I speak of course of the Northern states in the U.S., especially New England.  It is no surprise that the most famous of all the Northern-state presidents said things that would make any member of the KKK blush.  He said such things because, as one of the slickest politicians in American history, he knew that almost all people in the white supremacist North agreed with him.

Slavery was just as degrading in the Northern states as it was anywhere, especially in New York, where slaves were used to build slave ships destined to transport more slaves from Africa.  Boston, Newport, and Providence were the other hubs of the transatlantic slave trade where slaves were used to build the slave ships, and were also house servants to the wealthy New England slave traders and their business associates.

After slavery was slowly phased out (over about 60 years in New York) for purely economic reasons in the North, and many of the slaves there were sold into slavery elsewhere in the world, the tiny remaining population of free blacks was dehumanized and often brutalized.  “In virtually every phase of existence [in the North] Negroes found themselves systematically separated from whites, “wrote Leon Littwack in North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (p. 97).  They were excluded from railroad cars, stagecoaches, and steamboats or assigned to special “Jim Crow” sections that were later imposed on the South as well by the Republican Party during “Reconstruction.”  There were separate black schools, prisons, hospitals, and even cemeteries.  In New England, black graves were dug up and the corpses reburied in black cemeteries.

Northern Black Codes existed in the North and were also imposed on the South by the U.S. government during “Reconstruction.”  In some Northern states “Negroes and Mulattos” were prohibited from residing there; all contracts with Negroes were null and void; whites who encouraged blacks to enter one of these states were subject to fines and imprisonment; Negroes and mulattos were not allowed to vote; inter-racial marriage was banned; and Negroes and mulattos could not testify in court against whites or hold any public office.  “Racial discrimination was the rule” in the North, wrote C. Vann Woodward in The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 

Leon Littwack also wrote that the folklore of “southern racial inhumanity” versus “northern benevolence and liberality” during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “does not accord with the realities” (p. vii).  It is little wonder, then, that even Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his famous book, Democracy in America, that “the prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known” (p. 359).  All Americans are taught, beginning in elementary school, that these people died by the hundreds of thousands during the “Civil War” solely for the benefit of black strangers in the South.

All of this goes to show how incredibly ignorant of American history –and hypocritical — all the super-sanctimonious Haters-of-All-Things-Southern who have been on a torches-and-pitchforks rampage  in recent days truly are.

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