Slave Trade in US, 1790-1860

choi

Fergus M Bordewich, When Labor Was Capital; Before the Civil War, slavery played a central role in the economics of both North and South. Wall Street Journal, Sept 6, 2014
online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-the-half-has-never-been-told-by-edward-e-baptist-1409952510
(book review on Edward E Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told; Slavery and the making of American capitalism. Basic, 2014)

Quote:

“Mr Baptist writes most effectively about the cotton-growing states of the Mississippi River Valley. During the boom years of the 1830s, the region transformed itself from a frontier backwater into the wealthiest and most productive agricultural region in the United States.

“Slavery weathered the Panic of 1837 * * *  In the 1850s, the slave-based economy experienced a dramatic resurgence when a new wave of ‘Negro fever’ doubled the price of slaves in relation to that of other goods. On the cusp of the Civil War, slavery showed no sign of dying a natural death, except in parts of Maryland and Delaware. Slavery remained, Mr Baptist says, ‘both modernizing and modern’ and its growth ‘muscular, dynamic.’"

Note:
(a) “As the wealthy South Carolina planter and politician James H Hammond condescendingly put it in 1845, in a truculent rebuttal to attacks on slavery made by a British abolitionist: ‘We must therefore content ourselves with our dear labor under the consoling reflection that what is lost to us is gained to humanity.’"
(i) James Henry Hammond
den.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Henry_Hammond
(1807-1864)
(ii) truculent (adj
“scathingly harsh : VITRIOLIC <truculent criticism>
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/truculent

(b) “As the number of slaves in the US swelled from just under one million at the dawn of the century to about four million at the time of the Civil War, investors consistently demonstrated their confidence in slavery's profitability. As the historian Walter Johnson has eloquently put it, slaves represented ‘a congealed form of the capital upon which the commercial development of the [Mississippi River] Valley depended * * *’” [brackets original]
(i)
(A) In the following table, numbers of column 1 are from:

Activity 11[:] Slave Population of United States: 1790-1860. Slavery Workshop, Delaware Center for Teacher Education, College of Education & Human Development, University of Delaware, undated.
www.dcte.udel.edu/hlp2/resources/slavery/slaves-US-1790-1860.pdf
(B) In the following table, numbers in columns 2 to 4 are from:

Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals By Race, 1790 to 1990, and By Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, For The United States, Regions, Divisions, and States, US Census Bureau, September 2002 (Working Paper Series 56)
www.census.gov/population/www/do ... s0056/twps0056.html
(Table 1 United States - Race and Hispanic Origin: 1790 to 1990)

……………….Slave population ,,,,Total population …..Black ……...American Indian
1790 ……..697,897 ………………..3,929,214 …………...757,208 …..NA [not available]
1800 ……..893,041 ………………..5,308,483 …..1,002,037……......NA
1810 …….1,191,364 ……………..7,239,881 …...1,377,808 ………..NA
1820 …….1,538,048 …………....9,638.453 …...1,771,656 ………...NA
1830 …….2,009,050 …………..12,860,702 …...2,328,642 ………….NA
1840 …….2,487,455 …………..17,063,353 …...2,873,648 ….……..NA
1850 …….3,205,313 …………..23,191,876 ……3,638,808 …………..NA
1860 …….3,953,760 …………..31,443,321 …..4,441,830 …………..44.021

(ii) Distribution of Slaves in 1860. US Census Bureau, undated
www.census.gov/history/www/refer ... slaves_in_1860.html
(iii) Lincoln Mullen, These Maps Reveal How Slavery Expanded Across the United States; As the hunger for more farmland stretched west, so too did the demand for enslaved labor. Smithsonian, May 15, 2014
www.smithsonianmag.com/history/m ... d-states-180951452/
(1790-1860)
(iv) Walter Johnson (historian)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Johnson_(historian)

has been a professor, Department of History in Harvard University, since 2006.

choi

(c) “As early as the 1820s, says Mr Baptist, slave owners commanded the biggest pool of collateral in the United States: two million slaves worth more than $1 billion. "Not only was that almost 20 percent of all the wealth owned by all US citizens,’ Mr Baptist writes, ’but it was the most liquid part of that wealth, thanks to the efficiency of markets manned by professional slave traders.’ Slaves were a uniquely flexible commodity: There was a ready market for them everywhere in the South; they could be either sold or leased; they could be moved from place to place under their own power; and unlike tools and buildings, they naturally reproduced, adding to the value of their master's investment.”

“As early as the 1820s, says Mr Baptist, slave owners commanded the biggest pool of collateral in the United States”  Hence the review title: When Labor Was Capital.
(d) “As the native Indian tribes were removed from their land—either by treaty or at gunpoint—investment capital gushed in. In just eight years, from 1824 to 1832, the Philadelphia-based Bank of the United States, the banker for the federal government, multiplied the amount of its loans to Mississippi Valley slave owners 16 times over. By 1832, according to Mr Baptist, at least one-third of all the bank's capital had been allocated to planters, slave traders, merchants and local banks on the ‘slave frontier’ of the southwestern states.”

Bank of the United States
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_the_United_States
(may refer to Second Bank of the United States (1816–1836) [located in Philadelphia])
(e) “the Consolidated Association of the Planters of Louisiana—a local bank chartered in 1827—enjoyed a lucrative relationship with Baring Brothers of London, a firm that lobbied successfully to persuade the Louisiana legislature to back the association's bonds with public credit. Thus if the association failed to pay off its bonds, Louisiana's taxpayers would be liable for the debt. Baring would eventually handle some $2.5 million in bond sales for the association, marketing to clients in Britain as well as the European continent.

Barings Bank
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barings_Bank
(Headquarters: London; was owned by the Baring family of German origin; Barings Bank was founded in 1762 by Francis Baring, with his older brother John Baring as a mostly silent partner; ING, a Dutch bank, purchased Barings Bank in 1995 for the nominal sum of £1)

(f) “Remarked one observer in 1835: ‘People here [New Orleans] are run mad with speculation. They do business in . . . a kind of phrenzy.’"
(i) phrenzy (n): “archaic variant of frenzy”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/phrenzy
(ii) frenzy (n; Middle English frenesie, from Middle French, from Medieval Latin phrenesia, alteration of Latin phrenesis, from phreneticus [(adjective masculine; from Greek phrenētikós mad; from Greek phrḗn mind) mad]):
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/frenzy

(g) through bank loans “borrowing to purchase the ‘tools of the trade’—slaves and more slaves. * * * The firm [Franklin & Armfield, a slve trading company rather than a bank] rode rising demand to become the biggest slave-trading company in the United States, moving many thousands of ‘surplus’ slaves from the Upper South to the plantations of what was then called the ‘Southwest.’ To finance its activities, Franklin & Armfield drew up to $40,000 at a time from the Bank of the United States to buy slaves for the Mississippi Valley markets. According to Mr Baptist, about 5% of all the commercial credit handled by the bank in 1831-32 passed at some point through the hands of that single slave-trading company. Although the vast majority of the company's ‘human stock’ would wind up in the cotton fields, many females, attractive mulattoes in particular, were destined for prostitution.”

Franklin & Armfield Office en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_and_Armfield_Office

(h) “Like Mr Baptist, Mr Johnson argues that abstracting slavery from industrial development in the US—or, for that matter, in Britain—is fundamentally ahistorical.”
abstract (vt): “REMOVE, SEPARATE”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/abstract
ahistorical (adj)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ahistorical