Anne Farrow

Complicity provides a very illuminating view of the history of Connecticut during the US Civil War period. With the arrival of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War this year, it appears many historians are trying to take a fresh look at the Civil War from a more objective view point. Complicity is revealing for anyone that has grown up north of the Mason Dixon line and was taught that the north were the good guys and uniformly anti-slavery. And, similarly the south were the bad guys who created and perpetuated slavery. After reading Complicity you'll never have these simplistic views again.
In Complicity, the authors, all journalists with the Hartford Courant newspaper, take the premise that the industrial north, particularly Connecticut were aiders and abettors of slavery. In fact slavery has a long history in New England starting with the Puritans. In 1627, Henry Winthrop, son of the Pilgrim founding father, landed in Barbados to found a sugar empire that imported over 19.000 slaves between 1640 and 1650 alone. During the King Philip's war, the Massachusetts colony sent whole families of "unruly" native Americans into slavery in central and south America.
Several New England ships captains were directly involved in the slave trade transporting the human cargo between west Africa and the Americas.
However, the main basis of northern complicity is based on economics of raw materials such as cotton and ivory. The southern slave states produced nearly 60% of the worlds cotton. In th early 19th century, cotton made up 40% of all New York city exports. And while much of the cotton was exported to England and France; southern cotton was the life build of the mills of the industrial north. The economic influence can easily be seen by the efforts of wealthy northern businessman to advert war at almost any cost.
One surprising element of Connecticut's history was the ivory industry. Connecticut factories were the US center for the processing of ivory for piano keys and billiard balls. Ivory was harvested in east Africa by killing herds of elephants and then transported by slaves to the African coast. Once at he coast the ivory was loaded on ships and the slaves (the ones that survived) were also sold.… (meer)

Three journalists from the Hartford Courant attempted to expand a series of newspaper articles into a book-length examination of `the North's' complicity in slavery. They partially succeed. The book's early chapters explore slavery as it existed in the North, the connections between Northern industry and Southern slavery, New York City's particular role in the slave trade and the `triangular trade' (involving the US, Europe and Africa), and a `reverse underground railroad' involving the kidnapping of free blacks and their sale in the South. These chapters all supply useful information to fill the interstices of history, although much of it struck this reader as much less surprising than it did to the authors.

The book first goes seriously off its rails in the concluding chapters when it ventures into the stories of Elijah Lovejoy and John Brown. Their familiar stories are so well known that they seem out of place in a book that strives to deliver journalistically fresh content. Certainly nothing new is added to the reader's knowledge about these men and the hatred they generated North and South.

A chapter about the 19th century Philadelphia scientist Samuel George Morton who developed a `scientific' theory of the `races' that `proved' the inferiority of Africans and their descendants adds less than it might have and seems like an afterthought, a rather disorganized one at that. The chapter reaches its nadir when the authors elect to cherry pick quotes from Rev. Theodore Parker and Abraham Lincoln affirming the superiority of whites. They might have at least added Parker's quote predicting the success of abolition: "I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one... And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice."

The book's final chapter is also its oddest. It concerns the undeniably horrid consequences of the ivory trade especially on the African slaves forced to transport the tusks long distances. The tusks were particularly used to make piano keys. Undeniably, Northerners made pianos and played them, but they were hardly alone in these endeavors. Like the preceding chapter, this one seems like it was added in order to satisfy the publisher's idea of how long a book should be.

In a brief afterword, the authors assert that America's `extraordinary ascent into the world arena' would have been much delayed had the country, North and South, not benefited from the unpaid labor the slaves. This assertion is necessary to undergird the author's next assertion that the North was complicit in allowing this to happen and benefited from it. As a matter of labor economics, the authors' assumption that the US economy would have suffered if it had had to rely on free labor is doubtful. Indeed, the assumption flies in the face of the `free soil, free labor' ideology of Abraham Lincoln's nascent Republican Party, which argued that free men would work harder in a free labor society and that slavery undermined the free workers of the South.

The authors also disavow any intent to `debunk the myth of a virtuous North'. Perhaps so, but to this reader their failure to place the undeniable negative facts about the North in a broader context gives the book an unbalanced sensationalism. A reader might be excused for thinking that the only abolitionists were the few heroic leaders and not the thousands of members of a Northern mass movement. The authors cite statistics that New York State still had 20,000 slaves within its borders in 1790. True enough, but the authors neglect to relate that Maryland, North Carolina and South Carolina each already had over 100,000 slaves while Virginia had over 290,000 slaves.

`Complicity' fills in gaps in general knowledge about specific ways in which many Northerners benefited a little and a few Northerners benefited enormously from slavery. The book at least implicitly suggests an equivalency between the North and the South in responsibility for slavery that the facts do not support. The South was a slave society based on and defined by slavery; the North was not a slave society (and likely would have prospered without Southern slavery), but the North did benefit from slavery indirectly in large ways (e.g., large-scale manufacture of textiles that employed thousands) and directly in more limited ways (e.g., slave-trade shipping that benefited relatively few Northerners).

The book's tone ironically undercuts a nuanced reading of history that an appreciation of the relative roles of the North and South in slavery yields. The reader might better spend his time with Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.)Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom, Eric Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War With a New Introductory Essay, or even The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox by Stephen Budiansky.… (meer)