The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley – A Summary, Part Four: Prologue, Setting the Stage, by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Four of Four, Conclusion

A Summary of

The Last Words

The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States

by Michael R. Bradley

Part Four

Prologue, Setting the Stage

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Part Four of Four,
Conclusion

(Continued from Part Three)

AS A MATTER OF RECORD, the British bought and sold black people legally until 1807, and New Englanders and New Yorkers bought and sold black people legally until 1808.

New Englanders and New Yorkers then carried on an illegal slave trade until well after the War Between the States.

Here’s how the 2005 book, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery, written by three New England journalists then with the Hartford Courant, described New York’s illegal slave trade:

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.¹

W. E. B. Du Bois in his famous book, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870, writes that Boston, New York and Portland, Maine were the largest slave trading ports on the planet in 1862, a year into the War Between the States:

‘The number of persons engaged in the slave-trade, and the amount of capital embarked in it, exceed our powers of calculation. The city of New York has been until of late [1862] the principal port of the world for this infamous commerce; although the cities of Portland and Boston are only second to her in that distinction. Slave dealers added largely to the wealth of our commercial metropolis; they contributed liberally to the treasuries of political organizations, and their bank accounts were largely depleted to carry elections in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut.’²

The North’s addiction to slave trading should come as no surprise. Much of the infrastructure of New England and New York was built with the enormous profits from their slave trading.

Five out of six New England states were vigorous slave trading states. Little Rhode Island was a dynamo and America’s transatlantic leader in the eighteenth century

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.³

Rhode Island’s Reverend Samuel Hopkins admits the slave trade was Newport, Rhode Island’s “first wheel of commerce” but it was not just Newport’s first wheel of commerce, it was all of New England and New York’s first wheel of commerce:

‘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.’⁴

Another famous Rhode Island slave trader, John Brown, whose family founded Brown University, said in a Providence newspaper in 1789:

‘there was no more crime in bringing off a cargo of slaves than in bringing off a cargo of jackasses.’⁵

Like the drug trade today, the slave trade was lucrative. When you can buy a slave in Africa perhaps a warrior that had himself been on a mission to capture slaves but instead got captured for $50 and sell him for $1,000, that is a huge profit even today, much less back then.⁶

Harvard professor, Bernard Bailyn, “dean of colonial historians,” wrote:

[T]he main factor in New England’s phenomenal economic success, ‘the key dynamic force,’ was slavery.⁷

Black tribal chieftains in Africa were the starting point of global slavery and the African diaspora. For centuries, slaves were Africa’s chief export. They were the unfortunate captives of tribal warfare, gathered up and waiting in around 40 slave forts built by the British and other Europeans up and down the African coast because they needed labor in their colonies.

Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in a New York Times article, “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game,” quotes Boston University historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood who estimated “that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders.”

Gates gets into specifics:

[T]he sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asanta Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming that they had violated her new Christian precepts.⁸

Gates writes about the shocking but admirable display by some African leaders today who have begged African Americans to forgive them for selling their ancestors into slavery:

In 1999, for instance, President Mathieu Kerekou of Benin astonished an all-black congregation in Baltimore by falling to his knees and begging African-Americas’ forgiveness for the “shameful” and “abominable” role Africans played in the trade. Other African leaders, including Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, followed Mr. Kerekou’s bold example.⁹

Captives in Africa were held sometimes for months, chained and shackled in pens inside slave forts on Africa’s coast, waiting for European, New York and New England slave traders.

They would then be placed into the bowels of scorching hot slave ships that were filled to capacity with Africans on their backs, chained side by side to the decks below, where there was no ventilation, no fresh air.

Poor slaves had to endure the stench of vomit, urine, feces and death cooked together in ovenlike heat for months through the Middle Passage. No description of Hell could be worse than a New England or New York slave ship, or a British or Portuguese or Spanish slave ship before them.

The North, especially New England and New York, with Europeans, own the cruelty and brutality of the slave trade, which was more brutal than slavery itself because slave traders did not have to live with their slaves. All they had to do was deliver them and collect their money.

In the American slave trade, New England and New York own the stench and horror of slavery’s Middle Passage.

Academia may be shocked to find out but nobody was disappointed that slavery was over, though it was not yet over for three of the six Union slave states that had slavery months after the war, until the Thirteenth Amendment ended it in December, 1865.

As Lincoln himself said, he didn’t know how to end slavery and if he had been born into it as Southerners were, he would do no different than  they.

Southerners would have unquestionably ended slavery in a better way than what happened with almost a million blacks dying from disease and exposure after the War Between the States¹⁰ followed by a century of second class citizenship. It was in the South’s best interest to end slavery with peace, opportunity and good will for all.

Slavery existed in the South but blacks and whites did not hate each other. They got along better than anywhere in America, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted, because the South was a bi-racial nation. There were more free blacks in the South, around 250,000, out of their population of nine million, than there were black people in the entire North out of their population of twenty-two million.

What did Northerners know about blacks except that they had made huge fortunes selling them, and they hated them and didn’t want them in the North as job competition or in the West as neighbors.

Literary colossus Charles Dickens, in addition to his many novels and short stories, published a periodical, All the Year Round. He was on top of current events and our American war. Dickens wrote:

Every reasonable creature may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and that until it was convenient to make a pretence that sympathy with him was the cause of the War, it hated the abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale.¹¹

Jim Crow was born in the North as C. Vann Woodward states in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, and he lived in the North a long time before moving South.

All nations ended slavery with gradual, compensated emancipation and we could have too but there was no plan by virtue signaling abolitionists, and, of course, there was no offer from the North to contribute from the treasury to buy the freedom of black slaves in the South who would then come North and be job competition.

Several Northern and Western states had laws forbidding blacks from even visiting, much less living there, including Lincoln’s Illinois.

Next Week:

A Summary of

The Last Words

The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States

by Michael R. Bradley

Part Five

General Robert E. Lee

April 10, 1865

NOTES:

¹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxviii.

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), 179. Du Bois is quoting the Continental Monthly, January, 1862, p. 87, the article “The Slave-Trade in New York.”

³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxviii.

⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 99-100.

⁵ John Brown, in United States Chronicle, March 26, 1789, in Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 110.

⁶ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 126.

⁷ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 48.

⁸ Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game,” the New York Times, April 22, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23gates.html, accessed 5-21-22.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom, African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012).

¹¹ Charles Dickens, letter to W. W. De Cerjat 16 March 1862, in Graham Storey, ed., The Letters of Charles Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), Vol. Ten, 1862-1864, 53-54.