Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited From Slavery, By Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Ballantine, 255 pp., $25.95
A startling new history exposes the plantations, slave ships, and rebellions in the North, upending the notion that slavery was a peculiarly Southern institution.
In 1641, Massachusetts became the first colony to recognize slavery by statute. Four years later, a Boston ship made one of the earliest known slave voyages from New England to Africa.
By the late 1700s, tens of thousands of blacks were living as slaves in the North. ''Complicity" shows just how integral slavery was to the region's economy.
While the authors are careful to say that slavery was never as widespread in the North as it was in the South, the scope of the North's involvement with slavery is staggering to anyone raised with the notion that slavery was limited to the South.
In the mid-1800s, Charles Sumner, a Bay State abolitionist, railed against the unholy alliance ''between the cotton-planters and flesh-mongers of Louisiana and Mississippi and the cotton spinners and traffickers of New England -- between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom." In 1861, the mayor of New York suggested the city -- long a hub of illegal slave trade -- secede from the Union in large part so cotton trade with the South could continue.
''Complicity" grew out of The Hartford Courant's investigation of slavery throughout Connecticut. The reporters discovered that more than 5,000 Africans were enslaved in Connecticut during the year before the American Revolution. Now three Courant veterans have produced a rich history of slavery in the North that adds new dimensions to what you might have learned in school.
The successful voyage of a slave ship was 10 times as profitable as an ordinary trading voyage from New England to the West Indies. Rhode Island entered the slave trade in a big way, shipping nearly 50,000 slaves in less than 20 years. By the mid-18th century, plantations in the Narragansett area matched the plantations of Virginia's Tidewater region in acreage and numbers of slaves.
For more than a century, Ivoryton and Deep River, Conn., were an international center for milling elephant tusks into piano keys. As many as 2 million enslaved Africans carried tusks hundreds of miles to the coast so the tusks could be shipped to America. Two industry leaders were abolitionists who ignored the contradiction between their business and their politics.