Slavery in the North was always of the “household” variety. The North never had anything resembling a plantation system, (the official name of Rhode Island not withstanding). Most Northern slaves tended to be either household servants or artisans such as farriers and carpenters or printer’s devils.
While slavery hung on with the failure to emancipate previously purchased slaves until old age or death freed them, (New Jersy freed the last dozen or twenty slaves only with the 13th Amendment), there were very few slaves in the North following the adoption of the Constitution:
Northern slave states
Significant dates VT PA MA NH CT RI NY NJ
European settlement 1666 1638 1620 1623 1633 1636 1624 1620
First record of slavery c.1760? 1639 1629? 1645 1639 1652 1626 1627
Official end of slavery 1777 1780 1783 1783 1784 1784 1799 1804
Actual end of slavery 1777 c.1845 1783 c.1845? 1848 1842 1827 1865
The Northwest Ordinance kept slaves out of every state North and West of Ohio from the very beginning.
The question of slavery in the north is an interesting one. Its generally held that for the most part slavery was limited to the household variety, as **tomndebb ** showed. Recently, there have been some revelations that a plantation system of a sort existed some places in the north. A professor of mine in college, for instance, was doing work excavating a plantation in Salem, CT that employed a few dozen slaves, owned by a wealthy merchant from the Massachusetts town of the same name. I’ve also heard, although I admittedly know little of it myself, that southern RI also had a plantation economy to some extent. As far as I know, however, slavery in the north was mostly limited to the household variety.
Sometimes people will cite that many of the northern states didn’t completely end slavery until sometime in the 1840’s as evidence that it was more widespread here than was mentioned. This arguement ignores the fact that by the 1780’s slavery, across the entire US no longer made much economic sense and was widely seen as a dying institution. One of the reasons that the northern states and the constitution convention (although there were other considerations in that case) didn’t address it more directly is because it had, for the most part, declined heavily in the north and was expected to do the same thing in the south. Indeed, I’ve heard many historians argue that this was exactly what was in the process of happening until Eli Whitney, ironically from Connecticut, invented the cotton gin. Thus giving the institution its second life, the one that we mostly think of when we think of US slavery.
This leads to the other question of how complicit the north was for perpetrating the slave system in the sense that it economically prospered from and enabled it. My local newspaper, the *Hartford Courant * has been banging this drum quite loudly for for the past couple of years and has even published a book on the subject. For example, the town across the river from where I live, Wethersfield, CT was famous in colonial times for growing a kind of red onion which was sold to the slave plantations in the south and the Caribbean as a cheap food for their slaves. While I understand the reason for this line of inquiry and consider it a fascinating aspect of history in its own right, I’m not really much of one for the blame game in general. I also think it ignores the fact that the entire Atlantic world was a fairly intergrated economy, so that if you are going to start blaming people by economic association, you litteraly have to blame everyone who is connected to that economy; and once we’ve done that its really no more than an intellectual exercies to see how many people you can connect.
As far as my opinion of the goodness of my anscestors, I only had one part of my family that was here at that time and based on what I know they were pretty poor farmers who weren’t in a position to own any slaves. That aside, as I said, I’m not really big on playing the blame game because it turns into an academic excercies. Besides, as I said in an earlier post, although those people could see plainly on person to person level the evils of slavery, they came from an intellectual tradition that was only beginning to formulate arguements against it and thus their response was uneven. Also, if they were going to condemn slavery based on the intellectual foundation that we now do, they would have also needed to condemn things like the working conditions in thier nascent factory system. I think asking all these things at once are more than any one society can reasonably do in a short span of time. I laud the north, much like I do England, France, Canada, and the other modern western states for making this transition in the relatively smooth way that they did over the course of the 19th century. I also laud them for throwing thier economic and military might behind ending the system in other places.
As far as the Amercian south, I think many aspects of its culture were and in some cases remained (and perhaps even remain) backwards and reprehensible. Its my own opinion that the US of today would have been alot better if when the Southern States seceeded in 1860 we had said, “We’re keeping Virginina and Texas, but for the rest of you good riddance. Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.”