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

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)

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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), 28.

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