Click on the headline to link to a Boston Sunday Globe article, dated September 26, 2010, concerning the links between New England merchant capitalist trading and the slavery trade in its early history.
Markin comment:
This is an interesting little article about the interconnectedness between New England merchant capital and the slave trade. For those who know a little history about the “triangle trade” (slaves, sugar, rum, as an example), this should not come as a surprise. Nor for those who are familiar with the story of stalwart Boston anti-slavery man, John Quincy Adams, and the plight of the slaves on the Amistad in the mid-1800s. And certainly not for those who saw the Boston tensions explode around the Anthony Burns Fugitive Slave Law case in the 1850s. There was a reason for the name “Conscience” Whigs, mainly Northerners, who eventually broke from that party to form the nucleus of the Republican Party in the immediate pre-Civil War period.
Those “Conscience” Whigs” were a minority in Boston for a long time, the others, the traditional commerce-oriented Whigs, gladly getting fat off of the booming cotton trade. For every radical anti-slavery Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker or other of the Boston supporters of John Brown (the Secret Six connection) there were plenty who sat on their hands, at least until their bluff was called by the South. We will not even speak of the post-Civil War era and the abandonment of the freedman in the Northern scramble to buy up the South. That is its own worthy subject for commentary in another article.
Markin comment:
This is an interesting little article about the interconnectedness between New England merchant capital and the slave trade. For those who know a little history about the “triangle trade” (slaves, sugar, rum, as an example), this should not come as a surprise. Nor for those who are familiar with the story of stalwart Boston anti-slavery man, John Quincy Adams, and the plight of the slaves on the Amistad in the mid-1800s. And certainly not for those who saw the Boston tensions explode around the Anthony Burns Fugitive Slave Law case in the 1850s. There was a reason for the name “Conscience” Whigs, mainly Northerners, who eventually broke from that party to form the nucleus of the Republican Party in the immediate pre-Civil War period.
Those “Conscience” Whigs” were a minority in Boston for a long time, the others, the traditional commerce-oriented Whigs, gladly getting fat off of the booming cotton trade. For every radical anti-slavery Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker or other of the Boston supporters of John Brown (the Secret Six connection) there were plenty who sat on their hands, at least until their bluff was called by the South. We will not even speak of the post-Civil War era and the abandonment of the freedman in the Northern scramble to buy up the South. That is its own worthy subject for commentary in another article.
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