Was the US Built by Slaves?

[abradley]

Strength

{Snip}

Never claimed we were perfect, but when compared to other nations we're pretty good.

And yes, we started as 13 states on the east coast of an unexplored land and managed to build a great nation composed of every racial group on the earth.

Whether you wish to acknowledge that or wallow in victimhood is up to you.

Me, I am proud to be an American, know we have our faults, and want to see those faults corrected through our system

 

[EgonSpengler]

And yes, we started as 13 states on the east coast of an unexplored land and managed to build a great nation composed of every racial group on the earth.

It wasn't unexplored. I think just about every region of North, Central and South America had people living there long before the European colonies.

 

[metalhead]

I think my most hated white supremacist belief is that white people built this country. The white people who first came here were huddled masses, that were largely cared for by the natives. The only reason white people survived was because the natives gave them food, gave them shelter, gave them land on which to build colonies. White people were sustained here because the natives already had built towns, already had developed agriculture, had already built a society that was basically abandoned when they all died of disease. The white people basically moved into a ready-built place, and yet somehow history has twisted it around to where we think we actually built this place.

 

[Lexicus]

I think my most hated white supremacist belief is that white people built this country. The white people who first came here were huddled masses, that were largely cared for by the natives. The only reason white people survived was because the natives gave them food, gave them shelter, gave them land on which to build colonies. White people were sustained here because the natives already had built towns, already had developed agriculture, had already built a society that was basically abandoned when they all died of disease. The white people basically moved into a ready-built place, and yet somehow history has twisted it around to where we think we actually built this place.

*shrug* Much of the land was depopulated by the time the settlers showed up. Not that the natives didn't basically save the day for the early settlers, but it's not really like we moved into their towns and villages after they died.

The real refutation of the notion that white people built this place is the fact that we shipped a few hundred thousand Africans here to do it for us. Slave labor was essentially the entire basis of the US economy until the Civil War.

 

[metalhead]

We wouldn't have survived here to build anything, if it wasn't for what the natives had already built. The Pilgrims are portrayed as hardy settlers, but that's far from the truth. Inland territory may have been largely depopulated, but the coastal regions sure weren't.

 

[Lexicus]

Yes, I agree with that, I would just change it to "we wouldn't have survived to force Africans to build anything for us".

 

[EgonSpengler]

I think estimates rate Tenochtitlan as among the largest cities of the 15th Century, smaller than Constantinople but larger than London and Venice. About equal to Paris, maybe. The Aztecs are thought to have had a pretty good road system, too, with amenities for long-distance travel. I don't know if the Aztecs ever made it across the desert into North America, and I don't think they ever had much in the way of boats, so they probably didn't get into the Caribbean.

 

[Naskra]

Slave labor was essentially the entire basis of the US economy until the Civil War.

It's for gems like this that I read this board.

 

[Lexicus]

Slave labor produced the commodities which formed the basis of the US's participation in international trade
The financial system grew up financing slavery's expansion from tobacco country into the Deep South.
Industrialization was financed with capital that was accumulated through slave labor.

You should read Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams for a fuller account of a lot of this stuff.

 

[Traitorfish]

Do Americans genuinely forget that Virginia predates Plymouth by twenty years, or do they just not like to talk about it?

It seems to be the one thing that both sides of the culture war agree on, that Jamestown doesn't count. I suppose it doesn't offer simple morale fables for either side.

 

[Commodore]

We wouldn't have survived here to build anything, if it wasn't for what the natives had already built. The Pilgrims are portrayed as hardy settlers, but that's far from the truth. Inland territory may have been largely depopulated, but the coastal regions sure weren't.

"Portrayed as hardy settlers"? That's not what I learned in school. I was taught exactly what you just said, that the natives bailed out the European colonists who had no idea what they were doing when it came to building settlements.

 

[Naskra]

Lexicus: No need to read any books, just look at some pictures. Civil war pictures. See the huge artillery parks, rows of gunboats, endless supplies trains. Then ask yourself how the Yankees were able to do this while destroying "essentially the entire basis of the US economy". Seriously, stop reading.

 

[Lexicus]

Do Americans genuinely forget that Virginia predates Plymouth by twenty years, or do they just not like to talk about it?

The way I learned it, Jamestown was the same story. Starving colonists bailed out by knowledgeable natives.

Lexicus: No need to read any books, just look at some pictures. Civil war pictures. See the huge artillery parks, rows of gunboats, endless supplies trains. Then ask yourself how the Yankees were able to do this while destroying "essentially the entire basis of the US economy". Seriously, stop reading.

What part of "industrialization was financed with capital accumulated from slave labor" was unclear exactly?

 

[Traitorfish]

The way I learned it, Jamestown was the same story. Starving colonists bailed out by knowledgeable natives.

I mean, yeah, broadly speaking, but Powhatan's motives were rather less altruistic than his New England cousins, and he was altogether content to let the English starve when they didn't play ball.

 

[Lexicus]

I mean, yeah, broadly speaking, but Powhatan's motives were rather less altruistic than his New England cousins, and he was altogether content to let the English starve when they didn't play ball.

*shrug* I don't claim any detailed knowledge. But my understanding is that, altruism or not, the colonists literally would all have starved to death if they'd not been fed (and more importantly, taught how to feed themselves in the new environment) by the natives.

In retrospect the natives would have been justified exterminating every last man, woman, and child who arrived from Europe, and I say that as someone who wouldn't be here to talk about it if they had.

 

[Naskra]

industrialization was financed with capital accumulated from slave labor

It's perfectly clear until you think about it. It's also too sweeping and vague to argue with, much less assert.

 

[Lexicus]

http://www.gilderlehrman.org/histor...s/was-slavery-engine-american-economic-growth

In the pre-Civil War United States, a stronger case can be made that slavery played a critical role in economic development. One crop, slave-grown cotton, provided over half of all US export earnings. By 1840, the South grew 60 percent of the world's cotton and provided some 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Thus slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured goods that laid the basis for American economic growth. In addition, precisely because the South specialized in cotton production, the North developed a variety of businesses that provided services for the slave South, including textile factories, a meat processing industry, insurance companies, shippers, and cotton brokers.

http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2014/11/19/slavery-economy-baptist

1783 at the end of the American Revolution to 1861, the number of slaves in the United States increased five times over, and all this expansion produced a powerful nation. For white enslavers were able to force enslaved African-American migrants to pick cotton faster and more efficiently than free people. Their practices rapidly transformed the southern states into the dominant force in the global cotton market, and cotton was the world’s most widely traded commodity at the time, as it was the key raw material during the first century of the industrial revolution. The returns from cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the United States had become the second nation to undergo large-scale industrialization. In fact, slavery’s expansion shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation—not only increasing its power and size, but also, eventually, dividing US politics, differentiating regional identities and interests, and helping to make civil war possible.

The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth.

 

[Naskra]

Lexicus: I advised you to think and you give me quotations. Goddam marxists everywhere --
exploitation of labor is always the answer. It's a simple. attractive story. Engrave it on your heart and be happy.

Moderator Action: Please stick to the discussion, do not discuss the poster.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[Flying Pig]

The obvious follow-up question, in my mind, would be to ask how it was that slavery and slave cotton were the main part of the US economy, yet by 1861 there a striking inequality in how wealth and economic power were distributed across the US, and the slave states were the ones dramatically worse off from that inequality. In fact, the large scale industrialisation and the slavery that that second author talks about happened in totally different places - look at any map of the railroads on the eve of the Civil War, for example, or any measure of industrial output between North and South. In fact, it's often been said that slavery was what got in the way of Southern industrialisation: you can beat people into doing jobs which only require muscle power and basic attention, but the minute you want them to do anything complicated or skilled like manufacturing, you have to start giving them incentives to do well. It's much more likely that things will go dramatically and expensively wrong when factory workers are unhappy than when farm labourers are.

 

[Naskra]

Here's another way to tell the story: Planters made money off cotton, then did the obvious thing with their profits: bought more land and slaves and grew more cotton. Then crashed the price of cotton, and found themselves in debt to northern banks, financing their own destruction on credit.
The antebellum equivalent of hookers and blow also figures in here. Generations later, Faulkner came along and tried to make these fools interesting.