I listened to a good part of a podcast by a professor of history somewhere, about colonial history re mainly slavery.
She dodn't get into indentured servitude, except to note that after slavery was aboloshied the children of slaves were to be indentured rather than enslaved. Nice touch.
One of her main points is that the history of America has been sanitized, but sanitized in a peculiear way. According to her account, slavery had been a national rather than a southern disease. She cites innumerable facts to show how the colony, and later state, of Rhode Island was literally built on the slave trade almost from the beginning. It had started out, after all, as a lawless refuge for religious refugees, often exiles, from Massachusetts. I didn't hear all of it, but the financing for slavery in the South was based, on what I know, completely in Northern, I guess mainly New York, banks.
The South has been portrayed, since the Civil War, even by knowledgeable historians like Professor Kaiser, as the site of a horrid disease, slavery. The North was innoculated, or even had always somehow been immune, from this terrible social disease, as the story goes.
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