Slavery in the US Northern States

As a northern Yankee, could your ancestors have been slavers? Best to be certain you’re not just another stone thrower living in a glass house.

INTRODUCTION

African slavery is so much the outstanding feature of the South, in the unthinking view of it, that people often forget there had been slaves in all the old colonies. 

Slaves were auctioned openly in the Market House of Philadelphia; in the shadow of Congregational churches in Rhode Island; in Boston taverns and warehouses; and weekly, sometimes daily, in Merchant’s Coffee House of New York. Such Northern heroes of the American Revolution as John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin bought, sold, and owned black people. William Henry Seward, Lincoln’s anti-slavery Secretary of State during the Civil War, born in 1801, grew up in Orange County, New York, in a slave-owning family and amid neighbors who owned slaves if they could afford them. The family of Abraham Lincoln himself, when it lived in Pennsylvania in colonial times, owned slaves.[1]

Related Posts

• University of Florida’s anti-Southern commercial
• Negro Slave Trade History in Albany, NY
• Martin Luther King…and His Communist Affiliations
• King Lincoln Archives for Compliant Republicans
• Robert Barnwell Rhett: Our Cause is Not Dead