Northerners in Antebellum America Supported Slavery!

Americans in the antebellum north were not opposed to slavery on economic grounds and indirectly relied on slave labor.  They were also not completely opposed to slavery on moral grounds and allowed people in the south to own slaves.  Economically the north relied largely on slavery.  As seen in the graph below, as the number of textile mills in Lowell (a city located in the north) increased, the number of pounds of cotton needed increased.  This caused the number of slaves used to also increase because slaves were needed to grow and pick the cotton.  As the industrial revolution grew in the north and became their fundamental economic structure, more cotton was needed to make fabrics in and clothes in factories, thus requiring the south to need more slaves to meet this demand for cotton.  The north was economically reliable on the south and their use of slaves. 

Some of the wealthiest and most prominent people in the north depended on slave labor and the slave trade occurring in the south.  In a documentary about the DeWolf family, it is revealed that this family lived in Rhode Island, but has been the largest American slave traders in history.  The DeWolf family was rich because of their rum business, but the only way for this business to have been successful was through the use of slaves on sugar plantations. 

                The following short clip from the documentary about the DeWolf family, Traces of the Trade talks about the DeWolf family and their involvement in the slave trade.  

Even though the slave trade became illegal in 1808, the DeWolf’s were not morally opposed to continue trading slaves to fund their business after it was illegal.  Even president Thomas Jefferson looked the other way on their illegal activity.  He was clearly not morally opposed to slavery since he was allowing illegal slave trade activity just because the DeWolf’s supported his presidential campaign.

                In Lowell, people were morally supportive of slavery.  There were anti-abolitionist groups who stated they were “no advocates of immediate abolition”¹.  They believed abolishing slavery denied southerners their constitutional right to property.  Morally not being opposed to slavery, northerners viewed slaves (people) as property.  The anti-abolitionist groups were “opposed to every species of unasked intermeddling or advice to the Slave States, or to individual-slave holders”¹.  Northerners were not morally opposed to slavery enough to interfere with the slave states and slave owners.  They consciously allowed other people to own slaves.   The only thing they were morally against and viewed as violence was “Southern Lynch-Law, Southern mobs, and Southern threats”¹.  They did not view slavery itself as being violence and being morally wrong.  Slavery was not opposed to on moral or economic grounds by Americans in the antebellum north mainly due to the north’s indirect dependence on slaves.

¹Excerpts from Lowell Patriot’s Coverage of Lowell’s Anti-Abolition Meeting, August 28 1825, Courtesy of Pollard Memorial Library Lowell. http://www.edline.net/files/_wdH66_/b4d0623095d7fd993745a49013852ec4/Unit_4_Activity_5_Doc_9_Lowell_Patriot.pdf

Trace’s of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, June 24 2008. http://www.pbs.org/pov/tracesofthetrade/film_description.php