The Other Slave Trade

[guillaumeb]

From the article:

Most Americans are well aware of the Underground Railroad that helped escaped Southern slaves find freedom in the North, but few have heard of the Reverse Underground Railroad that delivered free Northern black Americans into slavery. That’s probably not just because we prefer uplifting stories over shocking and depressing ones. It’s also because the latter railroad, which transported about the same number of people as the former—hundreds each year—puts the lie to the notion of the North as a safe haven, making the nation’s original sin even harder to forgive.

Stolen, a new book by Richard Bell, tells the remarkable and brutal story of this other railroad, focusing on one horrifying case for which significant documentation exists. It involves the abduction of five African American boys from their families in Philadelphia in 1825.
What happened to these youngsters was not an aberration. During the first half of the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of free Northern black people, many of them children, were kidnapped into slavery in Southern states. Plantation owners in Southern states would pay $400 to $700 per newfound slave, then a tidy sum (comparable to $9,000 to $15,000 today).

To read more:

https://progressive.org/magazine/the-other-slave-trade-lueders-191001/

Before reading this article this morning, I had never read anything about this "underground Railroad in reverse", where free blacks were kidnapped and sent south to be sold.

[LakeArenal]

1. The movie 12 years a slave is about it.

[guillaumeb]

3. I did not see the movie.

And this article is very interesting for what it says, given that many focus only on the Underground Railroad.

[LakeArenal]

13. For me it was a difficult movie to watch.

But I did. It was good.

[JudyM]

2. Ugh, horrible.

We humans.

[guillaumeb]

4. And what we leave out of what we call history. eom

[appalachiablue]

5. History, where's the money in that? We're an increasingly

corrupt and dysfunctional society brainwashed to live and breathe for the 'free market,' consumerism and materialism. As well as hiding our history of abuse, oppression and racism.

Ten years ago when Bush uttered, 'Is our children learning?' I didn't know quite how wide and deep the ignorance in this country was. It's enormous and plenty of it is by design- underfunding public schools on purpose to enhance privatized charter schools for elites, staggering costs of college tuition and a fractured and then consolidated media landscape in multiple formats that is full of information and so called 'news.' What can get us out of this era besides real consciousness and a giant movement I can't imagine.

[guillaumeb]

6. Very true.

And many schoolbook publishers deliberately edit their books to appeal to the Texas education market. So slavery and many other evils are whitewashed in the name of revisionist history.

And yes, I did choose the word whitewash deliberately.

[PufPuf23]

7. Thank you. Enlightening alas. kr

[guillaumeb]

8. To me as well.

And I will guess to many, perhaps most.

[KT2000]

9. the movie Harriet

has this fact in it. My brother saw it and was so blown away by it, he called and told me the whole story in the movie. I want to see it and wish everyone could because she was an incredible person - even beyond the Underground Railway. Her accomplishments were many.

Let's get her on the currency!

[guillaumeb]

10. Amazing, or not, that this fact is rarely mentioned in US history.

[KT2000]

11. another thing they did

in the South after emancipation was to arrest black men for made up charges and then sentence them to work on plantations. Our education about slavery in this country has certainly been sanitized.

[guillaumeb]

12. Exactly. The plantation ws replaced by the prison and the work farm.

And in all cases, the labor was free.

[GeoWilliam750]

14. It was far more prevalent than many realize

And was notably common in Illinois.

Most people are also unaware that many Northern states, including Illinois, had laws prohibiting free blacks from moving into the state.

At the same time, some of the slave states had laws that required a freed person to leave the state within a year or be sold back into slavery by the state. This is one of the reasons why there were black owners of enslaved people - sometimes their "slaves" were their own spouse and children. They could not manumit them because they had no place to go, and no money to get there. Before 1800, these laws were much less strict, so that Washington could free the people enslaved on his estate, but by the time Jefferson died, the laws prohibited him from doing do unless he arranged for the newly freed people to live in a Northern state that allowed the manumitted to settle there.

The system of slavery was an especially sick and disgusting - and stupid - one, from which only a few actually benefitted, but those few were able to bend half a nation to their will.

On edit:

In 1860, the daily wage for farm labor was $1 for an 11 hour day on average (I am not sure whether that included any meals). Minimum wage in much of the US (with adjustments for time and a half) would be about $100/day. Thus, getting $400-$900 for stealing a free person and selling them into slavery would be the rough equivalent of working 11 hours a day for 400 days. Really, $400 would be in many ways more equivalent to about $40,000 now.