sartesian wrote:
To get at the distinction between wage-labor and slave labor, and what it means for both the laborer and the plantation owner, and to see what happens regarding technology and social relations, I can think of no better work than John C. Rodrigue ]Reconstruction in the Cane Fields[.
But either there was capitalist development through slavery in the early days of the republic or there was no development at all. Africans were enslaved not because there was some kind of romantic attachment to a pseudo-aristocratic existence pace "Gone With the Wind" but because there was not a pool of labor that was available as there was in the British countryside in the 1500s. What would be the purpose of Enclosure Acts when there was nothing to enclose? Cotton, tobacco, indigo and sugar exports fueled capitalist development in the USA. Jefferson was a bourgeois. So were many New Yorkers who relied on the slave trade.
"In the years just before the Civil War, it was customary for anti-slavery writers and speakers to refer to New York City as 'the prolongation of the South' where 'ten thousand cords of interests are linked with the Southern Slaveholder.' If, by some magic, one of the countless visitors to the 'World of Tomorrow' had suddenly been transported back to the New York World's Fair of 1853, he would have had no difficulty in discovering the reasons for these remarks. Had he arrived in the city late in June or early in July, he would have noticed that the lobbies of the Astor, St. Nicholas, Fifth Avenue, St. Denis, Clarendon, and Metropolitan hotels were thronged with Southern merchants and planters. The pages of the morning and evening newspapers, he would have observed, were filled with advertisements addressed to these Southerners, urging them to visit this or that store, to inspect the latest assortments of dry goods, hardware, boots and shoes, and other types of merchandise…
"Had the visitor remained in the city until September, he would have seen the daily departures of packets for the South, burdened with huge cargoes of dry goods, boots and shoes, hardware, clothing, liquors and even fruits, butter, and cheese. The same vessels, he would have noticed, soon returned to New York, this time loaded with cotton, tobacco, tar, resin, turpentine, wheat, pork and molasses. By the time our visitor was ready to return to the Twentieth Century, he should have been quite ready to agree that New York was 'almost as dependent upon Southern slavery as Charleston itself.' Perhaps he might even have agreed with James Dunmore De Bow, who said in reply to a query by the London Times, asking, 'What would New York be without slavery?'"
Philip Foner, "Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict"
