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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?)
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.
...and frequently flowing right back out again, because hilariously the southern planters insisted on importing just about everything else other than their raw goods, and as a result were almost always in stonking amounts of debt
Exactly. It would be one thing if the South had invested in themselves and turned themselves into an economic powerhouse, but they didn't - cotton profits were consumed, not invested.
On the one hand, they kind of did invest in themselves - the planter aristocracy's money paid for a lot of fancy clothes, yes, but it also paid for Monticello's library, and the education of the statesmen who shaped early America's politics, who were disproportionately from the upper South's aristocracy. That class got surpassed in wealth and direct power when the VA/NC/SC tidewater soils collapsed in fertility under repeated tobacco plantings, while cotton (which was the preferred crop of the declasse Deep South "black belt", which until surprisingly late in the 19th century was fairly wild frontier country) became much more profitable due to the power loom and cotton-gin. Even still, the upper-South's "gentlemen cavaliers" still retained inordinate influence even up to the Civil War - Robert E. Lee, of course, being the "beau ideal" of the type.
On the other, once the South was initially settled as a series of small settlements clustered around an individual manor and plantation, industrialization in the northern fashion became much more difficult. With no real major cities, there were no large single markets justifying expansion beyond cottage-industry production, which was more than adequate to keep individual communities supplied. And because the South is "blessed" with a lot of rivers running from the Appalachians to the sea (either the Atlantic or Gulf Coast), there wasn't really any need to build out road networks for movement of goods - raw materials could be loaded on barges at individual plantation wharfs to float down to seaports, then be transferred onto bulk cargo ships for shipment to factories elsewhere.
Economic development is complicated, and rarely turns on single factors.
I'm not sure how the planter aristocrats of the early United States are anything more than a historical curiosity. Sure, they wielded political influence and had some fancy tutors. But did they play a critical role in the emergence of the United States as an industrial behemoth and world superpower? Speaking as someone who knows virtually nothing about the topic, I don't think so. No doubt there were rich slaveholders all over Latin America, to say nothing of the Middle East and Asia, and likely no less well educated according to their own traditions.
And sure, there were no doubt good reasons from the perspective of those aristocrats to spend their blood money on silk gowns and classical architecture rather than infrastructure. But to return to the object-level issue, the argument isn't that 'slavery could have built America if the planter aristocrats didn't all live next to natural waterways on top of absurdly productive agricultural land with no threats and abundant external demand for cotton and abundant supply of finished goods from industrialized UK', it's 'slavery built America'.
Until about 5 minutes ago they were the undisputed heroes of the Independence era - Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Patrick Henry, George Mason, Peyton Randolph, John Marshall, Edmund Randolph ... 4 of the first 5 presidents, architect of the Constitution, author of the Declaration of Independence, some of the most prolific speakers, demagogues, and essayists in defense of independence and the notion of a unified "America," First Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, first Attorney General, and the first President of the Continental Congress.
And many of the major figures associated with other states were actually Virginians of the upper rank - just transplanted: William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Stephen Austin, Sam Houston... the list goes on and on.
In many respects, they were the political elite of the first 30 years of U.S. independence; New England was frigid and pietistic, and the Middle States were a wishy-washy after-thought.
Well, insofar as they were key to forging political compromises and coalitions which (1) kept the 13 colonies together as a single polity, and prevented splintering and disunion through which European superpowers could have played diplomatic puppet-games as happened in Latin America, and (2) were early adopters and frequent boosters of the idea of westward expansion and continental (sometimes even hemispheric - see the Ostend Manifesto for a late-period example) dominance, which ensured the U.S. its present enviable geographic, resource availability, and strategic position (at the expense of a lot of natives getting displaced or killed), yes - absolutely.
I agree. Slavery in one sense enabled America, because the indispensible figures of the Revolutionary era were only able to be "statesmen" on the backs of the surplus produced by slave-driven latifundia. However, slavery did not drive American industrialization, because the areas where the slaves were had been set up such that industrialization just wasn't in the cards, and the areas which did industrialize had no need of the institution - free workers were actually cheaper, and africans didn't have a mortality advantage over european immigrants in the north anyway.
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