England
prospered from its slave labor-plantations of North America; New
England slave ships profited greatly from the infamous “Rum Triangle”
which brought African slaves to the New World; Eli Whitney of
Massachusetts perpetuated slavery with his gin invention. New England
slavers were still being caught off the coast of Cuba as late as 1859.
The following is an excerpt from a speech by Zebulon B. Vance in the
United States Senate, January 30, 1890.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
New England’s Commerce in Slaves:
“Several
hundred years ago this fair land of ours, which it would seem God had
specially intended for the seat of liberty and the noblest development
of man, was desecrated by the introduction of human slavery. The
serpent thus entered into our political Eden. The great forests which
covered the face of the earth called for labor to remove them, for more
labor than the slowly coming immigration of the free races afforded. The
morals of the age justified the holding of barbarous races in bondage.
The
favorite place for obtaining bondsmen was the African coast. So
desirable did the supplying of the newly discovered islands and
continents of the West with cheap labor appear, that old Joseph Hawkins
was knighted by Queen Elizabeth, as much for his successful introduction
of a cargo of slaves into the West Indies, as for his exploits against
the Spaniards. Even so great an good a man as Las Casa, the Spanish
apostle to the Indians, once advocated the introduction of African
slavery.
First
and foremost in this calamitous and iniquitous traffic was New England.
In fact, so anxious were the good people of those colonies for slaves
that they reduced to bondage the native Indians whom they captured in
war, and, not infrequently, those wicked people of their own race and
blood who were guilty of differing from them in religious opinions.
The
tobacco-growing colonies of the South soon followed suit in the
importation of African slaves, and early found how profitable this cheap
and involuntary labor was in the raising of their great staple. The
introduction of the cultivation and uses of cotton soon gave a further
impetus to slaveholding, and made the chief prosperity of all the
Southern regions to depend mainly upon this enforced labor. Whilst the
want of profitable returns gradually lessened the hold of the North upon
slavery, its great profits constantly increased that hold upon the
South.
The
stony and sterile fields of New England called for manufactures and
commerce. That commerce consisted very largely in purchasing slaves on
the African coast, and selling them to Southern planters. After a time
[slavery] ceased to exist altogether in the North, by reason of
emancipation….and by their sales to their Southern neighbors. By this
time the wrongfulness of holding slaves fully dawned upon the conscience
of the Northern people. Its prickings became so active that they not
only deemed it a sin to hold a slave themselves, but to permit anybody
else to hold one, even though there was no responsibility whatever upon
them for the transgression.
They
even went so far in obeying the dictates of conscience, that they did
not hesitate to stand up boldly in the sight of God, with the purchase
money in their pockets, and denounce the vengeance of heaven against
their Southern neighbors for holding on to the Negro which they
themselves had sold them.”
Life of Zebulon B. Vance, Clement Dowd, Observer Printing and Publishing House, 1897, pp. 240-241)
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