Note: This
information was taken from other sources and a list of these sources
is listed at the bottom
of the page. In no way is this anti-american , it is a precentation
of the facts an opinions of several diffrent people that needed to be heard.
Slavery was a legal
institution in this country for over 200 years. Africans were brought
here by Northern slave traders to be used in northern industry, long
before the antebellum South or the Confederacy ever existed. The
first American colony to legalize slavery was Massachusetts in 1641,
only 17 years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. "The
slave trade became very profitable to the shipping colonies and
Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Hampshire had many
ships in the triangular trade,"
(72). "The moral
argument against slavery arose early in the New England shipping
colonies but it could not withstand the profits of the trade and soon
died out."
(73).Thomas Jefferson
condemned the slave trade in the original draft of the Declaration of
Independence, but the New England slave traders lobbied to have the
clause stricken. In a short eleven year period form 1755 to 1766, no
fewer than 23,000 slaves landed in Massachusetts. By 1787, Rhode
Island had taken first place in the slave trade to be unseated later
by New York. Before long, millions of slaves would be brought to
America by way of 'northern' slave ships. After all, there were no
Southern slave ships involved in the triangular slave, it was simply
too cruel. William P. Cheshire, the senior editorial columnist for
the Arizona Republic recently noted, the New England Yankee who
brought slaves to America, "were interested in getting money,
not in helping their cargo make a fresh start in the New World."
He adds that northern slave ownership "isn't widely known -
American textbooks tend to be printed in Boston, not Atlanta - but
early New Englanders not only sold
blacks to Southern
planters but also kept slaves for themselves as well as enslaving the
local Indian
population,"
(74).Slavery did not
appear in the deep South until northern settlers began to migrate
South, bringing
with them their
slaves. It was soon discovered that while slaves were not suited to
the harsh climate and
working conditions of
the north, they were ideal sources of cheap labor for the newly flourishing
economy of the
agricultural South. Of the 9.5 million slaves brought to the Western
Hemisphere from 1500 - 1870, less than 6% were brought to the United
States. This means that our Hispanic, British and French neighbors to
the south owned over 94% of the slaves brought to the New World. In
the South, less than 7% of the total population ever owned a slave.
In other words, over 93% of Southerners did not own any slaves,
(75).Attempts to
outlaw the slave trade in the north only increased the profits of
smuggling. In 1858, only two years prior to the birth of the
Confederacy, Stephen Douglas noted that over 15,000 slaves had been
smuggled into New York alone, with over 85 vessels sailing from New
York in 1859 to smuggle even more slaves. Perhaps it was their own
guilt that drove the abolitionists of the day to point an accusing
finger at the South, while closing their eyes to the slavery and the
slave trade taking place in their own back yards.
For more than 200
years, northern slave traders made enormous profits that furnished
the capitol for future investments into mainstream industries. Who is
more responsible for slavery in America, the Southern plantation
owner who fed and clothed his slaves, or the New England
"Yankee" slave trader who brought the slaves here in the
first place?
From 1641, when
Massachusetts first legalized slavery, until 1865, when the
Confederate struggle for
independence ended,
slavery was a legal institution in America that lasted over 224
years. The Confederate battle flag flew for 4 of those 224 years, but
the U.S. flag and its colonial predecessors flew over legalized
slavery for ALL of those 224 years.
It was the U.S. flag
that the slave first saw, and it was the U.S. flag that flew on the
mast of New England slaves ships as they brought their human cargo to
this country.
It is clear, that
those who attack the Confederate flag as a reminder of slavery are
overlooking the most guilty and hateful of all reminders of American
slavery, the U.S. flag!
Bibliography:
72. The Concise
Dictionary of American History,
(Scribner & Sons), p.876
73. Ibid
74. The Arizona
Repblic, June 11, 1995
75. Rober William
Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time
on the Cross - The
Economics of American Negro Slavery
(New York: Norton,
1974), p.14
Thank you to rangerrick75th
