It Wasn't About Slavery

Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War

Samuel W. Mitcham

• Publisher: Regnery History
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781621578772
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

The Great Lie of the Civil War If you think the Civil War was fought to end slavery, you've been duped. In fact, as distinguished military historian Samuel Mitcham argues in his provocative new book, It Wasn't About Slavery, no political party advocated freeing the slaves in the presidential election of 1860. The Republican Party platform opposed the expansion of slavery to the western states, but it did not embrace abolition. The real cause of the war was a dispute over money and self-determination. Before the Civil War, the South financed most of the federal government—because the federal government was funded by tariffs, which were paid disproportionately by the agricultural South that imported manufactured goods. Yet, most federal government spending and subsidies benefited the North. The South wanted a more limited federal government and lower tariffs—the ideals of Thomas Jefferson—and when the South could not get that, it opted for independence. Lincoln was unprepared when the Southern states seceded, and force was the only way to bring them—and their tariff money—back. That was the real cause of the war. A well-documented and compelling read by a master historian, It Wasn't About Slavery will change the way you think about Abraham Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the cause and legacy of America's momentous Civil War.

CHAPTER I SLAVERY AND THE YANKEE FLESH PEDDLER

I believe that in the end truth will conquer.

—John Wycliffe

In his introduction to To Live and Die in Dixie, one of the best books ever written on Southern history and culture, R. Michael Givens noted that slavery was the glue that bound all anti-Southern arguments together. He also correctly pointed out that people are clueless as to the truth about slavery.¹ Though the Civil War was certainly not only about slavery, it was an issue. Now, it is an issue about which most people know next to nothing.

A poorly educated American believes slavery existed just in the Southern United States. However, it can be found in the first chapter of the Bible, in the Book of Genesis. The very word “slave” is ancient and comes from the word “Slav,” the ethnic group that inhabits eastern Europe, including much of European Russia. And slavery continues to this day. According to the International Labor Office, a United Nations-affiliated organization, there were an estimated 40,300,000 slaves in the world in 2017.² This means that, in terms of raw numbers, there are more slaves in the world today than at any other time in history. There is, however, no great outcry about this fact, nor any large-scale movements to rid the world of it. After all, there is no money in that.

In ancient times, slavery was not based on race. It was based primarily on military conquest or bad luck. If you got in the way of the Roman army, for example, you would likely end up as a slave, or if you were the grandchild of someone who got in the way of the noble Roman, you would likely be born a slave. Slavery in its earliest days, therefore, was based on military conquest, though some people were enslaved because of financial debts.

Racial slavery began in the ninth century, when Arab Muslims began enslaving black Africans. The Arabs and Berbers, who were non-European Muslims, established the Trans-Sahara trade routes and took more than 10,000,000 Africans to North Africa and the Arabian peninsula.³ They had to cross the Sahara Desert, and many died along the way. Some of these unfortunate Africans were captured as a result of aggressive military action. Others were sold into slavery by their fellow Africans. This era of the slave trade lasted until the nineteenth century.

The practice of slavery was accepted in many African societies even before the arrival of Muslims. It grew as many Africans converted to Islam and some of them went into the human trafficking business.

The second wave of race-based slavery began in the mid-1400s when Portugal established trading posts along the West African coast for the purpose of trading for slaves.⁴ The slave trade was introduced into the New World by the Spanish in 1503. The British did not enter the business until 1562, but it was so lucrative that they soon wanted to dominate it. They were unsuccessful until 1713, when the Treaty of Asiento with Spain gave Great Britain the bigger share of the slave trade.

The American Yankee slave trade started on a modest scale in 1638. Boston began importing slaves for use in New England in a small way in 1644,⁵ but not much else was possible. The slave trade was a Crown monopoly until 1749, when London opened it to all Englishmen. The New England elites saw the chance for enormous profits and were quick to seize the economic opportunity.

In Captain Canot or Twenty Years of an African Slaver, which was published in 1854, Theodore Canot provides us with some fascinating insight into the slavery business.

Canot was the son of a French officer and an Italian mother. He grew up in central Italy. His father died in the Battle of Waterloo, leaving his widow with six children to support. Canot, forced to drop out of school at age twelve, chose to go to sea. He apprenticed aboard the American ship Galatea, which sailed out of Boston, beginning in 1819. His first voyage was to Sumatra, Bengal, and Calcutta, among other places.

Young Canot lived a life of adventure. He apprenticed for five years, mostly doing business in the Indian spice trade. After escapades in Europe, he ended up in Paris, where he lost his money gambling. He took “French leave” from his hotel and secured employment with a British ship heading for Brazil. On the return voyage, he was shipwrecked. Then he boarded a Dutch vessel bound for Havana. After several more adventures, Canot boarded a clipper ship bound for Africa as an interpreter and supernumerary officer.

The clipper had a crew of twenty-one “scamps.” Canot recalled, “… accustomed, as I had been, to wholesome American seamanship and discipline, I trembled not a little when I discovered the amazing ignorance of the master, and observed the utter worthlessness of the crew.”⁶

After a forty-one-day voyage to Rio Pongo, Guinea, he and his captain faced an attempted mutiny; Canot and a loyal contingent put it down. During the struggle, Canot shot and killed one of the mutineers. The captain thought it best that Canot not return to Cuba, where he would face harsh Havana law. He stayed in Africa and went to work for a mulatto called “the Mongo” (a.k.a. Mr. Ormond), a local ruler and slave dealer. Many of the wealthy slave traders who dealt with the Mongo were Muslims, and Canot agreed to “follow the Prophet” for business reasons.⁷

While Canot was working for the Mongo, a Muslim slave trader named Ahmah-de-Bellah arrived with forty slaves. The Mongo accepted thirty-two of them and rejected eight. After some argument, Ahmah-de-Bellah consented to keep seven, which he likely slaughtered, but insisted that the Mongo accept the eighth because he (Ahmah) could neither kill him nor send him back.

Canot asked the chief what crime the slave had committed that he should be forced into permanent exile. Ahmah replied that this slave had killed his own son. There was no punishment in the Koran for a man who killed his son, so the judges of his country (Footha-Yallon) gave him a penalty they considered worse than death: he would be a slave to Christians for the rest of his life. On learning this, the Mongo accepted the killer as part of the bargain and resold him to Spanish slave dealers.

Before Ahmah-de-Bellah departed, he told the Mongo that his father, Ali-mami, intended to launch a “great war” the following year on a variety of smaller, non-Muslim tribes. He would expand his animal herds and have many more slaves to sell Ormond. Canot learned that Sharia law prohibited Ali-mami from making slaves of Muslims but had no restrictions for non-believers. He also learned that African chieftains in the interior were fond of working their slaves until their bodies were about to fail; then they would try to sell the worthless slaves to white men who had established trading outposts on the African coast.⁸

Theodore Canot finally became captain of his own slave ship, the schooner La Fortuna, in March 1827. It included a cargo of 200,000 low-quality cigars, 500 ounces of Mexican gold, and 220 slaves. Three months later, in northern Cuba, he sold the slaves for $77,469 and the vessel for $3,950. After expenses, his net profit was $41,438.⁹ According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index, $41,438 in 1827 is worth over $915,000 today, after inflation is factored in.¹⁰

These figures make it easy to see why New England businessmen embraced the slave trade so readily. In 1836, English Captain Isaacs visited the slave trading port of Lamu on the island of Zanzibar. It was overrun with Northern flesh peddlers. “There were so many Yankee slavers and traders active in Zanzibar that the local population thought that Great Britain was a subdivision of Massachusetts,” Isaacs recalled.¹¹

All U.S. slave ships were built in the North; none were constructed in the South. Their crews were mostly Northern men, and Northerners prospered by the trade. New England also prospered indirectly because their capitalists bought Southern goods that were mostly produced by slaves. The Yankees then sold them overseas, usually at a handsome profit. The centers of the slave fleets were not New Orleans, Charleston, or Savannah. They docked at Boston, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island, later joined by New York City, which was also the financial center of the slave business. New York bankers loaned money to slave buyers and Southern plantation owners to expand their cotton acreage. They often accepted slaves as collateral.

New England quickly developed a “Triangle Trade.” Yankee sailors loaded their slave ships in a New England port with fish and rum. They then sailed to Africa, where they exchanged the rum for slaves. The usual rate was about 200 gallons per slave. Next, they sailed to the West Indies, where they traded the slaves for gold and molasses. After this, they returned to New England, where they sold the molasses to distillers so that they could make more rum. Sometimes they stopped at a Southern port and delivered blacks to auctioneers. This was only a minor part of their business. Only six percent of the slaves exported from Africa to the New World were destined for the thirteen American colonies. The bulk of them went to the Caribbean, West Indies, Brazil, or the sugar plantations of South America or the islands such as Trinidad and Tobago.

When the British Parliament tried to collect a tax on molasses, the Massachusetts merchants were upset. They protested that the tax would ruin the slave trade and cause more than 700 ships to be docked for lack of work. It would result in high unemployment in the rum business. There were sixty-three distilleries in Massachusetts producing 12,500 hogsheads of rum. (A hogshead is a barrel holding 63 to 140 gallons.) There were another thirty-five distilleries in Rhode Island.¹²

By 1703, slavery was a respected institution in the North. More than 42% of New York City households owned slaves. This was the second highest total of any city in the thirteen colonies, surpassed only by Charleston, South Carolina.¹³ They were primarily employed as domestic servants and laborers. Other slaves toiled as agricultural laborers in the fields of Long Island, the Hudson Valley, and the Mohawk Valley. In 1711, the first slave market started on Wall Street, near the East River, and ran for fifty-one years.

The Northern flesh peddlers obtained their black chattels primarily from other Africans. Historians Linda Heywood and John Thornton of Boston University estimated that 90% of the slaves shipped to the New World were first enslaved by Africans and only later sold to Europeans and Americans. Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., of Harvard University writes: “The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.”¹⁴ Gates points out that the present-day advocates of reparations ignore this “untidy problem” and want people to believe the romanticized version—that all the ancestors of present-day African Americans were kidnapped by evil whites, as portrayed in the abduction of Kunta Kinte in Roots. “The truth, however, is much more complex,” Gates writes, saying, “slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.”¹⁵ The Fon (ruler) of Dahomey (now Benin), the Akan of the Kingdom of Asante (now Ghana), the Mbundu of Ndongo (now Angola), the King of Bonny (present day Nigeria), and the Mbundu of the Kongo (Congo) were just a few of the larger African slave dealers. King Gelele of Dahomey told Britain’s Sir Richard Francis Burton that God ordained the slave trade. “If I cannot sell my captives taken in war, I must kill them,” he told the horrified diplomat and naval captain, “and surely the English would not like that.” Chief Gezo of the same kingdom later told Sir Richard: “The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source of their wealth … the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.”¹⁶ Frederick Douglass used this fact as an argument against repatriations, stating that the “savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa” were no more inclined to accept abolitionist moral ideas than the American slave traders.¹⁷

Slavery grew throughout the United States in the eighteenth century. In Connecticut, for example, one-half of all ministers, lawyers, and public officials owned slaves, and one-third of all doctors had them as well. Nearly all the principal families of Norwich, Hartford, and New Haven possessed, it was said, one or two slaves. Being a free black person in that colony was no picnic, either. By 1690, no blacks or Indians could be out on the streets after nine o’clock at night, and they could not go beyond their town limits without a pass. In 1708, there were frequent fights between whites and blacks. The colony passed a law whereby any black person who disturbed the peace or even tried striking a white person for whatever cause would receive thirty lashes. Twenty-two years later, even speaking against a white person could draw forty lashes for any black, Indian, or mulatto.¹⁸

In 1717, the Connecticut Colonial Assembly passed a law forbidding free black or mulattos from living in any town without that town’s permission. Nor, the law said, could they own land or a business without the town’s approval. This provision was retroactive.¹⁹

By the end of the American Revolution, slavery was found throughout New England. The descendants of the Puritans had no qualms about enslaving people whom their religious leaders described as savages. In 1783, one out of every four families in Connecticut owned slaves, and one out of every fourteen people in Rhode Island was a slave.²⁰ Some of the most prominent men in the North were involved in the slave trade, including John Hancock (first signer of the Declaration of Independence, governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and a significant slave trader) and Josiah Franklin (Benjamin’s stepbrother and a prominent Boston slave dealer). Prominent Northern supporters of slavery and/or slave owners included Cotton Mather (the prominent Puritan minister); Judge John Saffin (a New England poet who, ironically, argued against slavery); General Jacob He...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• Chapter I: Slavery and the Yankee Flesh Peddler
• Chapter II: Hypocrisy
• Chapter III: Secession: The Constitutional Issue
• Chapter IV: Pregnant Events
• Chapter V: The Nullification Crisis
• Chapter VI: Cultural Differences
• Chapter VII: Agitation and Compromise
• Chapter VIII: The Chasm Grows
• Chapter IX: John Brown, Terrorist and Lightning Rod
• Chapter X: The Election of 1860
• Chapter XI: The Real Cause of the War
• Chapter XII: Lincoln and his Agenda
• Chapter XIII: Over the Edge
• Chapter XIV: Tyranny and Emancipation
• Chapter XV: The Costs and Results of the War
• About the Author
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright