it wasn't the New Englanders' faults, They were only responsible businessmen

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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.

Well stated.

I have studied this in particular.

Then why not start another thread (if there isn't already one) to discuss it? It would be both interesting and enlightening.

That is a good challenge. Has been discussed before and I have a set of questions to ask. I am looking forward to a new thread.
 
4
23px-Flag_of_Missouri.svg.png
Missouri August 10, 1821[26]
(admitted) Missouri Territory (part)

From that time, it was everyone's fault. The chimera that slavery would die out on its own was obviously false.
At that point the paid labor states should have let the coerced labor states go.
If coerced labor was the wave of the future, the next forty years would prove it. At that point, the addition of Texas and the Mexican addition to the United States would have been avoided. Demographic imperialism in 1849 might have been entirely northern, or that may have been the dispute that started the war. Each section then would have been able to fend for itself.
Immigrants would have voted with their feet. The south would not have controlled economic issues in the northern states, and the fugitive slave obligation would have disappeared.
I suspect the growth trajectories of the two countries would have been markedly different, but who knows.
 
Just to add a basic fact, Rhode Island in particular made a ton of money off of the Slave Trade. So much so, that they named a college after one of the contributing families from their fortune. (Not sure if it would be frowned upon to name it).
 
Just to add a basic fact, Rhode Island in particular made a ton of money off of the Slave Trade. So much so, that they named a college after one of the contributing families from their fortune. (Not sure if it would be frowned upon to name it).
When I check the history a criminal enterprise violating Federal law made a bunch of illicit dough but not RI in general.
 
So much so, that they named a college after one of the contributing families from their fortune. (Not sure if it would be frowned upon to name it).

I believe you are referring to Brown Uni. And no, its no big deal and has been bandied about quite a bit here, as well as the slavery based funding of many other Northern colleges.
 
Right, Brown University. Named after the Brown family who made their fortunes in the Slave Trade business.

Brown University's Debt to Slavery
The Brown family owned slaves and engaged in the slave trade, although one family member became a leading abolitionist and had his own brother prosecuted for illegal slave trading. The college did not own or trade slaves.
 
When I check the history a criminal enterprise violating Federal law made a bunch of illicit dough but not RI in general.

I was referring to the leading "businessmen" of the day in the business.

Also think of all of the businesses related to the trade, directly and indirectly that benefited from it.

It was probably one of, if not "the" biggest industry of the time, well boosting the state's economy.
 
When I check the history a criminal enterprise violating Federal law made a bunch of illicit dough but not RI in general.

That's it; a relatively small proportion of people in these states continued slave trading after it became illegal and made money from it. It's like the illegal drug business today; because there are drug dealers in say New York, would we make a blanket statement that "New York supports the drug trade"?

Also like drugs, the slave trade depended on people buying the product. It's been mentioned before without disagreement that southerners seem to have been content to let northern merchants, banks, and insurance companies bear the risk of the illegal commerce.

Despite the economic benefit to some, the majority of northern voters voted to abolish slavery in their own states, and the majority of their representatives in Congress apparently voted to restrict and then abolish the slave trade - does anyone have the record of votes on the slave trade acts of 1794, 1800, or 1807?
 
Brown University's Debt to Slavery
The Brown family owned slaves and engaged in the slave trade, although one family member became a leading abolitionist and had his own brother prosecuted for illegal slave trading. The college did not own or trade slaves.

That is correct.

My basic point was the amount of money made and the amount of money contributed to the college.
 
That is correct.

My basic point was the amount of money made and the amount of money contributed to the college.
A good point, but an economist accountant would like to know the % slave trading contribured to profits and if the accounts were segregated by source.
 
Interestingly RI did not fully abolish Slavery till 1842.
Started earlier

Slavery in Rhode Island
Stephen Hopkins introduced a bill while serving in the Rhode Island Assembly in 1774 that prohibited the importation of slaves into the colony. This became one of the first anti-slavery laws in the United States. In February 1784, the Rhode Island Legislature passed a compromise measure for gradual emancipation of slaves within Rhode Island. All children of slaves born after March 1 were to be "apprentices," the girls to become free at 18, the boys at 21. By 1840, the census reported only five African Americans enslaved in Rhode Island.[14]

Despite the antislavery laws of 1774, 1784, and 1787, an international slave trade continued. In 1789, an Abolition Society was organized to secure enforcement of existing laws against the trade. Leading merchants continued to engage in the trade even after it became illegal, especially John Brown and George DeWolf. After 1770, slaving was never more than a minor aspect of Rhode Island's overall maritime trade.[15]

Rhode Island manufactured numerous textiles throughout the early 19th century using southern cotton cultivated with slave labor—as did all other American textile manufacturers of the time.[16] By the mid-19th century, many Rhode Islanders were active in the abolitionist movement, particularly Quakers in Newport and Providence such as Moses Brown.[17]
 
That's it; a relatively small proportion of people in these states continued slave trading after it became illegal and made money from it. It's like the illegal drug business today; because there are drug dealers in say New York, would we make a blanket statement that "New York supports the drug trade"?

Also like drugs, the slave trade depended on people buying the product. It's been mentioned before without disagreement that southerners seem to have been content to let northern merchants, banks, and insurance companies bear the risk of the illegal commerce.

Despite the economic benefit to some, the majority of northern voters voted to abolish slavery in their own states, and the majority of their representatives in Congress apparently voted to restrict and then abolish the slave trade - does anyone have the record of votes on the slave trade acts of 1794, 1800, or 1807?

And this is the Yankee Myth! The Acts to Abolish the Slave Trade was a Ruse, It only increased Slavers Profits protected by the U. S. Government. It was Anti-English. Wrapped up in the Monroe Doctrine.

In the United States, New Englanders who had threatened secession only a year earlier were eager to capitalize on the restoration of a liberalizing carrying trade. Soon, many of these elite merchants would grow even more ambitious, and in the years ahead, the same men who had incorporated the public diplomatic apparatus of the United States into their private trade networks would rise to national public office, ready to wield the U.S. Navy for the protection of their profits. Ultimately crafting a pro-slavery U>S> foreign policy to protect the slave trade, they would establish the precedent for the promulgation of informal American empire throughout the Americas. But without soldiers, "empire" is meaningless, and none of their dreams would have been possible without the acumen and brutality of the men who captained the slave ships and negotiated with customs house officers on behalf of their elite employers. As William Gray, James D' Wolf and John Quincy Adams assumed public office, it was this class of "commercial agents" on the ground who made their rise possible. pp76 No God but Gain by Stephen Chambers
 
As further information:

No God But Gain: The Untold Story of Cuban Slavery, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Making of the United States by Stephen Chambers. Verso Press, 2015. Cloth, ISBN: 978-1781688076. $27.00.

Chambers begins with a discussion of the relations between the post-revolutionary generation of political officials and business elites that facilitated American participation in the Cuban slave trade. These “15ers” included such well-known figures as John Quincy Adams who, despite his later support for abolitionism, formulated the Monroe Doctrine in part to support American-Cuban efforts to ship coffee and sugar to Russian ports on the Baltic Sea. One of Adams’ key collaborators in this nefarious business was James D’Wolf, a successful slave trader and U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. D’Wolf in many ways symbolized the traits of Americans involved in the Cuban slave trade—ambition, cunning, and an almost inhuman callousness towards the lives of the human beings whose lives they destroyed in the pursuit of profit. Vignettes from D’Wolf’s life appear at various points in No God But Gain to help drive home the brutality which underwrote the genteel lifestyles of Americans who invested in the Cuban slave based economy.

American participation in Cuban slavery required not merely New England capital or Washington political clout, but boots on the ground in Havana. American agents such as Edward Spalding and Benjamin Bosworth worked actively to outfit ships and crews, smuggle slaves into Cuba, and export coffee, cotton, and sugar abroad. Encouraged by Spanish officials who liberalized trade policies and Cuban planters who wished to encourage “white” migration, many New Englanders traveled south to take up new lives as Caribbean planters. The rolling hills and sandy beaches of Matanzas Province (including an area known locally as the Bahía de Cochinos, or Bay of Pigs), which superficially resembled the Massachusetts coastline, proved a popular destination for many expatriate Yankees.

Chambers complicates our traditional understanding of both capitalism and slavery in several ways. Drawing from scholars such as James Oakes and Sven Beckert, Chambers reveals how American settlers like Nathaniel Fellowes, Ebenezer William Sage, and S.A. Rainey used modern business techniques—rigorous bookkeeping, time management techniques, and labor allocation—to make their plantations efficient business operations. Yet Americans who ran their plantations in such a manner became brutal slaveholders whose callousness towards the lives of their slaves often shocked their Cuban neighbors. Chambers thus asserts that capitalism and slavery were not only compatible but presented a dynamic, thriving alternative to free labor that would not be eradicated until Union victory in the Civil War.

https://www.civilwarmonitor.com/blog/chambers-no-god-but-gain-2015
 
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