Yesterday, I wrote about the slavery apology passed by the Connecticut House of Representatives and, because it was a breaking story, had to settle for linking to the A.P. wire story on the site of the Hartford Courant.

This morning, the Courant has its own story about the vote, which begins:

More than 200 years after the fact, the state House of Representatives voted Thursday to formally apologize for slavery in Connecticut.

I think this opening line powerfully illustrates the importance of finally, and fully, acknowledging our society’s sordid history around slavery and race.

Just what does the reporter believe happened in Connecticut more than 200 years ago?

Surely he isn’t referring to the start of slavery in Connecticut, which had occurred by 1639, when the first slaves were mentioned in Hartford.

Surely he isn’t referring to the end of slavery in Connecticut. Slaves were listed openly in the state in each federal census until 1850, when the federal government simply stopped counting slaves in New England.

Perhaps he was referring specifically to the complicity of the state’s General Assembly in slavery. If so, however, he is mistaken.

The Connecticut General Assembly did eventually act to formally abolish slavery, declaring that “no person shall hereafter be held in slavery in this State.”

However, this was in 1848, a mere 161 years ago.

The exact number of years since slavery ended in Connecticut isn’t the real issue, of course, and the reporter may simply have made a meaningless slip which wasn’t caught by an editor or proofreader. However, this is a surprising mistake to make in the opening line of an article about the legislature’s role in slavery, and it does perfectly fit a common and pervasive pattern of historical amnesia about northern slavery.

It is common in Connecticut, and in the rest of the north, to assume that northern slavery was minor and economically unimportant, that the practice ended after the colonial period, and that long before the Civil War the north had become staunchly anti-slavery.

In fact, slavery was an essential part of Connecticut’s history and economy. At the time of the American Revolution, Connecticut had more slaves than any other New England state. Slavery in Connecticut was also a middle-class phenomenon, with one in four households owning at least one slave. In the antebellum period, while the economic benefits of owning slaves in Connecticut declined sharply, slavery in other regions became central to the state’s own growing economy and to its economic future, particularly through the process of industrialization.

Of course, apologies and acknowledgments are about the present as much as the past. Today, it is important that we cast aside myths about our history which seriously distort our understanding of our own past and its impact on the present day. It is also important that those who may feel that they remain second-class citizens do not continue to see evidence suggesting, fairly or not, that the majority of citizens deny that this history even occurred.

In fairness, I want to point out that this newspaper story, by Christopher Keating, is otherwise well researched and well written. Moreover, the Hartford Courant has been at the forefront of reporting on the North’s role in slavery. In fact, the newspaper’s ground-breaking reporting was turned into a book, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, which I highly recommend as a very readable introduction for the non-specialist. However, these facts only emphasize how strange it is that the mistake above would slip by, undetected, in such a prominent location.

2 Responses to “When did the North give up slavery?”

  1. 11:34 am, 16 June, 2009.
    Patricia says:

    Many mistakes slipped by in Keating’s article. No one has ever apologized for or to the white slaves. Too many are in error on their idea of what slavery was. No truth has ever been told on slavery to date. This is an institution that has been around since the beginning of society. The black slave owners in the south were worse than the white ones. Don’t tell a story until you get your facts right. Read your Bible. Yes, slavery is in it. In our time it was used by a President (Lincoln) to bully the South into shifting the wealth into the North. States Rights were all the South wanted. Lincoln used a way to get what he wanted. Make your enemy a monster and you will not only win the war you will change history, but only in the classrooms.

  2. 12:04 pm, 16 June, 2009.
    James says:

    Patricia, I’m not quite sure what you mean when you say that no one has apologized for “the white slaves.”

    In this country, we never practiced chattel slavery (or anything like it) with white people. There was indentured servitude, to be sure, but this institution didn’t remotely resemble the enslavement of black or Native American peoples.

    I’m also not sure why you believe that “the truth” has never been told about slavery. For instance, the fact that slavery has existed in different times and placed throughout recorded history is commonly mentioned in history books and in discussions of slavery.

    You’re right to point out that the U.S. Civil War was not a simple conflict about ending slavery. The South was fighting for more than the mere preservation of its slavery-based economy, and the North’s stance on slavery was decidedly ambiguous.

    The North deserves to shoulder its share of blame for slavery, as the North practiced slavery and profited heavily by it. Any attempt to describe American slavery as being primarily about the South is misguided at best.

    What, however, does this tell us here? How, for instance, do you believe that Keating got his story wrong about any of this?

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