I might be headed there from a different direction.
The promoted myth is that northern investors were isolated from slavery. They bought cotton futures, invested in land, etc. However, buying slavery mortgages, even packaged in southern bank bond issues, was direct investment in slavery. What percentage of slaves in the south, at the start of the war, were indirectly owned by them?
If the northern banks, markets, investors didn’t write off those investments as losses due to emancipation, but were bailed out in some backdoor fashion, then those institutions (or their successors) are still sitting on a huge pile of funds accumulated from that original blood money. Funds that descendants of the enslaved might have a legal claim to.
Where is this myth promoted? Even in the antebellum period it was acknowledged how tightly intertwined all of this was. For the last 80 years, USAn scholarship has been pretty open about this. Around 10 years ago I published a primary-source supplement for 5th graders, and there were many references to how intertwtined northern industry, including banks, was with slavery, It provoked no controversy or comment, even among the homeschool set.
Plenty of people have been talking about it, and attempting to counter the promotion of myths (links embedded in this article point to more information on the subject, too):
Others have researched many myths taught to and learned by pols who oppose efforts to improve how educators teach Black history (as well as the Civil War and enslavement in the US):
For sure. But the claim that northern banks and northern industry was deeply enmeshed in the slave system, complicit in its rise and continued profitability, is widely understood, accepted, and taught.
Probably depends on what you mean by “widely.” Certainly anyone who has bothered to do any basic research into the issue can easily find that information and schools may be better about teaching it than they used to be, but I don’t remember learning much about it in, for example, my Jr. High American history class. Heck, I didn’t even learn until a few years ago that the last state in the US to have legal chattel slavery was Delaware, a Northen state that was part of the Union in the civil war. Slavery didn’t end with the emancipation proclamation or even on Juneteenth, but probably the majority of Americans think that it ended on one or the other.
I also largely ignore northern and European banks, whose relationship with slavery was usually more indirect, through the financing of the cotton trade or through investment in southern bonds.
Okay, she’s writing a book focused on southern banks, but why spend the time running down the involvement of northern and European capital? Those southern bonds were probably secured with slavery mortgages, and “financing of the cotton trade” isn’t all that clean.
(That’s not a criticism of the book, which I haven’t read yet.)
This. That’s why the article I posted above by Michael Harriot is so great. He went right to the source - multiple textbooks widely used in states during the decades that those pols attended school. That’s a major source of those myths. Of course, all the revisionist history messages conveyed through art and non-scholastic publications just reinforced what they learned at school, at home, and from their peers.
More recently, we’ve also seen institutions involved in religion, shipping, insurance, higher education, liquor, etc. publishing apologies after they were called out publicly for their role:
In the face of that, those who prefer to cling to their myths instead of facing reality mounted a campaign of misinformation, and now they are bringing a lot of backlash to educators and students at every level.
