Plenty of Blame to Go Around
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Having read approx. 50 books on the history of slavery as it relates to the colonies and later the USA, I've always known that an essential piece of the puzzle was missing. I'm a southerner, born in Texas but with all of my ancestors from KY and VA. I'm a VMI grad and retired Army officer. Throughout my travels both in the US and abroad, it's always "the South" who takes most of, if not all, the flack for the evils of slavery. Frankly, after 55 years on this earth, it's gotten a bit stale and borish. Finally, someone appears to have tackled head-on America's dirty little secret- the North was just as responsible for American slavery as the South was. Neither could have survived or prospered without the other. I have no doubt this work has caused major concern in the New England area and has probably been near being banned in many libraries. It certainly won't end up being on the "must read" list of the "enlightened" living north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line. I hope my northern brethern will learn to take it (the truth) for what it is without too much of a backlash toward these extremely talented journalists. I truly applaud them for such a courageous effort toward telling the entire, unadulterated truth, at least to the best of their ability (certainly more info will be uncovered about this subject). Bravo to all of them. I trust that all well-read Americans will buy this book and really ponder its message. I'm marking through my softcover copy and now intend to buy a hardback version as well with the intent of getting the authors to autograph it; it's that good!
Interesting, But Lacks Nuance and Context
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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.
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