New Englanders and non-Southerners in general often try to take the moral high ground when debating historical issues with Southerners. One of their most common tactics is to depict the South as a land of slavery and racism and the North as a land of equality and human rights. According to this narrative, Northerners sacrificed their lives in a moral crusade to abolish slavery and save the Union while Southerners fought to preserve slavery and destroy the Union. The Northern States were the “Free States” while the Southern States were the “Slave States.” This is the typical interpretation of history that goes on in the media and government schools today.
One of the many problems with this view of history is that the slave trade which brought West Africans to the United States was largely a New England enterprise. Yankee businessmen accumulated vast fortunes built upon their domination of the slave trade.
The Boston Tea Party Historical Society’s website says of the slave trade:
New England colonies, including Massachusetts and the city of Boston actively participated in the so-called Triangular Trade. The trade was called “triangular” because of the specific pattern in which the goods were exchanged. Like any other trade the purpose was to bring goods from overseas that were in high demand at home and trade them for goods that would be more expensive if sold overseas.
In most cases the triangular trade relied on importing slaves from Africa to work on plantations, but unlike Brazil and other South American countries such as Peru that traded with Africa directly, the triangular trade involved three destinations. It required more planning and carried higher risk and as a result was more profitable….
The leg of the trade between Africa and American or Caribbean colonies became known as the infamous “Middle Passage” where slaves were transported in below-human conditions. The mortality rates were 12% or higher and were considered the “cost of the business”.
The slave trade was in fact a large and highly-profitable part of the economy in New England that involved far more people those those who actually operated the slave ships themselves:
Few people living today in Rhode Island realize that the slave trade was once a vital component of the Ocean State’s economy.
“The numbers are astonishing,” says Ray Rickman, project director of an exhibit detailing the slave trade in Rhode Island which will be on display at the Jamestown Philomenian Library for the next three days, starting with an opening reception tonight.
“In an 80-year period, people in Rhode Island got rich” from the slave trade….
Slavery was everywhere in Rhode Island, Rickman says. Slaves worked on South County farms and in the mansions in Newport. But it was the slave trade that was the “number one financial activity” for Rhode Island from 1720 to 1807.
The slave trade started here with the spirits: Rhode Islanders would manufacture rum, which they would ship to Africa and sell or trade for slaves. “Rhode Islanders were really good at making rum,” he says.
Then the Rhode Islanders would transport the slaves in the Caribbean and the southern colonies, which later became states, where the slaves would be sold or traded for sugar cane. “They would fill the boat with sugar” that was brought home to the Ocean State to make the rum, Rickman says.
It was a trading triangle, he says. Slaves were packed below decks on the ships and many became sick and died. Their treatment was brutal and inhuman.
Many Rhode Island residents were involved in the slave trade. There were “16 or 17 rum factories” in the state. “Newport had six,” Rickman said.
Wooden barrels to transport the rum were manufactured in northern Rhode Island. Trees were also felled in the northern areas of the state for the slave ships, many which “were built everywhere – Newport, Bristol, Providence,” Rickman says.
Bakers in South County would make the bread used to feed the Africans who were being transported in the ship’s hold from western Africa.
Paul Davis at the Providence Journal writes:
For more than 75 years, Rhode Island ruled the American slave trade.
On sloops and ships called Endeavor, Success and Wheel of Fortune, slave captains made more than 1,000 voyages to Africa from 1725 to 1807. They chained their human cargo and forced more than 100,000 men, women and children into slavery in the West Indies, Havana and the American colonies.
The traffic was so lucrative that nearly half the ships that sailed to Africa did so after 1787 — the year Rhode Island outlawed the trade.
Rum fueled the business. The colony had nearly 30 distilleries where molasses was boiled into rum. Rhode Island ships carried barrels of it to buy African slaves, who were then traded for more molasses in the West Indies which was returned to Rhode Island.
By the mid-18th century, 114 years after Roger Williams founded the tiny Colony of Rhode Island, slaves lived in every port and village. In 1755, 11.5 percent of all Rhode Islanders, or about 4,700 people, were black, nearly all of them slaves.
David S. Reynolds, in reviewing Charles Rappleye’s book Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution writes:
“I grew up in Rhode Island, thinking of my native state as the cradle of freedom…. Rappleye’s book provides vivid testimony to the painful fact that the Browns and the tiny state they helped form were indeed all too much like America, fractured between the ideal of liberty and the reality of chattel slavery. The pugnacious, high-spirited John Brown, born in 1736 (and definitely not to be confused with the later abolitionist), was a Rhode Island business leader and politician whose commercial interests included shipping, rum, banking, iron production – and the slave trade. John’s milder younger brother, Moses, participated in all of these businesses. Like John, Moses owned slaves, but a conversion to the Quaker faith in the early 1770s inspired him to set them free. Thereafter Moses was an ardent abolitionist dead set against the traffic in humans that swelled the coffers of his brother.
How were slaves and even free Black people in general treated in Colonial New England?
“In keeping with the usual pattern, a higher percentage of blacks meant a more strict control mechanism. South Kingstown had perhaps the harshest local slave control laws in New England. After 1718, for instance, if any black slave was caught in the cottage of a free black person, both were whipped. After 1750, anyone who sold so much as a cup of hard cider to a black slave faced a crushing fine of £30,” historian Douglass Harper writes…. “Rhode Islanders are poorly educated in school about slavery,” Rickman says.
So what about the historical narrative of the South as a land of slavery and racism while the North was a land of racial equality and human rights? There are many problems with this narrative, as pointed out above. It is true that by the 1860s New Englanders had largely turned against slavery. Of course, it should also be pointed out that by then their region had already benefited handsomely from the institution (and acquired capital which could then be put into factories and other enterprises) and slaves were not profitable in their industrial-based economy the same way that they were in the agricultural South (though by the 1860s Southern cotton was starting to lose out on the international market to foreign competition – if war had not brought slavery to a violent end it’s likely that the changing economy would have made the institution far less profitable in the South and perhaps led to its peaceful decline there as it did in New England and elsewhere in the world). We don’t know for sure what would have happened if Lincoln’s War had been avoided. None of the people from that era are alive today. None of the slaves, the slave-masters, the traders or those otherwise involved in the slave trade are alive today either. Perhaps one can see that the history of slavery in North America is not as clear as we are often led to believe. The wisdom of the Bible would seem to be in order when it comes to assigning blame and talking about slavery in the various regions of North America: those without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.
A very good and finally honest article from the North. It is a good thing to hear and much better than the ” lets hate a blame all Southerners for slavery stuff” that has been spread all over the nation and world for the past 150 years. It is only sad that in the former times the truth was not told and a hypocritical ,judging and a stirring of racial problems, as well as poverty was flung on the South which really the majority of the people never had any interest in Slavery and fought the war for other reasons and mainly self defense!I am only afraid that the former teaching has gone on so long that it will never be corrected. It is true that the minority of slave holders that were cruel should have been punished but also the Yankees involved. It is only very sad for me as a Southerner who always had African American friends that I was loved that so many times I have experienced hateful people from the North who prejudged me just for being a Southerner.