This represents the last 12% of the slave population and small fraction of a percent of the slave owner population.  These are large agricultural business of the time period and the owners were more apt to be removed from the actual operation of the business.  Although it is difficult to trace specific people from census data, several of the largest plantations were absentee owned.

With at least 75% of the slave population being held by mid-sized to large businesses the contention that this was a system based principally on concepts of racial superiority becomes difficult to support. Businesses are not driven by philosophy unless specific political and social positions are associated with economic rewards and penalties. The Chattel slave system was the labor system that existed at the time and it became the source of skilled labor to supply cotton and other agricultural products to a worldwide market that grew very rapidly during this time period.  The south was able to meet the demand for cotton not because there were unique conditions that other potential suppliers throughout the world lacked, it could be grown in a great many locations.  The South dominated the market during this time period because there was a work force along with logistics that was able to rapidly meet the market.  By the mid 1850’s cotton was losing steam because other producers in other areas of the world were starting to catch up. Although difficult to precisely quantify, a great many of these business owners were not particularly enthusiastic about secession or the Confederacy or even the institution of slavery. When that time came they simply adapted to a different labor system.

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Due to a convergence of economic circumstance, the demand for the slave workforce grew sharply in the South while it had fallen off dramatically everywhere else in the western world with the rise in overall population and increased mechanization. There had arisen a global abolitionist movement led by British abolitionist William Wilberforce that led to the abolition of the slave trade in the British West Indies in 1807, emancipation there in 1830’s, and a global abolitionist movement. (2 p. 15)(this was only a practical goal in the western world). In the case of England, emancipation didn’t affect the English Isles, which had long had excess population as opposed to a labor shortage prior to the industrial revolution, but rather ended slavery in British processions in the Caribbean 8000 miles away. Even in the sugar plantations of Brazil and Cuba, which was labor intensive work, the number of free blacks was rapidly approaching the number of slaves.  In Mexico gradual manumission had practically ended slavery before it was abolished in 1829 (2 p. 15). The South was going against the flow of history but not of global economics. Still all of this directly impacted only a minority of the white Southern population and was probably of more direct and general benefit to those in the North.

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Slavery and Race in the North

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Slavery eventually died in the North but it was a long, generally unguided, process driven more by economics and demographics than morality. While slave ownership (but not transport) was never central to the New England economy, it played a key role in its transformation from subsistence to a market economy (8 p. 23). The slave population atrophied due to high mortality, lower birth rates, the ending of the transatlantic slave trade, and slaves being “sold south”.  Despite this, in 1810, there were still 27,000 slaves in free states (9 p. 228) and, even as slavery formally was outlawed, it was replaced with other forms of pseudo-slavery.

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The slave population in New England was not spread uniformly across New England but was clustered along the seacoast, in major cities, and in a few agricultural areas (8 p. 15). Slaveholding was more deeply entrenched in the rural North. Urban slave owners, especially artisans willingly switched to free labor from slave labor (9 p. 237) as it was more economical for them especially as the size of the labor force and availability of skilled labor increased. In agricultural areas it was more entrenched but still faded gradually with less than 800 slaves remaining in Pennsylvania in 1810. In New York, in 1800 more than half the white households in Kings County on Long Island still owned slaves, as did one-third of those in Richmond County and one-fifth of those in Queens. These numbers gradually declined from that point. One-third of the white households in Kings, one-quarter in Richmond, and one-eighth in Queens counties still owned slaves by 1810(9 p. 237).

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Arguments against emancipation stressed potential social and economic costs holding that emancipation would create an economic underclass of people who would not be self-supporting. It is important to realize that this was a common issue and concern that would be made worse by the results of British emancipation in the Caribbean. The New York abolition law of 1799 and the New Jersey act of 1804, along with similar legislation in Pennsylvania, mandated the eventual liquidation of slavery but actually freed no slaves.(9 p. 234)

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As slavery waned in the North and also in the upper South the process of emancipation frequently involved a good deal of negotiation.  Slave owners had an advantage here but slaves were not entirely lacking in negotiating skills gained from independently hiring out their labor and selling goods in markets.  In Many Thousands Gone, author Ira Berlin described the process as follows:

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“They pressed their owners for the opportunity to purchase themselves and their families, promising fidelity and hard work for a term of years, or in some cases decades, in exchange for eventual freedom. If refused, slaves-drawing upon the customary right to select their own master-schemed for another, more compliant owner to purchase them. If those plans came to naught, slaves turned sullen, malingered, and in some cases simply walked away from slavery. Occasionally, they lashed out at their owners with violence and the threat of yet more violence. During the 1780s and 1790s the slaves' insistent demands broadened the avenues to freedom. The number of manumissions increased rapidly in New York and New Jersey, slavery's remaining northern bastions.”(9 p. 235)

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The conditions of those who exited slavery were frequently not much different from life under bondage. Conditional manumissions and indentures were contributing factors to this as was the nature of work. Free blacks would commonly continue to reside in the same household with their former owners. The frequency of this appears to have increased in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s. Domestic service, service jobs, and other marginally skilled roles were the norm including food preparation and catering, cutting hair, cleaning chimneys, and driving coaches. In 1800 roughly one fifth of slaveholding families in New York City had free Blacks living with them as did one-third in Kings Country (9 p. 238). In New York there was a Black artisan population but this was the exception and not the norm. Free Blacks continued to be governed by the same laws and regulations that they did as slaves including curfews, travel restrictions, inability to vote, serve on juries, or testify in court, and exclusion from militia service (9 pp. 238-39).

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Gradually from the time of the revolution forward the Black population in the north became increasingly urbanized which was also impacted by the arrival of Caribbean immigrants. By 1830, there were hardly any Blacks in the rural North.  In 1826 a Hudson Valley newspaper wrote "few of this ill-fated race, more wise and faithful than the rest, still remain in their old chimney corners to spend their days in comfort(9 p. 243).” There also developed a gender imbalance with many more black women than men in Northern cities.  In New York City, women from 14 to 26, prime household formation years, outnumbered men two to one. This was due to young men being sold south and others finding work at sea which was the largest employer of free black men (9 p. 244).

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As the New England antislavery movement developed, the term “freedom” had significantly different meanings to different people which were, in turn, not what people would assume the meaning to be today projecting modern ideas back to a distant time. To the slave, freedom aligned most closely with the impression given by the antislavery rhetoric of an independent life with legal rights and economic opportunity. To slave owners, it could mean a combination of things including freedom from the newly recognized sin of owning slaves, freedom from managing slaves, and freedom from the continual presence of slaves. For whites who didn’t own slaves, it meant freedom from ongoing political narrative and ultimately freedom from the existence of slaves in their society (8 p. 163). The common point here being that amongst whites in the north, freedom didn’t mean emancipation and inclusion of slaves but the absence of them. Because the elimination of a category of people was most commonly equated with the elimination of those occupying that category, ending slavery was seen as the removal of the unwanted black presence and the restoration of New England to its original ideal state as a homogenous white society.  Quoting Emerson, “The abolitionist seeks to abolish slavery, but because he wishes to abolish the black man.”(8 pp. 163-64)

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When the Spanish conquered Mexico they wrestled with the subject of whether the conquered Indians were truly human or a separate species. They rightly concluded they were human and were treated accordingly especially with regard to the Catholic faith. In the mid-1800’s the academic and religious elite of the North again came upon this question but tended to reach other conclusions as the result of higher criticism of Biblical authority. In the 1830’s, prominent Philadelphia physician and pre-Darwinian scientist George Morton used measurements from his famous collection of skulls to determine that Blacks had the smallest cranial capacity of all human samples and were “doomed to inferiority”(10 p. 182). In Crania Americana, Morton “presumed that the Bible had been misread. Caucasians and Negroes were too different to both be descended from Adam through Noah.”  Morton speculated that God must have intervened at the time of the Flood to reshape mankind (10 p. 186)” (11 pp. 31-32). Josiah Nott and Louis Agassiz, who were followers of Morton, wrote a 700 page paper titled “Types of Mankind” intended to prove blacks were a separate species than whites. The paper concluded that “science – not the Bible – must decide the true origins of mankind”(11 p. 32)

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Despite emancipation, the black population while not growing dramatically didn’t decline either.  This led to more active steps to remove them including targeting people or “warning out” as undesirables under the legal settlement laws, taxing their presence, advocating their deportation to Africa as advocated by the American Colonization Society, and, finally, conducting armed raids on urban black communities and associated institutions(8 p. 165).

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The presence of a black population in their midst was perhaps a reminder of the far greater role the region had played in the establishment and continuation of slavery which was transport and the related enterprise of shipbuilding. During the presidency of John Quincy Adams from 1825 to 1829, Great Britain and France were attempting to put a stop to the then illegal business of slave transport which became illegal in the states in 1808.  They asked permission to board and search US vessels but President Adams denied the request (2 p. 16). Why? Because the New England merchant marine was still very active transporting slaves to the South and other locations in the New World and remained so into the 1880’s. The story of the last slaves to arrive here provides an interesting illustration.

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In 1859, members of the Takkoi nation in West Africa were attacked by the women Amazon warriors of the infamous Dahomey. The old and sick were beheaded and their heads mounted on sticks as a trophy as was their custom. Those remaining were taken as slaves to be sold at the beach at Dmydah. On the second day the group stopped to smoke the heads of their decapitated victims due to the smell. The survivors awaited the arrival of a slave ship which, in this case, was the Cotilda sailing out of Maine. After loading those selected by the captain, the Cotilda outran a British man-of-war that attempted to intercept it, made it to Mobile and proceeded upriver where the one hundred captives were offloaded. Due to timing, their lives as slaves were short and the new arrivals created the settlement of Plateau, Alabama where some of their descendants live today. (12) (This account was derived from Dust Tracks on a Road by African-American Anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and included in Samuel Mitcham’s, It wasn’t about Slavery as well as the cited source, H.V Traywick Jr on the Abbeville Institute blog)

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While black-white racial issues are seen today as the most pressing problems of this sort, to those living in this place and time, the increasing presence of Catholic immigrants would likely have seemed to be a bigger problem. During the colonial and early national period, the Catholic Church in America was small, consisting largely of displaced English gentry, and isolated to Maryland (13 pp. 76-78). The rapidly growing immigrant workforce in the North was largely nominally Catholic upon arrival and heavily Irish. To the New England clergy and practicing northern Protestants, the Catholic Church was commonly associated with the anti-Christ and Irish were seen by those from East Anglia as an inferior race however these religious concerns didn’t outweigh the economic benefits these immigrants provided employers and investors. In response to Protestant attacks, the nominal Catholics evolved into a sect heavily defined by their faith.  This was to be ethno-religious conflict that dominated 19th century American politics.

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In explaining the desperate condition of Blacks in the North during the antebellum period the simplest solution is to associate it solely with racism which in turn led to social isolation and economic suffering but there is another explanation to consider.  Free blacks in the North were making some slight progress prior to 1820 which corresponds with the start of mass European immigration(14 pp. 23-25). Author Roy Beck documents this in his book “Back of the Hiring Line” which assesses the impact of mass immigration on Black Americans along with other poorer or underclass people. The Irish and especially the German immigrants were willing to work longer hours for less pay and were preferred by northern employers (14 p. 25). The new immigrants in turn saw Blacks as posing a threat to their livelihood. Although there was a natural labor shortage during this period based on American born labor, immigration completely wiped it out and drove wages down. Regardless of whether a group of people are liked by other groups, so long as they have some measure of economic power through market forces, they will also retain some degree of political power.  In this case immigration kept that from happening.  A lower immigration rate could well have altered history.

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Slave Culture

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In addressing slave culture there are a few fundamental questions that must be addressed in defining its breadth and consistency. First, is it synonymous with Black culture as there were significant numbers of free Blacks especially in the Border States and Upper South? Also how consistent was it across different regions of the country? In comparing it to “white” culture and society which “white” culture is it being compared to? Unfortunately all these only have general answers. Because the number of enslaved people heavily outnumbered the number of free blacks during this time period and because many free Blacks were at one time enslaved, it would be reasonable to assume that Black culture largely aligned with Slave culture but, of course, there would have been exceptions. In Many thousands Gone, author Ira Berlin provides a detailed view of the origins of slavery in the Americas and addresses different regions separately because of the differences but again, there was also a good deal of commonality. Because the Puritan culture of the Northeast was becoming dominant, it was better documented so comparisons would tend heavily to be with this group and conclusions shouldn’t be projected onto other groups. In general, slave culture would have been least like Puritan culture and most like Scot-Irish or Borderlander culture or that of Irish Catholic immigrants.

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Economically slaves were not entirely without bargaining power and had some degree of freedom in conducting basic trade. Slave owners were economically responsible for slaves and making the slave as economically self reliant as possible was actually in their best interest.  Slaves who were principally agricultural performed work that was not constant and peaked during planting and harvesting times(9 pp. 278-84). Slaves could withhold labor, work slowly, or simply run away.  Slaves commonly grew their own food, participated in petty trade at local markets, and hired out their own labor, especially in the North and upper South, giving them some experience with free market trade and negotiation. Their accumulated earnings generally remained small but this did provide the ability to acquire some processions and to engage in activities that required some level of disposable income. An Anglican missionary in the Chesapeake area observed slaveholders regularly gave their slaves, "one Day in a Week to clear Ground and plant it, to subsist themselves and Families to free themselves from the Trouble and Charge of Feeding and clothing their Slaves (9 p. p. 57)." The concept of a “vacation” where a worker could be gone for multiple consecutive days was not known in the free labor in the North until well after the War Between the States, but it was an established practice in slave culture(15 p. 55).

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Generally slaves that developed artisan skills in various trades, became domestic servants, or worked in provisioning trades involved with transporting goods had better and more stable lives and it wasn’t uncommon for slaves to pass on trades to their children. Working in provisioning related trades also provided a good deal of mobility and the ability to develop associations that were not tied tightly to a highly specific location(9 pp. p. 56-58). Provisioning or logistics required a fairly large number of people during this time period. Plantations and farms required not just waggoneers but also blacksmiths, saddlers, harness makers, and tanners. Many tanners also learned to be shoemakers. Throughout the Upper South, plantations and farms housed proportionally more skilled workers and fewer field hands(9 pp. 266-70).

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The awakenings were well received by the slave population and changed domestic lives as well. Religious participation appears to be comparable to the overall population although religious services were generally segregated in terms of seating with the exception of Catholics which were fully integrated (7 p. 157). Some slave owners manumitted their slaves because they concluded slavery to be contrary to God’s commands.  Sometimes, however, there were other motives.  Ira Berlin in Many Thousands Gone noted, “To be sure, some emancipators merely mouthed antislavery rhetoric while ridding themselves of unwanted slaves. Indeed, economic changes seemed to reduce the cost of subscribing to abolitionist principles, as the seeming surplus of slaves allowed for selective manumission without affecting the economy of the region. The growth of a class of free blacks-who who would support themselves most of the year but be available for hire at planting and harvest time-seemed to fit better with the new agricultural regime than with the old monoculture. (9 p. 284)”

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As overall population density and mobility increased in the 19th century, the slave population also increased and became more mobile making it easier to maintain an active community life. This was in contrast to the relative isolation of the 18th century in most rural locations. Some slaves enjoyed the freedom of mobility becoming what one slave owner referred to as “great ramblers”(9 pp. p. 266-67). Economic changes with the decline of slavery in the North and Upper South coupled with its expansion in the Deep South caused domestic dislocation.  The slave didn’t have many effective strategies for dealing with large dislocations on the long term but could sometimes establish some leverage by developing non-agricultural skills.  In the case of local movements of people, visiting rights were common which were generally weekly(9 pp. 270-72).

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To this point a description has been provided of some of the context and characteristics of slave life. While much of it might seem surprising to most, none of this defines slave culture in contrast to the other cultures that surrounded it. In renegade History, Thaddeus Russell devotes a chapter to this and the contrasts create a vivid picture not just of slave culture but of white cultures, most notably that of the Puritans and northern Evangelicalism.  He did this, in part, by tracing the life of Dan Emmett who helped create the genre of the “black face” musical. The story begins with young Dan’s early life in the puritan upper Midwest.

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“Dan Emmett knew well what it meant to be a free American. Born in 1815 in Ohio—a state where slavery was banned—he came of age during a time when the meaning of freedom was being hammered out. As Emmett learned, American freedom was curiously burdensome and restrictive. His father and mother knew this before he was born. Sometime in the early eighteen hundreds, they trekked to the flat plain between the Ohio River and Lake Erie and settled in Mount Vernon, which was then a few small buildings in a forest of tall trees. Like other Americans who headed west in search of the physical foundation of American freedom—land—Abraham and Sarah Emmett found that to be free was to work hard and constantly. Abraham felled trees and then shaped them into logs, from which he built their home by hand. To make a living, he pounded hot metal into tools and weapons as the town’s only blacksmith, while Sarah undoubtedly worked even harder as the housekeeper and mother of four children.(15 p. 47)”

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Life as an independent yeoman farmer especially on the frontier, as shown from this account and innumerable others, was constant work and required a wide variety of generalized skills. Instead of hiring or buying workers, they raised them.  The children then would repeat the cycle. They did help each other but highly dispersed populations made this an irregular event.  As in this example, they may develop a specialized trade in addition to everything else to provide a steady but modest income. Contrast this to the lives most slaves lived either on plantations or increasingly in urban areas where there was significant specialization of labor, a higher level of automation, and work hours that were more in line with what someone might expect today.

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Hard work was unavoidable to survive in pre industrial rural America and is not to be scorned. This is an important part of our common history and few today could or would be able to live this sort of life. In Puritan culture, however, hard and continuous work was celebrated as an end in itself and leisure time scorned. This sort of thinking in varying degrees spread to other groups through the denominations of the gentry (Congregationalist, Episcopalian, and some Presbyterian).  Viennese immigrant and author, Francis Grund observed this saying, “There is, probably, no people on earth with whom business constitutes pleasure, and industry amusement, in an equal degree with the inhabitants of the United States of America (15 pp. 48-49).”  This is the Puritan work ethic. Schools in this tradition discouraged play and emphasized self denial.  One lesson from the United States Spelling Book (commonly used in the early 19th century) stated in part, “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye; is not of him that made us; but is of the world. (15 p. 50)”

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The typical life of a slave was not burdened by this sort of thinking.  In the 1930’s hundreds of writers were hired by the Federal Writers Project to record the memories of former slaves. Some did tell of whippings, oppressive overseers, loved ones being sold, and a longing to be free but this was the exception and not the rule.  The solid majority had a positive view of that time and wished they could return. Junius Quattlebaum, interviewed by Henry Grant gave a fairly representative response when he said, “Well, sir, you want to talk to me ’bout them good old days back yonder in slavery time, does you?” “I call them good old days, ’cause I has never had as much since”(15 pp. 50-51). Slave society and culture was in many respects envied by whites, especially those who sought to live up to Puritan standards of what constituted a “good American”, and those who sought to create a singular American culture knew it and saw this to be a problem.

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Leading abolitionist Theodore Weld, who gave the abolitionist movement its largest following during the 1840’s saw one of slavery’s greatest evil as the promotion of sloth that denied the incentive to work which produced “ignorance and stupidity”(15 p. 53).Abolitionists carried forward a paradigm from some of the founding fathers that external controls should be replaced with strict self-discipline.  Related to this point, many abolitionists also led a campaign against the use of corporal punishment on children.  Weld wrote a child rearing manual where he contended that, “the child must be made his own disciplinarian(15 p. 62).” While abolitionists disagreed on many things including immediate vs, gradual emancipation, colonization, and whether blacks (and other European peoples) were naturally inferior, they all agreed that slavery made people less industrious. They saw the laziness of the slaves and the masters as threatening the hard working puritan culture of the North.

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The perceived sexual freedom of slaves was especially offensive to abolitionists. Henry Stanton of Lane Seminary wrote, “The state of morals among slaves, especially in regard to licentiousness is sickening! (15 p. 63)”. James Thome, who was the son of a Kentucky planter but took up the abolitionist cause at Lane, referred to what he had seen as “one great Sodom”(15 p. 63). An early Abolitionist journal made special note that Southern Law didn’t prohibit such things as laws in Puritan areas did (although rarely enforced). While these perceptions appear to have been significantly overstated they do appear to have had greater sexual freedom and expression than what was observed in the Puritan Evangelical culture which was particularly oppressive(15 p. 65).  Indirectly related to this point, slaves often dressed better and more extravagantly than their white counterparts. The clothing of the prevailing white culture sought to be inconspicuous and specifically avoid outward appearance of sensuality.  Russell cited Cornelius Mathews in 1843 stating, “Cornelius Mathews, the poet of “Young America,” described the “Man in the Republic” as living “With plainness in thy daily pathway walk / And disencumbered of excess.” Women were instructed to wear dresses of “surpassing neatness and simplicity,” and respectable urban men were expected to become what a business directory in the 1850s called “the unknown knight, with his plain unostentatious black armor. (15 pp. 71-72)”

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Slave/Black culture had music, as did that of the Scot-Irish and Irish Catholics, while that of the Puritan by in large did not outside of church. American music developed as a mixture of those groups with whom music played a significant role in their life and was largely Southern in its origins. Slave culture had large and regular gatherings, dances, and feasts while these things were rare amongst the white gentry although it wasn’t uncommon for some of these to actually try to join the slaves in their enjoyment of life(15 pp. 72-75). In general it could be rightfully said that Slave culture highly valued recreation and community while undervaluing work and responsibility. On the other side of the scale there was Puritan culture where work was an end in itself and those things that would make life bearable were seen as sinful or at least frivolous. Most today would conclude that there was an appropriate balance somewhere between the two extremes.

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While slave culture was certainly influenced by the Borderlander and Cavalier cultures in the South, especially with regard to religion, the influence was by no means one directional with Slave culture and, in a broader sense, black culture helping to create common cultural characteristics in the South. Black historian John Blassingame in his book, The Slave Community, observed, “Southern whites not only adapted their language and religion to that of the slaves but also adapted agricultural practices, sexual attitudes, rhythm of life, architecture, food and social relations to African patterns.(16 p. 101)”   Even with regard to speech the Southern dialect blended the two cultures as noted in the 1847 Charleston based Southern Presbyterian Review, “Our children catch the very dialect of our servants, and lisp all their perversions of the English tongue, long before they learn to speak it correctly.(11 p. 34)”

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Abolitionism

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The abolition movement in the North was deeply associated with Northern Evangelicalism and many of the prominent people were initially at least clergy or teachers in Northern church affiliated colleges. Most had solid Puritan or Yankee backgrounds which would begin as Congregationalists and then evolved to Unitarians or Transcendentalists and eventually wound up as simply progressive political activists. The two most prominent people in northern abolitionism were Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Weld. Garrison was the co-publisher of the anti-slavery newspaper, “The Liberator” which was first printed in 1831. Before looking at the specifics of the abolitionism, a key data point to remain focused on is that the movement was very small and shrinking. There were hundreds of small abolitionist societies or groups in the North at the time of the war totaling about 200,000 members (17 p. 46) having shrunk from as many as  400,000 in the early 1840’s. This is well under 2% of the total adult population of Union states and the percentage of active abolitionists in the Union Army would have been no higher than this and probably somewhat lower as the membership of these groups was generally not made up of people who would fight wars and a large percentage were female. For a time there was a larger abolition movement in the South but the antics and threats of violence from the northern abolitionists effectively killed it.

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Garrison became the face of the wing of the anti-slavery movement demanding immediate, uncompensated emancipation. Historian and author Thomas Fleming described his combative and dismissive style by saying “He found no conflict between this style and his religious beliefs because both nicely complimented the prevailing attitude of New England Federalists.  They were inclined to believe in the moral depravity of anyone who disagreed with them” (18 p. 103). When Garrison was unable to sell his paper to a white market, he turned to free Blacks as a new market segment that supported him well.  When Garrison would travel to speak to Black gatherings, they were largely drawn together to oppose colonization. Garrison also circulated free copies through other periodicals which made their way to the South.  The letters to the editor were overwhelmingly negative, which he would rebuttal, and his adversaries, through this process, actually expanded the distribution of the Liberator and helped to make it successful (somewhat similar to modern social media).(18 pp. 99-104)

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In first issue of the Liberator Garrison warned if slavery wasn’t abolished peacefully it would be abolished by the sword in a poem that read in part, “Wo to the innocent babe – the guilty sire – Sire and citizen alike shall die! Red-handed Slaughter his revenge shall feed, And havoc yell his ominous death-cry.” In August of 1833, Nat Turner, who was a self-appointed preacher who believed that God had ordained him to free Virginia’s slaves, led a revolt resulting in the slaughter of at least 55 people including women and children. Garrison, showing himself to be remarkably politically tone deaf, led with the headline “INSURRECTION IN VIRGINIA” and went on to say “What was poetry – imagination – In January is now bloody reality” and “In his fury against the revolters, who will remember the wrongs?””(18 pp. 99-104)

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Garrison on numerous occasions barely escaped bodily harm when attempting to speak in Northern cities. In his home town of Boston he was led around with a noose around his neck but was rescued by authorities(18 pp. 99-104). He saw no difference between emancipation in Britain that resulted in freeing 850,000 slaves thousands of miles away and in freeing several million as close as a few hundred miles away Quoting again from Thomas Fleming:

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“What was to stop tens of thousands of ex-slaves from heading for New York and competing with white workers for jobs? If employment was not forthcoming, they would have to be fed and clothed by the city or state government to prevent an insurrection that would make Nat Turner’s eruption a mere skirmish.  William Lloyd Garrison and his followers remained tragically blind to the crucial difference between British and American slavery.”  (18 p. 136)

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Weld was from upstate New York and was in many ways a counter character to Garrison. His early career as an abolitionist was that of a traveling speaker as opposed to an author and publisher going from church to church. He was a charismatic figure who drew large crowds and was largely responsible for the early growth of the Anti-Slavery Society which raised enough money for 27 full time paid employees. His fundraising also helped support a vast number of pamphlets and other forms of literature. (18 pp. 129-36)

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His audience was primarily Yankees who migrated to New York and then the upper Midwest.  He projected an activist Puritan faith and style much in line with the Awakening movements in these areas.  Weld enrolled in Lane Seminary in Ohio where he called upon the school to enroll Cincinnati’s free Blacks which they refused to do.  Lane’s president, Lyman Beecher, was more concerned with Catholicism as the most pressing evil to be done away with. Weld then led a revolt resulting in a large number of Lane’s students transferring to Oberlin.  Oberlin was then and has remained a central institution in liberal progressivism. (18 pp. 129-36)

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Weld eventually came to question the abolition movement in part because of a couple significant scandals and in part due to the violent message and aggressive rhetoric that he increasingly couldn’t reconcile with his faith. In a speech in 1844 where he asked “could any person or group of persons hope to reform the American world in any fundamental way by calling slave owners names? Were Christian charity and any hope of mutual respect being destroyed by abolitionism?” concluding they were he withdrew from the movement.(18 pp. 129-36)

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The abolitionist movement split politically in 1840 when the Garrison wing, requiring a commitment to immediate uncompensated emancipation, won a crucial vote that led to a large part of the membership breaking away and forming a new organization. Garrison had increasingly taken to attacking more mainstream churches that favored a gradual approach and still may have seen colonization as at least part of the solution to the problem. The split in Abolitionism also formed around evangelical and non-evangelical factions.  The evangelical wing was Armenian emphasizing perfectionism and generated mission efforts to the South while the non-evangelical wing had a higher concentration of Quakers, Transcendentalists, and Unitarians and was more political producing pamphlets, newspapers, and encouraging slave rebellions. (11 p. 57) Many descriptions of Garrison at this point place him as having drifted to Transcendentalism.

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Evangelical abolitionists were more orthodox in the language but theology and rhetoric was not necessarily that different. Wesleyan missionary Daniel Wilson referred to the South as the “land of whips and chains and mobs”.  Another Wesleyan missionary Jesse McBride maintained that “slaveholders could not be Christians nor gain salvation” and that “horse thieves were angels compared to them”. American Missionary Association (AMA) missionary John C. Richardson threatened Southerners with the false claim that “there are 40 thousand blacks in Canada training daily and they will come down here and cut your throats”(11 p. 63).  Northern missionaries to the South or targeting the South were typically young and inspired by Charles Finney’s millennial theology.

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A key difference between the evangelical and non-evangelical abolitionists was their rigid legalism.  This was consistent with prior Puritan thought although taken to new and higher levels and foreshadowed the fundamentalists movement making it very significant looking forward. “Economic exploitation, sexual license, gambling, drinking and dueling, disregard for family ties – all traits associated with slave owning – could easily be set in bold contrast with the pure ideals of Yankee evangelicalism.”(11 p. p. 63) This carried the doctrine of decisional regeneration into all areas of life that was not typical of Southern Christianity which was more Calvinistic meaning that it held a higher view of God’s sovereignty and lower view of man’s intellect.(11 p. 63)

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The abolition movement lacked large numbers and also had relatively few key leaders although numerous people, many of them women, who were involved in abolitionism would go on to take leading roles in other activist causes. In the end the abolition movement was small and fragmented but had a good deal of political influence.  While its role in causing the war can be debated, it controlled and hijacked the dialogue. It does stand as an example of the influence a very small group of people can have on the destiny of others.  To quote from Thomas Fleming: “Perhaps the most amazing—and dismaying—aspect of this raging final stage of the abolitionist disease in the public mind was the relatively small number of men who perpetrated it. One of slavery’s best historians estimates that the paranoid phase of the campaign was launched by little more than twenty-five people.”(18 p. 179)

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The entire northern abolitionist movement is summed by renowned southern historian Clyde Wilson as follows:

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“Abolitionism, despite what has been said later, was not based on Sympathy for the black people nor on an ideal of natural rights. It was based on the hysterical conviction that Southern slaveholders were evil sinners who stood in the way of fulfillment of America’s driving mission to establish Heaven on Earth. Most abolitionists had little knowledge or interest in black people or knowledge of life in the South . . . . many abolitionists expected that evil Southern whites and Blacks would disappear and the land repopulated by virtuous Yankees.”(19)

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English Emancipation

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In 1807 Britain abolished the slave trade in the West Indies and set about the path of gradual emancipation of all slaves. On July 26 of 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act was passed three days prior to the death of British abolitionist leader William Wilberforce.  Wilberforce came to the abolitionist cause through Evangelical conversion, as did most others in the British Anti-Slavery Society, and he mentored John Newton, who had worked in the slave trade as a young man and wrote Amazing Grace. Abolition in this case was compensated to a total sum of $100,000,000 in 1830 US dollars which equates to about $2 Billion in 2010 dollars (18 p. 110). American Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was in England for this historic event and managed to secure a signed statement from several notable British abolitionists, including Wilberforce, denouncing the idea of Black colonization, giving Garrison a perceived victory over the American Colonization Society. When he returned to New York he was surprised to see a newspaper referring to him as “notorious” (18 pp. 111-12).  He narrowly escaped from New York where he documented his experience but never grasped what should have been obvious. British abolition freed 850,000 slaves three thousand miles away and separated by a vast body of water.  In America immediate emancipation would result in the liberation of 2,000,000 slaves that were as close as 300 miles from New York. This could collapse working wages, result in massive public expenditures to provide support for a large number of unemployed migrants, or, worst case, cause mass insurrection (18 pp. 112-14).

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In the 1830’s and 1840’s Weld and others travelled to Britain’s West Indies colonies and observed that everything was peaceful and prosperous. By the 1850’s, however, it became clear that emancipation had resulted in economic disaster. The ex-slaves stopped working as employees on the sugar plantations and instead preferred to work small plots to produce just enough food for themselves and their families(18 pp. 192-93). Sugar production fled to Louisiana, Brazil, and Cuba. According to an assessment from the US consul in Jamaica, the price of land declined by at least 50 percent and larger plantations were worth about 10 percent of their pre-emancipation value (18 p. p. 193). The English tried a couple of schemes at importing workers, which offered no improvement and the white population rapidly disappeared leaving behind abandoned fields and buildings.  In 1856 a correspondent from the New Orleans Picayune, one of the South’s leading papers, who had just visited Jamaica wrote, “The impressions which, on a personal view, the dilapidation of Jamaica, has made upon me are of the most sad and somber character….This city, which once counted eighty thousand prosperous inhabitants, who resided more in a great accumulation of beautiful gardens than in densely built squares, now contains, we are told, only about forty thousand . . . people, composed in great measure, to use the expression of an English gentleman resident here, of poverty-crippled Negroes.(18 pp. 193-94)”

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What had happened in the West Indies was lost on no one at the time in both the North and South as well as in Europe considering the dependencies these economies had on the South.  The London Times reported that, “slave emancipation in the West Indies was a colossal failure that had annihilated millions of pounds of capital and reduced blacks to a degradation lower than they had known as slaves(18 p. 194)”.  In Southern Wealth Northern Profits written in 1860, Kettle addresses an entire chapter to this in what is otherwise, a book of economic statistics. This content is highly racist by modern standards but gives a view into what people of the time period were thinking. Projecting what happened in the British West Indies across slave holding states considering there were significant economic and cultural differences isn’t  appropriate but there was a lot at stake here and what happened in the Caribbean complicated an already bad situation.

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Starting in 1791 when Santa Domingo became the first Black republic, there had been a steady stream of refugees going north arriving in ports from New Orleans to Charleston to New York including white refugees along with free Blacks. Northern cities sought to bar or restrict Black refugees but the flow continued (9). No area of the country was either unaffected by or unaware of what was going on in the West Indies.

 

 

Bibliography

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1. Kettell, Thomas Prentice. Southern Wealth and Northern Profits. New York New York : George W. and John A. Wood, 1860.

2. Mitcham, Samuel W. Jr. It Wasn't About Slavery - Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War. Washington, DC : Regnery History, 2020.

3. US Census Reports. US Census Report. s.l. : US Census Bureau, 1790 - 1860.

4. Kennedy, Walter D. Myths of American Slavery. Gretna Louisiana  : Pelican Publishing Company, 2003. 2002007056.

5. Bettersworth, John K. Mississippi - A History. Austin Texas : The Steck Company, 1959.

6. US Census Data 1860. US Census Data 1860. s.l. : US Census Bureau, 1860.

7. Perry, John C. Myths and Realities of American Slavery. Shippensburg Pennsylvania : Burd Street Press, 2002. 978-1-57249-335-3.

8. Melish, Joanne Pope. Disowning Slavery Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England 1780 - 1860. Ithaca, New York : Cornell University Press, 2016.

9. Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone. Cambridge Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 1998.

10. Farrow, Anne, Lang, Joel and Frank, Jennifer. Complicity How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profitied from Slavery. New York, New York : Ballantine Books, 2006.

11. Jay, Joseph. Sacred Conviction the Souths Stand for Biblical Authority. Columbia South Carolina : Shotwell Publishing, 2018.

12. Unlearning Fake History. Traywick, H.V. Jr. 2018, Abbeville Institute Blog.

13. Marsden, George M. Religion & American Culture. Grand Rapids Michigan : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1990.

14. Beck, Roy. Back of the Hiring Line. Arlington Virginia : Numbers USA, 2021.

15. Russell, Thadeus. A Renegade History of the United States. New York, New York : Free Press, 2011.

16. Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York, New York : Oxford University Press, 1971.

17. DiLorenzo, Thomas J. The Real Lincoln. New York, New York : Three Rivers Press, 2002.

18. Fleming, Thomas. A Disease in the Public Mind - A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War. Boston MA : Da Capo Press, 2013.

19. DiLorenzo, Thomas. Lew Rockwell.com. [Online] Joly 13, 2013. [Cited: March 1, 2020.] https://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/07/thomas-dilorenzo/who-caused-the-1861-65-bloodbath/.