Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

The conventional sanitized history tells a story of a North that is heroic, tolerant, progressive—and teeming with ardent abolitionists that led the long march for freedom. Slavery is euphemistically described as the South’s “peculiar institution.” New England is said to have been much too humane to have tolerated this nefarious institution that benighted the southern states. Benevolence is ascribed as the motivation of the few slaveholders in the northern states. They were merely sparing their slaves a pitiless existence in the cotton states or the West Indies. As it was assumed, their slaves were treated rather like members of the family. Similarly, we are told the ostensibly temperate-minded Lincoln championed the cause of abolitionism. Northerners are also heralded as the good guys in the late War Between the States. Their crusade after all was driven by a moral revulsion against slavery. And they embraced a “free soil” ideology that sought peaceable manumission as well as the integration of the black freedman—or so we are often told. Complicity nevertheless tells a much different story that challenges the egalitarian ideological nostrums perpetuated by the purveyors of political correctness.

As the authors write in the introduction, “Complicity is the story of how the north helped create, strengthen, and prolong slavery in America.” The startling reality that slavery was as a much a vital wealth builder for the north as well as the south has been obfuscated in the annals of history. “The truth is slavery was a national phenomenon. The North shared in the wealth it created, and in the oppression it required,” notes the authors of Complicity. It is a well-kept secret that whole fortunes in New York City were built upon slavery. Before they became the titan investment houses of Wall Street, J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers made their riches in King Cotton, a commodity harvested by slave labor. “Junius Morgan, father of J.P. Morgan, arranged for his son to study the cotton trade in the South as a future industrialist and banker.” America’s first millionaire and shipping magnate John Jacob Astor carried tons of cotton in London in the lucrative transatlantic trade. Today, the illustrious Waldorf-Astoria Hotel has a name bearer in the person of John Jacob Astor. King Cotton was indeed the economic dynamo of New York City and intricately linked its interests with those of the cotton-cultivating states. The authors go so far as to surmise, “Slave-grown cotton is, in large part, the root of New York’s wealth.” It’s no overstatement. In 1861, New York City mayor Fernando Wood went so far as to propose that his city become an independent “free city” unhindered by the confiscatory tariffs of the United States government. Many merchants surreptitiously acquiesced. Wood declared, “As a free city,” he announced, New York City “would have the whole and united support of the Southern States, as well as other States to whose interests and rights under the constitution has always been true.” Though, Republican-Whig stalwarts in Washington and Albany scoffed at Woods and rebuffed him, and the idea of an American Hong Kong city-state was shelved. However, New York City’s solidarity with the south, and the anti-war, anti-draft climate later led to one of the most tumultuous riots in the nineteenth-century.

But one would have to go further back in history to infer just how integral slavery was to northern fortunes, which is exactly what the authors of Complicity do. New England has long been recognized as the maritime power renowned for its shipbuilding, shipping and fisheries. On the other hand, New England is seldom heralded for being a major player in the lucrative transatlantic slave trade in our American memory. In the seventeenth-century, sugar was a veritable “white gold,” a staple crop of the West Indies and growing all that sugarcane required a huge supply of labor, which was available in West Africa. There were a multitude of New England shippers that rallied to cater to this demand. The crucible of their Triangle trade was slavery, coupled with its money-spinning byproducts rum, molasses and ivory. Rivers of molasses harvested by slaves were brought from the West Indies to be distilled in New England distilleries. The famous colonial governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop’s son had landed on Barbados to establish an enterprise networked with New England, and in 1645 he wrote that its planters had bought “a thousand Negroes; and the more they buy, the better able they are to buy, for in a year and half they will earn (with gods blessing) as much as they cost.”

A great number of slave-trading ships called New England their home port. In the century before the slave trade ban in 1808, “Rhode Island launched nearly 1,000 voyages to Africa, carrying at least 1,000,000 slaves back across the Atlantic.” Their bountiful cargo of slaves didn’t just find their way to the West Indies and the muggy climes of the South Carolina low-country, as quite a few captives made passage to New England and other northeastern states. When Ira Berlin wrote Generations of Captivity in 2003, he noted, “On the eve of American independence, nearly three-fourths of Boston’s wealthiest quartile of property-holders held slaves. A like proportion could be found in New York, Philadelphia, Providence, and Newport.” The authors of Complicity note that archaeologists have surveyed 4,000 acre plantation in New London County, Connecticut, which may have employed over sixty slaves. Its owners were intricately involved in the West Indies trade. Small farmers from Long Island to New Jersey also owned slaves.

The authors of Complicity spare no punches as they illustrate just how intricate the slave trade was to a great number of northern port cities. Rhode Island had quite a few “merchant princes” in Newport, Bristol and Providence that profited heavily from the legal slave trade in the eighteenth-century, as well as rum-running. There is the other John Brown, the “Providence Colossus,” who led one of the first acts of rebellion against the British firing on the British customs schooner Gaspee in 1772. Brown later served in Congress in 1799. Brown also made his fortune in rum-running and the slave trade. The Brown family name is preserved in Brown University. Aaron Lopez, his father-in-law Jacob Rivera, John Brown of Providence and James Dewolf were all key players in the lucrative eighteenth-century slave trade. Brown and Wolf went so far as to go into national politics to protect their enterprise.

Long after the 1808 ban on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, many northern shipping magnates profited handsomely off of the lucrative and illegal slave trade. Most of the slaves found their way to Brazil and Cuba where slavery thrived, and a few may have found their way to American soil. When the British Empire pressed other nations for commercial treaties allowing the British Navy to board the ships of suspected slave-traffickers, the United States had flatly refused until 1863. Because of a jealous concern for national sovereignty, only the U.S. Navy was allowed to search ships flagged with the Stars and Stripes up until that time. Although, the U.S. Navy had a hand in policing, it remained indifferent to doing its job. Even if slavers were caught, they could often count on northern judges to look the other way. The illicit trade “was carried on so flagrantly that New York newspapers reported the names of ships leaving for slave voyages.” In the peak years, 1859 to 1860, on the eve of the War Between the States, at least two slave ships left New York per month. A cautious estimate suggests in those two years as many as 20,000 Africans were brought into captivity. Because of “official indifference,” policing was lackluster and “slave trade convictions were rare and severe punishment even rarer.” A longtime admiralty judge Samuel Rossiter Betts let a slave ship captain make flight to Rio ostensibly to gather evidence for his defense. Though, he jumped bail and never returned. The captain even bragged, “You don’t have to worry about facing trial in New York City… I can get any man off in New York for $1,000.” Front companies set up throughout New York City often carrying on the same illegitimate trade as a cover.

A naturalized American John Albert Machado had a fleet of illegal slavers including New England whaling ships. His cover was a wine-importing business. In 1860, one of Machado’s Whalers, the Thomas Watson set sail for Africa, and months later it landed with 800 slaves in Cuba. “The asking price for slaves in Africa at that point was about $50, while the selling price in Cuba was more than $1,000.” Some slavers were even ordering steamships to expedite the passage. Other tales of illegal slave ships trolling out of northern harbors abound, such as the Porpoise, the Kentucky, and the Wanderer.

This book by Hartford Courant journalists revisits a murky, long-ignored chapter in the American history of slavery. The research emanated from a special series of newspaper articles. It is well-researched, meticulously documented with a plethora of photographs, records and other substantive documentation. With this groundbreaking volume, the venerable myth of the archetypal humanitarian Yankee possessed of the goodwill to disparage slavery is revealed as little more than a clever fable. Granted, the story had to be told by northeastern journalists before the rest of the America starts to take it seriously.

It seems that the quintessential Yankee so often heralded as the torchbearer of America’s flame of virtue erstwhile was a duplicitous flesh merchant and crypto-profiteer of slavery. The raison d'être behind most northern opposition to slavery spreading West—is often obfuscated. But as the U.S. Senator from Illinois Lyman Trumball explained, “we, the Republican Party, are the white man’s party. We are for the free white man, and for making white labor acceptable and honorable which it can never be when Negro labor is brought into competition with it.” The conventional establishment history of the War Between the States is painted with brushes and stripes that accentuate northern virtue and southern infidelity in each of their respective causes. Mr. Lincoln’s war so often heralded as the great abolitionist crusade, in fact left up to one-fifth of the slave populations of some deep south states dead of starvation in its bitter aftermath. The real intent of the Emancipation Proclamation is too often forgotten. It was a pragmatic bit of diplomatic posturing against British and French intervention, as they had Confederate sympathies. It was also a cynical attempt to incite a slave rebellion in order to weaken the Confederate Cause. Though such a revolt never happened. As Lincoln’s Secretary of State Seward cynically proclaimed, “We show our sympathy for slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in captivity where we can set them free.” At the Hampton Roads conference, when asked of the fate of black freedman following the war, Lincoln showed his concern for their welfare in proclaiming they can either “Root, hog, or die!” The revelations made in Complicity only make the indictment of northern hypocrisy all the more damning.

Not surprisingly, the modern Yankee northeasterner that whimpers for social and racial justice and other assorted limousine liberal causes remains smugly hulled up in the most racially segregated cities in the United States like Boston and Buffalo. Nothing like northern pretense and double standards! The more things change, the more things remain the same.