Slave ship Le Saphir, 1741

“THOUGH Southerner George Mason tried, unsuccessfully, to prohibit the U.S. slave commerce as early as 1787 — referring to it as a ‘wicked, cruel and unnatural trade’ — and though Southern President Thomas Jefferson finally permanently banned it in 1808, the law (as even Lincoln observed) was routinely ignored by Northerners (mainly from New England and New York), who vigorously  continued to illegally traffic in human chattel, even during and after the Civil War. Not a single slaving captain or trader was punished by the U.S. until Nathaniel Gordon in 1862, and for good reason: the federal government was completely controlled by slave interests right through to the Lincoln administration. Indeed, as just mentioned, this is how “Honest Abe” funded his war: chiefly with profits from Northern slavery and the Yankee slave trade.

“Yankee abolitionist, individualist, and natural rights advocate Lysander Spooner saw right through Lincoln’s duplicitous treachery, correctly referring to the president’s ‘Wall Street Boys’ — that is, New York City’s business establishment (bankers, merchants, manufacturers, and stockjobbers) — as the ‘lenders of blood money.’ Wrote Spooner:

“… these lenders of blood money had, for a long series of years previous to the war, been the willing accomplices of the slave-holders in perverting the government from the purposes of liberty and justice, to the greatest of crimes. They had been accomplices for a purely  pecuniary consideration, to wit, a control of the markets in the South; in other words, the privilege of holding the slave-holders themselves in industrial and commercial subjection to the manufacturers and merchants of the North (who afterwards furnished the money for the [Civil] War) And these Northern merchants and manufacturers, these lenders of blood money were willing to continue to be the accomplices of the slave-holders in the future for the same pecuniary considerations. But the slaveholders, either doubting the fidelity of their Northern allies, or feeling themselves strong enough to keep their slaves in subjection without Northern assistance, would no longer pay the price these Northern men demanded. And it was to enforce this price in the future — that is, to monopolize the Southern markets, to maintain their industrial and commercial control over the South — that these Northern manufacturers and merchants lent some of the profits of their former monopolies for the [Civil] war, in order to secure themselves the same, or even greater, monopolies in the future. These — and not any love of liberty or justice — were the motives on which the money for the [Civil] war was lent by the North.”

— Everything You Were Taught About American Slavery is Wrong, Ask a Southerner! Lochlain Seabrook (Sea Raven Press, 2014); pp 223-224

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