Davis Hang Jeff Davis from a Sour Apple Tree!

It's already been done. Won't make a wit of difference. It's the South's fault, didn't you hear?

New England's slave traders and her consumers of cotton will be spared the Sour Apple Tree, apparently.

Of course, it wasn't the New Englanders' faults, They were only responsible businessmen who had every right to make a profit –and a handsome profit it often was.
 
Feel free! Place to start is Complicity about northern business support for slavery, written by two Hartford, CN reporters, that kicks off, unsurprisingly with insurance. Hanging Captain Gordon is about a certain Looking the Other Way with the illegal Atlantic slave trade that continued after the Constitutional ban. Gordon himself was a native of Maine, and some surprised when the Lincoln administration proved less sympathetic to slave trading than Buchanan's or Pierce's.

While a good percentage of New England textile mills processed wool, the majority dealt in cotton. Mill owners and their Agents(that's a title for the onsite managers), tended to frown on criticism of the sacred institution as bad for business. The mill workers it must be said, were anti slavery generally. Fun fact: the tariff structure tended to protect coarser grades of cloth, so that's one of the main products of the mills. Their best customer? Slaveowners who bought (I swear I am not making this up!) "negro cloth" for their slaves.

People are peeved with Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told, as too mean to white people, or too disapproving of slavery, or whatever. He does detail the financing of land and slave acquisition, a lot of which originated in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and London, England. One of the companies speculating in lands in then frontier Mississippi territory, the "Yazoo" country, was titled either the New England-Yazoo Land Company, or something like that. I'll check.

So, start the thread and get posting.
In this post are several starting points for the involvement of the Northeast in the institution of slavery.

None of which changes the fact that the protection of slavery was the motivation of the secessionists of 1860.
 
“The day is coming when slaveholders and their descendants will no more think of boasting of the fact, or even mentioning it, than the grandchildren of the slave-stealers and pirates of Newport, and other Northern seaports, now think of priding themselves on the unspeakable villainy of their ancestors.” [introduction to The Narrative of Bethany Veney]

Abolitionist and Methodist Episcopal Bishop W. F. Mallalieu made that prediction some 130 years ago. Yet still, today, those descendants pride themselves in praising the “unspeakable villainy” of a Confederacy created to uphold slavery.

The good bishop, sadly, was no prophet.

Both regions bear quite enough guilt, thank you. It's the pride in that guilt that is troubling.
 
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