Having grown up in Pennsylvania and attended public schools there, I was taught that slavery was an exclusively southern institution, and that southerners were therefore inherently inferior, if not barbaric. This was all a Big Lie, of course, concocted by the government-controlled schools throughout America in the post-1865 era as a means of justifying the Yankee Leviathan state that was created when the Lincoln administration murdered 300,000 fellow citizens (with the help of tens of thousands of conscripts and
European mercenaries).
But the truth is slowly getting out, at long last. The latest example of this Big Lie being exposed is an exhibit this month at the New York Historical Society entitled "Slavery in New York." Professor Ira Berlin of the University of Maryland played a role in assembling the exhibit, and was interviewed about it yesterday in the Batimore Sun. He pointed out that "New York City in the 17th and 18th centuries was the largest slave-holding city on the North American continent. There were more slaves in New York than in Charleston or New Orleans. Slaves made up a quarter of New York's population at various times . . . . New York had slave auctions and slave whipping posts and slave rebellions." And, "there were over 10,000 slaves in New York in the third decade of the 19th century."
"Everybody who walks in" to the exhibit, says Professor Berlin, "walks out saying, 'I didn't know that. Why wasn't I told this? Why didn't we learn it" in school?"
"For most people, slavery was a Southern institution; our racial problems were probably the products of something that existed in the South, not in the North."
In other words, it wasn't only southerners who were "reconstructed" in the post-war era. For more truth about Northern slavery read Joanne Pope-Melish's book, Disowning Slavery.
