Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

This is a brave bold brilliant and deeply needed exposition of truth most people just do not know. It was never taught.I began studying the civil war about ten years ago. Being a southerner born and raised I always knew without any doubt that i couldn’t be considered a hateful hurtful deeply prejudiced person. I began to be really doubtful and skeptical of all the negative things that were piled upon southern people because I knew I wasn’t hateful and I knew my family wasn’t hateful and I didn’t know anybody who is hateful and hurtful. Quite frankly I don’t see any blatant racism here in the south where I live. I believe we all get along extremely well and I mean extremely well we get along fine and nobody seems to be hateful or prejudiced to any degree that could be considered hurtful. So I bought this book after spending probably three or four years studying the Civil War. Anyway I’ve gone too long on this. I will simply say you can trust this book because no one would write it if it were not true. Think about that no one from way up north in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and Vermont and all that no one would write a book like this if it weren’t true unless they were totally insane but there are three authors anyway you be the judge I’m done that’s enough.I didn’t realize I could come back and edit my review just shortly after I submitted it. But after reading it I thought at least I should explain that I am quite a verbal person I go a little long I talk probably more than most people have the patience to listen to. But this book is a very brave and bold look at deep deep truth that nearly no one seems to know. It’s absolutely the kind of illumination that gives me the desire to learn more and more of the history of my country and frankly the world. Ok thanks. G C

Book came in good condition

Blaming the South for the horrors of slavery is analogous to blaming young black males for the horrors of the modern urban drug war. In both instances the metastasizing tumors lay elsewhere. As Complicity’s brilliant research reveals, slavery’s tumor lay in the North. Farrow, Lang, and Frank created a watershed work which has not been embraced in America, but one day it will be. Truth always takes its time when money is at stake. Harriett Beecher Stowe said it succinctly: “Northerners have slavery just the way they like it; all of the benefits and none of the screams.”This book contributed to three enduring changes in my view of the Civil War and the emancipation process.(1) When the War began two ships per month were being built and outfitted for slaves in New York harbor. They were not built surreptitiously but in plain view. Each held as many as 1,000 slaves. This was forbidden by federal law but that law was ignored because the slave trade was too profitable. Once president, Lincoln quickly called an emergency session of Congress not to address slavery or war but to get his railroad built. As soldiers died, slaves kept arriving in New York and Lincoln didn’t prosecute anyone.(2) Complicity’s authors introduced me to a profession of brokers called “Factors.” Between harvest and planting the only banks large enough to provide capital to the huge Southern plantations were in New York and London. Factors arranged those loans and their careers made them more knowledgeable about the plantations than were the aristocratic owners. Without those loans many plantations would have died.(3) The United States is fond of boycotts and embargoes. We have one in force against Iran and another worked brilliantly against South Africa. None was ever attempted against the Confederacy prior to the invasion of Virginia. Merchants in New York City such as Macy made significant profits from cotton goods and the Northern public loved sugar and cotton products. Thoreau said such a boycott by merchants and consumers would have peacefully and quickly ended slavery.The authors express astonishment at their discovery of the depths of Northern complicity, especially since they were all raised in Northern cities. America’s educational establishment for five generations preached the gospel of the South’s monopoly on evil and the North’s on virtue.This book helps the truth rise a little higher in the quagmire of deceit. Slavery was not a Confederate phenomenon; it was an American, and indeed a global phenomenon.Buy the book. It will provide some of the education you never received in school, but should have.

The assertion has been made elsewhere that slavery as a whole was a major factor in the early economic growth of America and also Europe. That formal economic case is not made here, but much supporting evidence is provided in here of the impact of slavery on northern business and culture, as well as actual slavery in the north. This impact is not news but this is a fine comprehensive compilation. Included is an extensive early history of actual slavery in the north, heavy participation of the north in the slave trade and manufacture of slave ships, a large northern textile industry using southern cotton produced by slavery. A majority of exports from the US were cotton and predominantly from northern ports. Annual financing was provided by northern banks for southern plantation planting cycles. Northern companies sold life insurance on slaves to southern plantations. Due to exceptionally strong economic ties to the south, the mayor of New York briefly proposed seceding from the union along with southern states.

Growing up in New England, I was taught, as most of us were, about the South’s reliance on slave labor, leading us to believe that we “northerners” were innocents in that business. What we were taught in school, however, is the history of the War Between the States, with the south’s addiction to slavery as the primary element of evil regarding that conflict. Northern states were not blameless, however. Many of the ships used in slave trade came from New England ports and many slaves were used in the north in a variety of ways no less despicable than the demands of King Cotton. The research has been around a long time, but this seems to be the most comprehensive account, ideal for the casual reader of history. Even those readers into slavery accounts should find this a good read.

Informative and very interesting well written