Module 6: Was there just one slavery in British North America and the United States?

Slavery is slavery. If a human being is bought, sold and considered owned, than that make the person a slave. The use of a slave is always different though. In the South, most slaves worked on plantations and in the fields picking and planting crops. However, as some people do not know, the North had it's numbers of slaves as well.

Generally, however, as the numbers of slaves were fewer in the North than in the South, the controls and tactics were less severe. African slavery is so much the outstanding feature of the South, in the unthinking view of it, that people often forget there had been slaves in all the old colonies. Slaves were auctioned openly in the Market House of Philadelphia; in the shadow of Congregational churches in Rhode Island; in Boston taverns and warehouses; and weekly, sometimes daily, in Merchant's Coffee House of New York. Such Northern heroes of the American Revolution as John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin bought, sold, and owned black people. William Henry Seward, Lincoln's anti-slavery Secretary of State during the Civil War, born in 1801, grew up in Orange County, New York, in a slave-owning family and amid neighbors who owned slaves if they could afford them. The family of Abraham Lincoln himself, when it lived in Pennsylvania in colonial times, owned slaves(1).

People of the colonial times didnt know any better. Society in that era approved the ownership of black slaves and frankly didn't see anything wrong with it. It's a reflief to know that not only the South owned slaves, but so did the great northern colonies as well as some famous historical characters.

-(1) Slavery in the North. Douglas Harper, 2003. www.slavenorth.com.