Slavery in the north.

So, how many people here didn't know they had slavery in the north? Seems that some places have been teaching that slavery did not exist up north. (sorry if this has already been on on this board. I don't have the ability to search on here.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/nyregion/03slave.html

<excerpt>
DURING his American history class in Meriden, Xavier Santos learned a lesson he did not expect: Slavery had once been a vital and enduring part of Connecticut.

"I didn't think it was true. I was like, 'You're kidding,' " said Xavier, 16, a junior at Orville H. Platt High School. "We were pretty much taught that down South, they had slaves on plantations and that the free slaves were allowed to go up north and be free. It's a bunch of lies."

Around the state, middle and high school history teachers, many of whom just learned about the state's ties to slavery themselves, are ignoring their history textbooks and teaching a very different version of New England history. In communities including Newtown, West Haven, Griswold, New Haven, Hartford, West Hartford and Hebron, history teachers are telling their students that some Connecticut residents did indeed own slaves and that many profited from the slave trade. The new lessons are a revelation to many students, parents and even to the teachers themselves.

"I didn't realize there was slavery in the North," said Susan Lang, an eighth-grade social studies teacher at Newtown Middle School who is now teaching her students about slavery. "I was never taught anything about it."
<end excerpt>

of Northern slavery or of urban slavery. People also are surprised to learn slavery thrived outside of the US and that Brazil received exponentially (about 10x) more Africans than did the US.

until early in the 20th century.

started with the enslaving of Native Americans in the 1600s by MA Bay Colonists (sadly including one of my direct ancestors). NY didn't ban slavery until the 1820s, and it was gradual-Sojourner Truth's son was sold South to evade his emancipation, and she went to court and won his freedom, her first touch with fame among Abolitionist circles.

In Southern Illinois, there was a salt spring where slaves worked for years, despite the Northwest Ordinance's prohibition of slavery. They got by with it by "leasing" the slaves from nearby KY. This place also kidnapped blacks, both runaway and free, and sold them back into slavery. A "buck slave" was kept to impregnate any females. If you've ever been to the place, you can feel the revulsion and horror that still seeps from the cubicles where the slaves were kept in the attic.

The entire U.S. Empire is stolen from Native Americans. If that isn't slavery, nothing is!

Thanks ayeshahaqqiqa

which I heard Native activists sing at a protest:

This land is my land,
It is not your land,
From California
To the New York Island
From the redwood forests
To the Gulf Stream waters
This land was swiped by you from me.

The "north" presents an interesting study in slavery. The Dutch, French, and English were impressed by the success the Spanish had in instituting slavery among the native Central American populations. Hence, they assumed they would easily set up a similar system in the northeast. The difference is that the Central American populations were living in and around cities, and they were used to the concept of empire, and recognized a ruling class. Once the Spanish controlled/killed a few at the top, the masses fell in line.

In the northeast, the native population lived in villages, and were democratic. With no easily identified center of power to be controlled/killed, the Europeans were not able to establish control of the general population. The majority of Indians taken into slavery prefered to die, rather than "serve" a "master." The chances of keeping a woodland Indian as a slave increased only when the person was taken to Europe,

Another form of slavery was the indentured servant. Today there is a common misconception that this relationship was always voluntary. It was, quite simply, not true. The first group of people who were non-voluntarily forced into labor in significant numbers in the northeast were the Irish.

Perhaps the relationship that has been the most glossed over in our history books is that of the African and Native American peoples in colonial times. The book "Red, White, and Black" by Nash is the single best source that I know of that details this fascinating chapter of American history. The influence of some Indian societies on the institution of slavery played a significant role in decreasing the "success" of this practice in the north.

except during the early years of colonization. The crown passed a series of laws in 1542, that among other things, banned enslavement of Indians. They instead relied on draft labor systems, similar to that used by the Incan and Aztec empires. I'm not quite sure of the meaning for your reference to Central America, since it was exploited later than the core areas of Central Mexico, the Yucatan, and the Andean Highlands. Draft labor (mita, repartimiento, etc..) are not the same as slavery because the person is not owned by another. They are forms of coercive labor on the Marxist continuum of free to forced labor, but it is not slavery. Indians generally labored 3 to 4 months a year for the Spanish then returned to their villages the remainder of the year. One of the reasons why the Spanish were so effective in maintaining their empire--in, as you describe it, taking off a few on the top so "the masses fell in line"--was that they grafted their own imperial structures on top of Incan and Aztec systems. The mita was a labor system used not only under the Inca but even before the Incan conquest. It remained an effective means of labor extraction throughout the colonial period.

Indentured servitude is also a form of coercive labor but is not slavery. I had an ancestor who came over on the Mayflower as an indentured servant. His servitude, like that of others bound through indenture contracts, was temporary. It was not a system of permanent slavery, where one is born into bondage and has few options of becoming free. An indentured servants person was not owned. He had a right to family, spouses and children. Under slavery, all such decisions belonged to masters.

While all of these are systems of unfree labor, they are not slavery. Debt peonage and sharecropping are also unfree labor systems, but they are not rightly considered slavery. The distinction is between that which compels one to labor--is it simply economic coercion, as in capitalist free-wage labor, or are there extra-economic forces that compel one to labor. Unfree systems all share some degree of extra-economic coercion, but slavery is another beast, far more oppressive and dehumanizing than any of the others you describe.

"That war, however, proved to be the real liberator of the northern slaves. Wherever it marched, the British army gave freedom to any slave who escaped within its lines. This was sound military policy: it disrupted the economic system that was sustaining the Revolution.

Since the North saw much longer, and more extensive, incursions by British troops, its slave population drained away at a higher rate than the South's. At the same time, the governments in northern American states began to offer financial incentives to slaveowners who freed their black men, if the emancipated slaves then served in the state regiments fighting the British. "

http://www.slavenorth.com/

(Interestingly, England abolished their slave trading in 1807--some years after a court decision which stated that legally, there could be no slaves in Britain, in 1772. They emancipated the slaves already there finally in 1833.)

Also, the South had an agriculture based economy that seemed to 'need' slaves more.

It's still important to recognize that even though it was on a smaller level, the north still had slaves. Even in the rural, upstate New York community that I live near, the census just before the Civil War shows a couple families had slaves.

Before I posted the first time, I had as part of my post that there were *almost* no slaves in the North--I had heard stories as the ones you described.

the local history. There was a man who was raised in a near-by hamlet of under a hundred people. He went on to become a US Senator. While he was opposed to slavery as an institution, but like Lincoln, was hesitant to take steps that might divide the Union. (Yet, at the same time, he was very pro-Irish, and opposed to England denying human rights to the Irish -- though he was not Irish!)

His father-in-law was a doctor who was an abolitionist "when it was dangerous to be an abolitionist," according to a book from 1878. The doctor was a supporter of the Underground Railroad in this area. The people who were involved had also been supporters of the rebels in the Anti-Rent War in NYS.

I often wonder what the holiday meals were like when the senator returned from Washington with his wife, to spend time with her parents.

That's right. Some Cherokee and Creek indians were slave-owners.

And one of the most successful slave traders in Mississippi was - wait for it - a freed black man!

American schools want to make everything as simple as possible. Unfortunately, many people on this board reflect that simple education, thus their unwavering belief that everyone in the South was totally evil because they owned slaves. Those on this board who hold fast to this belief should consider that not only was slavery legal and practiced in the North, but much of Northern wealth came either from slave trafficking or from products made possible by slave labor. All hands are dirty here.

there are ten posts on the thread before yours. None of them fit the description that you are attempting to apply. None.

Hmmmm.

In fact, it simply isn't there.

This whole Southern persecution trip is boring. The Civil War ended 140 years ago. Don't you think it's time to get over it? Southerns have a great deal of power in American poltics today. And in return they have given us a Republican majority and president.

Just you, and you alone. And it is based upon the entirely faulty "logic" that all DUers are from "the north." Non-issue, nonsense.

If you mean high schools, the problem is not a prejudice toward the South but unfettered ignorance. High school textbooks are designed by committees, generally in Texas because they hold one of the largest markets. High school teachers are poorly trained in their subject matter, though a few manage to become excellent despite low standards for certification. High school is a wasteland when it comes to history.

Now if you're referring to College, you're entirely mistaken. But I must note something in your comment. You observe a single black man who was a slave trader. You certainly can find black slave owners in the South. But if you are going to extrapolate that as some sort of trend, to imagine that American slavery was not racial, that is simply distortion.