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The Pious Cause Narrative claims the North’s anti-slavery was motivated by a moral humanitarian concern for the black race. Hear the words of the movers and shakers in the antebellum North:“By God, sir, men born and nursed of white women are not going to be ruled by men who were brought up on the milk of some damn Negro wench!” Congressman David Wilmont of Pennsylvania. Famous for the Wilmont Proviso.“The dark man, the black man declines, it will happen by and by that the black man will only be destined for museums like the DoDo.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Northern writer, abolitionist, and humanitarian. Expressing his desire that blacks “die out.”“Southerners have retarded progress because of the direct influence of so large a population of half barbarous Africans interspersed among them, GT and who had instructed them in the structures and principles of African despotism.” Thomas Goodwin, Northern author and abolitionist.“I’ve heard you have abolitionists here, we have a few in Illinois and we shot one the other day.” Abraham Lincoln, 9/1848. Spoken in a jocular tone revealing his disdain for abolitionists.“Canada is just to our North, and offers a fine market for wool.” Gov of Conn. William Alfred Buckingham. His response to the need to take in black war contrabands.“There is in the great masses of the people a natural and proper loathing of the negro, which forbids contact with him as with a leper.” Chicago Times.“Confine the negro to the smallest possible area, hem him in, coup him up, sloth him off, preserve just so much of North America as it possible for the white man and to free institutions.“ The Atlantic Monthly.“I went through the State of Illinois for the purpose of getting signers to a petition, asking the Legislature to repeal the Testimony Law, so as to permit colored men to testify against white men. I went to prominent Republicans, and among others to Abraham Lincoln and Lyman Trumbull, and neither of them dared to sign that petition to give me the right to testify in a court of justice! If we sent our children to school, Abraham Lincoln would kick them out, in the name of Republicanism and anti-slavery!… I care nothing about that anti-slavery which wants to make the Territories free, while it is unwilling to extend to me, as a man, in the free States, all the rights of a man.” H. Ford Douglas, free negro abolitionist in Chicago, Illinois.“The white man needs this continent to labor upon. His head is clear, his arm is strong, and his necessities are fixed. He must and will have it. To secure it, he will oblige the Government of the United States to abandon intervention in favor of slave labor and slave States, and go backward forty years, and resume the original policy of intervention in favor of free labor and free States...Mr. President, this expansion of the empire of free white men is to be conducted through the process of admitting new States, and not other- wise. The white man, whether you consent or not, will make the States to be admitted, and he will make them all free States. Sec of State William Seward, Speech before the US Senate 3/3/1858.“The negro is a foreign and feeble element like the Indians, incapable of assimilation, a pitiful exotic unnecessarily and unwisely transplanted into our field, and which it is unprofitable to cultivate at the cost of the desolation of the native vineyard.” William Seward, in a speech at an 1860 political rally.“In the State where I live we do not like Negroes. We do not disguise our dislike. As my friend from Indiana (Mr. Wright) said yesterday, ‘The whole people of the Northwestern States are, for reasons, whether correct or not, opposed to having man among them, and that principle or prejudice has been engraved in the legislation of nearly all the Northwestern States.’ “ Ohio Senator John Sherman, on April 2, 1862. “Keeping slaves out of the West will confine the negro to the South.” Abolitionist Charles Elliot of Massachusetts.This is just a sampling of Northern quotes, revealing that “anti-slavery” in the North meant “anti-black.” A neutral anti-slavery Englishman you may have heard of had this to say about Northern “anti-slavery” -“I take the facts of the American quarrel to stand thus. Slavery has in reality nothing on earth to do with it…that the North hates the negro, and until it was convenient to make a pretense that sympathy with him was the cause of the war, it hated the Abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale.” Charles Dickens, 1862.Forgotten Connections to Slavery: the North’s Dirty Little Secret.Several years ago the Hartford Connecticut Courant published a story titled “Aetna Regrets Insuring Slaves”. Courant’s reporters began to investigate the newspapers role in slavery. The Sunday magazine staff investigated slavery roots in the northern states and found “ what appeared to be unshakable proof of Connecticuts complicity in slavery. What’s more, it quickly became obvious that our economic links to slavery were deeply entwined with our religious, political and educational institutions. Slavery was a part of the social contract in Connecticut. It was the air that we breathed”.“For most Northern whites in the 1850’s, the desire to end slave labor did not equate with a belief in racial equality. Thus blacks might be freed, eventually, but they would not be welcome to remain.” In Connecticut and New York state laws enlarged the male electorate while reducing the black male voters by property requirements and harsh residency laws. Scholar David Roediger revealed that Northern free blacks stood alienated both literally and figuratively with white workers who violently chased them from public parks. It is worth remembering that In the Supreme Court in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 brought charges of national, not just southern discrimination, suing establishments in NY, San Francisco, Kansas and Tennessee. In the 1940’s thru the 1960’s the fight to end Jim Crow and disenfranchisement would be fought not only in Southern cities but also in northern cities.“Somehow In popular perception, slavery has been cut out of the trade triangle transferred forward to the Civil War, where it became a moral problem confined to the south. Just as Connecticut was thought not to have had slavery because it did not have many slaves or Southern style plantations, it was thought not to profit from slavery as much as the south did. The truth, however, which out to have been plain, is that Connecticut derived a great part, maybe greatest part of its early surplus wealth from slavery.” Hartford Courant.“The truth is that slavery was a national phenomenon. The North shared in the wealth it created and the oppression it required.” The nations financial institutions and manufacturing centers like New York and Massachusetts spun gold from them slave fields in of the south.In 1775 Connecticut held 5,000 Africans as slaves. In 1790 most prosperous merchants owned at least one slave and 50% of the clergy owned at least one slave according to census records. While in the south a few people owned a lot of slaves, in the North a lot of people owned a few slaves.“The effects of the New England slave trade were momentous. It was one of the foundations of New England’s economic structure, it created a wealthy class of slave trading merchants, while profits derived from this commerce stimulated cultural development and philanthropy.” ..The Negro in Colonial New England, page 3“Horses and barrels, fish and flour-the Norths earliest traffic in slavery commerce ran from Plymouth Rock to the West Indies.” ....Connecticut CourantNew England gained their economic rise because regions grew and shipped food to help feed millions of slaves in the West Indies. What’s more, Northern merchants, shippers and financial institutions were crucial players in every phase of the national and international cotton trade. Land all over New England were crowded With textile mills. Well before the Civil War, the economy of the entire North relied heavily on cotton grown by slaves. Starting before the Civil War and lasting until the 20th century two Connecticut towns were international centers for the production of ivory milling hundreds of thousands of tons of elephant tusks procured through enslavement of Africans and caused the death of as many as 2 million people in Africa.Harriet Beecher Stowe said this was the way the northerners liked it...all of the benefits and none of the screams.In America’s infancy it was discovered that the West Indies and Caribbean were perfect for growing sugar. Island were stripped of forests and all land was used to grow sugar cane.Between 1640 and 1650 19,000 Africans were brought to the West Indies. By 1700 there were 134,000 in Barbados alone.In 1645 the son of John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony saw riches in the slave trade. That year a Boston ship made the first known slave voyage to Africa, picking up slaves and delivering them to Barbados. This began what’s known as the Triangle Slave Trade. Northern colonies sent food, livestock and wood to West Indian sugar plantations where slaves harvested sugar cane that fed the refining mills. Sugar, molasses and slaves were shipped north. Northern distilleries turned molasses into rum to trade for Africans who were then shipped to sugar plantations. The triangle trade was complete.The scale of trade from New England was astonishing. In 1775 80% of New England exports went to the West Indies. Flour, corn, potatoes, dried fish, onions, cattle and horses were all exported because the West Indies only grew sugar, they grew little food. When ships could not get through during the Revolution a famine swept across the Caribbean starving tens of thousands.The Narragansett areas of Rhode Island developed its own plantation system using slave labor to keep up demand of supplying the West Indies. Both in acreage and in number of slaves they matched the plantations of Virginia in the 19th century. Connecticut also had plantations. In New London archaeologists are surveying one plantation that was 4,000 acres in size. The owners of small farms in New Jersey, New York including Westchester, Long Island, Staten Island all used slaves to grow crops to supply sugar plantations in the West Indies. West Indian sugar was distilled into rum in New England and traded for Africans who were then dropped off in the West Indies and America. The survival of a slave on a sugar plantation in the West Indies was less than a year. But Africans sold into slavery were plentiful and New England ships were bringing in a constant supply of replacements.By the Revolution there were at least 41,000 slaves in New York and Pennsylvania and Delaware. It soon became accepted that slavery was benign, loosely defined like a mutually agreed upon indenture, the attitude was that slavery was as beneficial to the slave as the owner. Slaves of the North served at the whims of their masters and could be sold or traded. They lived in unheated attics, basements, outbuildings and barns. They often slept on floors and were subject to a harsh system of black codes that controlled their movements, prohibited them from being educated and limited their social contracts.Lining the New England Coast were 40 “slave castles” or “slave factories” that were warehouses where traders could select and buy captive human beings.John Atkins was a British surgeon on a slave ship. He describes the captives of Cape Coast Castle....”In the areas of the Quadrangle are large vaults with an iron grate at the surface to let light and air on these poor wretches, the slaves who are chained and confined there til a demand comes. They are all marked with a burning iron on their breast.”Among the 13 colonies only one plunged into the slave trade in a huge way...Rhode Island. In sheer volume US participation in the slave trade may have seemed insignificant. European ships transported 11.5 million Africans sold over 3 centuries into New World Slavery with only a small percentage sent to the colonies. On this side of the Atlantic, however Rhode Island was the leader. In 1775 it controlled two thirds or more of the colonies slave trade with Africa. After the Revolutionary War Rhode Island had a monopoly in the slave trade.While Rhode Island and its neighbors found ways to profit by trading with slave plantations in the West Indies, Rhode Island went further, competing with European powers in the slave trade itself. Rhode Island shipped more slaves than any of the 13 other colonies combined. In 1772 merchants who owned slaving vessels occupied 8 of the top 10 positions on Newport’s tax rolls. Newport launched 70 percent of all American slave voyages.In the last years the slave trade was legal, John Brown and Captain James DeWolf joined forces to protect the slave trade. Brown entered Congress in 1799. But DeWolf had a reputation as especially cruel on his ships. He once threw a slave tied to a chair overboard then complained about losing a good chair. One of his captains cut off the hands if two slaves clinging to the railing. But it was Brown who would become famous in New England for starting Brown University.“After Congress outlawed the importation of slaves, ship captains began to hide their boxes of shackles but little else about the slave trade changed except that it’s center shifted to Manhattan and it’s conditions became even more horrific. “ Connecticut CourantBy the eve of the war hundreds of businesses in New York and countless more businesses throughout the North were connected to or dependent on cotton. As New York became the center of the US cotton trade, merchants , shippers, auctioneers, bankers, brokers, insurers and thousands of others made their living off the backs of southern slaves growing cotton. New York City became the center of the cotton trade for thee world. The Lehman brothers, Junius Morgan (father of J Pierpont Morgan), John Jacob Astor, Charles Tiffany all had their wealth begin in the cotton trade.On the eve of secession New York City Mayor declared that his city should also secede, for the most part because New York’s economy depended on the cotton trade. Before the election of 1860 Boston area manufacturers were desperately currying favor with southern politicians and planters. Their financial survival depended on slavery.New England was home to almost 500 textile mills scattered through New York State, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The powerful group of Massachusetts businessmen historians call the Boston Associates established Americans own industrial revolution. By the 1850’s their enormous profits had been poured into a complex network of banks, insurance companies, and railroads. Their wealth was anchored to the mammoth textile mills in Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire.In the 1850’s 10 major cotton states were producing 66 percent of the world’s cotton. Raw cotton accounted for more than half of all US exports, all exports that benefitted New York brokers, New York banks, northern ship builders, exporters, ship crews. All business involved in the export of cotton ran through the north. In 1860 the US produced 2.3 billion pounds of cotton. Of that amount, half was exported. The other half fed northern textile mills.On the eve of secession New York City Mayor declared that his city should also secede, for the most part because New York’s economy depended on the cotton trade. Before the election of 1860 Boston area manufacturers were desperately currying favor with southern politicians and planters. Their financial survival depended on slavery.At the same time the Union Committee called a meeting for 200 people to discuss what could be done to stop the south. Two thousand people showed up. The office building across the street was commandeered to hold the overflow, but merchants and bankers, politicians and shipping magnates spilled into the street. This was not the first time a worried business community had met, but this meeting was the most panicky by far. The south had to be persuaded to stay. They very spine of 19th century business, money and power attended the meeting includingAT Stewart, owner of the nations first department store and the wealthiest man in New YorkMoses Taylor, sugar importer, bankers and coal and railroad magnate and for nearly half a century, the most influential businessman in New York.Ariel Abbot Low, whose A.A. Low and Brothers was the most important firm in the China trade.William B Astor, son of John Jacob Astor, the nation’s first millionaire.August Belmont, American agent for the Rothchilds of Germany, and creator of the Belmont Stakes.Wlilliam H. Aspinwall and his partners Robert Minturn and Henry Grinnell, editors of the Journal of Commerce and the New York Herald.Also in attendance were politicians who included two former mayors, presidential candidate Samuel J Tilden, and former president Millard Fillmore.For half a century before the war cotton was the backbone of the economy of America. Cotton was king and the North ruled cotton. From seed to cloth Northern business was involved. Only large banks, located mostly in New York could extend credit to plantation owners needed between planting and selling their crops. Any plantation owners wishing to expand depended on Northern Banks to lend him money for additional equipment and additional labor. Slaves were usually bought on credit. Other Northerners made up the long chain between planter and manufacturer.the “factor” helped the planter get the best price, advised him, and often took care of his finances. Ships that carried cotton to market were Northern owned, northern built, captained and crewed by northerners.But that was not the only use of northern ships. By 1860 New York was notorious as the hub of an international illegal slave trade. It was too lucrative and too corrupt to stop. Ships to carry slaves were built and sold in New York complete with crates of shackles and supersized water tanks. During its peak in 1859 and 1860 at least 2 slave ships left from New York harbor every month , able to hold 600- 1,000 slaves each. At this point most slaves were sold to Bermuda and Cuba. In the summer of 1860 the traffic from Africa was so heavy that the US Navy seized The Storm King, carrying 620 Africans, half of which were children and the Cora loaded with 700 Africans along with the Erie with a hold filled with 900 Africans. All three ships were New York ships.By 1861 the illegal trade had grown so daring that anyone who read a NY paper knew how it worked. NY ships sailed to Rio or Later, Havana where they might take aboard a second captain or crew. For the crossing to Africa the US ship would list foreigners as passengers. On the African Coast came a switch in nationality. Just before slaves were loaded the foreigners would declare themselves owners of what had been only moments before a US vessel. The American captain and crew made the return voyage as working passengers on the now foreign slave ship. In its final years as abolition threatened national economies dependent on slave labor, the illegal slave trade became more profitable and more horrific. Ships grew larger, able to hold 1,000 Africans chained in pairs to its decks. Slave ships were insured to lose 10% of their slaves but the actual rate was much higher, usually topping 20% or more.After the Revolution white prejudice against blacks began to harden into an aggressive racist ideology. Shortly before the Civil War the science of the “American School of Ethnology “. It’s reining geniuses enjoyed the prestige rained upon them by elite Northern scholars and colleges. Nineteenth century race scientists made the slavery circle more vicious by equating blacks with subhuman biology. Their cutting ideas of racial purity supported the self image of the nations white supremacist majority. Samuel Morton was a leading race scientist who used measurements from his famous skull collection to show that black people had the smallest “cranial capacity” of all humans and were therefore doomed to inferiority.By this death on 1851, Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton Hans achieved international fame for his reserach on skulls that seemed to prove that blacks were mentally inferior to whites and not even of the same species as whites. In 1854 Types of Mankind, a book based on his work the respected Putnam’s monthly Magazine noted that Morton’s investigations “evinced a scientific sagacity of the most extraordinary research and penetration, coupled with a judicial severity of judgement”...Ewell Sale Library, The Academy of Natural Sciences Of Philadelphia.Close behind Morton were Josiah Mott, a University of Pennsylvania graduate and Louis Agassiz, a professor at a Harvard. In the 1850’s they collaborated on “Types of Mankind”. All three were considered among the brightest minds of their times.. “Seeing their black faces with their fat lips and their grimacing teeth, the wool on the heads, their bent knees, their elongated hands, their large, curved fingernails and above all the livid color of their palms, I could not turn my eyes from their face in order to tell them to keep their distance” wrote Agassiz upon first encountering Africans.The federal government sought the advice of Agassiz during the Civil War on the best way to deal with millions of freed slaves, he said the first priority should be to avoid the catastrophe of increased mixing with blacks, “Beware of any policy which may bring about our own race to their level” he wrote. Nearly a century earlier Dr Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, a leading abolitionist believed that Africans were effected with a mild strain of leprosy that made their noses flat and their skin black. He also thought it made blacks less sensitive to pain. When a sideshow sensation named Henry Moss became a sensation by exhibiting himself as a black man turning white, Rush held out hope that a cure could be found for blackness. He recommended as treatment the juice of unripe peaches, tight fitting clothing and bleeding, purging and abstinence.Morton published a sequel to his first book called “Crania Aegyptiaca” in 1844. In it Morton added that data from the embalmed heads of Egyptians that, according to home, proved racial differences. Morton was achieving international fame. Among scientists who praised Morton was a Swede who wrote that Morton did “more for ethnography than any other living physiologist.”By this death on 1851, Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton Hans achieved international fame for his reserach on skull that seemed to prove that blacks were mentally inferior to whites. In 1854 Tyoes of Mankind, a book based on his work the respected Putnam’s monthly Magazine noted that Morton’s investigations “evinced a scientific sagacity of the most extraordinary research and penetration, coupled with a judicial severity of judgement”...Ewell Sale Library, The Academy of Natural Sciences Of Philadelphia. Dr Samuel Morton’s collection of 600 skulls provided what may be the Norths most insidious contribution to slavery...the “proof of black inferiority”In 1831 the only kind of abolitionism that had popular support was the American Colonization Society with chapters in the north and the south. The society’s goal was to send freed blacks to Africa. Few white people in America thought blacks and whites could coexist in the same society. Prudence Crandall wanted to educate young black women in rural Connecticut. The violence she encountered was life threatening. White parents withdrew their daughters from her school. In Canterbury, nearly everyone opposed Mrs Crandall and her belief that education would prove blacks equal to whites. Andrew Harris, a doctor who lived nearby refused to treat her black students. Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Judson spoke at a town meeting . No school for “nigger girls” would ever be across the street from his house, he promised that if black students showed up he would, use the law to have them arrested. When abolitionist Samuel May asked to speak he was confronted with fists and driven from the meeting. Through the next year and a half Crandall and her students increasinglybecame targets of community anger, local merchants refused to do business with the school and the stage driver refused to transport its students, boys threw manure in the schools while neighbors refused requests for pails of fresh water, Rotten eggs and rocks were thrown at the school building. Prudence Crandell was forced to give up her school.Northern hostility to black education was not limited to Connecticut. Noyes Academy in Canaan was not only shut down, but a demolition crew hitched a train of oxen to the school and pulled it off its foundation. In New Haven residents voted 700-4 against allowing a school for young black men to open near Yale. One of the rationales was that the education would do blacks more harm than good. “ What benefit can it be to a waiter or coachman to read Horace, or be a profound mathematician.” Read a local editorial.In May 1833 the Connecticut legislature passed black law making it illegal for out of state students of color to attend school without local permission. A phrenologist testified that Negroes could not be educated beyond a certain level and could never be fit citizens.New England slave trading went on to supply slaves to Bermuda and Cuba until almost 1890. But transporting slaves between countries was hardly the only connection New Englanders has to slavery.“. Two little Connecticut river towns helped produce music for the middle class, at a cost of as many as 2 million African lives, sacrificed to harvest elephant ivory”. Hartford CourantIvorytown, Connecticut, situated between two Connecticut river towns shaped, refined and turned ivory into the stuff and substance of everyday life. Starting with piano keys, baubles, combs, ivory refinement also made billiard balls, hair combs, shaving kits. New England merchants sailed to Africa then traveled inland to Zanzibar where “it is custom to buy a tooth of ivory and slave to carry it to the seashore” wrote Michael W Shepard, a merchant who visited Zanzibar and communicated with Connecticut’s ivory merchants. “Then the ivory and slaves are carried to to Zanzibar and sold”. The ivory going to America and the slave were usually sold to Arab slavery traders or slave traders headed for Cuba or Bermuda. During the second half of the 19th century and well into the 20th 75% of the ivory exported from Zanzibar on the backs of slaves went to only two piano key manufacturing centers in Connecticut. (Deep River Historical Society)Alfred J Swan, a English missionary described the horrors if the ivory caravans he saw in 1880’s. He describes “the feet and shoulders of ivory’s black porters were a mass of open sores, made more painful by the swarms of flies that followed the march and lived on the flowing blood”.. Swan said the porters were “a picture of utter misery” and were covered in scars left by the chipotle, a leather whip made of rhinoceros hide.In 1843 a New England buyer describes seeing “several gangs of slaves just as they came in from the interior of Africa “thin almost as skeletons. They had an iron ring around the neck and a chain went through it, thus connecting 50 or 50 in a line.”Explorer David Livingstone describes what he saw while exploring the Zambesi River in Southeast Africa. “A long line of manacled men, women and children came winding their way round the hill and into the valley, on the side where the village stood. The black drivers, armed with muskets, and bedecked with various articles of finery marched jauntily in the front, middle and rear of the line; some blowing exultantnotes out of long tin horns”.Joseph Conrad worked as a steamboat captain in the Belgian Congo and invented his plot line for “Heart of Darkness”, his classic novel of the search for a doomed ivory trader up river. He insisted that his description of what he saw in the Congo were accurate. “Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half e faced within the dim light, in all attitudes of pain, abandonment and despair....They were dying very slowly-it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now-nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom”.The suffering that accompanied ivory fills more than half a century of eyewitness accounts for the 1830’s to the 1890’s. The Civil War ended slave labor in the US but not the notion that black people were inherently suited only to hard labor. In his address to the New Haven Historical Society in 1875, scholar William C Fowler discussed the status of black people on Connecticut since their introduction into the colony in the 17th century. Fowler said that blacks “being an imitative race readily adopted the customs of the whites” and that the New World slavery was an improvement over the “moral degradation” of their African homeland. Fowler’s views were not regarded as racism but common sense. The America these men knew was in the process of freeing itself from the system of slavery , but the reality of involuntary labor was familiar to them, particularly the involuntary labor of black people.Hard work was what one historian calls “the bifurcated mind” of the 19th century commerce. Human rights were good, but a successful business always rested on somebody’s back and even abolitionists like Read and Pratt understood that. An inferior people, living in untamed wilds were part of ivory’s African supply system and was instrumental in maintaining the flow of high quality ivory.Enslaved Africans who managed to survive the trek carrying 100 pound ivory tusks on their shoulders for New England ivory merchants up the Ivory Coast ended up in the slave marketplace in Zanzibar. They were then sold into forced labor on plantations in Indian Ocean Islands or on huge sugar plantations in Brazil where the life expectancy was less than a year. Or they were sold into agricultural slavery in Arabia and North Africa.Abolitionists like Julius Pratt and George Read went to Zanzibar to promote slave trade to help build a market that would make his fellow New Englanders rich. As elephant populations dwindled, ivory had to be harvested farther from coastal Africa and the trek for enslaved Africans became longer. Under the weight of the tusks they were forced to carry men and women taken from their villages by force walked hundreds of miles to the coast.Ernst D Moore, native New Englanders and ivory merchant lived in luxury for years in Africa. Moore wrote that at the height of the ivory trade the ships that lay at anchor off the town were packed with slave awaiting transport to Arabia and Persia after New England merchants had bought them and forced them to walk 700 plus miles with 100 pound ivory tusks on their backs. This only stopped when the demand for ivory stopped.The south’s connection to slavery ended with the Civil War. The north’s connection to slavery and the money made off the backs of slaves continued for at least another 40 years. This article list only a minute portion of the severity and size of the Northern United States connections to profiting on the backs of enslaved Africans, nor does it delve into the horrors those enslaved in the North suffered.“Slavery has long been identified in the national consciousnesses a Southern institution. The time to bury that myth is long overdue. Slavery is a story about America, all of America. The nations wealth, from the very beginning depended upon the exploitation of black peoples on three continents. Together, over the lives of the millions of enslaved men and women, Northerners and Southerners shook hands and made a country. “ Hartford Courant.Here is an article I wrote for an online history community. Hope you’ll learn a little history from it.Forgotten Connections to Slavery: the North’s Dirty Little Secret.Several years ago the Hartford Connecticut Courant published a story titled “Aetna Regrets Insuring Slaves”. Courant’s reporters began to investigate the newspapers role in slavery. The Sunday magazine staff investigated slavery roots in the northern states and found “ what appeared to be unshakable proof of Connecticuts complicity in slavery. What’s more, it quickly became obvious that our economic links to slavery were deeply entwined with our religious, political and educational institutions. Slavery was a part of the social contract in Connecticut. It was the air that we breathed”.“For most Northern whites in the 1850’s, the desire to end slave labor did not equate with a belief in racial equality. Thus blacks might be freed, eventually, but they would not be welcome to remain.” In Connecticut and New York state laws enlarged the male electorate while reducing the black male voters by property requirements and harsh residency laws. Scholar David Roediger revealed that Northern free blacks stood alienated both literally and figuratively with white workers who violently chased them from public parks. It is worth remembering that In the Supreme Court in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 brought charges of national, not just southern discrimination, suing establishments in NY, San Francisco, Kansas and Tennessee. In the 1940’s thru the 1960’s the fight to end Jim Crow and disenfranchisement would be fought not only in Southern cities but also in northern cities.“Somehow In popular perception, slavery has been cut out of the trade triangle transferred forward to the Civil War, where it became a moral problem confined to the south. Just as Connecticut was thought not to have had slavery because it did not have many slaves or Southern style plantations, it was thought not to profit from slavery as much as the south did. The truth, however, which out to have been plain, is that Connecticut derived a great part, maybe greatest part of its early surplus wealth from slavery.” Hartford Courant.“The truth is that slavery was a national phenomenon. The North shared in the wealth it created and the oppression it required.” The nations financial institutions and manufacturing centers like New York and Massachusetts spun gold from them slave fields in of the south.In 1775 Connecticut held 5,000 Africans as slaves. In 1790 most prosperous merchants owned at least one slave and 50% of the clergy owned at least one slave according to census records. While in the south a few people owned a lot of slaves, in the North a lot of people owned a few slaves.“The effects of the New England slave trade were momentous. It was one of the foundations of New England’s economic structure, it created a wealthy class of slave trading merchants, while profits derived from this commerce stimulated cultural development and philanthropy.” ..The Negro in Colonial New England, page 3“Horses and barrels, fish and flour-the Norths earliest traffic in slavery commerce ran from Plymouth Rock to the West Indies.” ....Connecticut CourantNew England gained their economic rise because regions grew and shipped food to help feed millions of slaves in the West Indies. What’s more, Northern merchants, shippers and financial institutions were crucial players in every phase of the national and international cotton trade. Land all over New England were crowded With textile mills. Well before the Civil War, the economy of the entire North relied heavily on cotton grown by slaves. Starting before the Civil War and lasting until the 20th century two Connecticut towns were international centers for the production of ivory milling hundreds of thousands of tons of elephant tusks procured through enslavement of Africans and caused the death of as many as 2 million people in Africa.Harriet Beecher Stowe said this was the way the northerners liked it...all of the benefits and none of the screams.In America’s infancy it was discovered that the West Indies and Caribbean were perfect for growing sugar. Island were stripped of forests and all land was used to grow sugar cane.Between 1640 and 1650 19,000 Africans were brought to the West Indies. By 1700 there were 134,000 in Barbados alone.In 1645 the son of John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony saw riches in the slave trade. That year a Boston ship made the first known slave voyage to Africa, picking up slaves and delivering them to Barbados. This began what’s known as the Triangle Slave Trade. Northern colonies sent food, livestock and wood to West Indian sugar plantations where slaves harvested sugar cane that fed the refining mills. Sugar, molasses and slaves were shipped north. Northern distilleries turned molasses into rum to trade for Africans who were then shipped to sugar plantations. The triangle trade was complete.The scale of trade from New England was astonishing. In 1775 80% of New England exports went to the West Indies. Flour, corn, potatoes, dried fish, onions, cattle and horses were all exported because the West Indies only grew sugar, they grew little food. When ships could not get through during the Revolution a famine swept across the Caribbean starving tens of thousands.The Narragansett areas of Rhode Island developed its own plantation system using slave labor to keep up demand of supplying the West Indies. Both in acreage and in number of slaves they matched the plantations of Virginia in the 19th century. Connecticut also had plantations. In New London archaeologists are surveying one plantation that was 4,000 acres in size. The owners of small farms in New Jersey, New York including Westchester, Long Island, Staten Island all used slaves to grow crops to supply sugar plantations in the West Indies. West Indian sugar was distilled into rum in New England and traded for Africans who were then dropped off in the West Indies and America. The survival of a slave on a sugar plantation in the West Indies was less than a year. But Africans sold into slavery were plentiful and New England ships were bringing in a constant supply of replacements.By the Revolution there were at least 41,000 slaves in New York and Pennsylvania and Delaware. It soon became accepted that slavery was benign, loosely defined like a mutually agreed upon indenture, the attitude was that slavery was as beneficial to the slave as the owner. Slaves of the North served at the whims of their masters and could be sold or traded. They lived in unheated attics, basements, outbuildings and barns. They often slept on floors and were subject to a harsh system of black codes that controlled their movements, prohibited them from being educated and limited their social contracts.Lining the New England Coast were 40 “slave castles” or “slave factories” that were warehouses where traders could select and buy captive human beings.John Atkins was a British surgeon on a slave ship. He describes the captives of Cape Coast Castle....”In the areas of the Quadrangle are large vaults with an iron grate at the surface to let light and air on these poor wretches, the slaves who are chained and confined there til a demand comes. They are all marked with a burning iron on their breast.”Among the 13 colonies only one plunged into the slave trade in a huge way...Rhode Island. In sheer volume US participation in the slave trade may have seemed insignificant. European ships transported 11.5 million Africans sold over 3 centuries into New World Slavery with only a small percentage sent to the colonies. On this side of the Atlantic, however Rhode Island was the leader. In 1775 it controlled two thirds or more of the colonies slave trade with Africa. After the Revolutionary War Rhode Island had a monopoly in the slave trade.While Rhode Island and its neighbors found ways to profit by trading with slave plantations in the West Indies, Rhode Island went further, competing with European powers in the slave trade itself. Rhode Island shipped more slaves than any of the 13 other colonies combined. In 1772 merchants who owned slaving vessels occupied 8 of the top 10 positions on Newport’s tax rolls. Newport launched 70 percent of all American slave voyages.In the last years the slave trade was legal, John Brown and Captain James DeWolf joined forces to protect the slave trade. Brown entered Congress in 1799. But DeWolf had a reputation as especially cruel on his ships. He once threw a slave tied to a chair overboard then complained about losing a good chair. One of his captains cut off the hands if two slaves clinging to the railing. But it was Brown who would become famous in New England for starting Brown University.“After Congress outlawed the importation of slaves, ship captains began to hide their boxes of shackles but little else about the slave trade changed except that it’s center shifted to Manhattan and it’s conditions became even more horrific. “ Connecticut CourantBy the eve of the war hundreds of businesses in New York and countless more businesses throughout the North were connected to or dependent on cotton. As New York became the center of the US cotton trade, merchants , shippers, auctioneers, bankers, brokers, insurers and thousands of others made their living off the backs of southern slaves growing cotton. New York City became the center of the cotton trade for thee world. The Lehman brothers, Junius Morgan (father of J Pierpont Morgan), John Jacob Astor, Charles Tiffany all had their wealth begin in the cotton trade.On the eve of secession New York City Mayor declared that his city should also secede, for the most part because New York’s economy depended on the cotton trade. Before the election of 1860 Boston area manufacturers were desperately currying favor with southern politicians and planters. Their financial survival depended on slavery.New England was home to almost 500 textile mills scattered through New York State, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The powerful group of Massachusetts businessmen historians call the Boston Associates established Americans own industrial revolution. By the 1850’s their enormous profits had been poured into a complex network of banks, insurance companies, and railroads. Their wealth was anchored to the mammoth textile mills in Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire.In the 1850’s 10 major cotton states were producing 66 percent of the world’s cotton. Raw cotton accounted for more than half of all US exports, all exports that benefitted New York brokers, New York banks, northern ship builders, exporters, ship crews. All business involved in the export of cotton ran through the north. In 1860 the US produced 2.3 billion pounds of cotton. Of that amount, half was exported. The other half fed northern textile mills.On the eve of secession New York City Mayor declared that his city should also secede, for the most part because New York’s economy depended on the cotton trade. Before the election of 1860 Boston area manufacturers were desperately currying favor with southern politicians and planters. Their financial survival depended on slavery.At the same time the Union Committee called a meeting for 200 people to discuss what could be done to stop the south. Two thousand people showed up. The office building across the street was commandeered to hold the overflow, but merchants and bankers, politicians and shipping magnates spilled into the street. This was not the first time a worried business community had met, but this meeting was the most panicky by far. The south had to be persuaded to stay. They very spine of 19th century business, money and power attended the meeting includingAT Stewart, owner of the nations first department store and the wealthiest man in New YorkMoses Taylor, sugar importer, bankers and coal and railroad magnate and for nearly half a century, the most influential businessman in New York.Ariel Abbot Low, whose A.A. Low and Brothers was the most important firm in the China trade.William B Astor, son of John Jacob Astor, the nation’s first millionaire.August Belmont, American agent for the Rothchilds of Germany, and creator of the Belmont Stakes.Wlilliam H. Aspinwall and his partners Robert Minturn and Henry Grinnell, editors of the Journal of Commerce and the New York Herald.Also in attendance were politicians who included two former mayors, presidential candidate Samuel J Tilden, and former president Millard Fillmore.For half a century before the war cotton was the backbone of the economy of America. Cotton was king and the North ruled cotton. From seed to cloth Northern business was involved. Only large banks, located mostly in New York could extend credit to plantation owners needed between planting and selling their crops. Any plantation owners wishing to expand depended on Northern Banks to lend him money for additional equipment and additional labor. Slaves were usually bought on credit. Other Northerners made up the long chain between planter and manufacturer.the “factor” helped the planter get the best price, advised him, and often took care of his finances. Ships that carried cotton to market were Northern owned, northern built, captained and crewed by northerners.But that was not the only use of northern ships. By 1860 New York was notorious as the hub of an international illegal slave trade. It was too lucrative and too corrupt to stop. Ships to carry slaves were built and sold in New York complete with crates of shackles and supersized water tanks. During its peak in 1859 and 1860 at least 2 slave ships left from New York harbor every month , able to hold 600- 1,000 slaves each. At this point most slaves were sold to Bermuda and Cuba. In the summer of 1860 the traffic from Africa was so heavy that the US Navy seized The Storm King, carrying 620 Africans, half of which were children and the Cora loaded with 700 Africans along with the Erie with a hold filled with 900 Africans. All three ships were New York ships.By 1861 the illegal trade had grown so daring that anyone who read a NY paper knew how it worked. NY ships sailed to Rio or Later, Havana where they might take aboard a second captain or crew. For the crossing to Africa the US ship would list foreigners as passengers. On the African Coast came a switch in nationality. Just before slaves were loaded the foreigners would declare themselves owners of what had been only moments before a US vessel. The American captain and crew made the return voyage as working passengers on the now foreign slave ship. In its final years as abolition threatened national economies dependent on slave labor, the illegal slave trade became more profitable and more horrific. Ships grew larger, able to hold 1,000 Africans chained in pairs to its decks. Slave ships were insured to lose 10% of their slaves but the actual rate was much higher, usually topping 20% or more.After the Revolution white prejudice against blacks began to harden into an aggressive racist ideology. Shortly before the Civil War the science of the “American School of Ethnology “. It’s reining geniuses enjoyed the prestige rained upon them by elite Northern scholars and colleges. Nineteenth century race scientists made the slavery circle more vicious by equating blacks with subhuman biology. Their cutting ideas of racial purity supported the self image of the nations white supremacist majority. Samuel Morton was a leading race scientist who used measurements from his famous skull collection to show that black people had the smallest “cranial capacity” of all humans and were therefore doomed to inferiority.By this death on 1851, Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton Hans achieved international fame for his reserach on skulls that seemed to prove that blacks were mentally inferior to whites and not even of the same species as whites. In 1854 Types of Mankind, a book based on his work the respected Putnam’s monthly Magazine noted that Morton’s investigations “evinced a scientific sagacity of the most extraordinary research and penetration, coupled with a judicial severity of judgement”...Ewell Sale Library, The Academy of Natural Sciences Of Philadelphia.Close behind Morton were Josiah Mott, a University of Pennsylvania graduate and Louis Agassiz, a professor at a Harvard. In the 1850’s they collaborated on “Types of Mankind”. All three were considered among the brightest minds of their times.. “Seeing their black faces with their fat lips and their grimacing teeth, the wool on the heads, their bent knees, their elongated hands, their large, curved fingernails and above all the livid color of their palms, I could not turn my eyes from their face in order to tell them to keep their distance” wrote Agassiz upon first encountering Africans.The federal government sought the advice of Agassiz during the Civil War on the best way to deal with millions of freed slaves, he said the first priority should be to avoid the catastrophe of increased mixing with blacks, “Beware of any policy which may bring about our own race to their level” he wrote. Nearly a century earlier Dr Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, a leading abolitionist believed that Africans were effected with a mild strain of leprosy that made their noses flat and their skin black. He also thought it made blacks less sensitive to pain. When a sideshow sensation named Henry Moss became a sensation by exhibiting himself as a black man turning white, Rush held out hope that a cure could be found for blackness. He recommended as treatment the juice of unripe peaches, tight fitting clothing and bleeding, purging and abstinence.Morton published a sequel to his first book called “Crania Aegyptiaca” in 1844. In it Morton added that data from the embalmed heads of Egyptians that, according to home, proved racial differences. Morton was achieving international fame. Among scientists who praised Morton was a Swede who wrote that Morton did “more for ethnography than any other living physiologist.”By this death on 1851, Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton Hans achieved international fame for his reserach on skull that seemed to prove that blacks were mentally inferior to whites. In 1854 Tyoes of Mankind, a book based on his work the respected Putnam’s monthly Magazine noted that Morton’s investigations “evinced a scientific sagacity of the most extraordinary research and penetration, coupled with a judicial severity of judgement”...Ewell Sale Library, The Academy of Natural Sciences Of Philadelphia. Dr Samuel Morton’s collection of 600 skulls provided what may be the Norths most insidious contribution to slavery...the “proof of black inferiority”In 1831 the only kind of abolitionism that had popular support was the American Colonization Society with chapters in the north and the south. The society’s goal was to send freed blacks to Africa. Few white people in America thought blacks and whites could coexist in the same society. Prudence Crandall wanted to educate young black women in rural Connecticut. The violence she encountered was life threatening. White parents withdrew their daughters from her school. In Canterbury, nearly everyone opposed Mrs Crandall and her belief that education would prove blacks equal to whites. Andrew Harris, a doctor who lived nearby refused to treat her black students. Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Judson spoke at a town meeting . No school for “nigger girls” would ever be across the street from his house, he promised that if black students showed up he would, use the law to have them arrested. When abolitionist Samuel May asked to speak he was confronted with fists and driven from the meeting. Through the next year and a half Crandall and her students increasinglybecame targets of community anger, local merchants refused to do business with the school and the stage driver refused to transport its students, boys threw manure in the schools while neighbors refused requests for pails of fresh water, Rotten eggs and rocks were thrown at the school building. Prudence Crandell was forced to give up her school.Northern hostility to black education was not limited to Connecticut. Noyes Academy in Canaan was not only shut down, but a demolition crew hitched a train of oxen to the school and pulled it off its foundation. In New Haven residents voted 700-4 against allowing a school for young black men to open near Yale. One of the rationales was that the education would do blacks more harm than good. “ What benefit can it be to a waiter or coachman to read Horace, or be a profound mathematician.” Read a local editorial.In May 1833 the Connecticut legislature passed black law making it illegal for out of state students of color to attend school without local permission. A phrenologist testified that Negroes could not be educated beyond a certain level and could never be fit citizens.New England slave trading went on to supply slaves to Bermuda and Cuba until almost 1890. But transporting slaves between countries was hardly the only connection New Englanders has to slavery.“. Two little Connecticut river towns helped produce music for the middle class, at a cost of as many as 2 million African lives, sacrificed to harvest elephant ivory”. Hartford CourantIvorytown, Connecticut, situated between two Connecticut river towns shaped, refined and turned ivory into the stuff and substance of everyday life. Starting with piano keys, baubles, combs, ivory refinement also made billiard balls, hair combs, shaving kits. New England merchants sailed to Africa then traveled inland to Zanzibar where “it is custom to buy a tooth of ivory and slave to carry it to the seashore” wrote Michael W Shepard, a merchant who visited Zanzibar and communicated with Connecticut’s ivory merchants. “Then the ivory and slaves are carried to to Zanzibar and sold”. The ivory going to America and the slave were usually sold to Arab slavery traders or slave traders headed for Cuba or Bermuda. During the second half of the 19th century and well into the 20th