Slavery by Another Name — The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II[/SIZE][/B]

I’ve often spoken of this fact of history on this board and it’s either that people deny it, ignore it or they don’t think it was that much of a big deal.

Off we go……..

Democracy Now Interview Part 1

Democracy Now Interview Part 2

[B]^^^ In that one he starts naming off some of the companies/ businesses that were involved in it and around the 5:20 mark, he gets into how it ended. Again, had nothing to do with morality on the part of whites. It had to do with that same ol’ narcissistic, psychopathic trait of “impression management” that I’ve spoken about time and time again on here.[/B]

Interview with Bill Moyers Part 1

Interview with Bill Moyers Part 2

[B]^^^ In part 1 above, you’ll hear him speak of the evolution of these laws from slave codes to Black codes to simply laws that are supposedly for everyone, but they more so go after Black people for them. This underscores another point that I make all the time on here about teaching white people about racism. In the interview, you will hear him admit that they keep on making modifications as it concerns these laws because they know how it looks. I have stated for the record on here before that psychologists/ psychiatrists etc generally agree that therapy not only does not work on psychopaths, but in fact it makes them worse because it is through therapy that they learn about certain human emotions and perspectives and thus how to manipulate people better.

And “better” means to be able to do so without being detected.

Before psychologists/ psychiatrists figured this out about psychopaths, they thought the patient was sitting down learning one thing when in reality he/ she was learning something else altogether.

This, I have maintained, is what goes on when you teach white people about racism i.e. when you tell them what you know/ see. Anybody who actually goes around teaching white people about the racism that they see or know about is only teaching them how to be better racists. What they are learning is not what you think they are learning. Psychopaths have no morals. You’re not telling them something that they then feel either guilty about, ashamed of or the need to morally correct. What they learn is that you’ve seen the truth and now they must find a way to conceal the truth so as to be able to continue the same ol’ practice as before.[/B]

Interview with Noam Chomsky where he mentions it

[B]^^^ That one’s just for good measure. [/B]

Interview with Tavis Smiley Part 1

Interview with Tavis Smiley Part 2

[B]^^^ Tavis touches on, around the end, what is one of my major points for even making this thread. I’ve been mentioning this for a while on here. I have refused to call 1865 the time when slavery was abolished because it’s a lie in more ways than one. But, and the author in the Bill Moyer’s interview pointed this out about Black people even in regards to their own relatives that WENT THROUGH IT, Black people do not believe it when Black people say it.

Words cannot describe how much I hate the fact that Black people hold the words of white people so much more important than that of their own people.

http://www.ecaroh.com/bmp/think/blackhistorymonth.htm

Can We Talk:
West Indian Americans and Black History Month

By Aubrey W. Bonnett, PhD

We are in the midst of a period devoted to the commemoration and celebration of Black History month, a time recognized since 1976 as one in which to reflect and ponder the accomplishments of African Americans, despite historically overwhelming odds. Carter G. Woodson, a noted African American historian, who is often hailed as the father of black history, initiated this period.

But Black History month is more than a recitation of contributions; it is also a description of the odyssey of struggle, protest and resistance by a dispossessed group of Americans in an effort to force states – this nation – to live up to its promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – ideals so prominent in the American creed. African Americans and West Indian Americans have a common bond in the quest to attain the promise of this creed.

Many West Indian immigrants and their descendants have historically played important roles in this fight for emancipation and liberation. Early immigrants such as Pan – Africanists Edward Blyden, George Padmore and Marcus Garvey, and poet activist Claude McKay, were among the first West Indians to become well known and well respected in the African American’s struggle for racial equality.

Other famous West Indian Americans include former U.S. representative Shirley Chisholm; Franklin Thomas, former head of the Ford Foundation; federal Judge Constance Baker Motley, the first black woman appointed to the federal Judiciary; activists Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure), Roy Innis, Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan; world renowned actor Sidney Poitier; civil rights activist and singer Harry Belafonte; Earl Greaves, philanthropist, businessman and publisher of Black Enterprise; and now Colin Powell the first black U.S. Secretary of State, have all made impressive contributions on behalf of African Americans.

It should also be noted that the struggle for civil rights for African Americans, culminating in what is known as the civil rights movement, also overlapped with the struggle in the West Indian colonies to bring about decolonization, independence and nationhood for West Indians of all races. Many of the populist leaders in the movement for nationhood – Norman Manley, Eric Williams, Cheddi Jagan, Linden Forbes Burnham, Eric Gairy, Alexander Bustamante, and Errol Barrow for example, were influenced by the audacious attempts of charismatic leaders such as Martin Luther King and others who were not afraid to challenge the American monolith, even at the point of threats to their own personal safety. These actions inspired our own leaders in the Caribbean who were often in mutual interaction with their African American counterparts in universities, churches or through the labor movement.

But interaction among these groups has not been without conflict. At the beginning of the twentieth century, West Indian Americans and African Americans held negative stereotypes of each other and rarely interacted socially. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s the children of some West Indian immigrants downplayed their ethnicity and attempted to integrate into the African American community, but both groups’ images of each other changed slowly. Secretary Powell, in his autobiography, My American Journey (1995), recalls his African American father-in-law’s reaction when he proposed marriage to his daughter Alma: “All my life I’ve tried to stay from those damn West Indians and now my daughter is going to marry one!”

The late 1960s, with its emphasis on racial solidarity and group identity, eroded much of the conflict between African Americans and West Indian Americans and supplanted it with black nationalist sentiments and identity. Since the 1990s many West Indian Americans, who actually come from many racial/ethnic lineages – African, Chinese, East Indian, Portuguese, Amerindian for example – present multiple identity formations such as: West Indian, with a strong ethnic orientation; African American, with a focus on their racial identity; and West Indian American, with a more hybrid cultural identity as hyphenated Americans.

Surely, this community is not monolithic, and class divisions and pressures influence roles in its identity resolution, as well as influence responses to racism and other societal challenges. Disproportionately, lower and working class West Indian Americans have strong affiliations with their ethnicity and its cultural symbols. They use the ethnic community as a “structural shield” in their coping repertoire in contemporary America.

In today’s America, what is undisputed, however, is the coming together of the African American and West Indian groups at important junctures. They coalesce to oppose racial and ethnic discrimination by the dominant white majority, and agencies of the state at federal, local or county levels, and to protest for the poor and disenfranchised among their midst.

It is in this contextual framework that Black History month should be viewed. Not simply to recall the successes of yesteryear but to plan and strategize for the challenges that still have to be overcome by both groups in their quest for full and complete inclusion in the American nation, and to minimize and neutralize divisive attempts to fragment their unity in this regard.

© 2003 Aubrey W. Bonnett, PhD.
eCaroh Communications, Inc.

Massa Day Done PDF

http://www.nationalcenter.org/Reparations.html

Press Releases

“Black Activists Call Senate Slavery Apology ‘Useless’; Say It Will Empower the Call for Reparations” – National Center for Public Policy Research, June 22, 2009
http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21PR-Reparations_062209.html

“Even if Millions Rally on the Mall, Reparations Won’t Heal Black America” – National Center for Public Policy Research, August 15, 2002
http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21PRReparations802.html

Commentary

“What Conservatives Think: Should Black Americans Receive Reparations Payments Because of Slavery?” – National Center for Public Policy Research, August 23, 2004
http://www.nationalcenter.org/WCT082304.html

“Reparations for slavery?  Or discrimination against light-skinned citizens?” Adversity.Net, January 30, 2004.
http://www.adversity.net/reparations/reparations_for_reverse_discrimination.htm

“Would Reparations for Slavery be Just?”- by Edward J.Erler, senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, May 5, 2002.
http://www.claremont.org/writings/020505erler.html

“America has Apologized,” New Visions Commentary by Mychal Massie, August 2003http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21NVMassieApology803.html

“The Reparations Pipe Dream and the Tax Cut Reality,” New Visions Commentary by Kevin Martin, June 2003http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21NVMartinPipedream603.html

“Even if Millions Rally on the Mall, Reparations Won’t Heal Black America; Huge “Millions for Reparations: They Owe Us” Rally on National Mall on August 17 Opposed by Conservative Black Leadership Group” Project 21 Press Release, August 2002.
http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21PRReparations802.html

“Slavery Reparations Aren’t a ‘Free Lunch’”- New Visions Commentary, by Michael King, Project 21, April 2002.
http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21NVKingReparations502.html

“Who Should Pay for Reparations? Black Americans . . . Obviously”- New Visions Commentary by Mike Green, Project 21, May 2001. http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21NVGreenReparations501.html

“Which Uncle Tom Am I?”- New Visions Commentary by Mike Green, Project 21, January 2002.
http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21NVGreenUncleTom102.html

“Reparations, Anyone?”- New Visions Commentary by Kimberley Jane Wilson, Project 21, August 2001.
http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21NVWilsonReparations801.html

“10 Reasons Why Reparations For Blacks Are A Bad Idea For Blacks And Racist, Too”- by David Horowitz, Center for the Study of Popular Culture, May 30, 2000.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1153

“Reparations Wouldn’t Cover the Whole Debt”- by Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., April 18, 2001.
http://www.freep.com/voices/columnists/pitts18_20010418.htm

“The Problems with Black Progress”- by Deroy Murdock, National Review Online, November 9, 2001.
http://www.nationalreview.com/murdock/murdockprint110901.html

“David Horowitz and Reparations”- by Charles Krauthammer, syndicated columnist, April 8, 2001.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/charleskrauthammer/printck20010408.shtml

“Reparations and Jesse Jackson’s ‘Illegitimate Children’”- by Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, WorldNetDaily, April 5, 2002.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=27109

“Reparations Now”- by Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online, March 19, 2001.
http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldbergprint031901.html

“Getting Out of Debt”- by Robert A. George, National Review Online, February 3-4, 2001.
http://www.nationalreview.com/weekend/culture/culture-georgeprint020301.html

“What America Owes Me”- by Michelle Malkin, syndicated columnist, January 12, 2001.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/mm20010112.shtml

“The Reparations Fraud – Part 1″- by Thomas Sowell, senior fellow of the Hoover Institute, January 4, 2002.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20020104.shtml

“The Reparations Fraud – Part 2″- by Thomas Sowell, senior fellow of the Hoover Institute, January , 2002.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20020104.shtml

“Victimizing Blacks”- by Thomas Sowell, senior fellow of the Hoover Institute, August 2, 2001.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20010802.shtml

“America’s Racial Divide: Of Debts Spoken and Unspoken”- by Lucas E. Morel, Adjunct Fellow at the John M. Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs, June 2001.
http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/onprin/v9n3/morel.html

“America’s Original Sin”- by Linda Chavez, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, May 30, 2001.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/lindachavez/lc20010530.shtml

News

“Black Leader to Start ‘Stop Reparations’ Tour,” Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny (BOND), April 16, 2002.
http://www.bondinfo.org/mediacommunications/pressreleases/reparations.htm

“California Considering Slave Reparations”- Foxnews.com, May 6, 2002.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,52062,00.html

“Second Slave Reparations Suit Filed”- Foxnews.com, May 2, 2002.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,51723,00.html

“Suit Seeks Billions in Slave Reparations”- CNN.com, March 27, 2002.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/03/26/slavery.reparations/index.html

“Rice Dismisses Reparations for Slavery”- CNN.com, September 9, 2001.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/09/09/rice.reparations/index.html

“Censorship on College Campuses”–Insight magazine, June 17, 2002. Report on the furor surrounding the publication of David Horowitz’s ’10 Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Is a Bad Idea’- and Racist Too.”
http://www.insightmag.com/global_user_elements/printpage.cfm?storyid=251678

“The Case for Slavery Reparations”- Minnesota Public Radio, November 13, 2000. A report by Brandt Williams on the arguments made by advocates of slavery reparations.
http://news.mpr.org/features/200011/13_williamsb_reparations/

“The Case For Black Reparations”- TransAfrica Forum, 2000. Transcript of a discussion on slavery reparations.
http://www.transafricaforum.org/reports/print/reparations_print.shtml

Litigation

Text of the lawsuit filed by Deadria Farmer-Paellmann seeking reparations from FleetBoston Financial, CSX, and Aetna for their alleged role in promoting slavery.
http://news.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/slavery/fpllmnflt032602cmp.pdf

“The Case After Slavery”- A legal commentary by Evan P. Schulz.
http://www.law.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagename=law /View&c=Article&cid=ZZZXCV7TLUC&live=true&cst=1&pc=0&pa=0

“Reparations Suits Are Too Little, Too Late”- A legal commentary by Steven P. Benenson.
http://www.law.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagename=law /View&c=Article&cid=ZZZ6AXLGC1D&live=true&cst=1&pc=0&pa=0

“The Color of Money: It’s Red for Reparations”- A legal commentary by Norm Pattis.
http://www.law.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagename=law /View&c=Article&cid=ZZZOY98EYZC&live=true&cst=1&pc=0&pa=0

“Perpetual Guilt? Legal Efforts to Punish Centuries-old Transgressions Will Open Pandora’s Box”- A legal commentary by Harold Johnson.
http://pacificlegal.org/op-ed/ed-guilt.htm

“A New Dream Team Intends to Seek Reparations for Slavery”- Part I”- A legal commentary by Anthony J. Sebok.
http://writ.corporate.findlaw.com/sebok/20001120.html

“Should Claims Based on African-American Slavery Be Litigated in the Courts? And If So, How?”- A legal commentary by Anthony J. Sebok.
http://writ.corporate.findlaw.com/sebok/20001204.html

Groups

Project 21
http://www.project21.org/P21Index.html

N’Cobra (The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America)
http://www.ncobra.org

Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny (BOND)
http://www.bondinfo.org

Adversity.net – reparations page
http://www.adversity.net/reparations/reparations_for_reverse_discrimination.htm

Disclaimer: This archive is provided to provide information about affirmative action from a variety of perspectives. Inclusion of a link should not be taken as an endorsement of the facts or opinions contained in the linked document by either Project 21′s membership or The National Center for Public Policy Research.

http://uhurunews.com/

Bericht von:
Shaun Nichols, Harvard University
E-Mail: <snichols@fas.harvard.edu>

For generations, historians have struggled to excavate the roots of what Kenneth Pomeranz has called the “Great Divergence”: namely, how and why did the nineteenth century see northwestern Europe—and later, the United States—so abruptly burst forth in an unprecedented explosion of industrial growth while so much of the world lagged behind in a preindustrial past. Pomeranz himself pointed to two key dissimilarities: access to coal, and access to the vast resources of the American continent cultivated largely through coerced and slave labor. Yet despite Pomeranz’s provocative insight, historians have been ultimately reticent to chart a common history of these two institutions that so indelibly marked the global history of the nineteenth century: capitalism and slavery.

Moreover, since the end of the American Civil War, American historians have been only too eager to make slavery out to be merely a “southern problem,” thereby conveniently exculpating the north from its role in the development and promulgation of this abhorrent institution. Indeed, the northern United States, it is so often claimed, represented the modernizing impulse of industrialization itself: the infinite productive capacity of free laborers and yeoman farmers in an open market. The south, on the other hand, was locked in hopeless stagnation—inextricably wedded to its endless wealth of homegrown cotton founded upon the sweltering sin of its peculiar institution: slavery. Only the cataclysm of Civil War could have possibly brought the simmering conflict between these two oppositional systems to a head, and thus pave the way towards the ascendance of liberal capitalism.

Yet in the last two decades, popular consciousness has increasingly diverged from the discourse of many American historians. Indeed, just as many Americans before the Civil War candidly acknowledged the ways in which slave-grown cotton was at the foundation of America’s growing industrial ascendance—it was, after all, the United States’ most valuable export, as well as the essential resource bringing specie into the nation’s fledgling banks—popular discourse has once more returned to seeing the reverberations of slavery’s past all around us. Activists from the reparations movement have exposed the ways in which Northern companies directly benefited from it; American universities have dug into their archives, consciously striving to disentangle their own links to it; and economists have produced a veritable corpus of econometric research compellingly demonstrating how slave labor undergirded America’s industrial revolution. American historians, however, have remained strangely aloof from these developments.

Curiously, the connections between modern institutions and slavery’s past had become so patently self-evident that it seemed to warrant little further research. Yet nothing could be less true. Indeed, highly charged statements of northern “complicity” in southern slaving—whether true or not—mask a far more complicated, contradictory, and often disconcerting historical reality. And although much is already known about the abstract linkages between northern industry and southern slavery, there still exists little scholarly research on the precise connections between these two key enterprises once central to American economic development. With these questions in mind, Sven Beckert, Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University, and Seth Rockman, Professor of History at Brown University, brought together seventeen scholars for a conference aimed at painting a very different picture of American economic development. Indeed, how might American history look different once we invite the possibility that perhaps the industrialization of the north and the proliferation of slavery in the south were not rivaldevelopments, but rather, transformations deeply embedded within one another? What were the precise connections between the burgeoning economic institutions of the north—banks, merchant establishments, trading firms, commercial shippers, and industrial manufacturers—and the slave plantations of the south? And ultimately, how might an understanding of slavery’s capitalism alter our understandings of the development of the American economy and its particular place in world history?

The conference opened at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island on April 7 to a wonderfully provocative keynote address by Brown University President RUTH SIMMONS (Providence) on how the university itself can play a key role in fostering open, public dialogue—even on contentious issues like the history of slavery. After three days and six panels, the conference ended at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts on April 9, 2011.

The first panel, “Finance,” explored the intricacies of how slavery was capitalized and funded. First, JOSHUA D. ROTHMAN (Tuscaloosa) traced the ways in which speculation in slave labor further inflated the financial “bubble” of the 1830s that culminated in the Panic of 1837. Indeed, Rothman detailed the ways in which northern financial markets supplied the loans (based on the potential return, in labor, of plantation slaves) which effectively made this speculative economic boom—and subsequent bust—possible. BONNIE MARTIN (University Park) then interrogated the ways in which the mortgaging (often repeated mortgaging) of slaves brought in much-needed cash and capital to the south. Yet Martin ultimately emphasized that northern banks and merchants were actually much less involved in this process than the complex neighbor-to-neighbor networks which permeated local southern communities. Finally, KATHRYN BOODRY (Cambridge) compellingly detailed the ways in which slavery was just one part of a larger, integrated Atlantic economy of cotton, capital, and textile manufacturing.

The second panel, “Development,” explored the institutional force and coherence of slavery. First, JOHN MAJEWSKI (Santa Barbara) presented a paper that sought, if not for just a moment, to take Abraham Lincoln seriously in his fears that slavery might have spread north. Indeed, Majewski showed how in the so-called “limestone south”—northern Virginia, the Kentucky Bluegrass region, and the Tennessee Nashville Basin—the natural, built, and cultural environment did not look all too different from the north. Thus, he concluded that slavery perhaps did have the potential to be a national institution, arguing that the defining factor that inhibited its growth in any given area was not climate or economics, but conscious political decision-making. STANLEY ENGERMAN (Rochester) then presented, arguing that although it was undoubtedly true that northern merchants were involved in the financing of slavery, whether or not the slave trade was necessary to northern economic development is a very different and far more complicated question. Indeed, Engerman pointed out that many other national economies thrived in this periodwithout slavery. Thus, he ultimately asked whether slavery undergirded New England’s industrial ascendance, or whether it was the very success of New England’s economy that made slavery such a thriving institution.

Before the next panel started, conference co-convener Seth Rockman reminded the audience that we should be hesitant to rush into abstruse theoretical debates about questions of “what exactly is capitalism?” and to what degree it is merely synonymous with “economic development.” He argued that although, historically, there may have been other nations exhibiting capitalism without slavery, this does not preclude the simple fact that nineteenth-century America did indeed witness the institutional development of both slavery and capitalism. Thus, Rockman argued that we should continue to keep our sights set on telling a better American economic history, not on redefining the very theoretical foundations of capitalism itself.

In the last panel of the day, “Commerce,” ERIC KIMBALL (Greensburg) asked how we might then quantify“complicity”: which is to say, how might we quantify the level of involvement most northerners had with the slave trade? By exploring the connections between West-Indian sugar plantations and northern industries like lumber and whaling, Kimball made a compelling argument that northern manufacturing and resource extraction was indelibly linked to slavery’s profitability. Next, CALVIN SCHERMERHORN (Phoenix) showed how the coastwise slave trade was itself an integral part of United States’ developing commercial shipping network. Finally, DANIEL ROOD (Worcester) detailed the ways in which the wheat-flour economy of the antebellum era was instrumental in pioneering new methods of business integration, foreign trade, and technological change.

The last day of the conference, held at Harvard University, opened with a morning panel dedicated to “Plantation Practices.” First, EDWARD BAPTIST (Ithaca) delivered a gripping account of slaves’ daily experiences in the “push system” of the Deep South: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. In Baptist’s telling, it was a world in which the ever-increasing demand for profit was satiated by pushing slaves harder and harder and by whatever means necessary. In a chilling conclusion, Baptist recalled a former slave’s reminiscences about his master’s “whipping machine”: a hand-operated spinning wheel of four to five whips. Thus, Baptist ultimately showed how the ever-looming threat of violence formed an oft-overlooked foundation of the explosion of productivity the United States experienced during the nineteenth century. IAN BEAMISH (Baltimore) then showed how “agricultural improvement” groups in the nineteenth-century south were in constant dialogue with industrialists in the north, mutually participating in movements to modernize, rationalize, and enumerate agricultural production. Finally, CAITLIN ROSENTHAL (Cambridge) presented her challenge to the all-too-common assumption that modern managerial expertise first emerged out of the large-scale enterprises of the late-nineteenth-century north. Indeed, Rosenthal carefully detailed the ways in which antebellum southern planters were remarkably meticulous accountants and numerate managers, ultimately suggesting that perhaps the overarching need to “control” and “master” slaves itself pushed these planters to develop incipient forms of managerial control.

In the next panel, “Human Capital,” DAINA RAMEY BERRY (Austin) examined the ways in which slaves were capitalized, commodified, and assigned financial value—both before birth and long after death—showing how planters insured their slaves and sought recompense when slaves died unexpectedly. Next, AMY DRU STANLEY (Chicago) interrogated why arguments over whether slavers bred their property were so powerful and controversial in the antebellum period. Moreover, she poignantly detailed the ways in which the meaning of love itself became a contested terrain for pro- and anti-slavery advocates. Indeed, to Stanley, these debates ultimately centered on the fundamental issue of how far the market itself would be allowed to penetrate into the most hallowed spheres of human existence.

The last panel of the day, “Institutions and Ideas,” scrutinized the institutional and ideological foundations of slavery. First, CRAIG WILDER (Cambridge) investigated the ways in which the wealth derived from Caribbean sugar plantations undergirded the rise of the American college in the eighteenth century. Next, ANDREW SHANKMAN (Camden) detailed the profound sense of intellectual crisis Jeffersonian democrats faced in the Panic of 1819—what he called the first crisis of both capitalism and slavery. Indeed, as Shankman pointed out, although slavery may have been one of the foundations of capitalist ascendance in the nineteenth century, for those committed to Jefferson’s vision of an “Empire of Liberty,” the daily reality of a developing “Republic of Slavery” was nevertheless deeply troubling. STEPHEN CHAMBERS (Providence) then delivered his study of how a rising cadre of powerful New England merchants used the power of the United States’ budding diplomatic state apparatus to secure trade channels for their Cuban sugar plantations, thus revealing the remarkable degree to which Cuban investments shaped early-American foreign policy. In the last paper of the day, ALFRED BROPHY (Chapel Hill) demonstrated the ways in which the developing American legal framework of the nineteenth century supported both burgeoning capitalist markets and the expanding institution of slavery.

In a concluding discussion led by Beckert and Rockman, many audience members raised questions about the precise interactions between slavery and capitalism, as well as their mutual conflicts and contradictions. Beckert concurred that these questions indeed required further study, adding that whereas the last generation of historians had shown that slavery indeed had a history, it was now our job to explicate more fully the minute ways in which slavery formed a national system inextricably linked to the history of both American and world-capitalist development. Similarly, Rockman added that although the conference had clearly shown that the American Civil War was certainlynot caused by the ineluctable contradiction between free and slave labor, more work still needed to be done to uncover alternative origins for the war. Indeed, if slavery and capitalism were not as oppositional as we once thought, what then were the roots of the awful violence and terrible destruction of the American Civil War? It was upon this question that the conference adjourned.

Conference overview:

Panel 1: Finance
Chair: Michael Vorenberg, Brown University

“The Contours of Cotton Capitalism: Speculation, Slavery, and Economic Panic in Mississippi, 1832-1841”
Joshua D. Rothman, University of Alabama

“Neighbor to Neighbor: Local Lending Networks Building Economies by Mortgaging Slaves”
Bonnie Martin, Southern Methodist University

“The Common Thread: Cotton, Slavery and the Development of Merchant Banking”
Kathryn Boodry, Harvard University

Comment: Elizabeth Blackmar, Columbia University

Panel 2: Development
Chair: Ted Widmer, John Carter Brown Library

“Defining the National Mainstream: Slavery, Capitalism, and the Limestone South”
John Majewski, University of California–Santa Barbara

“Did Slavery Need Capitalism, or did Capitalism Need Slavery?”
Stanley Engerman, University of Rochester

Comment: Kaivan Munshi, Brown University

Panel 3: Commerce
Chair: Cécile Vidal, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

“Quantifying Complicity: New Englanders and the Slave Economies of the West Indies”
Eric Kimball, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg

“The Coastwise Slave Trade and a Mercantile Community of Interest”
Calvin Schermerhorn, Arizona State University

“Slavery, Technology and the Richmond-Rio Circuit”
Daniel Rood, American Antiquarian Society

Comment: Ronald Bailey, Savannah State University

Panel 4: Plantation Practices
Chair: Joyce Chaplin, Harvard University

“The Whipping Machine”
Edward Baptist, Cornell University

“Improving the South: Plantation Slavery and American Industrialization”
Ian Beamish, Johns Hopkins University

“From Slavery to Scientific Management: Accounting for Mastery”
Caitlin Rosenthal, Harvard University

Comment: Lorena Walsh, Colonial Williamsburg (retired)

Panel 5: Human Capital
Chair: Richard Rabinowitz, American History Workshop

“‘Broad is de Road dat Leads ter Death’: Human Capital & Enslaved Mortality”
Daina Ramey Berry, University of Texas

“Slave Breeding: An Antebellum Argument over Commodity Relations, Love, and Personhood”
Amy Dru Stanley, University of Chicago

Comment: Walter Johnson, Harvard University

Panel 6: Institutions and Ideas
Chair: John Stauffer, Harvard University

“‘The Very Name of a West Indian’: Atlantic Wealth and the Rise of the American College”
Craig Wilder, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“Capitalism, Slavery, and Mathew Carey’s 1819”
Andrew Shankman, Rutgers University–Camden

“‘No God But Gain’: The Business of Cuba and U.S. Foreign Policy”
Stephen Chambers, Brown University

“Utility, Slavery, and Market in American Legal Thought”
Alfred Brophy, University of North Carolina School of Law

Comment: James T. Campbell, Stanford University

Further Research

The last decade has seen a surge in historical research pertaining to slavery and capitalism in the United States. The following bibliography—by no means comprehensive—is intended to highlight recent scholarship and guide interested readers to pertinent books and articles. A short collection of web resources may prove useful to those pursuing additional information or conducting research of their own.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ashworth, John. Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, 2 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995–2008.

Bailey, Ronald. “The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States: The Textile Industry in New England.” Social Science History 14 (fall 1990): 373-414.

Baptist, Edward E. “Toxic Debt, Liar Loans, and Securitized Human Beings: The Panic of 1837 and the Fate of Slavery.” Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American History 10 (April 2010).

Beckert, Sven. “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War.” American Historical Review 109 (2004): 1405-1438.

Berlin, Ira, and Harris, Leslie, eds. Slavery in New York. New York: New Press, 2005.

Blatt, Martin H. and Roediger, David, eds., The Meaning of Slavery in the North. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998.

Brazy, Martha Jane. An American Planter: Stephen Duncan of Antebellum Natchez and New York. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

Byrne, Frank J. Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820-1865. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006.

Crothers, A. Glenn. “Quaker Merchants and Slavery in Early National Alexandria, Virginia: The Ordeal of William Hartshorne.”Journal of the Early Republic 25 (spring 2005): 47-78.

Deyle, Steven. Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Downey, Tom. Planting a Capitalist South: Masters, Merchants, and Manufacturers in the Southern Interior, 1790-1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

Egnal, Marc. Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009.

Esch, Elizabeth and Roediger, David R. “One Symptom of Originality: Race and the Management of Labour in the History of the United States.” Historical Materialism 17 (2009): 3-43.

Fehrenbacher, Don E. The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery, ed. Ward M. McAfee . New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Gigantino, James. “Trading in Jersey Souls: New Jersey and the Interstate Slave Trade.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 77:3 (summer 2010): 281-302.

Glickman, Lawrence B. “‘Buy for the Sake of the Slave’: Abolitionism and the Origins of American Consumer Activism.” American Quarterly 56 (December 2004): 889-912

Graeber, David. “Turning Modes of Production Inside Out: Or, Why Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery.” Critique of Anthropology 26 (2006): 61-85.

Einhorn, Robin L. American Taxation, American Slavery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Eltis, David. “The U.S. Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1644-1867: An Assessment.” Civil War History 54 (2008): 347-378.

Ericson, David F. “The Federal Government and Slavery: Following the Money Trail.” Studies in American Political Development19 (2005): 105-116.

Farrow, Anne, Lang, Joel, and Frank, Jennifer. Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery. New York: Ballantine Books, 2005.

Faulkner, Carol. “The Root of Evil: Free Produce and Radical Antislavery, 1820-1860.” Journal of the Early Republic 27 (fall 2007): 377-405.

Gillespie, Michele. “Building Networks of Knowledge: Henry Merrell and Textile Manufacturing in the Antebellum South.” In Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, eds., Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization: From the Antebellum Era to the Computer Age, 97-124. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009.

Glickstein, Jonathan A. American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety: Wages, Competition, and Degraded Labor in the Antebellum United States. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002.

Gould, Philip. Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Hahn, Steven. The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Johnson, Walter, ed. The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

Kaye, Anthony. “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century and the Atlantic World.” Journal of Southern History 75 (2009): 627-650.

Kilbourne, Richard Holcombe. Slave Agriculture and Financial Markets in Antebellum America: The Bank of the United States in Mississippi, 1831-1852. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006.

Larson, John Lauritz. The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Laurie, Bruce. “Workers, Abolitionists, and the Historians: A Historiographical Perspective.” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 5 (2008): 17-55.

Majewski, John. Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Manegold, C.S. Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Marler, Scott P. “‘An Abiding Faith in Cotton’: The Merchant Capitalist Community of New Orleans, 1860-62.” Civil War History 54 (2008): 247-276.

Marrs, Aaron W. Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Martin, Bonnie. “Slavery’s Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human Property.” Journal of Southern History 76 (2010): 1-50.

McMichael, Philip. “Slavery in Capitalism: The Rise and Demise of the U.S. Ante-Bellum Cotton Culture.” Theory and Society 20 (1991): 321-349.

Melish, Joanne Pope. Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Murphy, Sharon, “Securing Human Property: Slavery, Life Insurance, and Industrialization in the Upper South.” Journal of the Early Republic 25 (winter 2005): 615-652.

Paterson, David E. “Slavery, Slaves, and Cash in a Georgia Village, 1825-1865.” Journal of Southern History 75 (2009): 879-930.

Rappleye, Charles. Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

Rockman, Seth. “The Unfree Origins of American Capitalism.” In Cathy Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions, 335-361. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006.

Rothman, Joshua. “The Hazards of the Flush Times: Gambling, Mob Violence, and the Anxieties of America’s Market Revolution.”Journal of American History 95 (2008): 651-677.

Schoen, Brian. The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Stanley, Amy Dru. From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Tomich, Dale W. Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.

Tomlins, Christopher. Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Van Cleve, George William. A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Waldstreciher, David. Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004.

Wells, Jonathan Daniel. Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800–1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Wright, Gavin. Slavery and American Economic Development. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

Zakim, Michael. “The Dialectics of Merchant Capital: New York City Businessmen during the Secession Winter, 1860-1861.” New York History 87 (2006): 67-87.

WEB RESOURCES:

The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database

Bibliography of Slavery and World Slaving at University of Virginia

Digital Library on American Slavery at UNC-Greensboro

Beyond Face Value Exhibition on Confederate Currency

The Texas Slavery Project

Documenting Louisiana Sugar at University of Sussex

Slavery and the Making of the University at University of North Carolina

Yale Slavery and Abolition Portal

New York Times Disunion Blog

Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection at Cornell University

Slavery in New York Exhibition at the New-York Historical Society

Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North

Slavery & Justice Exhibition at the John Carter Brown Library

American Slavery Debate at UC-Berkeley

http://brown.edu/web/slaveryconf/research.html

When the New York City banker James Brown tallied his wealth in 1842, he had to look far below Wall Street to trace its origins. His investments in the American South exceeded $1.5 million, a quarter of which was directly bound up in the ownership of slave plantations.

Brown was among the world’s most powerful dealers in raw cotton, and his family’s firm, Brown Brothers & Co., served as one of the most important sources of capital and foreign exchange to the U.S. economy. Still, no small amount of his time was devoted to managing slaves from the study of his Leonard Street brownstone in Lower Manhattan.

Brown was hardly unusual among the capitalists of the North. Nicholas Biddle’s United States Bank of Philadelphia funded banks in Mississippi to promote the expansion of plantation lands. Biddle recognized that slave-grown cotton was the only thing made in the U.S. that had the capacity to bring gold and silver into the vaults of the nation’s banks. Likewise, the architects ofNew England‘s industrial revolution watched the price of cotton with rapt attention, for their textile mills would have been silent without the labor of slaves on distant plantations.

The story we tell about slavery is almost always regional, rather than national. We remember it as a cruel institution of the southern states that would later secede from the Union. Slavery, in this telling, appears limited in scope, an unfortunate detour on the nation’s march to modernity, and certainly not the engine of American economic prosperity.

Yet to understand slavery’s centrality to the rise of American capitalism, just consider the history of an antebellum Alabama dry-goods outfit called Lehman Brothers or a Rhode Island textile manufacturer that would become the antecedent firm of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Reparations lawsuits (since dismissed) generated evidence of slave insurance policies by Aetna and put Brown University and other elite educational institutions on notice that the slave-trade enterprises of their early benefactors were potential legal liabilities. Recent state and municipal disclosure ordinances have forced firms such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wachovia Corp. to confront unsettling ancestors on their corporate family trees.

Such revelations are hardly surprising in light of slavery’s role in spurring the nation’s economic development. America’s “take-off” in the 19th century wasn’t in spite of slavery; it was largely thanks to it. And recent research in economic history goes further: It highlights the role that commodified human beings played in the emergence of modern capitalism itself.

The U.S. won its independence from Britain just as it was becoming possible to imagine a liberal alternative to the mercantilist policies of the colonial era. Those best situated to take advantage of these new opportunities — those who would soon be called “capitalists” — rarely started from scratch, but instead drew on wealth generated earlier in the robust Atlantic economy of slaves, sugar and tobacco. Fathers who made their fortunes outfitting ships for distant voyages begat sons who built factories, chartered banks, incorporated canal and railroad enterprises, invested in government securities, and speculated in new financial instruments.

This recognizably modern capitalist economy was no less reliant on slavery than the mercantilist economy of the preceding century. Rather, it offered a wider range of opportunities to profit from the remote labor of slaves, especially as cotton emerged as the indispensable commodity of the age of industry.

In the North, where slavery had been abolished and cotton failed to grow, the enterprising might transform slave-grown cotton into clothing; market other manufactured goods, such as hoes and hats, to plantation owners; or invest in securities tied to next year’s crop prices in places such as Liverpool and Le Havre. This network linked Mississippi planters and Massachusetts manufacturers to the era’s great financial firms: the Barings, Browns and Rothschilds.

A major financial crisis in 1837 revealed the interdependence of cotton planters, manufacturers and investors, and their collective dependence on the labor of slaves. Leveraged cotton — pledged but not yet picked — led overseers to whip their slaves to pick more, and prodded auctioneers to liquidate slave families to cover the debts of the overextended.

The plantation didn’t just produce the commodities that fueled the broader economy, it also generated innovative business practices that would come to typify modern management. As some of the most heavily capitalized enterprises in antebellum America, plantations offered early examples of time-motion studies and regimentation through clocks and bells. Seeking ever-greater efficiencies in cotton picking, slaveholders reorganized their fields, regimented the workday, and implemented a system of vertical reporting that made overseers into managers answerable to those above for the labor of those below.

The perverse reality of a capitalized labor force led to new accounting methods that incorporated (human) property depreciation in the bottom line as slaves aged, as well as new actuarial techniques to indemnify slaveholders from loss or damage to the men and women they owned. Property rights in human beings also created a lengthy set of judicial opinions that would influence the broader sanctity of private property in U.S. law.

So important was slavery to the American economy that on the eve of the Civil War, many commentators predicted that the North would kill “its golden goose.” That prediction didn’t come to pass, and as a result, slavery’s importance to American economic development has been obscured.

But as scholars delve deeper into corporate archives and think more critically about coerced labor and capitalism — perhaps informed by the current scale of human trafficking — the importance of slavery to American economic history will become inescapable.

(Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, historians at Harvard University and Brown Universityrespectively, are co-editing “Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development,” to be published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2013. The opinions expressed are their own.)

To contact the writers of this post: Sven Beckert at beckert@fas.harvard.edu and Seth Rockman at Seth_Rockman@brown.edu.

To contact the editor responsible for this post: Timothy Lavin at tlavin1@bloomberg.net.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-24/how-slavery-led-to-modern-capitalism-echoes.html

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