nice name.i love history,good are bad
yes harold,and no one ever wants to talk about this either
SLAVERY in the NORTH
African slavery is so much the outstanding feature of the South, in the unthinking view of it, that people often forget there had been slaves in all the old colonies. Slaves were auctioned openly in the Market House of Philadelphia; in the shadow of Congregational churches in Rhode Island; in Boston taverns and warehouses; and weekly, sometimes daily, in Merchant's Coffee House of New York.
African bondage in the colonies north of the Mason-Dixon Line has left a legacy in the economics of modern America and in the racial attitudes of the U.S. working class. Yet comparatively little is written about the 200-year history of Northern slavery. Slavery in the North never reached anywhere near the numbers of the South. It was, numerically, a drop in the bucket compared to the South. But the South, comparatively, was itself a drop in the bucket of New World slavery. Some 500,000 slaves were brought to the United States (or the colonies it was built from) in the history of the slave trade, which is a mere fraction of the estimated 10 million Africans forced to the Americas during that period.
Over time, slavery flourished in the South and failed in the North, except in New York City and southern New Jersey. This had little to do with morality and much to do with climate and economy. When the Northern states gave up the last remnants of legal slavery, in the generation after the Revolution, their motives were a mix of piety, morality, and ethics; fear of a growing black population; practical economics; and the fact that the Revolutionary War had broken the Northern slaveowners' power. But in the generally conservative, local process of emancipating a small number of Northern slaves, the Northern leadership turned its back on slavery as a national problem.
Northern slavery grew out of the paradox the new continent presented to its European masters. So much land was available, so cheaply, that no one was willing to come to America and sign on to work as a laborer. The dream that drew Europeans across the Atlantic was to own acres of land or make a fortune in trade or a craft. It was a reasonable expectation. In the 1680s a landless Welsh peasant from the mountains of Montgomeryshire could bring his whole family to Pennsylvania for ã10 and acquire 250 acres for another ã5; placing just one son in a trade in Britain would have cost the family ã7.
Yet workers were needed to clear the land, work the soil, build the towns, and exploit the new continent. Because of this acute labor shortage, all the American colonies turned to compulsory labor. In New Netherland, in the 1640s, a free European worker could expect to be paid 280 guilders a year, plus food and lodging. In the same time and place, experienced African slaves from the West Indies could be bought outright, for life, for 300 guilders.
"To claim that the colonies would not have survived without slaves would be a distortion," historian Edgar McManus writes, "but there can be no doubt that the development was significantly speeded by their labor. They provided the basic working force that transformed shaky outposts of empire into areas of permanent settlement." [1]
Or, to consider the situation from a broad view of the entire New World, "... export agriculture and effective colonization would not have occurred on the scale it did if enslaved Africans had not been brought to the New World. Except for precious metals, almost all major American exports to Europe were produced by Africans." [2]
Every New World colony was, in some sense, a slave colony. French Canada, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Cuba, Brazil -- all of them made their start in an economic system built upon slavery based on race. In all of them, slavery enjoyed the service of the law and the sanction of religion. In all of them the master class had its moments of doubt, and the slaves plotted to escape or rebel.
Roughly speaking, in New England black slaves were a valuable shipping commodity that soon proved useful at home, both in large-scale agriculture and in ship-building. The Mid-Atlantic colonies -- New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania -- had been under Dutch rule before the British conquered them in 1664, and there African slavery had been actively encouraged by the Dutch authorities. This was continued by the British.
Both the Dutch and English colonists in the North prefered to get their slaves from other New World colonies, rather than directly from Africa. Direct imports from Africa were considered too dangerous and difficult. Instead, the middle colonies originally sought their African slaves from Dutch Curaçao and later from British Jamaica and Barbados. "These slaves were familiar with Western customs and habits of work, qualities highly prized in a region where masters and slaves worked and lived in close proximity." [3] They also were more inured to Northern winters, which incapacitated or killed those direct from Africa. Both reasons contributed to the adjective often used to advertise West Indies slaves being sold in the North: "seasoned."
By the late colonial period, the average slave-owning household in New England and the Mid-Atlantic seems to have had about 2 slaves. Estates of 50 or 60 slaves were rare, but did exist in the Hudson Valley, eastern Connecticut, and the Narragansett region of Rhode Island. But the Northern climate set some barriers to large-scale agricultural slavery. The long winters, which brought no income on Northern farms, made slaves a burden for many months of the year, unless they could be hired out to chop wood or tend livestock. Unlike Southern plantations, Northern slavery tended to be urban.
"Slaveholding reflected social as well as economic standing, for in colonial times servants and retainers were visible symbols of rank and distinction. The leading families of Massachusetts and Connecticut used slaves as domestic servants, and in Rhode Island, no prominent household was complete without a large staff of black retainers. New York's rural gentry regarded the possession of black coachmen and footmen as an unmistakable sign of social standing. In Boston, Philadelphia, and New York the mercantile elite kept retinues of household slaves. Their example was followed by tradesmen and small retailers until most houses of substance had at least one or two domestics." [4]
In fact, the mounting Pennsylvania Quaker testimony against slavery in the 1750s and '60s was in large part aimed against the luxuriousness and extravagance of the Friends who had domestic slaves.
