died. Quaco was burned alive---in a slow fire so that his death took hours.⁸

Fort Amsterdam, later Fort George, "was built in the late 1620s with the labor of some of the first slaves who were brought to the colony."⁹

Between 1712 and 1741, slaves doubled and slave laws got tougher:

In 1735, when a slave who violated his curfew was horsewhipped to death by his owner, an all-white jury declared that the cause of death was not the beating, but 'Visitation by God.'¹⁰

By 1741, there were 1,800 slaves out of a total population of 10,000 with "new slave markets, named after prominent city slave traders" springing up on Wall Street.¹¹

Fort George was important to the city's defenses because there were threats from Spain and France but it was deliberately burned in March 1741. Several other fires followed.

A notorious thief, the slave "Caesar Vaarck, or 'Vaarck's negro'" with a slave named Prince "stole silver candlesticks, coins, and some fancy cloth from a shop belonging to Robert and Rebecca Hogg." Vaarck used to hang out at Hughson's tavern owned by "John Hughson and his wife." Vaarck had a "beautiful white mistress with red hair," Peggy Kerry.¹²

A sixteen-year-old indentured servant working in Hughson's, Mary Burton, testified against the slaves and Hughson. The prosecutor, Justice Daniel Horsmanden, "was trained for the law in England." He was an English minister's son.¹³

Horsmanden described Peggy Kerry as "'a notorious prostitute, and also of the worst sort, a prostitute to Negroes.'" He castigated Hughson too for "confederating" with slaves.¹⁴

Another slave, Cuffee, was arrested as a conspirator and a jail informant got from him the name of the slave who had set the Fort George fire: Quack Roosevelt. Quack had become enraged when he was denied permission to see his wife who was a slave cook for the governor.

The slaves were tried without counsel but were allowed to call witnesses.

Caesar and Prince were found guilty and sentenced to hang. Caesar's body, since he was ring leader, "was to hang in chains until it rotted."¹⁵

Cuffee and Quack were tried together. Mary Burton's testimony resulted in more slaves being brought in and more accusations:

As the court began to collect names and confessions, a teenage slave, Niblet's Sandy, dropped a bombshell: the plan had been to burn the property of white men, then kill the whites as they tried to put down the fires. Sandy also claimed that Hughson was to become king, Caesar governor, and the black men were to take the murdered white men's wives as their own.¹⁶

The conviction rate was 100% for the slaves on trial.

Attorney William Smith wrapped up the case:

'Gentlemen, no scheme more monstrous could have been invented. . . . That the white men should all be killed, and the women become prey to the rapacious lust of these villains.!'¹⁷

The same thing as above is exactly what Denmark Vesey in Charleston was said to have planned. He was to have burned Charleston to the ground, killed all the white men and taken all the white women for himself and his plotters. He was executed July 2, 1822.

In less than a day, Quack and Cuffee were convicted and sentenced "to be burned at the stake the next afternoon." It was said that, around three, "the two slaves were led to the stake. Upon seeing the huge piles of wood to be burned, the slaves 'showed great terror in their countenances.'"¹⁸

The trials of John and Sarah Hughson and Peggy Kerry ended with convictions. Prosecutor William Smith said "Hughson's crimes made him 'blacker than a Negro'" They were all hanged.¹⁹

The total after the first week in July:

11 black men had been burned at the stake, and 10 blacks and 3 whites had been hanged. By the end of the month, 7 more black men would die."²⁰

Mrs. Bradt's Tom was the last death. He was "convicted of setting fire to an outhouse." On March 13, 1742, he was hanged.

The prosecutor, Horsmanden, "wanted to burn Tom, but the other justices seem to have said 'Enough.'"

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Eight
Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

¹ https://www.charlestonathenaeumpress.com/complicity-how-the-north-promoted-prolonged-and-profited-from-slavery-by-anne-farrow-joel-lang-and-jenifer-frank-of-the-hartford-courant-a-comprehensive-review-by-gene-kizer-jr-part-two-in/

² https://www.charlestonathenaeumpress.com/complicity-how-the-north-promoted-prolonged-and-profited-from-slavery-by-anne-farrow-joel-lang-and-jenifer-frank-of-the-hartford-courant-a-comprehensive-review-by-gene-kizer-jr-part-three/

³ Francie Latour, "New England's hidden history, More than we like to think, the North was built on slavery," September 26, 2010, http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/09/26/new_englands_hidden_history/?page=full, pages 1-7, accessed 2-28-22.

⁴ Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 80.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 80-81.

⁷ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 81.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 82.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 84.

¹³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 86.

¹⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 86-87.

¹⁵ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 88.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 89.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 91.

²⁰ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 92.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Six, Chapter Three: A Connecticut Slave

Posted on March 23, 2022March 25, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 3 Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Six
Chapter Three: A Connecticut Slave

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Three.

A CONNECTICUT SLAVE opens with a New England slave owner beating a black slave woman with her fists. The slave's husband rushes to her aid and receives blows from a whip.

This chapter is about Venture Smith who "was captured in Africa, shipped to Rhode Island, and bought, beaten, and sold in colonial Connecticut where there were 5,000 others like him."¹

New England by the 1750s and "other Northern colonies were already becoming wealthy feeding slaves on the sugar plantations that covered the islands of the West Indies. The trade system that swept those Africans into permanent bondage also carried thousands of other Africans into forced labor in the American colonies."²

Before 1776 "there were tens of thousands of people in bondage in the Northern United States." ³

In the 1790s, New York alone "had more than 20,000."⁴

A historian in the late 1800s wrote: "'Connecticut had little to apologize for in her treatment of the Negro,'" but the truth was more like what happened to "Cato, Newport, and Adam."⁵

In 1758, a future governor "sentenced the three 'to be publicly whipped on the naked body for nightwalking after nine in the evening without an order from their masters.'"⁶

Slaves in the North were denigrated, faced hard punishment and fear:

They served at the whim of their owners and could be sold or traded. They were housed in unheated attics and basements, in outbuildings and barns. They often slept on the floor, wrapped in coarse blankets. They lived under a harsh system of 'black codes' that controlled their movements, prohibited their education, and limited their social contacts. Laws governing the rights and behaviors of slaves varied slightly from colony to colony, but they were updated in reaction to each new real or perceived threat. The two defining assumptions of all the codes were that blacks were dangerous in groups and that they were, at a basic human level, inferior.⁷

Venture Smith suffered greatly but overcame it all to achieve great success. He dictated his story to Elisha Niles, "a school teacher and Revolutionary War soldier." It was published in 1798 in New London, Connecticut and is "one of only a handful of surviving black narratives encompassing life in Africa and colonial enslavement."

Other accounts of slavery, much more recent, come from Zora Neale Hurston, the black anthropologist who wrote Barracoon, The Story of the Last Black Cargo and other books.

A barracoon is a slave fort on the coast of Africa where New England slave traders, and the British before them, pulled up their ships and hauled off the unfortunate black captives of incessant tribal warfare. Black tribal chieftains made slavery easy for the New Englanders and Brits.

Hurston at first believed the slave ships pulled up and a crew member waved a red handkerchief and the curious Africans went on board to see what it was, and were captured.

She was devastated to find out that her own people had sold her ancestors into slavery to face the Middle Passage.

She goes into great detail about how Cudjoe Lewis and his relatives were captured by women warriors. Their tribe was just about wiped out. Survivors were forced to march in slave coffles for days. Their captors stopped to smoke the severed heads of their murdered relatives on poles because they had begun to stink.

Hurston interviewed Lewis in the early 20th century. He had been sold off of a slave ship in Alabama in 1865, the last year of the War Between the States.

New Englanders vigorously carried on the slave trade through most of the antebellum period despite it being outlawed by the U.S. Constitution in 1808.

In 1862, a year into the war, according to W.E.B DuBois, Boston and New York were the largest slave trading ports on the planet.

Before the war:

New York City's bustling seaport became the hub of an enormously lucrative illegal slave trade. Manhattan shipyards built ships to carry captive Africans, the vessels often outfitted with crates of shackles and with the huge water tanks needed for their human cargo. A conservative estimate is that during the illegal trade's peak years, 1859 and 1860, at least two slave ships---each built to hold between 600 and 1,000 slaves---left lower Manhattan every month.⁸

Venture Smith "was raised Broteer Furro in the west of Africa."⁹

West Africa was a "battleground with thousands kidnapped and sold into slavery every year." It had been this way since the sixteenth century "when Africans were first stolen to provide labor in the New World."¹⁰

Along the coast of West Africa

were about 40 'slave castles,' or 'slave factories,' that were, in effect, warehouses, established largely by Europeans, where traders from Europe and the colonies could select and buy captive human beings.¹¹

Venture was eight when knocked on the head with the barrel of a gun. He watched his father tortured to death. He and the survivors "were dragged hundreds of miles to a coastal factory" then held for sale.

A British surgeon described the Cape Coast Castle like this:

'In the Area of this Quadrangle, are large Vaults, with an iron Grate at the Surface to let in Light and Air on those poor Wretches, the Slaves, who are chained and confined there til a Demand comes. They are all marked with a burning Iron upon the right Breast.'¹²

Venture became the property of a Rhode Island family, the Mumfords who

were quintessential Triangle Trade entrepreneurs: they commanded slave trade ships, owned farms where enslaved blacks worked, and sold captives in the West Indies and American colonies.¹³

There was a city nearby on Africa's Gold Coast named Mumford.

Venture had been sold for "a piece of calico cloth and four gallons of rum."¹⁴

Mortality on the Middle Passage was high "among the captives, pinioned cheek by jowl with the dead and dying" and could be "15 to 20 percent." Sixty of the 260 on Venture's slave ship died of smallpox.¹⁵

Another slave, Sojourner Truth, "was sold, beaten, and abused in New York, and she saw her parents die of hunger and cold there."¹⁶ She and her family lived in the cellar of Colonel Johannes Hardenburgh. She was sold at age nine for $100:

'They gave her plenty to eat,' she recalled in her third-person narrative, 'and also plenty of whippings.' One Sunday morning, Sojourner's owner beat the child severely, until blood streamed from her wounds. 'And now,' she says, 'when I hear 'em tell of whipping women on the bare flesh, it makes my flesh crawl, and my very hair rise on my head! Oh! My God!'¹⁷

A slave running away "baffled most slave owners, who believed blacks, as inferior and passive, were naturally suited to slavery."¹⁸

Venture "ran away from the Mumfords' Fishers Island property with two other enslaved black men and a white indentured servant named Joseph Heday, who had devised the plan." Smith states:

'We privately collected out of our master's store, six great old cheeses, two firkins of butter, and one whole batch of new bread. When we had gathered all our clothes and some more, we took them all about midnight, and went to the boat, embarked, and then directed our course for the Mississippi.'¹⁹

The white man ran off with the gear and was chased and caught by the three blacks but they all decided to go back and confess. The white man was supposedly punished and Venture was sold away from his family to Thomas Stanton though Stanton eventually bought his family.

There were violent episodes with Venture Smith and the Stantons. Smith was a big man and strong. He fought back when treated bad so the Stantons gave up and sold Smith to be rid of him.

Slaves often resisted in various ways but some turned to murder:

As early as 1708, a New York couple and their three children were murdered by the family's two slaves. In New Jersey, a slave struck off his owner's head with an axe, and in Newport, Rhode Island, a black man murdered the white woman who had beaten him. Connecticut's colonial diarist Joshua Hempstead wrote of the New London slave who slipped ratsbane into the family "coffy." Other poisonings or attempts to poison owners appear frequently in records."²⁰

Slavery had become "indispensable" for the North. Northern slaves

had to adapt to the diverse requirements of their owner's household, or farm, or other business. Slaves in the North worked in agriculture and in the maritime trades, but they also had tasks as varied as operating printing presses, shoeing horses, and constructing houses and barns.²¹

Joshua Hempstead's long-time slave, Adam, must have enjoyed his work and gotten along well with his owner. Hempstead wrote about Adam who

worked on his land in New London and Stonington for 40 years, labored all day, every day. Hempstead mentions Adam's threshing hay and wheat, tending livestock, building and repairing stone walls, cutting wood, harvesting apples and other crops, fixing broken wagons and farm equipment, and carting loads of seaweed.²²

At thirty-six, Venture Smith said "I left Col. Smith once for all. . . . I had already been sold three times, made considerable money with seemingly nothing to derive [from it], . . . lost much by misfortunes, and paid an enormous sum for my freedom."²³

It took him ten years but he bought his family, sons first so they could help earn enough for the others. One son, Cuff, fought for the colonists in the American Revolution and another, Solomon, was lost to scurvy.

Venture Smith ended up doing well. His son, Cuff, "worked with his father on Long Island, farming, chopping wood, fishing for eels and lobsters, and making a homestead. They owned a 30-ton sloop and used it to ferry wood to Rhode Island; this was one of Venture's most lucrative endeavors."²⁴

Smith "eventually owned several dwellings and boats, and had substantial landholdings. 'My temporal affairs were in a pretty prosperous condition.' he said."²⁵

Smith "moved to Haddam Neck on the Connecticut River, establishing a homestead on 100 riverfront acres. He made enough money farming, fishing, and shipping wood to buy several other black men, expecting that they would repay their purchase price and then begin their own lives in freedom."²⁶

He died in 1805.

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Seven
Chapter Four: Rebellion in Manhattan

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

² Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 61.

³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 62.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 63.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxviii.

⁹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 63.

¹⁰ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 64.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 64-65.

¹³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 65.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 67.

¹⁷ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 66.

¹⁸ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 68.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 71.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Ibid.

²³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 73.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 74.

²⁶ Ibid.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Five, Chapter Two: First Fortunes

Posted on March 17, 2022March 17, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 1 Comment

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Five
Chapter Two: First Fortunes

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Triangle-Trade-Drawing-CHAP-TWO 3-17-22 79K

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Two.

COMPLICITY ERRONEOUSLY STATES that "Virginia may have been settled first, but the United States was born in New England."¹

The only thing that was born in New England is a particularly nauseating kind of virtue signaling of the type practiced by "Native American" Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Chappaquiddick Ted.

Dr. Lyon Gardiner Tyler, son of President John Tyler, our 10th president, can help the New Englanders understand America's birth. Lyon Gardiner Tyler is savior of the College of William and Mary which was devastated after the War Between the States. He was president from 1888 to 1919.²

He wrote a piece in 1921, Virginia First, that explains all the details of America's founding. He writes that New England opposed expansion including the Louisiana Purchase and the admission of Texas so, if it had been up to New England, America would be a little strip along the east coast.

America was not only born in the South at Jamestown, Virginia May 13, 1607, a Southerner is the Father of Our Country, another wrote the Declaration of Independence and another is Father of the Constitution, all Virginians. It is hard for Massachusetts to claim to be the birthplace of America when Virginians did all that.

This is like a case of stolen valor by Massachusetts.

See Virginia First below, especially Section VII which includes:

VII.
Virginia Founded New England. In 1613 a Virginia Governor, Sir Thomas Gates, drove the French away from Maine and Nova Scotia and saved to English colonization the shores of Massachusetts and Connecticut. In 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers were inspired to go to North America by the successful settlement at Jamestown. They sailed under a patent given them by the Virginia Company of London, and it was only the accident of a storm that caused them to settle outside of the limits of the territory of the London Company, though still in Virginia. The Mayflower compact, under which the 41 emigrants united themselves at Cape Cod followed pretty nearly the terms of the original Virginia Company's patent.
In 1622 the people at Plymouth were saved from starvation by the opportune arrival of two ships from Jamestown, which divided their provisions with them. Without this help the Plymouth settlement would have been abandoned.

Though New England did not birth America, they were entrepreneurial as England had intended: "the first colonies were essentially start-up business ventures, scattered from Canada to South America, intended to make a profit."

The Caribbean "not raw New England, was quickly taking shape as the area of real economic promise, and this promise was fulfilled when the English eventually struck the sweet mother lode of sugar."³

Sugar "roared across the Caribbean like an agricultural hurricane" and "siphoned hundreds of thousands of Africans into slavery to feed a boundless, addicted market."⁴

One observer in 1643 "raved that Barbados was 'the most flourishing Island in all those American parts, and I believe in all the world for the producing of sugar.'"⁵

Producing that "'white gold'" needed labor:

Between 1640 and 1650, English ships delivered nearly 19,000 Africans to work the fields in Barbados. By 1700, the cumulative total had reached 134,000. The pattern was repeated on other islands. Jamaica, barely populated when the English invaded it in 1655, had absorbed 85,000 African slaves by 1700. The Leeward Islands, including Antigua, took 44,000.⁶

Puritan John Winthrop, "founding governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony," stated in 1630: "We shall be as a City upon a Hill."⁷

In 1645, he heard from "a nephew vising Barbados that its planters that year had bought 'a thousand Negroes; and the more they buy, the better able they are to buy, for in a year and a half they will earn (with gods blessing) as much as they cost.'"

Winthrop's brother-in-law told him: "'I do not see how we can thrive until we get a stock of slaves sufficient to do all our business.'"⁸

Harvard professor, Bernard Bailyn, "dean of colonial historians," wrote:

the main factor in New England's phenomenal economic success, 'the key dynamic force,' was slavery.⁹

New Englanders and residents of the Middle Atlantic States "owned slaves and trafficked in slaves [but] they profited more from feeding the increasingly large numbers of Africans in the West Indies and providing the materials to operate the sugar plantations and mills."¹⁰

The Triangle Trade---between America, Africa, and the West Indies---was how it happened:

Northern colonies sent food, livestock, and wood (especially for barrels) to West Indian sugar plantations, where enslaved Africans harvested the cane that fed the refining mills. Sugar, and its by-product molasses, was then shipped back North, usually in barrels made of New England wood and sometimes accompanied by slaves. Finally, scores of Northern distilleries turned the molasses into rum to trade in Africa for new slaves, who were, in turn, shipped to the sugar plantations.¹¹

Every acre was planted in sugar because profits were astronomical. Plantations "operated like factories, with sugar-boiling houses running around the clock."

Just before the Revolution, "almost 80 percent of New England's overseas exports went to the British West Indies. . . . a steady stream of flour, dried fish, corn, potatoes, onions, cattle, and horses as well as the fruits of Northern forests."¹²

There were big plantations in Rhode Island and Connecticut that rivaled "the plantations of Virginia's famed Tidewater region in the same period" but:

owners of small plots and farms in New Jersey and throughout rural areas of New York---including Long Island, Westchester, and Staten Island---also used slaves to grow crops to supply the sugar plantations.¹³

Families bound together by the "West Indies slave islands would include hundreds or thousands of names, depending on where the qualifying bar is set. In the eighteenth century, Boston merchant Peter Faneuil (endower of Faneuil Hall) had a plantation on French St. Domingue. Before its slaves rebelled, Sainte-Domingue (now Haiti) had supplanted Barbados and Jamaica as the world's richest colony. And, of course, the Winthrop family did very well."¹⁴

The bottom line is that:

Plantation slavery created tremendous wealth in the New World and the Old. It was the engine of the colonial Atlantic economy.¹⁵

Virginia First
by Dr. Lyon G. Tyler

The name First given to the territory occupied by the present United States was Virginia. It was bestowed upon the Country by Elizabeth, greatest of English queens. The United States of America are mere words of description. They are not a name. The rightful and historic name of this great Republic is "Virginia." We must get back to it, if the Country's name is to have any real significance.

II.

Virginia was the First colony of Great Britain, and her successful settlement furnished the inspiration to English colonization everywhere. For it was the wise Lord Bacon who said that, "As in the arts and sciences the 'first invention' is of more consequence than all the improvements afterwards, so in kingdoms or plantations, the first foundation or plantation is of more dignity than all that followeth."

III.

On May 13, 1607, the pioneers brought over by the Sarah Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery arrived at Jamestown on James River, and Founded the Republic of the United States based on English conceptions of Justice and Liberty. The story of this little settlement is the story of a great nation expanding from small beginnings into one of more than 100,000,000 people inhabiting a land reaching finally from ocean to ocean and abounding in riches and power, till when the liberties of all mankind were endangered [in World War I] the descendants of the old Jamestown settlers did in their turn cross the ocean and helped to save the land from which their fathers came.

IV.

Before any other English settlement was made on this continent, democracy was born at Jamestown by the establishment of England's free institutions---Jury trial, courts for the administration of justice, popular elections in which all the "inhabitants" took part, and a representative Assembly which met at Jamestown, July 30, 1619, and digested the first laws for the new commonwealth.

There at Jamestown and on James River was the cradle of the Union---The first church, the first blockhouse, the first wharf, the first glass factory, the first windmill, the first iron works, the first silk worms reared, the first wheat and tobacco raised, the first peaches grown, the first brick house, the first State house, and the first free school (that of Benjamin Syms, 1635).

VI.

In Virginia was the First assertion on this continent of the indissoluble connection of representation and taxation.

In 1624 a law was passed inhibiting the governors from laying any taxes on the people without the consent of the General Assembly, and this law was reenacted several times afterwards. In 1635 when Sir John Harvey refused to send to England a petition against the King's proposed monopoly of tobacco, which would have imposed an arbitrary tax, the people deposed him from the government and sent him back to England, an act without precedent in America. In 1652 when the people feared that Parliament would deprive them of that liberty they had enjoyed under King Charles I, they resisted, and would only submit when the Parliamentary Commissioners signed a writing guaranteeing to them all the rights of a self-governing dominion. And when after the restoration of King Charles II, the country was outraged by extensive grants of land to certain court favorites, the agents of Virginia, in an effort to obtain a charter to avoid these grants, made the finest argument in 1674 for the right of self-taxation to be found in the annals of the 17th century. Claiborne's Rebellion and Bacon's Rebellion prove that Virginia was always a Land of Liberty.

During the 18th century the royal governors often reproached the people for their "Republican Spirit," until on May 29, 1765, the reproach received a dramatic interpretation by Patrick Henry, arousing a whole continent to resistance against the Stamp Act.

VII.

Virginia Founded New England. In 1613 a Virginia Governor, Sir Thomas Gates, drove the French away from Maine and Nova Scotia and saved to English colonization the shores of Massachusetts and Connecticut. In 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers were inspired to go to North America by the successful settlement at Jamestown. They sailed under a patent given them by the Virginia Company of London, and it was only the accident of a storm that caused them to settle outside of the limits of the territory of the London Company, though still in Virginia. The Mayflower compact, under which the 41 emigrants united themselves at Cape Cod followed pretty nearly the terms of the original Virginia Company's patent.

In 1622 the people at Plymouth were saved from starvation by the opportune arrival of two ships from Jamestown, which divided their provisions with them. Without this help the Plymouth settlement would have been abandoned.

The 41 Pilgrim Fathers established an aristocracy or oligarchy at Plymouth, for they constituted an exclusive body and only cautiously admitted any newcomers to partnership with them in authority. As time went on, the great body of the people had nothing to say as to taxes or government.

Citizenship at Plymouth and in all New England was a matter of special selection in the case of each individual. The terms of the magistrates were made permanent by a law affording them "precedency of all others in nomination on the election day." The towns of New England were little oligarchies, not democracies. It was different in Virginia. There the House of Burgesses, which was the great controlling body, rested for more than a hundred years upon what was practically universal suffrage (1619-1736), and even after 1736 many more people voted in Virginia than in Massachusetts. There was a splendid and spectacular body of aristocrats in Virginia, but they had nothing like the power and prestige of the New England preachers and magistrates.

"By no stretch of the imagination," says Dr. Charles M. Andrews, Professor of History in Yale University, "can the political condition on any of the New England Colonies be called popular or democratic. Government was in the hands of a very few men."

VIII.

Virginia led in all the measures that established the independence of the United States. Beginning with the French and Indian War, out of which sprang the taxation measures that subsequently provoked the American Revolution, Virginia under Washington, struck the first blow against the French, and Virginian blood was the first American blood to flow in that war. Then, when, after the war, the British Parliament proposed to tax America by the Stamp Act, it was the Colony of Virginia that rang "the alarm bell" and rallied all the to her colonies against the measure by the celebrated resolutions of Patrick Henry, May 29, 1765, which brought about its repeal.

Later when the British Parliament revived its policy of taxation of 1767 by the Revenue Act, though circumstances made the occasion for the first movements elsewhere, it was always Virginia that by some resolute and determined action of leadership solved the crisis that arose.

There were four of these crises:

(1) The first occurred when Massachusetts, by her protest, in 1768, against the Revenue Act, stirred up Parliament to demand that her patriot leaders be sent to England for trial. Massachusetts was left quite alone and she remained quiescent. Virginia stepped to the front and by her ringing resolutions of May 16, 1769, aroused the whole continent to resistance, which forced Parliament to compromise, leave the Massachusetts men alone, and repeal all the taxes except a small one on tea. After the Assembly, "The Brave Virginians" was the common toast throughout New England.

(2) The next crisis occurred in 1772. In that year the occasion for action occurred in the smallest of the colonies, Rhode Island, by an attack of some unauthorized persons on the sloop Gaspee, which was engaged in suppressing smuggling. The King imitated Parliament by trying to renew the policy of transporting American to England for trial, but Virginia caused the King and his Counselors to desist from their purpose by her system of inter-colonial committees, which brought about a real continental union of the colonies for the first time.

(3) The third crisis occurred in 1774, after a mob of disguised persons threw the tea overboard in Boston harbor. Though Boston did not authorize this proceeding, Parliament held her responsible and shut up her port. Virginia thought this unjust, and was the first colony to declare her sympathy with Boston, and the first, in any representative character for an entire colony, to call for a Congress of all the colonies.

And to that Congress which met September 5, 1774, she furnished the first president, Peyton Randolph, and the greatest orators, Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee.

The remedy proposed by this Congress was a plan of non-intercourse already adopted in Virginia, to be enforced by committees appointed in every county, city and town in America.

(4) The fourth crisis began in 1775 with the laws passed by the British Parliament to cut off the trade of the colonies, intended as retaliatory to the American non-intercourse. This led to hostilities, and for a year, during which time the war was waged in New England, the colonists held the attitude of confessed rebels, fighting their sovereign and yet professing allegiance to him. When the war was transferred to the South with the burning of Norfolk and the battle of Moore's Creek Bridge, this attitude became intolerable to the Southerners, and they sought for a solution of the difficulty in Independence.

While Boston was professing through her town meeting her willingness "to wait, most patiently to wait" for Congress to act, and the Assembly of the province deferred action till the towns were heard from, it was North Carolina, largely settled by Virginians, that on April 12, 1776, instructed her delegates in Congress to concur with the delegates from the other Colonies in declaring independence, and it was Virginia that on May 15, 1776, commanded her delegates to propose independence. The first explicit and direct instructions for independence anywhere in the United States were given by Cumberland County, in Virginia, April 22, 1776. Unlike the tumultuary, unauthorized, and accidental nature of the leading revolutionary incidents in New England, such as the Boston Tea Party and the Battle of Lexington, the proceedings in Virginia were always the authoritative and official acts of the Colony.

All the world should know that it was Richard Henry Lee, a Virginian, who drew the resolutions for independence adopted by Congress July 2, 1776, and that it was Thomas Jefferson, a Virginian, who wrote "the Declaration of Independence" adopted July 4, 1776, a paper styled by a well known New England writer as "the most commanding and most pathetic utterance in any age of national grievances and national purposes."

IX.

During the war that ensued Virginia contributed to the war what all must allow was the soul of the war---the immortal George Washington, whose immense moral personality accomplished more in bringing success than all the money employed and all the armies place in the field; and the war had its ending at Yorktown, only a few miles from the original settlement at Jamestown. The Father of this great Republic was a Virginian.

Virginia led in the work of organizing the Government of the United States. She called the Annapolis Convention in 1786, and furnished to the Federal Convention at Philadelphia which met, as the result of this action, its chief constructor---James Madison---who has been aptly described as Father of the Constitution. She furnished the two greatest rival interpreters of its powers, Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall, and gave the Union its first President, George Washington.

Click Here to get a free PDF of Virginia First
which includes Parts XI to XV (seven more pages)

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Six
Chapter Three: A Connecticut Slave

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article: Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Four, Chapter One: Cotton Comes North, Part Three)

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

² Dr. Lyon Gardiner Tyler was the son of our 10th United States president, John Tyler, who was president from 1841 to 1845. President Tyler was later a member of the Confederate Congress. Lyon Gardiner Tyler is also author of A Confederate Catechism and numerous other books and articles. As stated in the text, he was the 17th president of the College of William and Mary and its savior after the War Between the States. He served for over three decades, from 1888 to 1919. Virginia First establishes clearly that America was founded in the South, at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, and not in New England as is erroneously stated at times.

³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 46.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 45.

⁸ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 47.

⁹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 48.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 48-49.

¹² Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 49.

¹³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 51.

¹⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 54.

¹⁵ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 55.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Four, Chapter One: Cotton Comes North, Part Three

Posted on March 10, 2022March 11, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 7 Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Four
Chapter One: Cotton Comes North,
Part Three

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter One.

COMPLICITY SHOWS that slavery and slave trading built Northern industrial might. Slavery supplied the rivers of raw cotton that were the lifeblood of the Northern economy.

Northern slave trading had supplied much of the initial capital to get it all going, then supplied a constant infusion of capital throughout most of the nineteenth century to help keep it going. The North traded vigorously in African flesh until 1888.

The Industrial Revolution had started in Great Britain and the British tried to keep it for themselves. They "prohibited the emigration of anyone with knowledge of it, and banned the export of information about the technology" but those laws were "impossible to enforce."¹

Clever Americans ended up getting the British technology and improving it with "integrated" operations and by putting "every step of the manufacturing process . . . under one roof."² That greatly increased efficiency and profits.

A brilliant group of industrialists known as the Boston Associates who had established America's textile industry built other businesses too:

By the 1850s, their enormous profits had been poured into a complex network of banks, insurance companies, and railroads. But their wealth remained anchored to dozens of mammoth textile mills in Massachusetts, southern Maine, and New Hampshire. Some of these places were textile cities, really---like Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts, both named for Boston Associates founders.³

Textile manufacturers were scattered around the country but were mostly in the North and "overwhelmingly in New England."

In 1850 "New England used 150 million pounds of Southern cotton a year."⁴

In 1860:

mills in Massachusetts and tiny Rhode Island manufactured nearly 50 percent of all the textiles produced in America. Altogether that same year, New England mills produced a full 75 percent of the national total: 850 million yards of cloth.⁵

The North's industrial success spawned an exciting but chaotic and often brutal culture that attracted immigrants who often arrived with just the shirts on their backs. They had to struggle to survive. The scenes in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York are historically accurate.

But people were drawn to New York, not only for commerce and because they could buy anything there, but for fun. There were theaters and other cultural events. Southerners headed there too and were warmly welcomed.

De Bow's Review was "the most widely circulated Southern commercial journal during the antebellum era." Founded by Charleston-born James D. B. De Bow in New Orleans in 1846, it was published until De Bow's death in 1867.⁶

The large amount of advertising in De Bow's Review for consumer and commercial goods indicated "a thriving nation."

We had a "highly symbiotic, highly functioning economy." Southerners grew the cotton and Northerners did everything else.⁷

From 1830 on, America's growing industrial might and westward expansion to fulfill its "manifest destiny" muscled us onto the world stage alongside longtime European powers.

Complicity gives William Lloyd Garrison credit for starting antislavery in the North with his publication, The Liberator. Garrison railed against "gradual emancipation" though that is how the Northern states themselves and every country on earth ended slavery except Haiti.

That's the problem with virtue signalers like Garrison who don't care how much trouble, death or hate they cause, as long as they can feel good about themselves.

Garrison and his ilk wanted slavery to end immediately with no consideration for the enormous social and economic problems that would cause. Not only would no cotton destroy the Northern economy, what was the South going to do with crime and social problems caused by four million freed slaves who had no way to make a living?

Northerners did not want blacks in the North where they would be job competition. Several Northern states had laws forbidding blacks from even visiting much less living there including Lincoln's Illinois.

If Northerners wanted to end slavery, why didn't they offer to compensate slave owners as they themselves had done in their states to end slavery? They didn't because there was no political will to do so. Northerners were not about to spend their hard-earned sweatshop money to free slaves in the South who would then move North and be job competition.

They love virtue signaling but not living in reality.

Besides, slavery was dying out on its own. Private manumissions were ending slavery.

Rapidly advancing technology would have ended slavery inside of a generation before the nineteenth century was over. Nobody was going to buy a black man with a birth to death commitment when they could buy a machine and pick the cotton better and faster.

Historians know that much of anti-slavery in the North was racist. Northerners didn't like slavery because they didn't like blacks and sure didn't want them in the North as neighbors or job competition.

In the early days of Garrison's virtue signaling, only 2 to 5% of the Northern population were abolitionists.

Abolitionists were hated in the North. Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in 1837. Garrison himself was almost lynched in 1835.

Later, in the 1850s, when Republicans were drooling to win elections, anti-slavery became political. It was not a movement to help black people. It was a way to rally Northern votes by promoting the hatred of Southerners so Republicans could win elections and control the federal government.

Republicans never proposed ending slavery. They agitated against slavery in the West because racist Northerners did not want blacks in the West anywhere near them.

Southerners would have ended slavery in a much better way than what happened. It was in the South's best interest to end slavery with good will for all.

Because Southern states refused to be ruled by hatemongers like William Lloyd Garrison and the New Englanders who sent John Brown into the South to murder and rape, they seceded. They expected to live in peace.

But a free trade South with 100% control of King Cotton could not be allowed by the North and that's why Lincoln started his war.

Complicity has made clear the millions of pounds of cotton that New England textile mills had to have constantly. Without the South, New England and the North were dead.

Not only would they lose their manufacturing industry, ignorant, greedy Northern leaders ran their shipping industry out of the North with the astronomical Morrill Tariff. Why would ship captains work out of the North where it was 47 to 60% more expensive than in the South where protective tariffs were unconstitutional? The South had passed a 10% tariff for the operation of a small federal government in a states rights nation.

A lot of ignorant historians in politicized academia discount economic issues because they do not realize how utterly dependent the North was on the South. Without the South, as Complicity shows, the mighty industrial northeast was going to crash and burn.

Lincoln and Northern leaders did not want a powerful free trade nation on their southern border with 100% control of King Cotton.

The North would not be able to beat the South in a war once the South cemented trade and military alliances with Great Britain and the rest of Europe. Lincoln knew this.

That's why he sent his five hostile naval missions into the South in March and April, 1861. There was no benefit to waiting even a second longer. With every minute that went by, Southern prospects grew while Northern prospects sank.

Complicity quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson:

'Cotton thread holds the union together; unites John C. Calhoun [the powerful South Carolina senator] and Abbott Lawrence. Patriotism for holidays and summer evenings, with music and rockets, but cotton thread is the Union.'⁸

If you are a man thirty feet tall armed to the teeth like the North was with a white population four times that of the South, you would not allow a man five feet tall carrying a musket to cause you trouble.

If you are thirty feet tall and a man five feet tall is causing you trouble you are going to fight. You can not wait to fight. Every man who has ever walked the earth knows this.

New Englanders in Boston, Massachusetts, Portland, Maine and other places along with New York City were still building slave ships and sending them to the coast of Africa to chain poor Africans to the decks and make them live in vomit, urine and feces through the Middle Passage where the stench was cooked in the bowels of burning hot slave ships with no ventilation for months. No description of hell could be worse.

The slave trade was outlawed by the United States Constitution in 1808 but New Englanders carried it on until around 1888 when Brazil, the last major slave country on earth, abolished slavery. W. E. B. Du Bois in The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 178-80, states that Boston, Portland and New York City were the largest slave trading ports in the world in 1862, a year into the War Between the States.

The North and especially New England own the stench and horror of slavery's Middle Passage.

No amount of virtue signaling can change that though many of the lame, politicized, pathetic historians of academia and the news media try constantly.

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Five
Chapter Two: First Fortunes

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Three, Chapter One: Cotton Comes North, Part Two)

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

² Ibid.

³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 6.

⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 26.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 21. De Bow was also a "superintendent of the U.S. Census."

⁷ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 25.

⁸ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 37.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Three, Chapter One: Cotton Comes North, Part Two

Posted on March 3, 2022March 3, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 2 Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Three
Chapter One: Cotton Comes North,
Part Two

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter One.

SEVERAL PEOPLE have pointed out an excellent 2010 article on the North's enormous involvement with slavery and the slave trade entitled "New England's hidden history, More than we like to think, the North was built on slavery" by Francie Latour, who, at the time, was with the Boston Globe. There is a link at the end of this blog article in Note 1.

Latour begins with the story of a slave, Mark Codman, in present-day Somerville, Massachusetts who, with two others, were convicted of murdering their master. Codman "was hanged, tarred, and then suspended in a metal gibbet on the main road to town, where his body remained for more than 20 years."¹

She knows it was there for more than 20 years because Paul Revere mentioned it in his account when he galloped past "Charlestown Neck, and got nearly opposite where Mark was hung in chains."²

Latour explains the myth that Northerners believe about their history just as it is explained in Complicity and almost verbatim:

Slavery happened in the South, and it ended thanks to the North. Maybe we had a little slavery, early on. But it wasn't real slavery. We never had many slaves, and the ones we did have were practically family. We let them marry, we taught them to read, and soon enough, we freed them. New England is the home of abolitionists and underground railroads. In the story of slavery --- and by extension, the story of race and racism in modern-day America --- we're the heroes. Aren't we?³

Latour writes that researchers are starting to bring out "the hidden stories of New England slavery --- its brutality, its staying power, and its silent presence in the very places that have become synonymous with freedom. With the markers of slavery forgotten even as they lurk beneath our feet --- from graveyards to historic homes, from Lexington and Concord to the halls of Harvard University."⁴

She quotes Anne Farrow, one of the authors of Complicity, who said "these great seaports and these great historic houses, everywhere you look, you can follow it back to the agricultural trade of the West Indies, to the trade of bodies in Africa, to the unpaid labor of black people."⁵

A mentor of Farrow's stated that the North "democratized" slavery:

Where in the South a few people owned so many slaves, here in the North, many people owned a few. There was a widespread ownership of black people.⁶

Latour goes into detail about Rhode Island's huge role in New England slave trading:

Following the Revolution, scholars estimate, slave traders in the tiny Ocean State controlled between two-thirds and 90 percent of America's trade in enslaved Africans. On the rolling farms of Narragansett, nearly one-third of the population was black --- a proportion not much different from Southern plantations.⁷

She quotes C. S. Manegold's Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North with its interesting discussion of the symbolism of the pineapple. She says "When New England ships came to port, captains would impale pineapples on a fence post, a sign to everyone that they were home and open for business, bearing the bounty of slave labor and sometimes slaves themselves."

The pineapple came to be a happy symbol of "hospitality and welcome."

John Winthrop, author of the famous sermon "City Upon a Hill" and first Massachusetts governor "not only owned slaves at Ten Hills Farm, but in 1641, he helped pass one of the first laws making chattel slavery legal in North America."

Ten Hills Farm "centers on five generations of slaveholders tied to one Colonial era estate, the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Mass." He writes that the house passed to the Royalls and:

entered a family line whose massive fortune came from slave plantations in Antigua. Members of the Royall family would eventually give land and money that helped establish Harvard Law School. To this day, the law school bears a seal borrowed from the Royall family crest, and for years the Royall Professorship of Law remained the school's most prestigious faculty post, almost always occupied by the law school dean. . . . ⁸

Supposedly, when Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan was a dean at Harvard, she "quietly turned the title down."

Kagan didn't explain her decision but if she turned down the title because it was associated with slavery yet didn't explain herself, then she is just as guilty as the long line of disgraceful New England historians who, to this day, lie about their history.

In 1860, the South was "producing 66 percent of the world's cotton, and raw cotton accounted for more than half of all U.S. exports."⁹

Eli Whitney's cotton gin, patented in 1794, revolutionized cotton production, which led to an "ironclad" relationship between the South and Great Britain:

By the eve of the Civil War, Great Britain was largely clothing the Western world, using Southern-grown, slave-picked cotton.¹⁰

The cotton industry was so dynamic it awed observers and was hard to describe. Solon Robinson, the New York Tribune agriculture editor in 1848, wrote of "'acres of cotton bales'" on the docks in New Orleans:

Boats are constantly arriving, so piled up with cotton, that the lower tier of bales on deck are in the water; and as the boat is approaching, it looks like a huge raft of cotton bales, with the chimneys and steam pipe of an engine sticking up out of the centre.¹¹

New York, Boston and other Northern cities were deeply involved in the cotton trade. It was the source of their wealth:

From New Orleans and the other major cotton ports---Savannah, Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina; and Mobile, Alabama---most of the cotton was shipped to Liverpool. If it did not go directly to Liverpool, it was sent to the North: to Boston for use in the domestic textile industry, or to New York City. From New York, it generally went to Liverpool, or elsewhere in Europe.
But this gives only the slightest hint of the role New York City and the rest of the North played in the cotton trade . . .¹²

Northerners were making vast sums of money shipping Southern cotton. The majority of their shipping industry was cotton.

That's why the South's low 10% tariff vis-a-vis the North's astronomical Morrill Tariff that was 47 to 60% higher, meant that few would be shipping into the North and paying 37% to 50% more than they had to pay in the South.

Northern ship captains could get cargoes in the South but were far less likely to find them in the North. The Morrill Tariff threatened to re-route the Northern shipping industry into to the South overnight.

When you add that to the obliteration of Northern manufacturing, which was about to lose the huge, wealthy, captive Southern market it had had all to itself, you can see a fast-approaching economic disaster for the North.

That is what Lincoln and Northern leaders saw in March, 1861, when he put together his plan to, hopefully, start a war in Charleston or Pensacola.

He was anxious to put up a blockade and scare Europe away from the South, and that is exactly what happened. Lincoln announced his blockade before the smoke had cleared from the bombardment of Fort Sumter.

The South, with 100% control of King Cotton, buying all its manufactured goods from Europe at lower prices while building its own manufacturing and shipping industries, would quickly become a powerhouse.

Once European military alliances were established, the North would not be able to beat the South in a war.

The idea that the good North fought their bloody war to free the slaves rather than protect their manufacturing and shipping industries and wealth and power, is an absurdity of biblical proportions.

Nobody in the North said they should march armies into the South to free the slaves. All their legislation and documents supported slavery.

The Corwin Amendment, supported by Abraham Lincoln, would have left black people in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress in places where slavery already existed. It passed the Northern Congress and was ratified by five states before the war made it moot.

The Northern War Aims Resolution said the war was about preserving the Union, not ending slavery, as Lincoln himself said over and over.

The North was still deeply involved in the slave trade at wartime. As W.E.B. DuBois wrote, New York and Boston, in 1862, a year into the war, were the largest slave trading ports on the planet.

Several Northern states had laws preventing blacks from even visiting, much less living there, including Lincoln's Illinois.

No wonder so much of Northern history is a flat out lie.

On December 15, 1860, two days before South Carolina's secession convention was to convene, a powerful group of Northern businessmen called the Union Committee of Fifteen met at the offices of Richard Lathers, "a prominent cotton merchant." Two hundred were invited but over 2,000 came. They were in a panic over the thought of Southern secession.¹³

Lathers implored Southerners to "'consider their duties to that part of their Northern brethren whose sympathies have always been with Southern rights and against Northern aggression.'"¹⁴

John A Dix, "New Hampshire native, former New York senator, and future New York governor" summed things up:

We will not review the dark history of the aggression and insult visited upon you by Abolitionists and their abettors during the last thirty-five years. Our detestation of these acts of hostility is not inferior to your own.¹⁵

Southerners had legitimate grievances against the North.

Northerners had organized and financed murderers like John Brown and sent him and his cutthroats into the South. They were to foment a slave insurrection, like in Haiti, where whites were raped and murdered for days with few survivors.

When John Brown was brought to justice, his sons were harbored in Ohio and Iowa, and he was celebrated throughout the North as a hero.

Would you allow people to rule over you who had sent murderers into your peaceful communities to kill your families?

No abolitionists had a realistic plan of gradual, compensated emancipation to end slavery such as the Northern states and all other countries on earth had used except Haiti.

Most anti-slavery in the North was political. It was designed to rally Republican votes for the first sectional party in American history, the party of the North pledged against the South as Wendell Phillips said.

Historians know that anti-slavery in the North was not pro-black. It was actually anti-black. They didn't like slavery because they didn't like blacks and did not want blacks near them in the West, and they surely did not want blacks coming North and being job competition.

The mechanics of the antebellum cotton trade are fascinating:

At nearly five feet high and some 500 pounds, a bale of cotton is an impressive presence. In the pre-plastic nineteenth century, bales were bound in tightly woven burlap or held more loosely in place by coarse, large-gapped material from which a sample could easily be sliced and tested for quality. Thin metal bands reinforced the wrapping. But this huge block of soft fibers seemed to burst from its covering, bulging over its tight bands, a muscleman squeezed into a T-shirt.¹⁶

Cotton bales could be stacked stories high "and remain stable while being shipped down the Mississippi River or one of its tributaries, up the East Coast, or across the Atlantic." They could be "wheeled from a dock onto one of thousands of flatboats, sloops, brigs, barks, schooners, clippers, and steamboats."¹⁷

Cotton was king, "the backbone of the American economy" and "the North ruled the kingdom."

From seed to cloth, Northern merchants, shippers, and financial institutions, many based in New York, controlled nearly every aspect of cotton production and trade.¹⁸

New York's power was enormous. After London and Paris, New York was third in the West. It's banks were instrumental because:

Only large banks, generally located in Manhattan, or in London, could extend to plantation owners the credit they needed between planting and selling their crop. If a farmer wanted to expand his operations during those boom decades, he required the deep pockets of Northern banks to lend him the money to buy additional equipment, as well as additional labor. Slaves were usually bought on credit.¹⁹

Northern middlemen such as cotton "factors" performed important functions. A factor would use his contacts to help the:

isolated rural planter earn the best price in the volatile world marketplace. Factors, generally New Englanders, were more than brokers or agents. They often bought a planter's supplies, advised him, and took charge of his finances; frequently they knew more about the condition of a plantation than the owner. A factor's success depended on being indispensable, and that required him to provide a high quality of service in return for his commission on a cotton sale.²⁰

Northerners thoroughly controlled the cotton trade:

Most ships that carried the cotton from plantation to port to market were built in the North, and they were usually owned by Northerners. Their captains and crews were often New Englanders. Northern companies sold the insurance to protect a farmer's crop and all of his property, including his slaves. And hundreds of Northern textile mills clothed those slaves, using what was sometimes referred to as 'negro cloth.'²¹

The "creation of 'sailing packets,' shuttles that assured the business world on both sides of the Atlantic of regular delivery of goods" was a huge advancement in the cotton trade. A dynamic cotton merchant named Jeremiah Thompson launched his Black Ball Line which in turn:

launched a storied era of transatlantic races and daring, colorful captains. Using ships termed "packets," after the leather mail pouches they carried, Black Ball was the first of more than a dozen shipping lines in the united States that transported products and passengers across the ocean---to Liverpool, and to Le Havre, in France---and up and down the East Coast. The ships would carry good from Europe and the North to the Atlantic cotton ports of Charleston and Savannah, and to ports on the Gulf of Mexico, including the mammoth New Orleans. They would return north with holds full of raw cotton. The Cotton Triangle had been created.²²

So, New York "became the fulcrum of the international cotton trade." Cotton was brought to New York "where it was unloaded and then reloaded onto Liverpool- and Continent-bound vessels" which added thousands of jobs and costs along the way that benefited New Yorkers.²³

When ships from Europe were unloaded in New York, those goods were "reloaded onto other ships that brought European and Northern products to coastal and river ports throughout the United States."

The bottom line was that the South with its slave-grown cotton, tobacco and rice, "was providing New York with more than half of its exports."

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Four

Chapter One: Cotton Comes North,
Part Three

Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

¹ Francie Latour, "New England's hidden history, More than we like to think, the North was built on slavery," September 26, 2010, http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/09/26/new_englands_hidden_history/?page=full, pages 1-7, accessed 2-28-22.

² Ibid.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Ibid.

¹⁰ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 10.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 10-11.

¹⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 11.

¹⁵ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 12.

¹⁶ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 13.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 14.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 18.

²³ Ibid.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Two, Introduction; Chapter One: Cotton Comes North, Part One

Posted on February 24, 2022February 24, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 1 Comment

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Two
Introduction;
Chapter One: Cotton Comes North,
Part One

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

From Page 7 of Complicity.

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from the Introduction, and Chapter One.

THE INTRODUCTION TO COMPLICITY makes it clear that the North got rich and powerful because of its enthusiastic relationship with slavery yet it has hidden its history well. Few people, as the authors of Complicity found out, know about the North's enormous involvement with slavery.

Northerners were slave traders, the flesh peddlers, who, along with the Brits before them, made huge fortunes buying and selling Africans into slavery. They built much, perhaps most, of the infrastructure of the Old North with profits from the slave trade.

Northerners created a powerful manufacturing industry thanks in large part to a huge, wealthy, captive market in the South, and they built a shipping industry that shipped mostly slave-picked cotton all over the world.

While Southern history has been falsified to the point where esteemed historian Eugene Genovese called it a "cultural and political atrocity," Northern history has been whitewashed making it a lie:

[T]he North's story is thought to be heroic, filled with ardent abolitionists running that train to freedom, the Underground Railroad. The few slaves who may have lived in the North, it has been believed, were treated like members of the family. And, of course, Northerners were the good guys in the Civil War. They freed the slaves.¹

The statement above is about as far from the truth as you can get.

Northerners chained hundreds of Africans at a time, side by side, to the decks of their slave ships. Slaves were so crammed in they could barely move.

They had to lay in vomit, feces and urine for months, the stench made worse by the stifling heat below deck where there was no ventilation during the Middle Passage. Many died and lay there among the living for days. It was said you could smell a slave ship five miles away.

Those poor Africans had been sold into slavery by other Africans, the result of tribal warfare. They were held in slave forts called barracoons in places like Bunce Island off the coast of modern Sierra Leone where they waited on Yankee and British slave ships and their passage through hell.

Even beyond slave trading, the Yankee record is not good.

When a Northern state ended slavery, always through a plan of gradual, compensated emancipation that would free the slave on, say, his 21st birthday, the poor slave would never see a day of freedom. Thrifty Yankees sold him South just prior to the date he was to be free. This is well documented by books such as Edgar J. McManus's Black Bondage in the North (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1973).

Northerners were slave traders until the last major slave country on earth, Brazil, abolished it around 1888. During the War Between the States, 53 years after the slave trade was outlawed by the U.S. Constitution, Boston, New York and Portland were the largest slave trading cities on the planet as W. E. B Du Bois noted in his book, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638 to 1870.

The American experience with slavery "was defined by commerce and violence, in the North as well as the South." New York City was a prime player, which is why Mayor Fernando Wood "declared that his city should secede from the Union along with the Southern states, in large part because of New York's economic dependence on the cotton trade."²

Northern merchants, shippers, and financial institutions, many based in New York City, were crucial players in every phase of the national and international cotton trade. Meanwhile, the rivers and streams of the North, particularly in New England, were crowded with hundreds of textile mills. Well before the Civil War, the economy of the entire North relied heavily on cotton grown by millions of slaves---in the South.³

Boston manufacturers, before 1860,

were desperately currying favor with the Southern politicians and planters whose millions of slaves delivered the product necessary to their wealth and financial survival. These business men were, after all, in textiles, and what would they do without cotton?⁴

After the Revolutionary War "tens of thousands of black people were living as slaves in the North. Earlier in that century, enslaved blacks made up nearly one-fifth of the population of New York City."⁵

Around the same time:

Rhode Island was America's leader in the transatlantic trade, launching nearly 1,000 voyages to Africa and carrying at least 100,000 captives back across the Atlantic. The captains and crews of these ships were often the veteran seamen of America: New Englanders.⁶

In the 1800s before the war:

New York City's bustling seaport became the hub of an enormously lucrative illegal slave trade. Manhattan shipyards built ships to carry captive Africans, the vessels often outfitted with crates of shackles and with the huge water tanks needed for their human cargo. A conservative estimate is that during the illegal trade's peak years, 1859 and 1860, at least two slave ships---each built to hold between 600 and 1,000 slaves---left lower Manhattan every month.⁷

The first Americans came here looking for religious freedom and found "a wild and hostile continent." They were anxious to conquer it so they could compete with Europe. They needed labor:

How could they not have been in a hurry to settle this wilderness, put together a workable way to govern themselves, and, both as a nation and as individuals, earn a living?⁸

The Introduction ends with:

Slavery has long been identified in the national consciousness as a Southern institution. The time to bury that myth is overdue. Slavery is a story about America, all of America. The nation's wealth, from the very beginning, depended upon the exploitation of black people on three continents. Together, over the lives of millions of enslaved men and women, Northerners and Southerners shook hands and made a country.⁹

Chapter One
Cotton Comes North
Part One

THE EPIGRAPH of Chapter One is the answer given by a "prominent Southern editor" when asked by The Times of London, "What would New York be without slavery?"

The editor answered:

The ships would rot at her docks; grass would grow in Wall Street and Broadway and the glory of New York, like that of Babylon and Rome, would be numbered with the things of the past.¹⁰

Complicity is a good book with respect to documenting the North's enormous participation in slavery.

It is, however, from the North's viewpoint, and written by Northerners. They do not know the broader American history, and they definitely do not know Southern history.

For example, Chapter One opens with: "The election of an antislavery president had finally forced the South to make good on years of threats, and the exodus of 11 states from the Union had begun."¹¹

It does not mention the years of secession threats made by New England. There were at least five serious threats of New England secession such as in the War of 1812, with the Louisiana Purchase, the admission of Texas, anything that would dilute New England political power.

Complicity also talks about the first seven states to secede - the Cotton States, led by South Carolina - then it simply states that "by the end of May, the Confederacy was complete."

What completed the Confederacy was the secession of Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina in which 52.4% of white Southerners live. Those four states seceded over nothing to do with slavery. They seceded over their abhorrence at federal coercion and Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers to invade the Cotton States.

There was nothing in the Constitution in 1861 giving Lincoln the power to do that or requiring him to do it. The idea that the federal government had a legitimate power to invade a state, kill its citizens and destroy its property, is absurd.

As stated earlier, New York City's lifeblood was slave-picked cotton, the "root of New York's wealth."¹² Cotton was the nation's number one export and in the four decades before the war:

New York had become a commercial and financial behemoth dwarfing any other U.S. city and most others in the world. Cotton was more than just a profitable crop. It was the national currency, the product most responsible for America's explosive growth in the decades before the Civil War.¹³

Cotton "created New York."

By the eve of the war, hundreds of businesses in New York, and countless more throughout the North, were connected to, and dependent upon, cotton. As New York became the fulcrum of the U.S. cotton trade, merchants, shippers, auctioneers, bankers, brokers, insurers, and thousands of others were drawn to the burgeoning urban center. They packed lower Manhattan, turning it into the nations's emporium, in which products from all over the world were traded.¹⁴

Complicity includes an egregious error when it calls Massachusetts the "birthplace of America." Massachusetts might be the birthplace of New England, "virtue signaling," and Puritan bigotry, but it is not the birthplace of America. Jamestown, Virginia is the birthplace of America. Settlers were there in 1607. They were not in Massachusetts until over a decade later, in 1620.

New England became dominated by textiles which means it was utterly dependent on slave-picked cotton:

By 1860, New England was home to 472 cotton mills, built on rivers and streams throughout the region. The town of Thomson, Connecticut, alone, for example, had seven mills within its nine-square-mile area. Hundreds of other textile mills were scattered in New York State, New Jersey, and elsewhere in the North. Just between 1830 and 1840, Northern mills consumed more than 100 million pounds of Southern cotton. With shipping and manufacturing included, the economy of much of New England was connected to textiles.¹⁵

Massachusetts industrialists made it clear they supported the South:

On the evening of October 11, 1858, a standing-room-only audience of politicians and businessmen honored a visitor at a rally at Faneuil Hall, long the center of Boston's public life. The wealthy and powerful of New England's preeminent city lauded the 'intellectual cultivation' and 'eloquence' of the senator from Mississippi, and when Jefferson Davis walked on thte stage, the Brahmins of Boston gave him a standing ovation.¹⁶

Faneuil Hall was given to Boston by slave trader Peter Faneuil.

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Three
Chapter One: Cotton Comes North,
Part Two

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article:
Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part One, Foreword, Preface)

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

² Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxvii.

³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxvi.

⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxvii.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxviii.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxix.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 3.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 4.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 6.

¹⁶ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 6-7.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part One, Foreword, Preface

Posted on February 16, 2022February 16, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 4 Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant

Part One
Foreword, Preface

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

IT IS HARD TO BELIEVE this 2005 book was written by journalists in this day and age when so many of them are politicized race-obsessed frauds, but it was; and regardless of its shortcomings, it is a good book and tribute to The Hartford Courant and the authors.

Complicity,¹ when it first came out, was ignored by the New York Times, which prefers pretend history like the 1619 Project with its primary theme that the American Revolution was fought because the Brits were about to abolish slavery. There is not a shred of evidence of that, not a letter, article, speech or statement by anybody. Nothing. But, then, truth and honor are not the standards of the New York Times.

The inside front cover of Complicity states:

Slavery in the South has been documented in volumes ranging from exhaustive histories to bestselling novels. But the North's profit from---indeed, dependence on---slavery has mostly been a shameful and well-kept secret . . . until now. In this starting and superbly researched new book, three veteran New England journalists demythologize the region of America known for tolerance and liberation, revealing a place where thousands of people were held in bondage and slavery was both an economic dynamo and a necessary way of life.

One reason for Complicity's veracity is its extensive use of primary sources rather than the politicized drivel that comes out of most of academia and the news media these days.

Complicity shows how the North's Triangle Trade of "molasses, rum, and slaves" which was run "in some cases by abolitionists" produced great wealth for New England and especially Connecticut.

Northerners brought all the slaves here after buying them from other blacks in Africa such as at Bunce Island off the coast of modern Sierra Leone. Slaves were a commodity, a way for Northerners and the British before them to make money, and they did. It is clear from Complicity that much of the infrastructure of the Old North was built on profits from the slave trade.

Northerners were slave traders well after it was outlawed by the U.S. Constitution in 1808. W.E.B. DuBois wrote in his famous work, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, that Boston, Portland and New York were the slave trading capitals of the planet in 1862, a year into the War Between the States.²

That's one reason New York City, when the South began seceding, threatened to secede from both New York state and the United States. NYC loved its trade with the South. Shipping cotton was much of that trade as well as financing the Northern slave trade and Southern agriculture.

Northerners traded in slaves until Brazil, the last major slave country on earth, outlawed slavery, around 1887.

The book, Complicity, started as a special report to The Hartford Courant which was so good "the Connecticut Department of Education sent [it] to every middle school and high school in the state" and it became required reading in many colleges.

Complicity should be required reading in every state in the union but instead we get the utterly false 1619 Project, which is pushed hard by the NY Times, the Pulitzer Center and other leftists for whom truth is whatever gives the Democrat Party more power.

The Foreword is written by Harvard professor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham ³ who writes that "the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the first of the American colonies to give legal recognition to the institution of slavery." Their recognition preceded Virginia's.⁴

She points out the irony:

[C]lergy-led Boston, this seventeenth-century 'city on a hill,' would soon become a bustling port for the trade in human flesh. Religion proved no match for profits. In Rhode Island, in the Narragansett Bay area, large landholdings used sizable numbers of slaves to provision the mono-crop plantations in the Caribbean with foodstuffs. Such cities as Boston, Salem, Providence, and New London, bustled with activity; outgoing ships were loaded with rum, fish, and dairy products, as slaves, along with molasses and sugar, were unloaded from incoming ships. Up until the American War for Independence, the slave trade was a profitable element of the New England economy.⁵

Massachusetts "never formally abolished slavery, but rather left it to acts of private manumission . . .".

Private manumission was also how slavery was dying out in the South and would have ended completely without Lincoln's war that killed a million people and maimed another million.

Higginbotham brings out some good points of history but still virtue-signals with regard to the North and its slave traders and business people who got filthy rich because of slavery. They made huge amounts of money manufacturing for the South and shipping Southern cotton. Cotton alone, in 1860, was 60% of U.S. exports. Add to that the other Southern commodities, which all total, were producing the wealth of the United States.

Higginbotham celebrates the anti-slavery societies in the North but does not mention that the South had those too, many more than in the North, until violent abolitionists supporting murderers like John Brown caused the South to close ranks for its safety.

She does point out Northern racism and admits blacks were not welcome in the North. Northerners wanted blacks to leave the North just as Abraham Lincoln wanted blacks to leave the entire country. See Colonization after Emancipation, Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement, by Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, copyright 2011, first printing 2018).

Higginbotham does not point out that racist Northerners didn't want slavery in the West because they didn't want blacks anywhere near them in the West. This was Lincoln's position too. He made it clear in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates that the West was to be reserved for white people from all over the planet. No blacks allowed.

Higginbotham does not seem to realize that abolitionists were hated in the North for much of the antebellum period. Abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in 1837 at age 34 in Lincoln's Illinois. Only around 3% of the Northern electorate were abolitionists.

None of these virtue-signaling abolitionists had a plan for emancipation that would work such as the Northern states, themselves, had used to end slavery. The Northern states ended slavery like every other nation on earth (except Haiti), with gradual, compensated emancipation.

The reason Northerners didn't suggest a plan that could work is because anti-slavery in the North was political, especially during the elections of 1856 and 1860. It was not a movement for the benefit of the black man. It is better described as "anti-South" rather than anti-slavery. It was political agitation against the South for the purpose of rounding up Northern votes so the North could take over the Federal Government and rule the country.

They wanted to continue with their bounties, subsidies and monopolies for Northern businesses, and high tariffs that took money out of the South and deposited it into Northern pockets. Southerners were paying 85% of the taxes but 75% of the tax money was being spent in the North.

Despite plans for compensated emancipation in place in some Northern states, six slave state still fought for the North in the War Between the States. West Virginia came into the Union as a slave state during the war, ironically, just weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. The Emancipation Proclamation specifically exempted the Union slave states.

Three Northern slave states still had slavery months after the war ended. It took the second Thirteenth Amendment (remember, the first Thirteenth Amendment was the Corwin Amendment that left black people in slavery forever where slavery already existed -- it was supported strongly by Abraham Lincoln and ratified by five Northern states including Lincoln's Illinois before the war made it moot).

The special report "Complicity," that led to the book, came about after The Hartford Courant published a story: "Aetna 'Regrets' Insuring Slaves".

The Courant's journalists started wondering if the Courant, itself, had been complicit in slavery and they found out it had, that it had published ads for the sale of slaves and the capture of runaway slaves.

They wanted to find a slave whom Aetna had insured and write about his or her life.

What they discovered shocked them to their cores. They thought slavery was a Southern evil, that Northerners were the good guys in the war because they had the Underground Railroad and Harriet Beecher Stowe. But now:

[I]t was becoming clear that Connecticut's role in slavery was not only huge, it was key to the success of the entire institution. . . . We were now looking at nothing less than an altered reality.⁶

The more they looked for their ties to slavery, the more "unshakable" was the proof they found:

It became obvious that our economic links to slavery were deeply entwined with our religious, political, and educational institutions. Slavery was part of the social contract in Connecticut. It was in the air we breathed.⁷

They found out there were 5,000 African slaves in Connecticut in 1775 and "in 1790 most prosperous merchants in Connecticut owned at least one slave." So did half of the ministers.⁸

The special report, "Complicity," had gotten enormous interest. The authors received a proposition from a literary agent to "broaden their thesis" and include the entire North and not just Connecticut.

A year-and-a-half later the completed book, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, came out.

The preface ends with this:

What was true of Connecticut turned out to be overwhelmingly true of the entire North. Most of what you'll read here was gleaned from older, often out-of-print texts, and from period newspapers, largely in Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts.
We are journalists, not scholars, and want to share what surprised, and even shocked, the three of us. We have all grown up, attended schools, and worked in Northern states, from Maine to Maryland. We thought we knew our home. We thought we knew our country.
We were wrong.⁹

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank

of The Hartford Courant

Part Two

Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

The Four Declarations of Causes for Secession Do Not Prove the War Was Fought Over Slavery

² W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 178-80.

³ The inside back cover of Complicity states that Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is co-editor with Henry Louis Gates Jr., of African American Lives.

⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, from the Foreword by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, xii.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xviii.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xix.

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant

Part Ten Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates Part One

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant

Part Eleven Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates Part Two

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Nine, Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves, Part Two)

NOTES:

(Scroll down for: Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant

Part Nine Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves Part Two

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant

Part Ten Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates

NOTES:

(Scroll down for: Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant

Part Eight Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves Part One

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant

Part Nine Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves Part Two

NOTES:

(Scroll down for: Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant

Part Seven Chapter Four: Rebellion in Manhattan

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant

Part Eight Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves

NOTES:

(Scroll down for: Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant

Part Six Chapter Three: A Connecticut Slave

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant

Part Seven Chapter Four: Rebellion in Manhattan

NOTES:

(Scroll down for: Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant

Part Five Chapter Two: First Fortunes

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Virginia First by Dr. Lyon G. Tyler

NOTES:

(Scroll down for: Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Ten
Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates
Part One

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Eleven
Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates
Part Two

(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Nine
Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves
Part Two

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Ten
Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates

(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Eight
Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves
Part One

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Nine
Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves
Part Two

(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Seven
Chapter Four: Rebellion in Manhattan

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Eight
Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves

(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Six
Chapter Three: A Connecticut Slave

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Seven
Chapter Four: Rebellion in Manhattan

(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Five
Chapter Two: First Fortunes

Virginia First
by Dr. Lyon G. Tyler

(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Four
Chapter One: Cotton Comes North,
Part Three

(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Three
Chapter One: Cotton Comes North,
Part Two

COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Chapter One: Cotton Comes North,
Part Three

(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Two
Introduction;
Chapter One: Cotton Comes North,
Part One

(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

Part One
Foreword, Preface