We northerners want to believe slavery mostly profited the South. That’s backwards: for over 200 years the North practiced slavery¹, then bankrolled southern slavery², & then sat on those profits for yet another century - with interest - before finally fighting the civil war. Northerners put those profits in the bank, migrated across the country, & finally did what anyone could do - made money with money.

But was northern slavery common? Of course: New York, by population, had almost as many slaves as Arkansas did in 1860:

The South’s denial is very different: infact you’ve probably heard passionate slavery denial before without noticing it. (due to all the numbers & sources they use.)

They’ll tell you how “only a few hundred thousand people owned slaves” like it wasn’t a big deal - like there weren’t millions of slaves. They’ll tell you every statistic but the number of slaves: Four million in 1860³ & many generations before that.

If we ever admit our past, what will we do to fix it?


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Sources:

(1)	“By 1804 slavery had been abolished throughout New England” — slavenorth.com

(2)	“Chase [aided] those who enslaved Africans and their descendants in America.” –(thenation.com) “Wachovia revealed on June 1 that one of the banks put hundreds of slaves to work on railroads and another accepted more than 100 more as collateral on defaulted loans in the 1800s.”(washingtonpost.com)

(3)	“The Civil War and Reconstruction” by Randall and Donald (Their source was U.S. Census, 1860, Population, pp. 598-599) —civilwarhome.com/population1860.htm

1 Comment

• At 2008.03.25 04:08, politikly.com | politics and world news said:

  A Blue-State Epidemic: Slavery Denial | politikly.com…

  \r\nThe belief that just the south got rich off slavery may be a bit backwards. Many believe that it…

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