Slavery is a part of American history that many people today wish had never been used as a tool to help America develop during its infancy as an independent nation. It was a condition which allowed many people in america and america itself to prosper, but at the cost of millions of African men, woman and childrens freedom. They were driven from their homes, shipped to america in horrible conditions and forced to work back breaking labor and obey their masters lest they wish to meet the tip of the whip, or worse, the rope of the gallows. Many people in America, and the world even, believe that during the 19th century, when slavery was at its peak in america, that the southern states in America were more harsh and treated slaves less likely people and more like property. They believe that the northern states, however, had more tolerance for slaves and treated them more like fellow humans. This can easily be perceived due to the fact that the civil war, which pitted the northern union states against the southern confederate states, seemed to be centralized around freeing the slaves and that the northern states freed their slaves before the southern states did. It may be true that more northern US states freed their slaves before the southern states, it does not automatically mean that the northern states treated slaves any better than how they were treated in the southern half of the US. Whites in both halves of the US wanted the blacks in the US to continue to believe that they were completely inferior to any and all whites in the US. Charles Mackay, an English writer who had visited America during this time of turmoil, had this to say about what he witnessed during his travels."This is the prevalent feeling, if not the language of the free north...'We shall not make the black man a slave; we shall not buy him or sell him; but we shall not associate with him'...'We are of another race, and he is inferior. Let him know his place - and keep it.'" This quote exemplifies that whites tolerated free slaves to a point, basically until they started to think they deserved anything that whites themselves were privileged to.
Northern Am
ericans during that time period have also been stated as being against slavery on an economic standpoint, as well as a moral one. This is also a misconception as all of America thought slavery was declining and was not needed at the beginning of the 18th century. Then the cotton boom happened. Eli Whitney was an american inventor who was living in Massachusetts during the beginning of the 18th century and had created very useful inventions during his previous years, most notably his use of interchangeable parts in modern weaponry of the time. His invention of the cotton gin helped to explode the cotton market and made slaves extremely desirable to work plantations in the south. This also translated into a large growth of slavery in the north as workers were needed to process the cotton into textiles and cloth. The picture above is taken from Harpers weekly, a magazine written in 1869 and depicted events of about 70 previous. The cotton boom also allowed the slave trade to boom in the sense that more slaves were being brought into the US and so more ports were needed to help handle and transport these slaves. Many of these ports were run in the northern US and ran far past the point when slavery became illegal in the northern US. One such family that ran these ports was the Dewolf family who lived and operated out of Connecticut and were in the slave trading business for three generations. Even though they traded when slavery was illegal, the government turned a blind eye due to the sheer amount of money and power the family possessed thanks to the slave trade. These examples easily depict that slaves were in no way treated better in the north than they were treated in the south. Slaves were treated as subhumans by almost all whites during this time and no one part of the nation should be credited with treating them better than the other parts of this nation.
