They say that history is written by the winners.
By the turn of the twentieth America’s people, including our historians North and South, were embracing segregation and terrorism against the African American population. To do this they had to tell a story about America. At the dawn of the Civil War abolitionists would successfully depict the truth of American race-based chattel slavery. That it was an institution based in violence: of torture, rape, and the destruction of families. This story had to change.
One belief shared by both abolitionists and those for the continuation of enslavement was that it was a flawed economic system. Slavery, they argued, was not about profit. Slavery was inherently unprofitable to all but the people who did the actual trade in slaves. In white America the responsibility and animosity for American race-based chattel slavery was centered on the slave trader. Depicted as coarse, lower-class outsiders it was they, not white society, that bore the guilt and reaped the profits.
Otherwise slavery was an ineffective, static structure focused not on producing profit but on doing God’s work in taking care of what they believed to be an inferior people. In fact, the Civil War, it would be claimed, wasn’t even about slavery but about State’s Rights. Race-based chattel slavery was about maintaining the natural order of things. Maintaining the standing of a virtually feudal elite was almost coincidental. Other than a few scant years during Reconstruction that natural order of white supremacy is one to which America would openly cleave until the 1960s and a new civil revolution. One for long denied Civil Rights.
This thinking persists even today in articles like this one written by Deirdre McCloskey, emerita professor of economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in which she insists that slavery could not be profitable because one had to feed and clothe those they enslaved and wait until they were grown to put them to work. Children were put to work by the time they were no older than six. Enslaved persons, treated, at best, like any other form of livestock and given the bare minimum to keep them functional, were not expensive to feed, clothe, or house. An able-bodied enslaved person, by 1860, was valued at over a thousand dollars, over thirty grand in today’s money. Someone with three enslaved persons had the modern equivalent of almost a hundred thousand dollars in capital at a time when average yearly salaries ranged from two hundred and fifty to five hundred dollars a year.
Another part of the new story, of this mythical separation of race-based chattel slavery from the economy, is that slavery and enslaved African Americans of the 19th century had little influence on the rise of the United States. There two elements to this idea. One, that race-based chattel slavery was both essentially different from the rest of the modern economy and separate from it. Two, that because slavery was fundamentally in contradiction ideological systems of our liberal republic the institution was dying a slow death.
In 1800 there were 893,602 people enslaved in the United States. By 1850 there were 3,204,313. This despite the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves of 1807, which went into effect in 1808, banning the importation of slaves into the United States. The returns from cotton, and the enslavement that underpinned it, powered the modernization of America. In the 1800s the United States grew into the world’s second largest economy beating out all of the other European colonial powers except Great Britain. Slavery molded every key facet of the economy and politics of our burgeoning nation. However, the idea that our economic prosperity is rooted in the blood and bones of enslaved African Americans doesn’t fit the American narrative of bootstraps and individualism.
A third aspect of the new story is the implication that American race-based chattel slavery is no different than slavery that came before. That, over the course of history, it didn’t change, evolve. That race-based chattel slavery showed up on our shores as a whole concept. An idea still promoted by everyone from the History Channel to PBS. When I tell people, Black and white, that the Africans brought to America in 1619 were never enslaved in America I get immediate resistance. The pernicious idea that Africans in America have always, and naturally, held the status of slave has festered for decades. It is part of this narrative written at the turn of the last century as the nation as a whole settled back into the comforting rhythms of white supremacy.
The last part of this new story is, perhaps, the worst. This new tale of American enslavement strips slavery of its violence. Slavery, we are told, robbed people of their work and denied enslaved African Americans the liberal rights of citizens. McCloskey writes, “Slavery was of course appalling, a plain theft of labor.” Illustrating that, even today, there is a resistance to seeing the innate violence of American race-based chattel slavery. Enslavement is the breaking of people for profit. It is torture, rape, and the destruction of families. It is mutilation and death. American chattel bondage, grounded in race, slaughtered human beings in large numbers. This new narrative, born in the century’s turn, deliberately removed this history from public memory. In this new narrative, enslavement becomes an almost paternal action. Part of the white man’s burden of civilizing the savages who were not, and are not, ready for such freedom. A cornerstone of white supremacist ideas about race in order to maintain white unity and power well into the 20th century.
This new story of the Old South was one of aristocratic whites taking care of happy negroes singing in the fields, a la Gone with the Wind. A mythology so potent that the fact that the Georgia mansion that served as the book’s inspiration is going up for auction makes international news to this day. In minimizing the violence white America changed the way slavery was perceived. In the minds of the ignorant, like Kanye West, four hundred years of slavery becomes a choice. Especially as there is absolutely no acknowledgement of the history of rebellion of those enslaved. The idea slithers into the national consciousness that African Americans, content with our lot both before and after emancipation, did not gain the rights of citizens because we did not, would not, fight for them.
We Americans see ourselves as a people cherishing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is a harsh contrast to our centuries’ long history of enslaving so many of our people. (Not to mention the attempted and successful genocide of the various indigenous peoples.) This retelling, whitewashing, if you will, of our history insulates the national story from the awkwardness of race-based chattel slavery. Abolitionists of the Civil War era collected documents and artifacts to preserve the memory of the slave trade and document why the sacrifices of the war had been necessary. But by the third decade of the twentieth century white America had been demanding for decades to hear only a sanitized version of our past.
The state sanctioned, and often state enforced, rape, murder, theft against, and destruction of African Americans in the United States did not end with the Civil War. Within half a century after the war’s end the children of white Union and Confederate soldiers united against African-Americans in a compact of white supremacy enabling Southern whites to impose Jim Crow, bar African-American citizens from the polls, and turn a blind eye to lynch-mobs terrorizing African-American communities. Outside the South, in non-former Confederate states, restaurants refused Black customers, stores and factories refused to hire African-Americans, Black Americans were barred from buying property and accessing credit, and hundreds of towns in the Midwest closed their doors to Black people completely, forcibly removing any unfortunate enough to have settled in them, becoming “sundown towns” (“Don’t let the sun set on you in this town”).
Though the South would never regain what it lost in the war a near-feudal society reemerged. At the top remained the patrician landowning sons of privilege. In the North the Gilded Age brought forth the nation’s first billionaires who made their money in their own form of plunder, exploiting the massive wave of immigrants pouring in from a floundering Europe. The science of eugenics was embraced by the left and right, pushing the fiction of biologically distinct human races with the conclusion Europeans were members of the superior one.
Americans of Northern European backgrounds even believed that they were distinct from, and superior to: Southern Europeans, Jews from Russia, and others who flooded Ellis Island in the early twentieth. All American became a blonde haired blue eyed ideal. Those of us of African descent were deemed barely human. Institutional bigotry was, and is, an effective form of social engineering. No matter how large the disparity between rich and poor whites, class tensions are smoothed by the belief that as bad as things are, at least they aren’t Black. Even more sinister, rage at bad conditions can be redirected away from those in power to those that society has deemed “other” and less than.
With the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s came the belated reacknowledgement of the importance, barbarity, and longevity of slavery and its extension, Jim Crow. However, there was a definite effort to isolate these horrors as unique to the South. This allowed for the North to cling to a story of freedom in which, the North, as a representative of the “real” United States sacrificed and fought to overcome an inhumane system of Southern slavery. Then there is the continued refusal to acknowledge the history of rebellion of those enslaved while at the same time heaping praise on those who escaped it through flight or fight. The implication being that those who didn’t flee or die somehow “accepted” slavery. An idea as present in Black culture as white. The result is that African-American students continue labor with a feelings of shame that their ancestors did not escape.
“Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from the ships, because they knew death was better than bondage.”
―Erik Killmonger
Deep denial about race-based chattel slavery and its role in the making of America exists to this day. We still have articles like McCloskey’s which is essentially a wish list of disingenuous would haves and should haves that refuses to acknowledge what was and what is. For example she points out that there were other sources of raw cotton and that “Britain in 1790 and the U.S. in 1860 were not nation-sized cotton mills.” without mentioning that cotton was more than half the US economy or that 80% of the cotton used in Britain at the time came from the US. Then there is this one by Scott Sumner over at The Library of Economics and Liberty (financed by the conservative Liberty Fund). Summer states the obvious. That “Slaves don’t stop being people just because the government treats them like animals.” But uses this observation to deny the reality of human beings as capital in the pre-Civil War South.
High school textbooks segregate centuries of enslavement into a chapter or two, creating an isolated and fixed picture. At plantation homes millions of visitors revisit the mythology of the Old South in which the enslaved, if mentioned at all, are referred to as “servants”. Guides are more likely to know details of the furniture and silverware than of the lives of those worked to death within the walls. It is the continued symbolic annihilation of enslaved African Americans. Compare the treatment of plantations and monuments of the Confederacy to the monuments to the sacrifices and sacrificed of WWII. 20th-century discrimination cannot be understood without comprehending its 19th-century manifestations. We cannot continue to bury our heads in the sand and pretend that the Emancipation Proclamation wiped the slate clean. As Americans we need to face our history before we can move beyond it.
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
https://www.salon.com/2014/09/07/we_still_lie_about_slavery_heres_the_truth_about_how_the_american_economy_and_power_were_built_on_forced_migration_and_torture/
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/
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/why-was-cotton-king/
https://www.rt.com/usa/442572-us-economy-aei-slavery/