Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

by Howard W. French

Then and now, people in the North have obtained tremendous moral satisfaction for their region’s role in fighting and dying to end slavery. But like Britain, where ending slavery has been woven into the very core of the national legend, conveniently overshadowing the fact that that nation was the superpower of Atlantic slavery for two centuries, the moral story of the American experience is a largely mythologized one. To anyone who has cared to really look, there is no escaping the fact that Black bondage benefited the North as much as the South, albeit in very different ways. When the rupture between the country’s two “sections” finally came, W. E. B. Du Bois explained the conflict in these terms: The South was fighting to take slavery out of the Union, and the North fighting to keep it in the Union; the South fighting to get it beyond the limits of the United States Constitution, and the North fighting for the old guarantees;—both despising the Negro, both insulting the Negro.