NY Times, August 26, 2001 FREE AT LAST The Enduring Legacy of the South's Civil War Victory By DAVID BRION DAVIS Partly as a result of this denial of slavery's centrality in American history, few Americans today know that black bondage had long been legal in all 13 colonies when the American Revolution began. Indeed, black slavery also flourished in 16th-century Mexico, Peru and Brazil. In the 17th century, it made possible factorylike plantations in the British, French, Danish and Dutch Caribbean — the center of wealth in the Western Hemisphere, as slave-grown sugar and tobacco became the first luxury goods for an international mass market. In fact, in 1688, Governor Denonville of French Canada wrote to King Louis XIV, begging him to end the manpower shortage by authorizing shipments of African slaves. Though France granted permission, Canada could not afford the high prices of prized African slaves paid in the South. In 1716, a high Canadian official attributed the success of New York and New England to black slave labor, and insisted Canada could vie for the profitable West Indies markets if given credit to buy more slaves. While no New World colony began with a blueprint for becoming a slave society, the entire Western Hemisphere had become implicated by the paradox of trying to reconcile racial slavery with aspirations to escape the sins of the Old World. If some Africans abetted this by enslaving and making available millions of cheap laborers, it was Western European and then American entrepreneurs who exploited it. >From the 1440's, when the Portuguese began transporting black slaves to Iberia, to the 1860's, when the illegal slave trade to Cuba finally came to an end, Africa exported an estimated 11 million slaves. AFTER decades of research, historians are only now beginning to grasp the complex interdependencies of a society enmeshed in slavery. There were shifting interactions among West African enslavers, sellers and European buyers; European investors in the slave trade, who ranged from small-town merchants to well-known figures like the philosophers John Locke and Voltaire; wealthy Virginian and Brazilian middlemen who purchased large numbers of Africans off the slave ships to sell to planters; New Englanders who shipped foodstuffs, timber, shoes and clothing as supplies for slaves in the South and the West Indies; and, finally, the European and American consumers of slave-produced sugar, rum, rice, cotton, tobacco, indigo (for dyes), hemp (for rope- making) and other goods. full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/26/weekinreview/26DAVI.html
