mericans tend to believe that slavery was peculiar to the South and that the North, particularly the New England states, was "free." This misbelief stems in part from mistaken ideas about the Civil War — the central metaphor of American popular history — and partly from the gargantuan reputations left by Northeastern abolitionists like Horace Greeley, William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The truth is that slavery existed all over the early United States. It lingered in Greeley's New York until 1827, and in Stowe's Connecticut until the late date of 1848. With the exception of architectural style, a traveler to the slave-era farms of New England would have found them virtually indistinguishable from the slaveholding regions of the rural South.

Though remarkably durable, the fiction of the free North has begun to fade as historians uncover records linking modern institutions to slave owners and slave traders who dominated the region in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. New Englanders were stunned when an amateur historian named Deadria Farmer- Paellmann showed that the man who founded an early predecessor bank of the modern FleetBoston Financial Corporation was a slave trader who persisted in the business even after Congress made aspects of the slave trade illegal. Corporate fax machines were likewise set chattering when archival insurance policies turned up showing that Aetna and other big firms had insured enslaved Africans for plantation owners in the Deep South. The language rendering the policies invalid when slaves were beaten to death or worked into the grave shows that the insurance companies knew exactly what they were into. In the aftermath of this discovery, the California Legislature passed a law requiring insurance companies that operate in the state to divulge any business they might have done with those in the slave trade.

Developments like these have debunked the simplified view of the past, while showing how many modern-day institutions grew at least partly out of the 17th- and 18th-century market in human beings. A similar set of relationships emerged this week at Yale University. Three doctoral students have published a detailed article linking the university's founders and early presidents to the slave trade. The article, published yesterday by a Connecticut group called the Amistad Committee, reveals that money from the slave trade financed Yale's first endowed professorship, its first endowed scholarships and its first endowed library fund.

Yale University in the modern era has produced many of the country's most distinguished black lawyers and judges. But back in the 1830's Yale officials led the opposition that prevented the building of the first black college, on the grounds that such an institution would have been "incompatible" with the existence of Yale. The university has reacted to the new research by saying that "few, if any, institutions or individuals from the period before Emancipation remained untainted by slavery." This is certainly true. But the article paints a damning portrait of Yale academic leadership during the term of its pro-slavery president Timothy Dwight, who was also the "undisputed senior scholar" at the college during his presidency, which lasted from 1795 to 1817.

Dwight wrote prolifically and rationalized slavery, saying that a man "who receives slaves from his parents by inheritance, certainly deserves no censure for holding them." A study of pro-slavery clergymen from the period showed that the school "with the largest number of [pro-slavery] graduates — one tenth of the total number attending college — was Yale University," with more than twice as many pro-slavery graduates as Princeton and Harvard. A charismatic speaker, President Dwight was obviously persuasive in class.

The article points out that 8 of Yale's 10 residential colleges are named for slave owners — while none are named for the school's abolitionists. It also proposes that the university determine if it has invested in any companies that profited from slavery, and consider reparations where possible. After more than a century out of public view, the slave trade in the North has taken center stage with a vengeance.