If in 1930, you were to arrive in Weimar Germany, and to proclaim that the Nazi party would seize control of Europe's most liberal democracy by burning the Reichstag, would embark on disastrous wars of aggression that would lead to a new world war, and during this war they would annihilate 6 million Jews, along with at least 6 million others, while being materially supported by American corporations like Ford and IBM, you would have been defamed as a conspiracy theorist. It would have seemed like an impossible tale to many, barely worthy of any credence. And yet it is the factually documented truth.
Today, I'm going to put forth an alternative theory of American history. One, that in my view, fits the historical evidence much closer than the typical theory of reluctant slavers, of the accidental slave republic. This theory, unlike the standard theory, explains a great deal more, and it is my opinion that it can change our understanding of 19th century politics forever. I must admit I am in debt, to the great African-American historian Gerald Horne, much more so than I am even indebted to Sakai's underground classic Settlers. The thesis of his latest book The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America has convinced me that slavery is the lynchpin, the key to understanding American history up till 1865.
The conventional account goes like this, in 1776 a group of enlightened oligarchs met behind closed doors to rebel against England for legitimate grievances, such as taxes. If taxes is sufficient grounds for rebellion, I suggest taking up arms next tax season and see what the response is. To be sure, there are enough deluded white idiots who seem to believe this is a legitimate cause for revolt every tax season. The Brits never figured out what the rebellion was really about, indeed, they had just busted their asses and bank accounts protecting the colonies from the French, it seemed only right that the colonies share some tax burden. The tax burden was exceedingly light, just ask any libertarian (caution, you may hear more than you care to know…). So, it was that the founders, who were majority slave-holders, happened to create a democracy without bothering to think about their poor slaves, surely they had no interest in perpetuating slavery, right? At the time of the American Revolution approximate 1/6th of the population was enslaved. A ratio, I'm sure rivals ancient slave societies like Greece and Rome. So, these modern romans, had no interest in perpetuating slavery and hoped it would die out. That is precisely why, instead of writing a democratic constitution, they consciously chose to model their constitution on those of Ancient Slave societies like Rome and Sparta, they rejected the model of "democratic" Athens out of hand. As we're told so many times by conventional historians, slavery was dying out, this hope they allegedly held, had a real basis. In the 1750s tobacco prices began to drop internationally, ruining the fortunes of many slaveholders. As well, policing the slaves took up a great deal of time, and American slaves were settling down deep communal roots which made them hard to handle. Around the time of the "revolution" an important case was ruled in Britain that made any slave that reached UK soil, legally free. Abolitionism it seemed would follow, and this panicked American slaveholders, but we are assured this is no reason to believe that the American "Revolution" was fought over slavery.
Horne has demonstrated in a most brilliant way, that slave rebellion sent a great many slaveowners crawling from the Caribbean carrying their slaves in toe, due to real and perceived threats. Once on the continental mainland, they tried out new methods of slave management, always conscious to keep a white majority or a sizable white minority that could combat a potential slave rebellion. The great Imperial Monarchies that ruled the New World all had condoned and participated in slavery, this is true, and England the most enlightened monarchy of all, was the worst enslaver nation. But a change did begin to occur, Britain needed African sailors and soldiers to police the vast empire it acquired in India and in the continental US. The reason for this is local politics in Britain, the Irish especially, but also the Scots and Welsh, felt oppressed by the English monarchy and its anglican church, so the British monarchy viewed these "whites" as even less reliable than Caribbean blacks.
That, combined with the difficult of policing her archipelago of Caribbean slave labor camps, was making some in the English government lean towards abolition.
Let's deal with a typical myth of American historiography that the expansion of slavery in the American republic was unpredictable. Adam Smith wrote in his economic treatise in 1776 that it was easier to end slavery in despotic regime (i.e. an absolute monarchy) than it was in a free government (a republic, or constitutional monarchy). The reason for this is obvious and actually written into the American constitution, no citizen maybe deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Translation: it's against the law for the government to attack "property" and not coincidentally this also applies to slave property. Since the slave is the absolute property of a Citizen and not a subject of a King, the government takes no interest in his eventual manumission, simply put he and his descendants become chattel slaves of "free citizens" for all eternity. This follows the most extreme interpretation of Roman property law, that they themselves did not strictly apply. So, slaves are property, property is an inviolable right of citizens, therefore the government can't do anything about slavery, so how was it a surprise that slavery expanded? Let's consider another factor, in 1776 the US was confined to 13 coastal colonies, there was no more psychological distance between New York and Jamaica then there was between New York and Georgia. Let us also consider that most travel was done by ship, it actually would take longer to go from New York to North Carolina overland then from New York to the Bahamas. At this time settlers were running afoul of Westminister by crossing the Appalachians and fighting the Indians in contravention of English law. So, it was completely unpredictable, that slavery would expand, once the settlers and the slaveholder elites crossed the Appalachians into the lush farming territory, which was greedily coveted it had actually been a rallying cry AGAINST the UK government during the "Revolution". The issue came up frequently, that the Monarchy prevented settlers from stealing lands behind the Appalachians.
Supposedly, it was impossible to know if slavery could have been expanded, even though the United States had acquired half a continent by 1812. It couldn't have been known that slave-grown cotton could be so productive, despite the fact that a great deal of the world's cotton was grown by slaves in the Caribbean and Brazil. The former place was hardly an ideal location for growing cotton. Seeing as slave-owners had managed to grow cotton under adverse circumstances, it couldn't have gone through the Founders heads, that in what is now the Southern US, with its extraordinary soil fertility, its plentiful water supply, and its warm temperate climate, that this region may have been the best place to grow cotton in the world. With all that prime land, they never even thought about cotton, despite its sky-high prices during and post-Napoleonic war. Lastly, there is the myth of the cotton gin breathing new life into slavery, I am not saying the gin did not lift a bottleneck on cotton production, but it did not come from nowhere. Southern courts actually would not enforce Whitney's patents because the device was based on similar devices made in China and India, so if the gin wasn't a singular invention without precedence, it can be wondered whether it was truly a limiting factor, whether it wasn't predictable that this technical device would be widely adopted.
Nor did the founders think that the Mississippi delta and Southern Florida could be prime real estate for sugar cane, apparently. Follow me here, because it is important, after the Haitian and French Revolutions, a wave of revolutions swept Latin America, making nearly all of the New World with the exceptions of Brazil and Cuba free. So the Founders ended up, leaders of a slave nation, in a region of the world that had moved dramatically towards abolition. Odd. There's no need to go over how they betrayed both the abolitionist Jacobins in France and the Haitian Revolutionaries as that is well-known. Being enlightened men, you might think they cheered on the liberation of the enslaved and the French peasantry, you might think but their reaction to both events was pure horror. There is an interesting caveat that Baptist pointed out in his book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, the Haitian revolution killed Napoleon's chances of building a North American Empire. Without Haitian slave-labor, the whole of Louisiana wasn't worth the cost it took to defend it. We can speculate there was no other labor source to develop it, so his plan may have been to transport slaves there, or Haiti, the jewel of the Caribbean was necessary to the formation of a French North American system. What did Napoleon do, this traitor to the Revolution, who had rescinded the laws abolishing slavery in the French Empire? He passed it off to another slaveholding power, the United States, who also began waging a war on Spanish Florida around the same time, a region long-known to be a sanctuary for runaway British slaves.
The relationship between France and the US was rocky before then, in fact according to Baptist, the US was considering waging war against France before the Louisiana purchase. The United States knew what Napoleon had done for them, and why they did it. That's why in 1812, a crucial moment for Napoleon, they declared a Second War against Great Britain. Allegedly this was a war for the freedom of American shipping, allegedly. However, American politicians knew that half of American sailors were British and that most of the men who were impressed by the HMS were British Citizens (http://www.pbs.org/wned/war-of-1812/essays/british-perspective/). Furthermore, the British Monarchy agreed to stop impressment, however, the US had already declared war by the time the message arrived. Which leads one to wonder, whether the war wasn't set upon from the start. In the beginning the US attacked Canada, which was a refuge for runaway slaves, being part of the British commonwealth it had no obligation to return slaves. In a rather brilliant move the British Empire outlawed the slave-trade in 1807 and put a great deal of pressure on other nations to follow suit. The move must've been calculated to undermine the political legitimacy of Napoleon and his regime. The US outlawed it technically in the same year, it was under pressure from abolitionist fever emanating from France, Haiti, and now even Britain. However, the US continued to participate illegally in slave-trafficking up to the Civil War and according to Gerald Horne even after. According to Horne the slave trade of pacific islanders, also known as "blackbirding", to Australia and various plantations in the South Pacific. According to Horne as well, it was also a prime reason why the monarchy of Hawaii was overthrown, Japan also saw it as a moment to assert its claim to the title of guardian of the pacific. Whatever the case, the US did not take its obligations to proscribe the trade very seriously, a great many illegal clippers found a home port in NYC, where they rested after running the gauntlet from Africa to Brazil, the world's foremost destination of slaves in violation of international law.
Slaveships did come and go into the US even after official prohibition of the trade, but then again, America didn't need the supply of slaves from the trade so much. There were already a great deal of black slaves in Virginia and the Carolinas, Jefferson fervently hoped they could all be transported to a more productive region of the country, whitening up their former home states in the process. In a word, the domestic slave trade filled a dual-role of profit reservoir and ethnic cleansing. According to Jefferson these slaves would be dispersed among the new Louisiana territory where they would labor for free in white majority states, and eventually die out, like the Indians had a habit of doing, leaving a free prosperous yeoman class in the wake. I guess that abolition through genocide can be considered abolition nonetheless. But is it really true he believed this lie? The black population in Virginia certainly wasn't "dying out of its own accord", it wasn't even dying out. And who would do all the work in this glorious white republic of ideals? Wasn't a capitalist slave-society like what existed in the antebellum south pre-Civil War, a completely predictable outcome of the purchase?
During this period America went from producing a few million pounds of cotton to almost 2 billion pounds by the start of the Civil War. The growth was incredible, America held a monopoly on the cotton market with 60% of the market share. Larger even then India with its 200 million people. Was this not also by design? Capitalist labor management principles were applied at ever-increasing rates to slaves, resulting in ever-increasing output and profit. As chattel slaves, the slave population, which grew (though not with the same speed as the white population) never quit providing labor and could always be limited to the bare essentials of life, if even that. Although the new slavery as it has been called, started comparatively small, with slave auctions happening in New Orleans cafes on behalf of small individual slave-dealers and cotton proprietors. The transformation of this somewhat paltry trade into a massive industry was predictable, especially with such big profits thanks to post-war prices.
We also have the example of Texas. Which was a rebellion against the Mexican government by Southern settlers, financed by slave-dealing capitalists, in favor of slavery. The Mexican government had outlawed slavery, and through a series of legal tricks, the settlers had managed to disguise their slaves as "servants". But as soon as the Mexican slavery got serious about enforcing abolition, the settlers rebelled, just like they did in 1776. Then they joined the great slavers republic, on equal terms, their own republic being a pale copy. It was fortuitous for the United States government to pick up Texas, not only did it allow the US to get involved in another war that would allow it to expand to the sea, but it effectively wiped out another destination for runaway slaves. It was an effective blow against another abolitionist government, this time a revolutionary government and it sealed any chance that Mexico had of challenging Washington for rule of the North American continent. Nor could they. Slave profits were generating so much money, that in the period of 1830-37, the US economy grew 6.5% a year, not excepting economic depression in-between. This type of growth is only heard of in 20th and late 19th century miracle economies. Between 1800-1860 the US grew at 2.6% a year, a respectable long-term growth rate for nearly any nation. According to Calhoun and other leading Southern politicians, the UK was so anti-slavery, because it was jealous of America. American slavery was giving the US a serious edge, one that the UK couldn't make up even with its direct control of the world's second largest economy, India, and its 200 million lives. Only the Opium trade gave Britain comparable access to the same type of easy profit, which is why they went to war to defend it multiple times.
According to figures produced by Baptist, the productivity of slave laborers in America was on par with that of Industrial workers in Britain. Meaning that American slaves had evenly matched British workers (Irish mostly) working on advanced steam driven technology in productivity. This could've been done only with the most amazing brutality, and that was no small feat, considering life for many laborers in England was truly hellish. Southerners also it would seem went all out to discredit America's international reputation, constantly lobbying for annexation of Cuba from Spain and forming mercenary expeditions to Latin America to try to overthrow governments and reinstate slavery by force. The monster of capitalist slavery emanating from the US had grown beyond the bounds of rational policymaking, and many were starting to see that it would lead the nation into disaster. But it wasn't the kind of force any restraint could stop. This led to secession and disaster for slaveholders. However, the most damning piece of evidence of the slave-conspiracy is that Northern claims that slavery was inefficient was patently untrue. Southern farm workers picked 100 lbs of cotton a day in the 1930s, by contrast the slave ancestors of those workers had been able to pick 200 lbs of cotton a day. Free labor couldn't compensate, there were no technical inventions to make up for the disparity until the mechanical cotton picking machine in the 1930s.
If slavery wasn't vital to American capitalism as Baptist points out, then why couldn't free labor produce the same results? All these things I have pointed out amount to disconnected incidents from the official point of view. They have no internal coherence. But if the real purpose of the founding of the American nation was to expand or at the very least preserve slavery and if the US was actively resisting the international forces of abolition in the 19th century, therefore impeding human progress rather than embodying it, then all the books need to be rewritten. The Great American experiment until 1865 was really a new experiment in slave management, and where other Empires had been forced to give up or reduce slavery precisely in order to maintain their Empires, the soul and drive of the American Empire was slavery itself.
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