From Greg Grandin's "Empire of Necessity": Slavery, as the historian Lorenzo Greene wrote half a century ago and many scholars, such as Harvard's Sven Beckert and Brown's Seth Rockman, are today confirming, "formed the very basis of the economic life of New England: about it revolved, and on it depended, most of her other industries." The expansion of slave labor in the South and into the West was still years away, but slavery as it then existed in the southern states was already an important source of northern profit, as was the already exploding slave trade in the Caribbean and South America. Banks capitalized the slave trade and insurance companies underwrote it. Covering slave voyages helped start Rhode Island's insurance industry, while in Connecticut some of the first policies written by Aetna were on slaves' lives. In turn, profits made from loans and insurance policies were plowed into other northern businesses. Fathers who "made their fortunes outfitting ships for distant voyages" left their money to sons who "built factories, chartered banks, incorporated canal and railroad enterprises, invested in government securities, and speculated in new financial instruments" and donated to build libraries, lecture halls, universities, and botanical gardens.
The use of slave labor in the North was ending by the time Amasa was building his Perseverance, but throughout New England there were merchant families and port towns—Salem, Newport, Providence, Portsmouth, and New London among them—that thrived on the trade. Many of the millions of gallons of rum distilled annually in Massachusetts a Rhode Island were used to obtain slaves, who were then brought to the West Indies and traded for sugar and molasses, which were boiled to make more rum to be used to acquire more slaves. Other New Englanders benefited indirectly, building the slave ships, weaving the "negro cloth” and cobbling the shoes to dress slaves, or catching and salting the fish used to feed them in the southern states and Caribbean islands. Haiti’s plantations purchased 63 percent of their dried fish and 80 percent of their pickled fish from New England. In Massachusetts alone, David Brion Davis writes, the "West Indian trade employed some ten thousand seamen, to say nothing of the workers who built, outfitted, and supplied the ships." _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
