Complicity (or
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery)
Three journalists from The Hartford Courant investigate the Northern states’ involvement in slavery before and after the Civil War and their economic dependence on it. Their profits ranged from building slave ships to importing huge amounts of cotton, rum, and ivory, which slavery made possible. During the 18th and 19th centuries, "the North took 40 cents of every dollar a planter earned from cotton."
The irony of this was that many of the profiteers in the New England states and New York claimed to be abolitionists. But abolitionism in those years proved to be no match for these profits. Slave-owning families in New York felt their Blacks lived better there than they had in Africa. They were also lucky they hadn’t gotten sick on their slave ship and thrown overboard.
Thomas Jefferson had drafted the Declaration of Independence to include a grievance about slave trading, but it was deleted. Worse yet, the Fugitive Slave Act justified the capture of runaway slaves, yet did little to stop them from being kidnaped and sold back to southern plantation owners. White kidnappers prowled city streets in the North looking for young free blacks they could sell into slavery.
In the 1800s, the ivory trade flourished in Connecticut. But as with the cotton or rum enterprises in the North, the ivory plants that made piano keys were also dependent on slaves providing such precious material. However, these slaves were still in Africa carrying ivory tusks hundreds of miles to ships bound for America. The British explorer David Livingstone once estimated that "Five Black people were killed or forced into slavery for each elephant tuck that reached the coast."
The North’s complicity with slavery was justified in many other ways. Christians believed that the Bible supported slavery. Jefferson had once suggested that "black inferiority might be permanent." Physicians and scientists a century later agreed that black skulls themselves proved racial inferiority. Even President Lincoln was in favor of having "the superior position assigned to the white race."
Complicity was published in 2005 and contains many pictures and printed documents that have often been suppressed or ignored in history books dealing with slavery.