A Comprehensive Review of COMPLICITY How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery Part One by Gene Kizer, Jr. Posted on The Charleston Athenaeum Press IT IS HARD TO BELIEVE this 2005 book was written by journalists in this day and age when so many of them are politicized race-obsessed frauds, but it was; and regardless of its shortcomings, it is a good book and tribute to The Hartford Courant and the authors. Complicity, when it first came out, was ignored by the New York Times, which prefers pretend history like the 1619 Project with its primary theme that the American Revolution was fought because the Brits were about to abolish slavery. There is not a shred of evidence of that, not a letter, article, speech or statement by anybody. Nothing. But, then, truth and honor are not the standards of the New York Times. The inside front cover of Complicity states: Slavery in the South has been documented in volumes ranging from exhaustive histories to bestselling novels. But the North's profit from---indeed, dependence on---slavery has mostly been a shameful and well-kept secret . . . until now. In this starting and superbly researched new book, three veteran New England journalists demythologize the region of America known for tolerance and liberation, revealing a place where thousands of people were held in bondage and slavery was both an economic dynamo and a necessary way of life. One reason for Complicity's veracity is its extensive use of primary sources rather than the politicized drivel that comes out of most of academia and the news media these days. Complicity shows how the North's Triangle Trade of "molasses, rum, and slaves" which was run "in some cases by abolitionists" produced great wealth for New England and especially Connecticut. Northerners brought all the slaves here after buying them from other blacks in Africa such as at Bunce Island off the coast of modern Sierra Leone. Slaves were a commodity, a way for Northerners and the British before them to make money, and they did. It is clear from Complicity that much of the infrastructure of the Old North was built on profits from the slave trade. Northerners were slave traders well after it was outlawed by the U.S. Constitution in 1808. W.E.B. DuBois wrote in his famous work, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, that Boston, Portland and New York were the slave trading capitals of the planet in 1862, a year into the War Between the States.2 That's one reason New York City, when the South began seceding, threatened to secede from both New York state and the United States. NYC loved its trade with the South. Shipping cotton was much of that trade as well as financing the Northern slave trade and Southern agriculture. Northerners traded in slaves until Brazil, the last major slave country on earth, outlawed slavery, around 1887. The book, Complicity, started as a special report to The Hartford Courant which was so good "the Connecticut Department of Education sent [it] to every middle school and high school in the state" and it became required reading in many colleges. Complicity should be required reading in every state in the union but instead we get the utterly false 1619 Project, which is pushed hard by the NY Times, the Pulitzer Center and other leftists for whom truth is whatever gives the Democrat Party more power. The Foreword is written by Harvard professor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham 3 who writes that "the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the first of the American colonies to give legal recognition to the institution of slavery." Their recognition preceded Virginia's.4 She points out the irony: [C]lergy-led Boston, this seventeenth-century 'city on a hill,' would soon become a bustling port for the trade in human flesh. Religion proved no match for profits. In Rhode Island, in the Narragansett Bay area, large landholdings used sizable numbers of slaves to provision the mono-crop plantations in the Caribbean with  foodstuffs. Such cities as Boston, Salem, Providence, and New London, bustled with activity; outgoing ships were loaded with rum, fish, and dairy products, as slaves, along with molasses and sugar, were unloaded from incoming ships. Up until the American War for Independence, the slave trade was a profitable element of the New England economy.5 Massachusetts "never formally abolished slavery, but rather left it to acts of private manumission . . .". Private manumission was also how slavery was dying out in the South and would have ended completely without Lincoln's war that killed a million people and maimed another million. Higginbotham brings out some good points of history but still virtue-signals with regard to the North and its slave traders and business people who got filthy rich because of slavery. They made huge amounts of money manufacturing for the South and shipping Southern cotton. Cotton alone, in 1860, was 60% of U.S. exports. Add to that the other Southern commodities, which all total, were producing the wealth of the United States. Higginbotham celebrates the anti-slavery societies in the North but does not mention that the South had those too, many more than in the North, until violent abolitionists supporting murderers like John Brown caused the South to close ranks for its safety. She does point out Northern racism and admits blacks were not welcome in the North. Northerners wanted blacks to leave the North just as Abraham Lincoln wanted blacks to leave the entire country. See Colonization after Emancipation, Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement, by Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, copyright 2011, first printing 2018). Higginbotham does not point out that racist Northerners didn't want slavery in the West because they didn't want blacks anywhere near them in the West. This was Lincoln's position too. He made it clear in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates that the West was to be reserved for white people from all over the planet. No blacks allowed. Higginbotham does not seem to realize that abolitionists were hated in the North for much of the antebellum period. Abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in 1837 at age 34 in Lincoln's Illinois. Only around 3% of the Northern electorate were abolitionists. None of these virtue-signaling abolitionists had a plan for emancipation that would work such as the Northern states, themselves, had used to end slavery. The Northern states ended slavery like every other nation on earth (except Haiti), with gradual, compensated emancipation. The reason Northerners didn't suggest a plan that could work is because anti-slavery in the North was political, especially during the elections of 1856 and 1860. It was not a movement for the benefit of the black man. It is better described as "anti-South" rather than anti-slavery. It was political agitation against the South for the purpose of rounding up Northern votes so the North could take over the Federal Government and rule the country. They wanted to continue with their bounties, subsidies and monopolies for Northern businesses, and high tariffs that took money out of the South and deposited it into Northern pockets. Southerners were paying 85% of the taxes but 75% of the tax money was being spent in the North. Despite plans for compensated emancipation in place in some Northern states, six slave state still fought for the North in the War Between the States. West Virginia came into the Union as a slave state during the war, ironically, just weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. The Emancipation Proclamation specifically exempted the Union slave states. Three Northern slave states still had slavery months after the war ended. It took the second Thirteenth Amendment (remember, the first Thirteenth Amendment was the Corwin Amendment that left black people in slavery forever where slavery already existed -- it was supported strongly by Abraham Lincoln and ratified by five Northern states including Lincoln's Illinois before the war made it moot). The special report "Complicity," that led to the book, came about after The Hartford Courant published a story: "Aetna 'Regrets' Insuring Slaves". The Courant's journalists started wondering if the Courant, itself, had been complicit in slavery and they found out it had, that it had published ads for the sale of slaves and the capture of runaway slaves. They wanted to find a slave whom Aetna had insured and write about his or her life. What they discovered shocked them to their cores. They thought slavery was a Southern evil, that Northerners were the good guys in the war because they had the Underground Railroad and Harriet Beecher Stowe. But now: [I]t was becoming clear that Connecticut's role in slavery was not only huge, it was key to the success of the entire institution. . . . We were now looking at nothing less than an altered reality.6 The more they looked for their ties to slavery, the more "unshakable" was the proof they found: It became obvious that our economic links to slavery were deeply entwined with our religious, political, and educational institutions. Slavery was part of the social contract in Connecticut. It was in the air we breathed.7 They found out there were 5,000 African slaves in Connecticut in 1775 and "in 1790 most prosperous merchants in Connecticut owned at least one slave." So did half of the ministers.8 The special report, "Complicity," had gotten enormous interest. The authors received a proposition from a literary agent to "broaden their thesis" and include the entire North and not just Connecticut. A year-and-a-half later the completed book, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, came out. The preface ends with this: What was true of Connecticut turned out to be overwhelmingly true of the entire North. Most of what you'll read here was gleaned from older, often out-of-print texts, and from period newspapers, largely in Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts. We are journalists, not scholars, and want to share what surprised, and even shocked, the three of us. We have all grown up, attended schools, and worked in Northern states, from Maine to Maryland. We thought we knew our home. We thought we knew our country. We were wrong.9  1 Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company). 2 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 178-80. 3 The inside back cover of Complicity states that Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is co-editor with Henry Louis Gates Jr., of African American Lives. 4 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, from the Foreword by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, xii. 5 Ibid. 6 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xviii. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xix. Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Two, Introduction; Chapter One: Cotton Comes North, Part One Posted on February 24, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. A Comprehensive Review of COMPLICITY How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant Part Two Introduction; Chapter One: Cotton Comes North, Part One by Gene Kizer, Jr. From Page 7 of Complicity. At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from the Introduction, and Chapter One. THE INTRODUCTION TO COMPLICITY makes it clear that the North got rich and powerful because of its enthusiastic relationship with slavery yet it has hidden its history well. Few people, as the authors of Complicity found out, know about the North's enormous involvement with slavery. Northerners were slave traders, the flesh peddlers, who, along with the Brits before them, made huge fortunes buying and selling Africans into slavery. They built much, perhaps most, of the infrastructure of the Old North with profits from the slave trade. Northerners created a powerful manufacturing industry thanks in large part to a huge, wealthy, captive market in the South, and they built a shipping industry that shipped mostly slave-picked cotton all over the world. While Southern history has been falsified to the point where esteemed historian Eugene Genovese called it a "cultural and political atrocity," Northern history has been whitewashed making it a lie: [T]he North's story is thought to be heroic, filled with ardent abolitionists running that train to freedom, the Underground Railroad. The few slaves who may have lived in the North, it has been believed, were treated like members of the family. And, of course, Northerners were the good guys in the Civil War. They freed the slaves.1 The statement above is about as far from the truth as you can get. Northerners chained hundreds of Africans at a time, side by side, to the decks of their slave ships. Slaves were so crammed in they could barely move. They had to lay in vomit, feces and urine for months, the stench made worse by the stifling heat below deck where there was no ventilation during the Middle Passage. Many died and lay there among the living for days. It was said you could smell a slave ship five miles away. Those poor Africans had been sold into slavery by other Africans, the result of tribal warfare. They were held in slave forts called barracoons in places like Bunce Island off the coast of modern Sierra Leone where they waited on Yankee and British slave ships and their passage through hell. Even beyond slave trading, the Yankee record is not good. When a Northern state ended slavery, always through a plan of gradual, compensated emancipation that would free the slave on, say, his 21st birthday, the poor slave would never see a day of freedom. Thrifty Yankees sold him South just prior to the date he was to be free. This is well documented by books such as Edgar J. McManus's Black Bondage in the North (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1973). Northerners were slave traders until the last major slave country on earth, Brazil, abolished it around 1888. During the War Between the States, 53 years after the slave trade was outlawed by the U.S. Constitution, Boston, New York and Portland were the largest slave trading cities on the planet as W. E. B Du Bois noted in his book, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638 to 1870. The American experience with slavery "was defined by commerce and violence, in the North as well as the South." New York City was a prime player, which is why Mayor Fernando Wood "declared that his city should secede from the Union along with the Southern states, in large part because of New York's economic dependence on the cotton trade."2 Northern merchants, shippers, and financial institutions, many based in New York City, were crucial players in every phase of the national and international cotton trade. Meanwhile, the rivers and streams of the North, particularly in New England, were crowded with hundreds of textile mills. Well before the Civil War, the economy of the entire North relied heavily on cotton grown by millions of slaves---in the South.3 Boston manufacturers, before 1860, were desperately currying favor with the Southern politicians and planters whose millions of slaves delivered the product necessary to their wealth and financial survival. These business men were, after all, in textiles, and what would they do without cotton?4 After the Revolutionary War "tens of thousands of black people were living as slaves in the North. Earlier in that century, enslaved blacks made up nearly one-fifth of the population of New York City."5 Around the same time: Rhode Island was America's leader in the transatlantic trade, launching nearly 1,000 voyages to Africa and carrying at least 100,000 captives back across the Atlantic. The captains and crews of these ships were often the veteran seamen of America: New Englanders.6 In the 1800s before the war: New York City's bustling seaport became the hub of an enormously lucrative illegal slave trade. Manhattan shipyards built ships to carry captive Africans, the vessels often outfitted with crates of shackles and with the huge water tanks needed for their human cargo. A conservative estimate is that during the illegal trade's peak years, 1859 and 1860, at least two slave ships---each built to hold between 600 and 1,000 slaves---left lower Manhattan every month.7 The first Americans came here looking for religious freedom and found "a wild and hostile continent." They were anxious to conquer it so they could compete with Europe. They needed labor: How could they not have been in a hurry to settle this wilderness, put together a workable way to govern themselves, and, both as a nation and as individuals, earn a living?8 The Introduction ends with: Slavery has long been identified in the national consciousness as a Southern institution. The time to bury that myth is overdue. Slavery is a story about America, all of America. The nation's wealth, from the very beginning, depended upon the exploitation of black people on three continents. Together, over the lives of millions of enslaved men and women, Northerners and Southerners shook hands and made a country.9 Chapter One Cotton Comes North Part One THE EPIGRAPH of Chapter One is the answer given by a "prominent Southern editor" when asked by The Times of London, "What would New York be without slavery?" The editor answered: The ships would rot at her docks; grass would grow in Wall Street and Broadway and the glory of New York, like that of Babylon and Rome, would be numbered with the things of the past.10 Complicity is a good book with respect to documenting the North's enormous participation in slavery. It is, however, from the North's viewpoint, and written by Northerners. They do not know the broader American history, and they definitely do not know Southern history. For example, Chapter One opens with: "The election of an antislavery president had finally forced the South to make good on years of threats, and the exodus of 11 states from the Union had begun."11 It does not mention the years of secession threats made by New England. There were at least five serious threats of New England secession such as in the War of 1812, with the Louisiana Purchase, the admission of Texas, anything that would dilute New England political power. Complicity also talks about the first seven states to secede - the Cotton States, led by South Carolina - then it simply states that "by the end of May, the Confederacy was complete." What completed the Confederacy was the secession of Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina in which 52.4% of white Southerners live. Those four states seceded over nothing to do with slavery. They seceded over their abhorrence at federal coercion and Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers to invade the Cotton States. There was nothing in the Constitution in 1861 giving Lincoln the power to do that or requiring him to do it. The idea that the federal government had a legitimate power to invade a state, kill its citizens and destroy its property, is absurd. As stated earlier, New York City's lifeblood was slave-picked cotton, the "root of New York's wealth."12 Cotton was the nation's number one export and in the four decades before the war: New York had become a commercial and financial behemoth dwarfing any other U.S. city and most others in the world. Cotton was more than just a profitable crop. It was the national currency, the product most responsible for America's explosive growth in the decades before the Civil War.13 Cotton "created New York." By the eve of the war, hundreds of businesses in New York, and countless more throughout the North, were connected to, and dependent upon, cotton. As New York became the fulcrum of the U.S. cotton trade, merchants, shippers, auctioneers, bankers, brokers, insurers, and thousands of others were drawn to the burgeoning urban center. They packed lower Manhattan, turning it into the nations's emporium, in which products from all over the world were traded.14 Complicity includes an egregious error when it calls Massachusetts the "birthplace of America." Massachusetts might be the birthplace of New England, "virtue signaling," and Puritan bigotry, but it is not the birthplace of America. Jamestown, Virginia is the birthplace of America. Settlers were there in 1607. They were not in Massachusetts until over a decade later, in 1620. New England became dominated by textiles which means it was utterly dependent on slave-picked cotton: By 1860, New England was home to 472 cotton mills, built on rivers and streams throughout the region. The town of Thomson, Connecticut, alone, for example, had seven mills within its nine-square-mile area. Hundreds of other textile mills were scattered in New York State, New Jersey, and elsewhere in the North. Just between 1830 and 1840, Northern mills consumed more than 100 million pounds of Southern cotton. With shipping and manufacturing included, the economy of much of New England was connected to textiles.15 Massachusetts industrialists made it clear they supported the South: On the evening of October 11, 1858, a standing-room-only audience of politicians and businessmen honored a visitor at a rally at Faneuil Hall, long the center of Boston's public life. The wealthy and powerful of New England's preeminent city lauded the 'intellectual cultivation' and 'eloquence' of the senator from Mississippi, and when Jefferson Davis walked on thte stage, the Brahmins of Boston gave him a standing ovation.16 Faneuil Hall was given to Boston by slave trader Peter Faneuil. Next Week: A Comprehensive Review of COMPLICITY How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant Part Three Chapter One: Cotton Comes North, Part Two Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part One, Foreword, Preface) NOTES: (Scroll down for: Complicity, Actual Citation from Book) 1 Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), xxv. 2 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxvii. 3 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxvi. 4 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxvii. 5 Ibid. 6 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxviii. 7 Ibid. 8 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxix. 9 Ibid. 10 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 3. 11 Ibid. 12 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 4. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 6. 16 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 6-7. Complicity, Actual Citation from Book