“Complicity—How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery”

Via Billy

This is a new review, but the book was published in 2006.

Recently a friend in Athens, Louisiana lent me a book with the same title as this article. It was written by three writers who worked for a newspaper, the Hartford Courant, in Hartford, Connecticut. I mention that lest anyone accuse me of quoting some “bigoted” Southern source.

From what I can tell the three authors of this book are all quite a bit more liberal than I am and so I am sure there is much we would not agree on. But whatever else they might be, the three authors were honest enough to admit that slavery in this country was never only a “Southern” problem as we have, for so long, been led to believe.

I grew up in New England, went to school in New England, and I have to admit, I never read any of the material they present in any of the so-called “history” books I came across, either in school or anywhere else. We were always taught that all the slaves lived “down South” and that the virtuous New Englanders, among others, had fought to end that evil institution down here.

These folks did a lot of research to put their material together, so the research material is available. It just gets ignored. It’s the identical situation Donnie Kennedy and I found when we wrote Lincoln’s Marxists. The vast majority of the material about socialist and Communist penetration of both the Union armies and the early Republican Party by those people is just never mentioned. It doesn’t fit the current agenda and so it just gets omitted. It’s the same situation with Complicity. The truth about slavery in the North just doesn’t fit the agenda and so it mostly gets left out.

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