(Editor's note: Following is a book review by columnist Bill Ward.)

Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
By Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
Forward by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

Ballantine Books, a division of Random House. New York. Copyright © 2005 by the Hartford Courant Company. ISBN 0-345-46782-5. 269 pages with Index. $25.95.

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Popular history typically has presented the antibellum North as the great liberator and defender of humanity. Conversely, the same history depicts the Southern states as the bastion of enslavers and oppressors of rights.

However, "Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery," shows what serious investigators of U.S. history have known for years: the extensive complicity of the Northern states in the slave trade. Those states not only made enormous profits importing slaves on Northern ships through New England seaports; they enjoyed the fruits of slave labor on northern farms and reaped profits from textile manufacturing with cotton, the leading cash crop in early America, grown mostly in the Southern states by more slave labor.

The authors, Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, are reporters for the Hartford Courant newspaper at Hartford, Conn. It appears that history books, written mostly by Northern historians, have been as universally derelict in providing the whole truth in Northern schools about our country's growing pains as they have in the South.

"Complicity" contains a few minor historic slips, not unexpected from journalists as opposed to historians delving into history. However, instead of dwelling on minor faults, much solid information, perhaps little known to the average history reader, makes this book worthwhile.

For example, in the 18th century, black slaves made up nearly one-fifth of New York City's population. Two major slave revolts in the city in the mid-18th century resulted in 31 slaves and four whites being either hanged or burned alive at the stake, a favored form of punishment for blacks in several Northern states.

And who would have thought there had been plantations with slaves in Rhode Island and Connecticut? But in the Narragansett area of Rhode Island in the mid-18th century, a plantation system was in place using slave labor to raise horses, cattle, and dairy cows. In acreage and numbers of slaves, they rivaled the plantations of Virginia's Tidewater region.

Rhode Island also led America's transatlantic slave trade, originating nearly 1,000 voyages to Africa and carrying at least 100,000 captives back across the Atlantic. The captains and crews were virtually all veteran New England seamen.

And in the decades before the Civil War, the Port of New York became the hub of an enormously profitable illegal slave trade. Manhattan shipyards built vessels that held between 600 and 1,000 captive Africans. A conservative estimate is that during the peak years of the illegal trade, 1859 and 1860, at least two such slave ships left lower Manhattan every month.

Of the interesting history it covers, "Complicity" reveals that the illegal Northern slave trade continued on up into the time of the Civil War. The treatment of slaves aboard Northern slave ships surpassed harsh; it was absolutely brutal, resulting in the deaths of large numbers of the slave cargo, including children. Nathaniel Gordon, a ship's captain from Portland, Maine, was probably the first and only American tried and executed for crimes resulting in the illegal slave trade. He was hanged on Feb. 21, 1862, some 10 months after Ft. Sumter was fired on.

By 1860, New England contained 472 cotton mills using hundreds of millions of pounds of Southern-grown cotton. Hundreds of other textile mills were scattered around the North, including New York and New Jersey. Huge manufacturing profits were invested in banks, insurance companies, and railroads. But the engines that drove those enterprises were the mammoth textile mills in Massachusetts, southern Maine, and New Hampshire. Only the large banks in Manhattan or London had the capacity to extend credit to the owners of the 75,000 large Southern cotton plantations between planting and selling their crops.

Northerners also enjoyed making excellent livings catering to wealthy Southern planters in the importation of fine china, silver, soaps, wines, jewelry, and entertainment - anything to enhance their quality of life. In the summer, large numbers of wealthy Southerners came from the Deep South to escape the sultry climate of their home regions. Southern dollars were more than welcome as businesses, from the finest hotels and restaurants to theatres, advertised in publications directed to prospective Southern clientele. Wealthy Northerners and Southerners, socially and economically, were linked by the common threads spun from cotton.

The social and economic relationships between the North and South seemed almost enough to have prevented the Civil War. Any Southern planter who wanted his daughter to have "a solid education of the highest order" could send her to New York to the Rutgers Female Institute "in one of the most healthful, quiet, and moral neighborhoods in the city," while the traditionally liberal Harvard College academically supported white supremacy.

Louis Agassiz, a renowned Swiss zoologist and geologist, served a 20-year career as a Harvard professor. Mentored by Samuel George Morton, one of the most eminent physicians in Philadelphia, Agassiz did research to prove the inferiority of blacks. He supposedly showed that blacks were not even of the same species as whites, helping to justify slavery.

In Chapter 10 of "Complicity," the seldom-mentioned ivory industry - such as in piano keys and billiard balls - and the two small Connecticut towns of Ivoryton and Deep River where ivory manufacturing thrived, are discussed under the title of "Plunder for Pianos." To produce music for the middle class, as many as two million African lives were sacrificed to harvest elephant ivory.

Every history and social studies teacher today should make "Complicity" a part of their reading for their own continuing education. And it should be required reading for every middle and high school student.

Bill Ward lives in Salisbury and is a historian, writer, and member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Contact him at wardwriters@bellsouth.net