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. |