Slave Trading Laws of England and New England
 
From: bernhard1848@att.net
 
The American South did not invent African slavery, but inherited a colonial labor system of England which populated North America with previously enslaved Africans. This labor system was continued by New England slavers, who brought more Africans to these shores for the purpose of producing raw cotton to feed the hungry textile mills of Massachusetts. The radical abolitionists needed only to close the profitable New England mills in order to end slavery in the South.
 
Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
www.cfhi.net  

Slave Trading Laws of England and New England:
 
“The labor-system of the South before AD 1860, is a thing of the past. Nearly a generation has lived since it was abolished. It is time that the political emotions which once associated themselves with it were quieted. But every fair observer knows that in the South, essential changes from

[the] unjust and harsh system were made by law….So far did the laws of the South go from treating the African in bondage as a mere thing, owned by the master absolutely; those laws treated the bondsman as a responsible moral agent, personally amenable to statute laws, and encouraged and warned by its sanctions: they protected his life, limbs, Sabbath and chastity, against violence even from his own master: and that by the same statues, and the same penalties which protected these rights of white persons…” 
 [And how did the] Southern States…protect themselves from the evils of the presence of this savage population? A presence which had not been elected by those States, but forced on them, while colonies against their choice, by the slave trading laws England and New England. Let the reader observe in passing that nothing more is needed than this correct definition of the relation, to make an end of the boastful argument of the Abolitionist.”
 
(Discussions by Robert L. Dabney, C.R. Vaughn, editor, Volume IV, Secular, Sprinkle Publications, 1994 (original 1897), pp. 354-356)