People get confused about American slavery in part because the word slave was often used interchangeably with servant. Particularly indentured servants who were, in many ways, temporarily enslaved. Indentured servitude was a separate, though in many ways thoroughly unpleasant and dubious, entity. Theoretically, those who entered into it got something out of it, rather it be paying off a debt or gaining a skill. And, at the end of their service, and by its design indentured servitude came to an end, they received something of value. Land. Indentured servitude had deep flaws, but when I speak of American slavery I speak specifically of race-based chattel slavery.
Under chattel slavery people are treated as the personal property of another. Chattel enslavement is generational; children are born as property. While slavery of any kind is driven by extreme poverty, corruption, and/or discrimination it has been argued that when a society treats some members as less valuable or less worthy of protection, they are more likely to become slaves. In the modern era, where slavery still thrives its targets tend to be the most vulnerable: children, women, and ethnic or religious minorities. However, in the US the reverse is true. In choosing slavery America created a system of discrimination and dehumanization to justify this economic choice. An ideology that stains us to this day.
Its staying power comes, in part, because we don’t really talk about it. When former FLOTUS Michelle Obama pointed out that the White House had been built by those enslaved it set off a shock wave of consternation and denial of what was an obvious and easily checked piece of our history. Enslaved people of African descent played an integral part not only in building the White House, but in building the land of the free and home of the brave. In lieu of authentic conversations in our classrooms throughout the country, not just in the South, we have opted instead for suppression of the truth and promotion of Confederate mythology. Two hundred and fifty years of enslavement is reduced to a single chapter in a history textbook and is not taught as part of our economic history at all.
People hold desperately to the idea that the worst thing about slavery is that it was an infringement on liberal rights, not human rights. It is taught and viewed as almost something separate from America. Something that happened in isolation and benefited only a few wealthy planters, affected a handful of enslaved persons. After all, we claim, the US didn’t really come into power until the twentieth, filling a void left by a Europe ravaged by wars. We go out of our way not to recognize that slavery is the foundation of the United States of America’s growth, her power, her wealth, and her success. We cling to a false image built of half-truths and silence those who would speak otherwise. We, Americans, punish African Americans, and other Black Americans, with a lack of freedom, unequal treatment, and a dearth of opportunity because our mere presence is an uncomfortable reminder of this fact.
To this day it is promoted that “The history of African-Americans begins with slavery, as white European settlers first brought Africans to the continent to serve as slaves.” In fact, American race-based chattel slavery evolved from economic choices made by wealthy, white, male landowners and politicians. In the early 1600s, including in 1619 when the twenty and odd Africans were brought to the shores of Virginia, there was no chattel slavery in the colonies. The British American colonies were mostly agricultural economies, powered largely by indentured servants made up of poor, unemployed laborers from Europe and her colonies. This included a notable percentage who were descendants of African women and Portuguese or Spanish men who worked in African ports. Over the course of the century there was a gradual expansion of the laws targeting African descended people and separating Black and white Americans.
In the late 1600s two things happened that would greatly affect the chosen course of what would become the United States of America. The first was a shortage of workers from Europe as the economy there improved. British colonists in America turned toward the long established trans-Saharan slave trade. Historically, it traded in the enslavement of African, Russian, and Balkan labor sending as many as 10,000 enslaved persons to North Africa, the Middle East, and the Iberian Peninsula. Two was Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. Bacon’s ability to get Black and white people working together put a goodly dose of fear into the powers that be.
All of this ultimately culminated in the Virginia Slave Act of 1705 which committed African descended men, women, and countless generations of their children to a lifetime of slavery as the rest of the thirteen colonies quickly developed their own version of what would become known as the Black Codes. Throughout the 18th century race-based chattel slavery came to be seen as an economic necessity within the British American colonies where it was legal and enforced in both the North and the South. Rebellions were common. One of the earliest was an uprising in Manhattan in 1712, the New York Slave Revolt. As the numbers of enslaved persons grew, so did white paranoia. With each new rebellion the codes became stricter limiting the rights and freedoms not only of the enslaved but of their free Black brothers and sisters. Each step in the process of enslavement in America was calculated to protect and consolidate the wealth and power of white men.
Though America’s enslavement of African descended peoples is often construed as an institution both Southern and rural, over ten percent of enslaved African Americans lived in cities. Many people recognize that cities like New Orleans and Richmond had sizable enslaved populations, but so did Philadelphia and New York, hence the aforementioned rebellion. Most were domestic helpers working directly for their slave masters but there were also tradesmen with skills ranging from fisherman, to carpenter, to blacksmith some of whom were hired out to work on myriad outside projects. By the time of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 there were nearly 700,000 enslaved African Americans living throughout the United States. In today’s dollars worth an estimated $210 million. The question was as to its moral, legal, and social acceptability.
“Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!”
Patrick Henry, Speech in the Virginia Convention, March, 1775.
The reality was, that there was never any real thought given at the Convention to freeing those enslaved. Instead the argument centered over whether or not those enslaved would count as full human beings leading to the infamous 3/5 compromise and the eventual banning of the importation of people from Africa.
However, the Revolution cut off the market for America’s largest and most profitable product, tobacco. A miffed Great Britain turned to its remaining and expanding colonies for its tobacco supply. Slavery was unstable. People resisted their enslavement, and slavers needed to deploy a great deal of violence and coercion to ensure the stability of a slave society. It was dehumanizing to all involved. With lowering profitability, it just wasn’t worth it and American race-based chattel enslavement of Africans was actually on the wane. One by one the northern states abolished it, and even Virginia debated abolition in their Assembly.
Then, in 1794, inventor Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin.
Cotton production exploded. New England’s Industrial Revolution produced steam powered looms and weaving machines that increased the capacity to produce cotton cloth. Bigger, easier to navigate cargo ships outfitted with newly invented steam engines carried loads of cotton on seas protected against piracy by powerful navies. Between 1801 and 1835 U.S. cotton exports grew from 100,000 bales to more than a million. Over fifty percent, more than half, of the new nation’s exports in the first six decades of the 1800s consisted of raw cotton. Almost all of it grown and picked with enslaved labor.
Cotton mills in the North and Great Britain processed cotton grown and picked by those enslaved. At the beginning of the 1700s a slave would cost a slaver between five and ten dollars. By the mid-1800s that same person would sell for over a thousand. The chattel nature of American slavery meant that the enslaved could be used as collateral in business transactions or to pay off outstanding debt. A slaveholder in need of funds could sell off people in the same manner as livestock or lands or borrow against the enslaved person’s market value. Banks in the great financial centers of New York and London provided capital, financing and insured the growing, marketing, and transporting of cotton and those that worked the fields raking in great profits in the process. The enslaved and the buying and selling thereof were a source of tax revenue for state and local governments.
The trifecta of cotton, tobacco and sugar cane made the American South the economic engine of the country making an entire world of white people, though not each individual white person, wealthy. Slavery was so profitable there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River valley than anywhere else in the nation. The people Southern planters enslaved also represented the bulk of their wealth. By 1860 the value of those enslaved on American soil was three times more than the money in banks, seven times more than all of the currency in circulation, three times worth the whole of the livestock population, and twelve times the value of the cotton the cotton they were picking. Cotton and the enslaved bodies that picked it became the backbone of the US economy in turn leveraging the United States into one of the top two economic powers in the world.
Seventy-five percent of all of the cotton was produced in the world came through the hands of enslaved persons in the American South. At the start of the Civil War the slavery fueled Confederacy, as a separate nation, ranked as the fourth richest in the world.
Sources
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2017/05/03/the-clear-connection-between-slavery-and-american-capitalism/#1e0c37857bd3
https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-economy
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/01/how-slavery-helped-build-a-world-economy/
https://www.nhpr.org/post/without-slavery-would-us-be-leading-economic-power#stream/0
https://psmag.com/news/america-the-house-that-slavery-built
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/slavery-made-america/373288/
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/09/ending_slavery.html
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https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/03/how-the-slave-trade-built-america/
https://reason.com/2018/07/19/slavery-did-not-make-america-r/
https://www.pbs.org/video/american-experience-economics-slavery/
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