Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Wow! This was one of those books I found myself carrying around from room to room, so impatient was I to resume it after interruptions. Maybe the material is familiar to serious students of American history, but for somebody like me this book was a revelation, showing how hugely significant slavery (both in the Americas and in Africa itself) was for the economies and lifestyles of the northern states. The material assembled here is utterly fascinating, and the writing is condensed and pointed, with telling choices of anecdote or quotation in almost every paragraph. The book is much more of a page turner than most histories I have read. Maybe it's because the writers are professional journalists, people whose daily job it is, after all, to make information accessible and interesting to the average guy. I also get the sense the writers were deeply moved by the material, and eager to share it. The book isn't written in a straight chronological form, but organized according to topic (for example, a slave revolt in colonial NYC, or the hounding of a Connecticut woman who ran a pre-Civil War school for blacks, or the kidnapping of freed slaves from the North, or the thoroughly horrible ivory trade's beneficial impact on two Connecticut towns), and the writers, skillfully shifting their gaze back and forth in time, are quite masterful at showing how the past leads to the present. When I had finished reading I had a much deeper understanding of slavery's power and significance. The book itself is very handsome, not too bulky to hold, inset with many well-placed illustrations - not all grouped in a center section, as they are in so many histories and biographies. My one quibble is that some of the maps and reproduced newspaper clippings, etc., are too small to be read easily without a magnifying glass.

In some ways it's surprising that so few have been aware of the North's complicity in slavery. The very first slave auction took place in what is now New York. Even after the end of Northern slavery, Northern racism continued. Sadly, this was true in the White Churches as evidenced by the need for Richard Allen and Absalom Jones having to start the first Free Black Denomination due to White Christian prejudices. Though surprising that these facts are unknown, Farrow and her co-authors have done modern readers a great service by providing first-hand, primary sources that reveal not only the facts, but the cruel, soulless heart of the North's sad legacy of enslavement, racism, and prejudice. What readers don't hear as much of, are the inspiring stories of African American survival--through faith, nor do they hear enough of the stories of many Whites in the North, and even in the South, who did indeed reject slavery and the evil premises behind it. Of course, no one book can tell every aspect of the story of slavery. "Complicity" tells its story well.

Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction , Soul Physicians, and Spiritual Friends.

At just over 300 pages, this slender book is packed with one-after-another stunning revelations of the long-buried history of the North's intimate involvement in the slave trade.
This isn't the history your teachers taught you; this book will open your eyes to the realization that what has passed for American history for seven generations was a lie by omission, a mythology that portrayed the North as the home of noble souls who sought to free the slaves while the South exploited them.
This book will show you how the North exploited both the slaves and their masters, making them the engine for its own great wealth.
The book, written not by academicians but by professionaljournalists, is a rapid and exciting read, and the writing flows so smoothly, the reader finds herself at book's end wanting more.
Surely, more will come in the wake of this survey. The book teases us with many brief tellings of tales that could be books unto themselves, and it should be no less than a first window into a new era of re-examination of our greatest national shame.

Per Napoleon: "History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon."

Thanks to the authors for addressing this important topic in greater detail. Histories written about debates regarding slavery during the Continental Congress made it clear that southern delegates wouldn't sign the Declaration of Independence if slavery was abolished, but that it would be hypocritical of northern delegates to portray their states as anything but culpable in profiteering from the slave trade. In 1969, Sherman Edwards, a former New York high school history teacher become composer and lyricist, even touched upon this serious theme when he brought the musical "1776" to Broadway. His song lyrics for "Molasses to Rum", performed by Edward Rutledge, delegate from South Carolina, drives the message home of the North-South-Africa triangle:

Molasses to rum to slaves, oh what a beautiful waltz
You dance with us, we dance with you
Molasses and rum and slaves

Who sails the ships out of Boston
Ladened with bibles and rum?
Who drinks a toast to the Ivory Coast?
Hail Africa, the slavers have come
New England with bibles and rum

And its off with the rum and the bibles
Take on the slaves, clink, clink
Hail and farewell to the smell
Of the African coast

Molasses to rum to slaves
'Tisn't morals, 'tis money that saves
Shall we dance to the sound of the profitable pound
In molasses and rum and slaves

Who sails the ships out of Guinea
Ladened with bibles and slaves?
'Tis Boston can coast to the West Indies coast
Jamaica, we brung what ye craves
Antigua, Barbados, we brung bibles and slaves!

Molasses to rum to slaves
Who sail the ships back to Boston
Ladened with gold, see it gleam
Whose fortunes are made in the triangle trade
Hail slavery, the New England dream!
Mr. Adams, I give you a toast:
Hail Boston! Hail Charleston!
Who stinketh the most?

With all due respect to the teacher of US History, most US citizens have never taken a history course at a freshman college level. Yes, it is still a surprise to many people in the north. I live in Central PA where we see more confederate flags on pickups than you see in Alabama, yet there is a cultural moral superiority over the south that exists here, and can only be worse in Massachusetts. I took African-American history in college and even I was surprised to read that the mayor of NYC openly spoke of joining the south in secession.

So sorry to burst your bubble, this is a needed book. Even northerners who will admit there were slaves throughout all the colonies, a book like this shows the truth we'd like to forget about.

I was a working class white kid who thought himself pretty progressive and knowledgeable on these matters. Most of my peers and neighbors haven't ever given this topic a thought. If I can still find eye-opening material, most laymen can too. And some of the lucky few who've had a college course. Don't dismiss this as old news so readily. We're not all college professors.

I am so glad that I bought this one. I had read some of the Hartford Courant articles by Anne Farrow and wanted the full story of New England's part in slavery. This book is well researched and written. The authors are to be congratulated, and the Hartford Courant should be very proud of this team.

After the Civil War, the winner (the North), wrote the history of America to exclude the fact that Slavery was a major factor in Northern commerce. All of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, the Northwest Territory etc. had Slavery. But when the Northern history books, the ones we now use in school, were written large erasers were taken to them to exclude Northern Slavery. Many people still believe the Northern Colonies and then States never had Slavery. This book makes sure you don't make that mistake. When the Slavers (Slave ships) landed at New Orleans or Charleston, SC with their human cargo, they were not ships from the South. They were ships from New York, Boston, Rhode Island etc. The great robber-barron's of the 18th century made their fortunes from selling Blacks from Africa. And these merchants lived in the North. In addition, the Northern economy was dependent on Slave-grown cotton in the South. Cotton grown in the South was the oil that lubricated the Northern industrial revolution. As described in this book, Southern cotton was sent North for the weaving mills of New England and was shipped from Northern ports, making vast profits for the Northern businessman. In essence, the Northern economy demanded more slaves to grow more cotton and thus because the engine that drove slavery. Every American should read this book and know these facts.

This was a wonderful source of information shedding light on a otherwise little known subject. Most people, when thinking of slavery, only tend to think it was something exclusively in the south. However this book highlights the facts about the north's sorted past where this ugly subject was concerned. It was very informative and frank about it's subject and in some areas quite disturbing. An absolute must for people interested in the truth about America's past especially regarding the practice of slavery and economics.

Ms. Farrow reveals reality long concealed by historical revisionists and today's PC climate: that slavery existed in the north as well as the south and was equally responsible for the "peculiar institution" blamed only upon southern states.

Farrow leaves no stone unturned, from the practice of stealing free blacks and selling them as slaves to atrocities inflicted on blacks by angry white workers. It wasn't just the south; it was the entire country.

It's also interesting to note that the war of 1861-1865 did NOT "free" the slaves. Southern slaves were free at the end of the war; northern slaves remained in bondage until the constitutional amendment banning slavery was passed by Congress in the fall of 1865 - months after the last shot was fired.

This book studies the ways that the North, in particular New England, had an economic interest in the continuance of slavery in the South. From the legal and illegal slave trades to cotton mills to rum to ivory piano keys, the New England states made a lot of money off the labor and suffering of slaves in the U.S., the Caribbean, and Africa. Although we in the North are fond of thinking of slavery as not our issue, in fact the wealth of the entire United States is founded on the fruits of slave labor, and many Northerners--even abolitionists--welcomed these profits, tainted as they were. Love of money triumphs over principles yet again.

The subject matter of this book is interesting and the text is supported by many images, though most are so tiny that they are not as useful as they could be. While the authors, reporters from The Hartford Courant, name some names, they aren't finally as hard hitting as one would hope. I found the lack of footnotes or parenthetical citations bothersome in a history book. The documentation is in the back of the book, but there is no signal about sources or the need to look at the notes in the text itself. I understand that I am probably in the minority of readers here, but I like my scholarly documentation to be apparent.

The book was an eye-opener, and I am glad that I read it. More people should read it because it will help put an end to the self-congratulatory fairy tale of the North's opposition to Southern slavery.