| > Slavery was not in the least a contribution to "financial success"... What it did was create a huge unfair advantage for the few who could afford to "own" someone who had been enslaved I think you have been given a very skewed view of the role that slavery played in our country's economic past. There have been long efforts to downplay the role of slavery, and there still are. Cotton was the US's #1 export from ~1800 through 1930 due to slavery, and then continuing into the extremely exploitive sharecropping. That's the core period our country developed - and the single export that brought in the most capital into this country. That continuous inflow of capital is also what made New York City the financial powerhouse it became. [1] Slavery wasn't a just for the few. One of the number one ways that people mislead with slavery is by trying to show the percentage of the slaves divided by the total population in 1860. That's extremely misleading, as individuals didn't own slaves, families did. The same way measuring what percentage of families own their home is accurate, not individuals that own the home, as only one in the family typically owns the home. There were 15 slave states in 1860. Of the top 10 states, in all of them at least 25% of families owned slaves. With the top two states South Carolina and Mississippi topping out at 46% and 49% of families. Almost half the families owned slaves. And that's ignoring everyone else in the south who didn't own slaves, but participated in the slave trade - and those who rented slaves for labor but didn't technically "own them". [2] On top of that of the top 5 states owning slaves, enslaved people ranged from over 40% of the population in Georgia, to almost
60% of the entire population of the state of South Carolina. [3] Slavery and the white supremacy views it was built on, were an absolutely core part of the first part of this country's existence - culturally, economically, politically. Slavery wasn't a niche occurrence only for the elite - and especially so for the white South. It was disgusting, it was violent, it was immoral and it was everywhere. It didn't play a minimal role. The idea that a few wealthy elite slave owners "tricked" the rest of the southern population
to go to war for them is a farce. The entire south gathered up to go to war because white supremacy was the culture of their land. It's taken this country a long time to try to undo that work - and we still haven't finished... But to downplay Slavery is to also downplay what was taken from Black Americans, and how much that theft built this early country. 1. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cr...
2. https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/08/07/percent-of-whites-own...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_census |
Wait, you're making a very different claim than what I was talking about. I agree that it probably made some sense to have some kind of plantation economy in the South, and that, as a matter of fact the plantations the South did have were based on enslaved labor. And for sure, there are interesting debates to have about the unacknowledged contribution that's inherent in that. But slavery was never a necessary part of that successful economy; indeed, it's quite physically possible to have plantations that employ free laborers as opposed to relying on slaves!