The North made a lot of money off the slave trade....when are they going to pay reparations for that?RD2WINAGNBEAR86 said:Man, you almost sound like you want some of them thar slave owner reparations!!!Thee University said:
I was raised rural Texan and grew quickly to understand why there is still a large percentage of those living below the Mason-Dixon who have very, very little respect for the North and their attitudes toward the South.
[The great flaw of American abolitionism as it evolved toward demands of immediate and uncompensated emancipation was the fantasy that, if achieved, the goal would have no significant adverse consequences. Yet, there would obviously be at least two. First, abrupt emancipation would bankrupt the slaveholders who were often ultimately in debt to Northern bankers. Second, it would throw millions of ex-slaves out of work suddenly requiring them to care for themselves in a broken economy caused by plantation bankruptcies. That was, in fact, almost precisely what happened after the Civil War. Emancipation impoverished the entire region, black and white. Such results make a mockery of the pious initiatives by antebellum abolitionists demanding abrupt and uncompensated emancipation.]
-Philip Leigh
[The slave trade in particular was dominated by the northern maritime industry. Rhode Island alone was responsible for half of all U.S. slave voyages. James DeWolf and his family may have been the biggest slave traders in U.S. history, but there were many others involved. For example, members of the Brown family of Providence, some of whom were prominent in the slave trade, gave substantial gifts to Rhode Island College, which was later renamed Brown University.
While local townspeople thought of the DeWolfs and other prominent families primarily as general merchants, distillers and traders who supported ship-building, warehousing, insurance and other trades and businesses, it was common knowledge that one source of this business was the cheap labor and huge profits reaped from trafficking in human beings.
The North also imported slaves, as well as transporting and selling them in the south and abroad. While the majority of enslaved Africans arrived in southern ports Charleston, South Carolina was the largest market for slave traders, including the DeWolfs most large colonial ports served as points of entry, and Africans were sold in northern ports including Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Newport, Rhode Island.
The southern coastal states...were therefore home to the vast majority of enslaved persons. But there were slaves in each of the thirteen original colonies, and slavery was legal in the North for over two hundred years. While the northern states gradually began abolishing slavery by law starting in the 1780s, many northern states did not act against slavery until well into the 19th century, and their laws generally provided only for gradual abolition, allowing slave owners to keep their existing slaves and often their children. As a result, New Jersey, for instance, still had thousands of persons legally enslaved in the 1830s, and did not finally abolish slavery by law until 1846. As late as the outbreak of the Civil War, in fact, there were northern slaves listed on the federal census.]
-Sources: "Africans in America Part Two: Revolution." WGBH Interactive. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2narr1.html; David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, eds.
