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.”
![dynamicafrica:
theatlantic:
How Cuban Villagers Learned They Descended From Sierra Leone Slaves*
They were adamant about going all out. People who sing the village’s songs—melodies and rhythms that tie them to this inaccessible chiefdom — are considered family. “Our grandparents who told us the stories about our people going as slaves, we know now that they didn’t lie,” says Joe Allie, an elder of the village and Pokawa’s uncle.
“These must be our people,” says Solomon Musa, a young man who works as a teacher in the village, “when we saw the people who practice the same things we used to do, we were so happy, we are full of joy.”
Read more. [Image: They Are We]
*Sierra Leonean enslaved peoples.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/4bc00ead7217c62733da6ad83d2b1144/tumblr_mlpr24OnUA1qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
by Annie L. Burton and Others![Enslaved East African people rescued by the British naval ship, HMS Daphne, 1869.
The National Archives UK, reference: FO 84/1310
All these little children…
[Note: Burned Shoes posted this photo in 2011 with some additional information. Click here to read more. (Thanks to Burned Shoes!)]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/88dd1a3c229c956d68f0726344ca66ab/tumblr_mll3ttGrh81qd382lo1_500.jpg)
