Slavery in the United States - Essay Example

dear client, this is not yet the finalized paper, please do not submit this yet. I will upload the finalized paper in a while. I apologize for this delay. Please ignore the completed status of your paper. Thanks =) At the end of the 18th century, slavery in the United States was a declining institution. Tobacco planters in Virginia and Maryland had exhausted their soil and were switching to wheat. Wage labor was increasingly replacing slave labor in both the urban and the rural areas of the upper South. And then came cotton. The first part of the story is well known: the invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s and the concomitant rise of industrial capacity in Britain and the urban North made possible the profitable cultivation of cotton in a vast region of the lower South, one that stretched from South Carolina to Louisiana, which came to be called the “Cotton Kingdom.” Between 1803 and 1838, the United States, most famously personified by Andrew Jackson, fought a multifront war in the Deep South. In those years, the United States suppressed slave revolts and pacified whites still loyal to the European powers that had once controlled the region. These wars culminated in the ethnic cleansing of the Deep South. By the end of the 1830s, the Seminole, the Creek, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw and the Cherokee had all been “removed” to lands west of the Mississippi. Their expropriated land provided the foundation of the leading sector of the global economy in the first half of the 19th century. In the 1830s, hundreds of millions of acres of conquered land were surveyed and put up for sale by the United States. This vast privatization of the public domain touched off one of the greatest economic booms in the history of the world up to that time. Investment capital from Britain, the Continent and the Northern states poured into the land market. “Under this stimulating process, prices rose like smoke,” the journalist Joseph Baldwin wrote in his memoir, “The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi.” Without slavery, however, the survey maps of the General Land Office would have remained a sort of science-fiction plan for a society that could never happen. Between 1820 and 1860 more than a million enslaved people were transported from the upper to the lower South, the vast majority by the venture-capitalist slave traders the slaves called “soul drivers.” The first wave cleared the region for cultivation. “Forests were literally dragged out by the roots,” the former slave John Parker remembered in “His Promised Land.” Those who followed planted the fields in cotton, which they then protected, picked, packed and shipped — from “sunup to sundown” every day for the rest of their lives. Eighty-five percent of the cotton Southern slaves picked was shipped to Britain. The mills that have come to symbolize the Industrial Revolution and the slave-tilled fields of the South were mutually dependent. Every year, British merchant banks advanced millions of pounds to American planters in anticipation of the sale of the cotton crop. Planters then traded credit in pounds for the goods they needed to get through the year, many of them produced in the North. “From the rattle with which the nurse tickles the ear of the child born in the South, to the shroud that covers the cold form of the dead, everything comes to us from the North,” said one Southerner. As slaveholders supplied themselves (and, much more meanly, their slaves) with Northern goods, the credit originally advanced against cotton made its way north, into the hands of New York and New England merchants who used it to purchase British goods. Thus were Indian land, African-American labor, Atlantic finance and British industry synthesized into racial domination, profit and economic development on a national and a global scale. When the cotton crop came in short and sales failed to meet advanced payments, planters found themselves indebted to merchants and bankers. Slaves were sold to make up the difference. The mobility and salability of slaves meant they functioned as the primary form of collateral in the credit-and-cotton economy of the 19th century. It is not simply that the labor of enslaved people underwrote 19th-century capitalism. Enslaved people were the capital: four million people worth at least $3 billion in 1860, which was more than all the capital invested in railroads and factories in the United States combined. Seen in this light, the conventional distinction between slavery and capitalism fades into meaninglessness. We are accustomed to reckoning the legacy of slavery in the United States in terms of black disadvantage. The centrality of slavery to the nation’s economic development, however, suggests that any calculation of the nation’s unpaid debt for slavery must include a measure of the wealth it produced, of advantage as well as disadvantage. The United States, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, was “built upon a groan.” During the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, the United States’ large farmer population was growing increasingly discontent with the state of political affairs. Deflation, debts, mortgage foreclosures, high tariffs, and unfair railroad freight rates contributed to the farmers’ unrest and desire for political reform. Farmers sought immediate and radical change through political means. The establishment of the Farmer’s Alliance and the Populist Party had drastic repercussions in national politics including the introduction of new ideas regarding monetary policy and government’s role in the economy. Before 1870, the global economy was performing poorly because of widespread crop failures in other countries. American farmers took advantage of this and began growing large quantities of wheat, which they could sell for a high profit. However, by 1890 the global economy had rebounded causing wheat prices in the global market to plummet. Consequently, American farmers were hit hard and forced to sell their crop at lower prices. Similar to the “King Cotton” economy of the Civil War South, the nineteenth century Midwest economy was also “single crop” and thus prone to the effects of global market swings. The sudden increase of wheat quantities available in the world market caused a deflationary effect in the Midwest. There was simply not enough money to go around. Farmers were forced to mortgage their property and their crop in order to make ends meet. Many farmers lost their land to the “evils” of the “mortgage system”. As mortgage foreclosures increased, so did the number of farmers forced into tenancy. By 1900, the majority of Midwest farmers were tenants—unable to afford their own land. However, Midwest farmers were faced with other, more severe atrocities that eventually impacted national politics. Government corruption also contributed greatly to the farmers’ discontent. From their perspectives, it seemed like the government was doing everything in its power to injure the Midwest region and thus, its farmers. Railroad companies charged exorbitant rates that were “up to four times as large as Eastern rates” (Doc. F). Farmers had no other choice but to pay the grossly inflated freight fees in order to get their crop to market. Eventually, farmers began to clamor for government control of the railroads. To the farmers, it was the duty of the government to protect the general public, even at the cost of corporations or private companies (Doc. C). The government finally responded to the farmers’ demands with the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). The ICC was in charge of supervising railroad companies and ensuring that they conduct business ethically and post their rates openly. However, this organization proved to be ineffective at taming the ravenous railroads. In fact, many railroad insiders viewed the ICC as a tool to be utilized rather than an authority to be obeyed. Future United States Attorney General, Richard Olney, wrote in a letter to the president of the Chicago and Burlington Railroad, “The Commission . . . can be made of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads, [and] at the same time that supervision is almost entirely nominal” (Doc. E). In this manner, railroad companies increased their participation in politics, often bribing legislators in order to tighten their own grip on the government (Doc. F). “Robber barons” like William H. Vanderbilt cared nothing for the plight of the Midwest farmers. These “robber barons” charged unreasonable rates to farmers in order to pay off financial obligations arising from the dishonest practice of “stock watering”. In 1883, Vanderbilt famously said, “The public be damned!”, once again showing the railroad companies’ lack of concern for public interests. However, this was not the only complaint Midwest farmers made about the U.S. government. Midwest farmers expressed further discontent with the U.S. government on the issue of taxes. During the Civil War, the U.S. government had increased taxes to raise revenue for the relentless war machine, but had neglected to lower them back down after the conflict had concluded. The high taxes and tariffs—especially the McKinley Tariff (which raised rates up to 48.4%)—were especially devastating to Midwest farmers. Farmers were forced to purchase more-expensive American-manufactured goods rather than cheaper foreign goods because of the “protective” high tariff. Then, farmers had to turn around and sell their crops in international, unprotected markets with highly competitive rates. The U.S. high tariff policy was clearly beneficial to the industrial giants and the city-dwellers. However, farmers believed that the government should look more favorably upon farmers who, of course, provide all of the food to the nation. A famous poster entitled “The Farmer’s Grievances” (Doc. A) expresses the agrarian idea that all other walks of life are dependent upon the work of farmers. William Jennings Bryan also expresses this same idea in his famous “Cross of Gold” speech, “Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.” Farmers felt that their interests were consistently being overlooked by the government which was being controlled from behind-the-scenes by corrupt “robber barons”, railroad companies, and industrial giants with big-city interests. Read More