“The North was in the perfect position, however, to deal with resistance and violence. By and large, the region’s relationship with slavery, though extraordinarily profitable, was a distant one. That distance allowed the North to minimize and even deny its links with the institution that fuel its prosperity.” Consider: *New England and the Mid-Atlantic began their economic ascent in the eighteenth century because the regions grew and shipped food to help feed millions of slaves-in the West Indies. *Northern Merchants, shippers, and financial institutions, many based in New York City, were crucial players in every phase of the national and international cotton trade. Meanwhile, the rivers and streams of the North, particularly in New England, were crowded with hundreds of textile mills. Well before the Civil War, the economy of the entire North relied heavily on cotton grown by millions of slaves-in the South. *Even some smaller industries had these distant, but vital, links to slavery. Starting before the Civil War and lasting up to the edge of the twentieth century, two Connecticut towns were an international center for ivory production, milling hundreds of thousands of tons of elephants tusks procured through the enslavement or death of as many as 2 million people-in Africa. Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank “Complicity; How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery” Page xxvi
Posted on: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 21:09:01 +0000
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