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I know that slavery was integral to the economy of the southern states, but when people say "slavery built America", it seems like they're implying that it was integral to the northern states, too. My biases, which I am actively seeking to counteract, tell me that anyone who says slavery built America is ignoring history.. but y'know, I don't actually know that much about history. I just remember learning in high school that the southern economy was agricultural and sustained by unpaid labor, while the north wasn't agricultural and didn't have any financial need for slavery.
How important was slavery to the north, financially speaking? If the textile factories weren't able to get cotton from the south, would they have ceased to be, or would they have just gotten cotton elsewhere? (Like from overseas?)
It is not even correct to say it about the South, regardless of the North. Slaves were mostly (but not entirely) disposable labor who were brought over because they were inexpensive to purchase and had a +10 racial stat for heat resistance useful for the hot Southern summers. While it is true that intelligent slaves were often tasked with sophisticated skilled labor, and sometimes rose to great heights and were superior to white competitors, the cohort as a whole were brought over specifically to fulfill the most unskilled labor possible. They definitionally did not build anything, and in the absence of slavery they would have been replaced (and were indeed replaced) with poor European immigrants and Chinese workers.
(Today, globalism has replaced the exploitation of American slaves — by this I mean that we can outsource our exploitation to the poor African cobalt and lithium miners whose quality of life is worse than a mid-19th century slave in America. And we outsource our clothing to factories of questionable living standards and who even knows where China gets some of its materials. We pat ourselves on the back for our moral triumph, while we praise Apple execs for building the iPhone, before tweeting to the ancestors of the downtrodden white middle class that they built nothing and belong nowhere.)
I was under the impression that the primary competitive advantage of african slaves were disease resistance to (primarily African) tropical diseases that the very small amount of initial African slaves (or sailors?) brought over.
Before those tropical diseases were widespread white (and indigenous) workers did just fine in the tropical areas of the americas and were willing to go over and work for competitive rates. After the spread of the diseases people were much less willing to go unless paid well (and if they did many died), which obviously doesn't work very well for low skill labour.
It wasn't until the development of things like Quinine that things started to really change.
Specifically, malaria. The lines demarcating "slave" and "free" areas in the Americas even correspond almost precisely to the latitudes where the mosquitos that carry it can survive.
Indigenous "workers" (typically enslaved) were vulnerable to all manner of Old World diseases, like smallpox, and had a tendency to flee back into the wilderness they were more familiar with (sometimes even being joined by fleeing African slaves). They were used, especially in South America, but probably would not have been sufficient in number to support a mass labor force in North America. White workers did try to go over, but even by the time of the first attempt at the Jamestown colony in the very beginning over the 1600s, malaria was present and devastating.
Areas where malaria was a major limiting factor on a workforce presence mostly did not grow cotton, they grew rice. And African Americans descended from the populations that were enslaved there are ethnically distinct today.
It’s not difficult to imagine an alternative history where the cotton belt poor are mostly mestizos of Irish and Native American descent.
In my understanding "areas where malaria was a limiting factor" includes most of the American (non-Appalachian) South, Caribbean, and northern Latin America, and of course such an area included a very wide range of crops that were being grown (especially over hundreds of years--early settlers had to grow food and also often grew tobacco, for instance, while the large cotton plantations came later, after slavery was established). Whites found it difficult to grow anything, because they couldn't work.
I think it is pretty difficult. Native populations were always smaller north of the Rio Grande and were devastated by Old World diseases. And I find it unlikely that it would have made economic sense to bring lots of Irish to Virginia and South Carolina. Its population in 1600 appears to have been about 1-1.4M, so the 400,000 number for African slaves brought to NA that Gdanning mentions elsewhere in this thread would have been a huge portion of their population.
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