Tag Archives: slavery

Slavery, the Development of the United States, and the Case for Reparations

Recognising the role of slavery in the United States’ development up to 1865 bolsters the case for making reparations

In a new working paper I outline how slavery contributed to the development of the United States before the Civil War. The paper is called ‘King Cotton, the Munificent’ because I argue that slavery benefitted the free society of the North. In a nutshell, I argue that slaves were required to produce the cotton exports that balanced the imports that the Federal Government taxed. Those customs revenues then financed westward expansion, which tended to benefit Northerners because they had prohibited slavery in the Midwest. As the free states grew faster than the slave states, Southern slaveholders recognised that their cotton exports were being used to finance their own disempowerment in Congress, so they seceded. The North would not let them go, however, because they threatened to take with them the customs revenues that the Federal Government had relied upon up to then. The result was the Civil War, which eventually led to emancipation. Such is my analysis in an abbreviated form.

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Cotton and Slavery in Antebellum America

Slavery was necessary for the United States’ cotton boom because productivity levels were not high enough to attract free labour.

The dominant view among economic historians is that American slavery was an unnecessary evil: nothing good came of it for the development of the United States after independence. Even if some reluctantly accept that the boom in cotton production may have had some benefits for Antebellum America, they argue that the cotton could have instead been produced by free labour. Here, however, I will argue that productivity levels were too low in cotton to attract free labour, so slave labour was a necessary evil for the cotton boom.

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Without Slavery in the United States, Would California Still Be in Mexico?

The Mexican-American War illustrates how important slavery was for the expansion of the United States.

Unless you are Mexican, it is easy to forget that California was not always in the United States, having been a part of Mexico until the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, after which it was annexed. Slavery had much to do with the origins of that war, since white settlers hoping to grow cotton on slave plantations had fought for the secession of Texas in 1836, and then supported its annexation by the United States in 1845; a disagreement over Texas’ western boundary would lead to war with Mexico the following year. My argument here, however, is that slavery was also crucial to the outcome of the Mexican-American war because the goods produced by slaves were essential to the United States’ healthy public finances, which allowed it to defeat its poorer neighbour. This blog post thus makes a small contribution to the ongoing debate about slavery’s role in the development of the United States in the long nineteenth century.¹

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