Reflections on "Complicity" by Farrow, Lang, & Frank - By John Lloyd

[Eric Tipton]

Reflections on "Complicity"
By Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jennifer Frank
Review By John M. Lloyd

The usually-told story of the American Civil war is a story of the Southern Plantation, the white slave owner and the slaves that worked the plantation laboring miserably in the fields. It is one told of horrific beatings, heroic escapes from slavery to the North via the Underground Railroad, and of glorious Union regiments marching boldly to free enslaved people and crush the “Slaveocracy” that held America’s moral conscious in an icy grip. The Northern states are pictured as being wiser, more cultured, more modern and more benevolent since they did-away with the legality of slavery sooner than the Southern states did.
The quote “History is told from the side of the victor” is attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte. According to Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, this quote well could be applied to the story told above. It is a story commonly told by American schoolbooks for the past 150 years since the downfall of slavery in the American Civil War. Usually, when the story of slavery is told to schoolchildren today, and uplifting story like of the slave uprising aboard the Amistad or of the Underground Railroad is told to them since it is difficult even for people of today to admit that slavery existed in the North or that Northerners did just as many negative things to blacks as Southerners did to them.

Complicity, by Farrow, Frank and Lang highlights the concept that the population and governments of states in the North of the United States were complicit in the aiding of, profiting from, and even encouragement of the institution of American slavery, mostly in the name of economic and political exploitation. This book also argues that the foundations of the American Republic, both North and South, would not be economically possible without the institution of slavery and the rapid labor growth that it provided. Along with these main points, Complicity also traces in-depth such examples of the horrors of slavery in the North when it was legal (as well as when it was illegal), how New England was the main food source for West Indian slaves in the 18th century, how radical abolitionists provoked the masses in the Northern states and how those masses reacted to abolitionists in negative ways, and how even into the 20th Century that slavery’s after-effects were felt in the United States terms of the ivory trade with African ports.

The book follows from the time of colonial days up to slavery’s end in the American Civil War and into the vestiges of slavery’s legacy in the 20th Century, demonstrating the individual instances and facts that surround the Northern States’ scope of involvement with slavery. This scope is larger than most Americans have been led to believe. The authors attribute this mostly to revisionism by the Northern victors of the Civil War as well as the disassociation of Northern whites with slavery after its final abolition. A healthy dose of scapegoating racial inequality upon white Southerners after their loss of the Civil War is also evident from the tone of the authors’ writings as well.

The authors’ evidence to support their thesis that is presented is almost overwhelming. The authors advance their argument that just because slavery had been directly abolished legally by the Northern states in the early 19th Century and continued as a viable economic source in the Southern states, the Northern states still reaped the direct benefits of this association. If not direct benefit in the form of cotton for Northern mills and jobs, then indirect benefit from slave catchers, illicit trade in slaves, building of slave ships to continue the trade were known widely in the North well into their last vestiges in 20th Century’s piano ivory trade that led to the death of some 2 million slaves in Africa.

This book is a story that needs to be told to all Americans in order that the issue of slavery in our culture is a burden borne by both Northerners and Southerners alike. While there were triumphs against such a dehumanizing and cruel institution such as slavery at certain moments in time, for the most part these tended not to be the status quo according to the authors. I personally feel Complicity should be required reading amongst all students of this era, and I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

[Pvt Schnapps]

Re: Reflections on "Complicity" by Farrow, Lang, & Frank - By John Lloyd

The stereotype of irredeemably evil slave owners and vicious southern whites can get to seem as tiresome and one dimensional as the happy-slave, benevolent-owner caricatures in Gone With the Wind. The amount of southern wealth tied up in slaves meant that by 1860 a slave holder could be quite moral, even repulsed by the institution, but unable to escape it without severe penalty to his family's economic well being. And the explosion of slave value between 1850 and 1860 leading to that situation was facilitated by a whole financial network, much of which lay outside the south.

Any book that examines the extent of national culpability and racism makes a valuable contribution, and so I'm glad to see this review.

The only caveat I have is that balance remains -- perhaps will always remain -- an awkward challenge. The more one believes that northern whites benefitted from slavery, the more their general support for the war may appear more altruistic than it actually was.

In truth the more diversified economies of the northern states made it much easier for their citizens to shift whatever investments they had in the slave system to some other enterprise. The insurance industry, for example, was able to adjust fairly nimbly from policies on individual slaves to insuring whole cargos of Chinese rail workers.