“Before the Civil War, the North grew rich beyond measure by agreeing to live, however, uneasily at times, with slavery. Perhaps as a consequence of striking that bargain, Northerners have pushed much of their early history into the deepest shadows of repression. Many of the facts can, frankly, be shocking: *In the eighteenth century, even after America won its freedom from Great Britain, even after the writing of the Declaration of Independence, 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. *In the first half of the eighteenth century, two major slave revolts occurred in New York City. During the second uprising, with haunting parallels to the hysteria surrounding the Salem witch trials 50 years earlier, 31 black people, all slaves, and 4 white people were either hanged or burned alive at the stake. *At the same time that the North was selling food and other supplies to the sugar plantations that blanketed the islands of the Caribbean, thousands of acres of Connecticut, New York, and tiny Rhode Island held plantations that used slave labor. *In the century before Congress finally banned the importation of slaves, 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. *In the decades before the Civil 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. *A Harvard University zoologist was a major figure in the now-discredited field of “race science.” His mentor, one of the most eminent physicians in Philadelphia, had a world-famous collection of human skulls that the “ethnologists” said proved that blacks of African descent had the smallest “cranial capacity” among all humans and thus were doomed to inferiority. These influential scientists not only helped justify slavery, they helped solidify the myth of black inferiority. “Race science” may well be the most lasting and devastating legacy of the North’s involvement in slavery. Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank “Complicity; How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery” Page xxxviii
Posted on: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 21:09:54 +0000
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