Eh, that's kind of a ****ty whitewashing thing to do. While there certainly were people in the north making money off slavery, African slave trade was banned in 1807 and imports of slaves were much less common and breeding was the much more common method of acquiring new slaves. So in the life of the USA as we know it, about 20 years or so there was potential for what you were saying being a legit thriving industry, and then about 55 after that weren't. So it's not really that viable of a comp and it's a classic deflection tactic. "Hey Johnny punched Judy so it's OK that I murdered Marlene."
Arguing with you Zeets is usually a worthless endeavor. You'll note though that deflection would imply that I'm defending the South or trying to say, "well everybody did it so no big deal." I'm not of course. To say otherwise is just to make a strawman argument. I am, though, saying lots of hands are bloody, including monied interests in NE. The wealth that built the industrialization throughout NE came in great part from the large role NEnglanders played in shipping slaves from Africa to the South and the Caribbean.
"...Even after slavery was outlawed in the North, ships out of New England continued to carry thousands of Africans to the American South. Some 156,000 slaves were brought to the United States in the period 1801-08, almost all of them on ships that sailed from New England ports that had recently outlawed slavery. Rhode Island slavers alone imported an average of 6,400 Africans annually into the U.S. in the years 1805 and 1806. The financial base of New England's antebellum manufacturing boom was money it had made in shipping. And that shipping money was largely acquired directly or indirectly from slavery, whether by importing Africans to the Americas, transporting slave-grown cotton to England, or hauling Pennsylvania wheat and Rhode Island rum to the slave-labor colonies of the Caribbean.
Northerners profited from slavery in many ways, right up to the eve of the Civil War...."
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"...As the nation prepares to mark the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War in 2011, with commemorations that reinforce the North/South divide, researchers are offering uncomfortable answers to that question, unearthing more and more of the hidden stories of New England slavery — its brutality, its staying power, and its silent presence in the very places that have become synonymous with freedom. With the markers of slavery forgotten even as they lurk beneath our feet — from graveyards to historic homes, from Lexington and Concord to the halls of Harvard University — historians say it is time to radically rewrite America’s slavery story to include its buried history in New England.
“The story of slavery in New England is like a landscape that you learn to see,” said Anne Farrow, who co-wrote “Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited From Slavery” and who is researching a new book about slavery and memory. “Once you begin to see these great seaports and these great historic houses, everywhere you look, you can follow it back to the agricultural trade of the West Indies, to the trade of bodies in Africa, to the unpaid labor of black people.”..."
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Triangular Trade
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"...Clues have surfaced of late that New England, better known as a hotbed of abolitionism, had much more to do with the immoral traffic in human beings than its slight history of slaveholding suggests. Brown University has confessed that its early benefactors, including its namesake, owned or operated slave ships. Newport, R.I., has been identified as a leading port for such vessels. Aetna in Hartford has acknowledged writing life insurance policies on slaves.
Isolated examples they are not. In “New England Bound,” Wendy Warren, a Yale history professor, widens the lens to show the early New England economy was enmeshed in the seafaring trade that developed between four Atlantic continents for the transport, clothing, and feeding of African captives. The region’s early growth and prosperity, Warren shows, sprang from that tainted commerce..."
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DeWolfs
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I could go on, but hopefully you get the point.