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Notes -
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.)
The argument is obviously not that they literally built things, but rather that their labor enabled the growth of GDP, the accumulation of capital, etc. Obviously, there was some truth to that, since slaves made up a substantial portion of the labor force. But only some truth.
Perhaps in the Caribbean, but not in the US, as is evidenced by the fact that the slave population continued to grow after the importation of slaves was banned in 1808. There were 1.2 million slaves in the US in 1810 and 4 million in 1860; note also that the data in that link shows that the growth rate did not slow after importation was banned. Which makes sense, since only about 400,000 slaves were imported from Africa to North America; the vast majority went to the Caribbean and Brazil. Moreover, slaves were not cheap; prices apparently typically ranged from about $400 to $800, a pretty penny in those days.
Very few of those immigrants settled in the South. See here.
Well, yes - this doesn't demonstrate what the situation would have been in the absence of slavery, since it shows the situation resulting from our history, ie. where there was slavery (and, in 1900, there was still an abundance of cheap black labor in the South, even despite the abolition of slavery.)
? How does it indicate that there would have been labor available in the South, absent slavery?
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