Was the US Built by Slaves?
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Lexicus
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Er, I'm not a Marxist. And the "quotations" substantiate and add some detail to the assertion that slave labor provided the capital that financed US industrialization. Now obviously you are too ignorant to actually refute any of the claims made so you simply retreat into this puerile anti-intellectualism and wrongly call me a "Marxist."
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Naskra said:
I don't know what you mean by this. Exploitation of labor is how stuff got done for most of human history. I don't see what's controversial or "marxist" about acknowledging this patently obvious fact.
Flying Pig said:
Well, the thing is that the concentration of economic (thus political) power that the slaveholders enjoyed set them out and gave them influence far beyond their numbers. The Slave Power was real - Southerners more or less controlled the federal government until the Republicans finally won an election.
Slaveholding was profitable, but I suppose the fallacy might be in thinking that a profitable activity is the same as a productive one. The North was where the kind of investment that would be productive in the long-term and useful in fighting an industrial war was going on.
I'd say slavery was certainly part of what prevented the South from making those kinds of investments too.
I think he's trying to say "Marxists" like to blame every problem in the world on evil fatcats exploiting the labor of the noble proletariat instead of actually looking for the true cause of the problem.
I'm not saying I agree with that, just offering up what I took away from that statement in terms of what point he was trying to get across.
Naskra
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A)
B) Co-operative effort is how stuff got done for most of human history.
Statements A and B address the same phenomenon; both are "patently obvious". "A" is marxist framing. The two statements are equivalent, but lead to different places. Nothing wrong with being a marxist of course -- honorable calling, distinguished intellectual tradition, etc, etc.
The above-mentioned Walter Johnson is also a marxist. You don't need to read his book to know this, a snippet will do. It's all in the choice of concepts. (pro tip: not many). His book, a work of deep scholarship which meets or exceeds all standards of historiographic rigor, is also abolitionist propaganda. Why we are having an abolitionist revival at this time is just ... well, it takes all kinds to do the Lord's work, eh?
B) Co-operative effort is how stuff got done for most of human history.
Statements A and B address the same phenomenon; both are "patently obvious". "A" is marxist framing. The two statements are equivalent, but lead to different places. Nothing wrong with being a marxist of course -- honorable calling, distinguished intellectual tradition, etc, etc.
The above-mentioned Walter Johnson is also a marxist. You don't need to read his book to know this, a snippet will do. It's all in the choice of concepts. (pro tip: not many). His book, a work of deep scholarship which meets or exceeds all standards of historiographic rigor, is also abolitionist propaganda. Why we are having an abolitionist revival at this time is just ... well, it takes all kinds to do the Lord's work, eh?
I'm not sure it is entirely irrelevant. It's at least worth asking how fair a description 'wage slavery' can be, particularly in the time period for which we're usually interested in unfree labour. There's a danger of making much too much of the level of freedom that most people enjoyed in non-slave states, as that became a major political and rhetorical device.
Southern leaders/wealthy people rarely invested a lot of money into industry and railroads because they could make more money investing in land and slaves. Northerners could make more money investing in industry and railroads. So that's what they did. What that meant is that the planter class in the South tended to be very wealthy, but all most all their wealth was in the form of land and slaves. They didn't have a lot of cash. They didn't tend to invest in businesses. In the North there were increasingly just more people as a whole. And the average productivity was higher, because they were working with better/more tools. There were fewer of the really great personal fortunes in the North at that time. But the total productive capacity was greater. The output of the slave laborer was high, and the produce was valuable, and often sold for high prices. Prices did tend to go up and down, however. But the rate of productivity was essentially stagnant, because those slaves couldn't get any better at their jobs. The cotton gin made a huge increase in the value of the cotton. It pretty much saved slavery as an institution. But once that was done, manual labor is manual labor. And the tools didn't change. It wasn't until around WWII that someone invented a workable mechanical cotton harvester.
So while productivity in the South was largely stagnant, in the North it was growing quite a bit.
MobBoss
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Was the US built by Slaves? Partially, not totally.
r16
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a debate that needs sources to support to what one might say .
instead let me ask a question . It seems the landowners of the South were not into Cotton until some math teacher from the North came for a visit and invented a machine for seperating the fibers from the seed and faded into obscurity afterwards , a guy presumably anti-slavery as well . Suddenly Cotton was a viable business and in a couple of decades it became sacred for the South , their ancient life or something and clearly and certainly required tons of slaves . Is that correct ?
and reading on , ı see Cutlass has already referenced it ...
instead let me ask a question . It seems the landowners of the South were not into Cotton until some math teacher from the North came for a visit and invented a machine for seperating the fibers from the seed and faded into obscurity afterwards , a guy presumably anti-slavery as well . Suddenly Cotton was a viable business and in a couple of decades it became sacred for the South , their ancient life or something and clearly and certainly required tons of slaves . Is that correct ?
and reading on , ı see Cutlass has already referenced it ...
historix69
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I don't think so ... african slaves worked the plantations in the southern states and in the caribians, partly because they were less effected by malaria. Revenue was mostly invested into more land and more slaves. The Civil War destroyed the Southern States and freed the slaves, so after the Civil War there was probably not much left what was built by slaves or built with revenue from slave labour. The former slaves were now free to move to the northern states to work there in the upcoming factories ...
EgonSpengler
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A few thoughts: First, the Northern states didn't fully outlaw slavery until the early 19th Century. Vermont was first, in 1777 (although it wasn't technically a state yet - the first State-state to abolish was Pennsylvania in 1780). New Jersey was last, in 1804. And the abolition of the trade didn't mean the instantaneous emancipation of all slaves; some were kept (legally) in Northern states until, iirc, the 1830s-40s.
And then there were the profits of the slave labor. First of course were the big banks and insurance companies that were headquartered in places like New York, Philadelphia, Hartford, and Boston who provided financing and insurance policies, at a tidy profit. Then there were the textile mills, many of which are all over New England to this day (I think they're mostly condos and boutique shops now). Before the War for Independence a lot of that money went back to England, but from 1776 it was all ours.
Today, universities all over the Northeast are dealing with their historical ties to slavery.
The Boston Globe, 30 March 2016 - Harvard to honor slaves who worked, lived at Wadsworth House
As of 2015, Harvard's endowment was valued at $37.6 billion. I haven't Googled Yale or Columbia, but I imagine they're worth quite a lot, too.
schlaufuchs
Break My Heart
New York State was the last to formally abolish slavery, which they did in 1827. Although as I recall the abolition was done gradually through most of the Northern states. Wikipedia notes that Pennsylvania still listed owned slaves on their 1840 census, and New Hampshire and New Jersey still had slaves* into the 1860s.
*As I understand it these slaves were technically "free", but required to fulfill some form of indentured servitude to the masters of their parents if they were born into slavery. Something along those lines.
*As I understand it these slaves were technically "free", but required to fulfill some form of indentured servitude to the masters of their parents if they were born into slavery. Something along those lines.
The industrialization of the North took place as it did to a very large extent because of the slavery in the South.
EgonSpengler
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Yes, the wikipedia page on New Jersey notes that the importation of slaves was outlawed in that state in 1788, and the last slaves were freed when the 13th Amendment was passed in 1865. So at least in New Jersey, it was 77 years worth of baby steps.
Massachusetts has the distinction of being the first slave state in the Colonies, Boston was a major ship-building port, and New England was one of the legs of the "Triangle Trade." Encyclopedia.com says "The first American ship to carry enslaved Africans was the seventy-nine-foot long Desire, sailing out of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1638" and cites Slave Ships and Slaving by George Francis Dow, Dover Publications, 1970.
The Boston Globe, 26 Sept 2010 - "New Englands hidden history"
NPR, 21 June 2016 - "Forgotten History: How The New England Colonists Embraced The Slave Trade"
Lord of Elves
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It's historically inarguable that the economic and trade clout afforded the South by "slave power" was not ESSENTIAL to the South's political, economic and social existence. All the various and sundry concessions to the South in the Constitution and in legislation during the early republic make clear the absolute, dire need to secure the economic - and therefore political - benefits of the economic and social system of racial slavery. As the economic benefits of slavery became fewer and fewer during the Industrial Revolution, the raison d'etre of Southern planter elites - "slave power" - became threatened. Ultimately as a result the South tried to secede from the Union to preserve the system of racial slavery and the planter elite it had established.
Clearly this socioeconomic scheme was, especially before the War of Independence and several decades afterwards, so profitable and persuasive as a vision of economic and social security that it enabled the South to lobby itself political privileges that northern, non-slave states did not have and could not argue for. The institution of racial slavery was ultimately so aggressive and toxic that in bids to sustain itself it acquired Texas, began the Mexican-American War and tried to use the territorial gains secured to expand to the Pacific Ocean.
Yeah slavery kinda built America, I mean it really, really helped.
Clearly this socioeconomic scheme was, especially before the War of Independence and several decades afterwards, so profitable and persuasive as a vision of economic and social security that it enabled the South to lobby itself political privileges that northern, non-slave states did not have and could not argue for. The institution of racial slavery was ultimately so aggressive and toxic that in bids to sustain itself it acquired Texas, began the Mexican-American War and tried to use the territorial gains secured to expand to the Pacific Ocean.
Yeah slavery kinda built America, I mean it really, really helped.
