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The "free soil" farmer-settlers (and never forget that these were *settlers* bent upon the eradication of the indigenous population) were not strong enough as a social force at the time of the American Revolution; on the contrary the strongest settler current was coming out of the Upland South (i.e. Virginia and North Carolina) at that time. Some of the northern states had not even abolished slavery yet. Their only competitor were the Yankee farmers of New England (where land was largely settled and owned relatively evenly, therefore rents were high), who had hardly begun their irruption into upstate New York in search of cheap rents. More to the point, the deleterious effect of slavery upon ground rent, due to its suppression of capital accumulation on the land in general outside of the accumulation of slaves, was hardly perceived at that time. But by the 1850's the Midwestern farmer-settlers had come to understand very well the negative effects of slavery upon the prospective market price of their land, much as a homeowner neighborhood association might perceive the effects of the opening of a house of prostitution in their midst. It was these "Indian-hating", "Negrophobic" Midwesterners, whose idea of "free soil" also meant soil free of natives and Blacks, who, organized into federalized state militias were the social force that toppled slavery despite themselves. It certainly was not the abolitionists, to whom far too much attention has been paid. This is true even in their ostensible role as provocateurs, pushing the slaveholders to an overreaction they could have easily "rationally" avoided. For the absolute condition for the effectiveness of the abolitionist propaganda was the existence of the mass of slaves themselves as an objective fact, and nobody knew better than the slaveowners themselves the terror that would ensue should there be an uprising. It was the psychotic terror of the slaveowners themselves, so similar to the Islamophobic terror that seems to govern the U.S. ruling class today, that was the accidental trigger for the Civil War; it was the Midwestern settlers-in-arms that were their gravediggers, as their almost unbroken string of victories in the Western military theater shows. -Matt (Quote) Speech by Charles Sumner on the floor of the US Senate, June 4, 1860 _http://medicolegal.tripod.com/sumnerbarbarism.htm_ (http://medicolegal.tripod.com/sumnerbarbarism.htm) Comment This is good stuff although the question remains, why was slavery not abolished state wide in 1776? The quality of struggle by popular forces are not enough. The serf rebelled for a thousand years if not more. Something else must enter the equation for popular forces to achieve their cause and vision. We must minimally agree that the slaves as a class could not overthrow the system of slavery. If this is true, and it is, what other social forces were required to realize the vision of the first American Revolution? In 1861, the slave class of the South was not sufficient to overthrown the system of slavery. Why not the overthrow of slavery throughout America in 1787? WL. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
