So Stephen Puleo's "Dark Tide" has been noted,
and songs written.

It occurs to me to underline one thing.

The molasses in New England was one point of that unholy triangle
from which industrial profit was sustained over centuries.
The most infamous leg, it appears to me,
of that triangle was the "Middle Passage"
in which ships went to Africa for human captives
and shipped, literally, boatloads of souls in chains
to be sold into slavery west of the Atlantic Ocean.   

Where slavery was legal, and standard practice, in the United States,
that leg of the triangle could not be denied.
The New England point of the triangle could demonstrate hypocrisy.
Where the molasses/rum process went on, in Boston,
slavery was not standard practice,
and abolitionists made their point of view heard regarding slavery.
At the same time, you had people in New England profiting nicely from an industrial/business arrangement
which, in the big triangular view,
included the slave trade described previously.

So there could exist, in the Boston area and elsewhere,
a sanctimonious hypocritical point of view:
especially once the War between the States was history.
The Northerners there could look with scorn and disdain
on the societies and regions of people
who lived with slavery before slavery was abolished.
And said Northerners could, and I submit they often did,
overlook the fact that their business culture was connected to slavery
and profited from the slave trade
even though the Northerners paid lip service to disapproval of slavery.

Amongst the worst of the sanctimonious opinions in the North
was that of judging that the South deserved
its disastrous reversals of fortune
as a punishment for permitting slavery.

As if the North in general, and Boston in particular,
could profit cheerfully from that unholy triangle
and pay no price for doing so.

Then comes an industrial disaster/accident in Boston itself
connected to one of the very industries
that formed part of that shipping triangle:
and the New England sanctimony and judgment-passing
now comes back to haunt the North.