Rooney
Jr. Member
Posts: 843
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« Reply #2 on: November 22, 2012, 03:48:32 PM » |
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Morris puts forward an interesting theory and it is not an original one. He must have recently read Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer. In his book Fischer puts forward that East Anglian puritans traveled to Massachusetts, Southern English cavaliers found their way to Virginia, Quakers made their way to the Middle Colonies and those of Northern England found their home in Appalachia. The book is a good read but it over simplifies the American slave system from colonization to emancipation.
What Morris fails to note is that slavery existed in New England in the forms of indentured servitude and African slavery. Slavery was accepted in New England and the Middle Colonies as much as in the South. For nearly two hundred years the North maintained a slave regime that was more diversified than that of the South. New England slave m,asters chose to use slaves as not primarily agricultural laborers, but they were trained to do many other industrial tasks. New England and Middle Colony slaves were trained to meet the needs of its more complex economy. The slaves were owned mostly by ministers, doctors, and the merchant elite, the New England aristocracy. Enslaved men and women in the North often performed household duties in addition to skilled jobs.
Morris points out in his monologue that it was the "puritan work ethic" that led to the growth of New England's manufacturing economy. While it is true that it was this Puritan ethos that gave men the courage to invest and build Morris does not point out that slavery played a role in creating both the capital and the manpower for the creation of the New England manufacturing empire. Joanne Pope Melish writes in her work Disowning Slavery that "the introduction of slave labor into the New England household economy enabled its expansion from small-time farms to large agricultural production, the expansion of local and regional markets, widespread entrepreneurial activity, and the rise of manufactures." Faneuil Hall of Boston, for example, was built by Peter Faneuil. Faneuil's father made much of his fortune through the slave trade and Faneuil continued to grow his fortune through both the slave trade and slave-based manufacturing.
From the seventeenth century onward, slaves in the North could be found in almost every field of Northern economic life. They worked as carpenters, shipwrights, sailmaker, printers, tailors, shoemakers, coopers, blacksmiths, bakers, weavers, and goldsmiths. Many became so talented in the crafts that the free white workers lost jobs to them.
This kind of "New England slavery" would eventually catch on in the Upper South in the mid 1700s. The main reason slavery died out in New England was because it simply lost it's profitability.
None of this justifies chattel slavery. As a libertarian I abhor all kinds of involuntary servitude. However, this is posted to show that Morris and Fischer have a theory but one not totally based in fact.
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