I Have a Few Questions

[L Verge]

Good first post, Mark. Please read the several books on Sally Hemmings, mistress to Jefferson after he became a widower -- and half-sister to his deceased wife.

Now, I don't think that there is a person on this forum that condones the peculiar institution of slavery, and surely everyone recognizes the system existed from very early civilizations on. The postings to Kate's questions here certainly show that, to this day, no one can satisfactorily explain the detriments that slavery had on America and other parts of the world.

First, I believe that I have been told that William Penn was a slave holder and that Lincoln's Pennsylvania ancestors held slaves. Of course, we know that William Henry Seward was raised in a slave holding family.

There's just one thing that no one has addressed and that is the slave TRADE that was conducted by Northern exploiters for the first 200 years or so. Where is the bleeding-heart rationale in that? And why has no one mentioned the fact that slavery existed in the North well into the 1800s? The climate and soil conditions in the North may not have been conducive to large scale farming, but the factories and ports of the North needed laborers.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't many of the early colonists come from the crowded cities of England and Europe with skills that the North could use? Some of them may have come as indentured servants; but when their indenture was served, the factory owners and others felt the need to import slaves to fill the void in their work force, and slavery in the North became more prevalent.

During the American Revolution, I believe that the British promised freedom to slaves who would escape to serve their forces. I think this was done to disrupt the economic supplies that were fueling the 1776 Rebels. Many of the slaves who heard the promise headed North, and that increased the black slave population there into the 1800s. Northeners had their Moonlight and Magnolia tales also:

"The slaves in Massachusetts were treated with almost parental kindness. They were incorporated into the family, and each puritan household being a sort of religious structure, the relative duties of master and servant were clearly defined. No doubt the severest and longest task fell to the slave, but in the household of the farmer or artisan, the master and the mistress shared it, and when it was finished, the white and the black, like the feudal chief and his household servant, sat down to the same table, and shared the same viands." [Reminiscence by Catharine Sedgwick (1789-1867) of Stockbridge, Mass.]

"Yet the petitions for freedom from New England and Mid-Atlantic blacks, and the numbers in which they ran off from their masters to the British during the Revolution, suggest rather a different picture.

"Early-19th century New Englanders had real motives for forgetting their slave history; or, if they recalled it at all, for characterizing it as a brief period of mild servitude. This was partly a Puritan effort to absolve New England's ancestors of their guilt. The cleansing of history had a racist motive as well, denying blacks -- slave or free -- a legitimate place in New England history. But most importantly, the deliberate creation of a "mythology of a free New England" was a crucial event in the history of sectional conflict in America. The North, and New England in particular, sought to demonize the South through its institution of slavery; they did this in part by burying their own histories as slave-owners and slave-importers. At the same time, behind the potent rhetoric of Daniel Webster and others, they enshrined New England values as the essential ones of the Revolution, and the new nation. In so doing, they characterized Southern interests as purely sectional and selfish. In the rhetorical battle, New England backed the South right out of the American mainstream.

"The attempt to force blame for all America's ills onto the South led the Northern leadership to extreme twists of logic. Abolitionist leaders in New England noted the "degraded" condition of the local black communities. Yet the common abolitionist explanation of this had nothing to do with northerners, black or white. Instead, they blamed it on the continuance of slavery in the South. 'The toleration of slavery in the South,' Garrison editorialized, 'is the chief cause of the unfortunate situation of free colored persons in the North.'"

I am quoting here from a website that I encountered a few months ago. It is run by a Pennsylvania historian and author by the name of Douglas Harper. I have found it very interesting. Check out http://www.slavenorth.com. And, make sure you read the sections on "Denying the Past" and "Northern Profits from Slavery." Mr. Harper began his studies of the institution of slavery in the North when he increasingly found that all the blame was being placed on the South and not on the North. BTW, he was educated in the North.

How many of you know that New Jersey was the last Northern state to abolish slavery? They did so in 1804, but via gradual emancipation so that it did not fully end until 1865. New York still had slaves in 1824. New Hampshire passed a law to make slaves citizens of the state in 1857, but the law never fully took effect until the state's ratification of the 13th Amendment in July of 1865. In the years after the Revolution, the State of Rhode Island controlled anywhere from 60% to 90% of the slave trade to America. New Hampshire had a slave system that was very similar to those in the South. And, I could go on - and probably will at some point.

Kate - what I hope I am showing here is that everyone in American history (including the British, the Dutch, the Spanish, and the Portugese, who first brought enslaved Africans to the colonies) has to share in the blame for the Civil War. It is easy to be pious and above-the-fray today about the rights, wrongs, guilty parties, etc. that existed in America from the 1600s until 1865 and beyond. Hopefully, if we go back to teaching in-depth American history, we will still be pondering those same questions a hundred years from now, but with a reformed perspective. I think we can all agree that society in general - both North and South and European - had a hand in it. Spare me the modern finger pointing. I spent too many years trying to teach 8th and 9th graders to look at both sides of an issue.

P.S. - IMO, we can also look at the failures of Northern-led Reconstructionists and subsequent Jim Crow laws to see how our modern society has developed into the "give me generation" of liberal entitlements that discourages free enterprise.