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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?)
Other commenters are missing the point of GDP by labeling slavery as non-investment spending. Money changed hands, so someone saw material benefit from slavery. The question is whom. These foreign trade charts suggest we mostly exported crude materials until the late 1800s, but it wasn’t much of our GDP. On the other hand, this essay notes that US cotton provided something like 75% of British textiles. That’s potentially a lot of money flowing into the US.
But I suspect it’s a moot point. “Built on slavery” has legs because of the ideological gap between American founding principles and the peculiar institution. It’s an attack on Jefferson, Washington, etc. who saw personal benefit. Any overall economic effect is less important given the particular reverence of the American right for these figures.
I would be somewhat more charitable. "Slavery built America" is best understood as a serious-but-not-literal argument - a reaction to a socio-political milieu that tends to downplay the issues and concerns of African Americans and at worst actively rejects their legitimacy as participants in American society. It's not about attacking the Founding Fathers. It's about asserting their place in American history in the face of people who want to forget about it, Because while there are pretty good arguments that the US would have been better off had it abolished slavery earlier and in a more equitable fashion (the sharecropping system that emerged in the aftermath of the Civil War was better than literal slavery, but still quite suboptimal), the fact of the matter is that it didn't.
I'm trying to figure out what decade this could last be said about the US, where those issues and concerns have been aggressively "centered" in all media, every educational institution, and all government policies for decades.
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