krebscycle

In 1860, the cash value of the slaves in the cotton belt of the United States was more than the value of all the railroads and factories in the USA. The technology employed to move cotton down the Mississippi and goods up it was the leading edge of modern technology. The financial system that advanced credit to slavers and moved cotton bales to British factories was sophisticated and powerful  and profitable. The whole of the Deep South had been, in a few decades, stolen from its inhabitants, cut up into parcels and massively reshaped into cotton fields, factories, markets, and transportation channels. Slavery was not a weird anachronistic survival from primitive times, it was the heartbeat of the world economy, it was modern, thriving, self-sustaining and reaching out to expand into Texas and Central America while driving British armies into India and China.

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 [Walter Johnson]

Slavery had a working business model. Without the efforts of millions of people, mass slavery could have grown and adapted and lived on to our times. Soldiers fighting for the Union armies and the army of free Haiti, the men who escaped bondage to show General Grant how to move around Confederate positions at Vicksburg or who labored to move Union artillery into place, the men and women who kept escaping and rebelling, the people who helped them escape, Harriet Tubman, Theodore Parker who kept a gun by his Bible in Boston to kill slave catchers, Charles Deslondes and his men who brought the terror of justice to the Mississippi in 1811 before they were slaughtered by the army, Wilberforce and Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglas and millions of others: fought and sacrificed and persuaded and worked through defeat and despair. Even the bravery of those who deserted Confederate armies (defying the violent rule of the Slave masters) played a role. It was the action of human beings in the cause of justice that ended New World Slavery.

We have inherited from the Victorian Economists a collection of clockwork myths about progress. According to those myths the rationalizing power of capitalism, or the advance of historical development through stages,  or new technologies, or some other mechanical process brought modernity to the world and obsoleted slavery automatically. These myths are no more true than earlier myths about how Kings and Emperors and Generals made history while others just followed along. Slavery could have modernized and prospered in blood and torture.  Humans beings chose to resist slavery and, eventually, after many reverses and false paths and dashed hopes and cruel defeats they killed the monster.

One of the stories Walter Johnson tells in his amazing book is of Charles Deslondes doomed rebellion in 1811. Deslondes was brought to Mississippi by a slaver who was fleeing Toussaint’s victory in Haiti.  He raised a rebellion:

Among their number were men named Charles, Cupidon, Telemacque, Janvier, Harry, Joseph, Kooche, Quamana, Mingo, Diaca, Omar, Al-Hassan. They were African- and American-born, French- and English-speaking, Christian and Muslim, Creole, Akan, and Congo, organized in companies that reflected their various origins.

Johnson, Walter (2013-02-26). River of Dark Dreams (p. 18). Belknap Press.

They were defeated by massive force, but their memory haunted the South and helped drive the slavers into the paranoia and deluded over-reach  that eventually brought them down. If people had not rebelled in the face of hopeless odds, if Lincoln had lost either Presidential election, if Fred Douglas had given up and retired to a farm, if ordinary men and women in the Underground Railroad had not defied the law to help their brothers and sisters escape – any of these things could have helped evil to survive and grow. It’s impossible to tell even in retrospect what was the best, the most effective path or action. But we can be confident that the sum of the actions of all those people who would not accept slavery eventually beat the actions of those who supported slavery and those who shamefully tolerated it.

When the troops debarked, the evening of the 29th, it was expected that we would have to go to Rodney, about nine miles below, to find a landing; but that night a colored man came in who informed me that a good landing would would be found at Bruinsburg, a few miles above Rodney, from which point there was a good road leading to Port Gibson some twelve miles in the interior. The information was found correct, and our landing was effected without opposition.

Ulysses S. Grant. Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete.

Nobody knows who that “colored” man was. But he took initiative and helped change the world, at considerable risk to himself.