Today, most people in the world condemn slavery. That was not true in the early years of the American nation. Many Americans thought slavery was evil, but necessary. Yet owning slaves was common among the richer people in the early seventeen hundreds. Many of the leaders in the colonies who fought for American independence owned slaves. This was true in the Northern colonies as well as the Southern ones.

One example is the famous American diplomat, inventor and businessman Benjamin Franklin. He owned slaves for thirty years and sold them at his general store. But his ideas about slavery changed during his long life. Benjamin Franklin started the first schools to teach blacks and later argued for their freedom.

Slavery did not become a force in the northern colonies mainly because of economic reasons. Cold weather and poor soil could not support such a farm economy as was found in the South. As a result, the North came to depend on manufacturing and trade.

Trade was the way colonists got the English goods they needed. It was also the way to earn money by selling products found in the New World. New England became a center for such trade across the seas. The people who lived there became shipbuilders so they could send the products to England. They used local wood to build the ships. They also sold wood and wood products. They became businessmen carrying goods around the world.

The New England shipbuilding towns near the Atlantic Ocean grew quickly as a result. The largest of these towns was Boston, Massachusetts. By seventeen twenty, it had more than ten thousand people. Only two towns in England were larger: London and Bristol.