Product Description: Slavery in the South has been documented in volumes ranging from exhaustive histories to bestselling novels. But the North’s profit from–indeed, dependence on–slavery has mostly been a shameful and well-kept secret . . . until now. In this startling and superbly researched new book, three veteran New England journalists demythologize the region of America known for tolerance and liberation, revealing a place where thousands of people were held in bondage and slavery was both an economic dynamo and a necessary way of life.
Complicity reveals the cruel truth about the Triangle Trade of molasses, rum, and slaves that lucratively linked the North to the West Indies and Africa; discloses the reality of Northern empires built on profits from rum, cotton, and ivory–and run, in some cases, by abolitionists; and exposes the thousand-acre plantations that existed in towns such as Salem, Connecticut. Here, too, are eye-opening accounts of the individuals who profited directly from slavery far from the Mason-Dixon line–including Nathaniel Gordon of Maine, the only slave trader sentenced to die in the United States, who even as an inmate of New York’s infamous Tombs prison was supported by a shockingly large percentage of the city; Patty Cannon, whose brutal gang kidnapped free blacks from Northern states and sold them into slavery; and the Philadelphia doctor Samuel Morton, eminent in the nineteenth-century field of “race science,” which purported to prove the inferiority of African-born black people.
Culled from long-ignored documents and reports–and bolstered by rarely seen photos, publications, maps, and period drawings–Complicity is a fascinating and sobering work that actually does what so many books pretend to do: shed light on America’s past. Expanded from the celebrated Hartford Courant special report that the Connecticut Department of Education sent to every middle school and high school in the state (the original work is required readings in many college classrooms,) this new book is sure to become a must-read reference everywhere.
The legal goods on why many companies should pay historical black organizations money as retribution for the dirty money they made in the slave trade. Companies like Aetna insurance, JP Morgan, Lehman Bros. etc are still benefitting from slavery's profits via interest and should be taken to court in a similar fashion to companies who were outted during the Holocaust. many legal scholars could read this book and develop many lawsuits for companies to be prosecuted for promoting and benefitting terror in America. The brutality of the ivory trade was very shocking and definitely needs more exploration. Any country that had the amount of free trade and labor along with never being prosecuted for the crimes has no excuse but to be the richest country in the world.
Excellent History Book Being from the south made this book of great interest to me. Southerners have often been frowned upon for their involvment in slavery, almost as if they were the only ones profiting from the horrible treatment of another race; where as the north "supposedly" came to the rescue. This book, written by three New England reporters clears up a lot of misconceptions about just how "helpful" they were. There was considerably more money made in the northern states off the sweat and blood of slaves than in the south.
Interesting, But Lacks Nuance and Context Three journalists from the Hartford Courant attempted to expand a series of newspaper articles into a book-length examination of `the North's' complicity in slavery. They partially succeed. The book's early chapters explore slavery as it existed in the North, the connections between Northern industry and Southern slavery, New York City's particular role in the slave trade and the `triangular trade' (involving the US, Europe and Africa), and a `reverse underground railroad' involving the kidnapping of free blacks and their sale in the South. These chapters all supply useful information to fill the interstices of history, although much of it struck this reader as much less surprising than it did to the authors.
The book first goes seriously off its rails in the concluding chapters when it ventures into the stories of Elijah Lovejoy and John Brown. Their familiar stories are so well known that they seem out of place in a book that strives to deliver journalistically fresh content. Certainly nothing new is added to the reader's knowledge about these men and the hatred they generated North and South.
A chapter about the 19th century Philadelphia scientist Samuel George Morton who developed a `scientific' theory of the `races' that `proved' the inferiority of Africans and their descendants adds less than it might have and seems like an afterthought, a rather disorganized one at that. The chapter reaches its nadir when the authors elect to cherry pick quotes from Rev. Theodore Parker and Abraham Lincoln affirming the superiority of whites. They might have at least added Parker's quote predicting the success of abolition: "I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one... And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice."
The book's final chapter is also its oddest. It concerns the undeniably horrid consequences of the ivory trade especially on the African slaves forced to transport the tusks long distances. The tusks were particularly used to make piano keys. Undeniably, Northerners made pianos and played them, but they were hardly alone in these endeavors. Like the preceding chapter, this one seems like it was added in order to satisfy the publisher's idea of how long a book should be.
In a brief afterword, the authors assert that America's `extraordinary ascent into the world arena' would have been much delayed had the country, North and South, not benefited from the unpaid labor the slaves. This assertion is necessary to undergird the author's next assertion that the North was complicit in allowing this to happen and benefited from it. As a matter of labor economics, the authors' assumption that the US economy would have suffered if it had had to rely on free labor is doubtful. Indeed, the assumption flies in the face of the `free soil, free labor' ideology of Abraham Lincoln's nascent Republican Party, which argued that free men would work harder in a free labor society and that slavery undermined the free workers of the South.
The authors also disavow any intent to `debunk the myth of a virtuous North'. Perhaps so, but to this reader their failure to place the undeniable negative facts about the North in a broader context gives the book an unbalanced sensationalism. A reader might be excused for thinking that the only abolitionists were the few heroic leaders and not the thousands of members of a Northern mass movement. The authors cite statistics that New York State still had 20,000 slaves within its borders in 1790. True enough, but the authors neglect to relate that Maryland, North Carolina and South Carolina each already had over 100,000 slaves while Virginia had over 290,000 slaves.
`Complicity' fills in gaps in general knowledge about specific ways in which many Northerners benefited a little and a few Northerners benefited enormously from slavery. The book at least implicitly suggests an equivalency between the North and the South in responsibility for slavery that the facts do not support. The South was a slave society based on and defined by slavery; the North was not a slave society (and likely would have prospered without Southern slavery), but the North did benefit from slavery indirectly in large ways (e.g., large-scale manufacture of textiles that employed thousands) and directly in more limited ways (e.g., slave-trade shipping that benefited relatively few Northerners).
The book's tone ironically undercuts a nuanced reading of history that an appreciation of the relative roles of the North and South in slavery yields. The reader might better spend his time with Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.)Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom, Eric Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War With a New Introductory Essay, or even The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox by Stephen Budiansky.
Unbalanced No matter how much of this book is true, it certainly doesn't tell the whole story. The abolition movement in the North was very powerful, especially among certain Christian groups. Thousands of the men in the North who volunteered, and they were all volunteers at the beginnning of the Civil War had the moral purpose of ending slavery in mind. But with modern historical revisionism, all white men are bad, all persons of color are good! I've seen this time and again in current "histories" of the period. Certainly you can find racists anywhere you go in this world; the world of today and yesterday. Dwelling on the perceived evils of the past, committed by some, but not all, will not solve the evils of today. Therefore, what is this book worth to our modern society?
Many dots connected for refreshing view of North's slavery complicity While I knew most the basics of Northern states' slaveowning and its eventual phaseout, and that, pre-1807, Northern shippers/sailing captains made plenty of money on the slave trade, the post-1807 info, as well as the way this book pulled so many things together, is still very good.
That includes the financial tentacles of the New York Cotton Exchange and the economic impact of cotton itself, with the South producing 2/3 the world's cotton and exporting half of that total. Those two tidbits alone should help readers understand more of why Southern fire-eaters held out hope either that the North wouldn't oppose their secession or that Britain would intervene.
Hypocrisy in interdicting the slave trade is also exposed. The British had taken the lead in this, but Americans charged they were hypocrites because British traders still brought goods to Africa that were important in the slave trade. Meanwhile, the U.S. government had negotiated a deal with the British that only the U.S. Navy could interdict U.S. ships off the coast of Africa. Unfortunately, until just before the Civil War, the U.S. Navy didn't actually do much interdiction.
Beyond that, though the fact of the North having slaves was known to me, the authors still do a good job of illustrating details of slave life, slave purchases, advertisements for slaves and more.
Also, a slice of the North's antebellum intelligencia is found highly complicit in the pseudoscience of racial studies, including the 19th-century fad of phrenology.
And, for those unfamiliar, the authors show just how much of a minority position abolition was in the North.
Finally, this book has several helpful maps, illustrating the triangular trade, where all in Africa slaves came from and more.
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