Reply #61: Enslaving was done by New Englanders. Many Southern Blacks not slaves. [View All]

The slave trade was the dominant industry in New England for over 100 years, including the ship building, sail makers, etc. and continued on a large scale for 50 years after it became prohibited by the Constitution in 1808. Essentially all of the "old money" families in Newport, Boston, and New York became super-rich from the slave trade. They endowed the Ivy schools (Harvard, Yale, Brown) and educated their sons there, became the respectable leaders of Newport society, and prominent abolishionists, while their family businesses continued the slave trade into the 1860's.

The primary destination for those African slaves was Latin America, not the English colonies in North America. The growth in slaves imported into Southern colonies in the mid 1700's resulted at least as much from the British/American ships no longer being allowed to bring slaves into areas controlled by Spain and the ensuing search for new markets for slaves as it did from any increased demand for slaves in the South. Several Southern colonies, including NC, had laws against importing slaves externally -- from Africa or the Carribean -- mostly motivated by fears of a slave rebellion like those in in the West Indies, but also reflecting the modest demand for slaves in the colonies prior to the invention of the cotton gin. Georgia became non-slave for a period in the mid 1700's.

The 20-year extension in the Constituion of the slave trade by Americans was primarily for the New England slave traders who had recently regained access to certain foreign markets and for their associates who were expanding sugar cane production. The invention of the cotton gin suddenly increased the demand for labor to produce cotton thuse creating a huge demand for more slaves which the New England slave traders continued to supply long after it had become illegal, even past the beginning of the Civil War,

In regard to enslaving an entire race, that was not the situation in the Upper South. Hereditary bondage, slavery, became limited to Negros in all the English colonies by the mid 1700's, but many Negros were not in bondage. In VA, MD, DE, and NC in particular, there were large numbers of free blacks whose familes had been free for generations. Some of these black families had never been slaves, though they might have been indentured servants, but that was also the case for over half of the white First Families of Virginia. In the Upper South for several decades after the Revolution, the number of free "people of color" increased rapidly, in large part from the large number of newly-freed slaves.

The political debates from the Revolution to the Civil War are much the same as those today. Phrases like Right-to-life versus Right-to-choose, or pro-choice vs pro-life represent how the majority of Americans American interact with majority"s

I urge everyone to alert to and of skeptical of everything involving slavery, race, and the Civil War. The language used to frame that debate are as loaded as "right to life" vs "right to choose" or "welfare queens". As I have noted, "free states" were often "white only states", and "free labor" and the "Protestant work ethic" were appeals to the rural and small town voters and their prejudices against the recent Catholic immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Italy,... who were not citizens yet or lacked the property or money to qualify to vote.

Many of the racists slurs and descriptions of laziness, lack of motivation, unsavory habits, etc. in regard to Blacks and Native Americans were the same as the ones applied to the Catholic immigrants in the 1800's. Few people notice at all when the same descriptions of inferiority are applied to white Southerners, sometimes co-minglingling their opinions of Blacks and Southerners.