Anthony, many of whom were active participants in the abolitionist movement, to seek their own political equality. The movement, which focused on suffrage, culminated in a meeting at Seneca Falls, New York in The crowning moment of the Seneca Falls Convention, whose participants included Frederick Douglass, was Stanton's reading of the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments which borrowed the wording of the Declaration of Independence to appeal for women's political equality and the right to vote.
While the action set the agenda for years to come, the slavery issue, questions of states' rights, and the sectional crisis would overshadow the goals of the women's movement. Women would not gain the franchise until after World War I.
To many southerners, the society evolving in the North and its reform movements undermined the South's way of life, its traditions, and its political power.
Industrialism, the free labor ideology, and especially abolitionism threatened states' rights and revived the constitutional debate about the power of the federal government. The Nullification Crisis, precipitated over the issue of tariffs, proved a defining political issue during the s and s and exacerbated the already divisive sectional differences of slavery. South Carolina, which saw the tariffs as a bold extension of federal powers and a prelude to forced emancipation of slaves, led the charge to nullify the cotton tariffs.
Such action would allow a state to declare a national law unenforceable within state borders, an action that could eventually spur a state to secede from the Union. President Jackson viewed nullification as a direct threat to federal power and threatened military intervention, but Congress eventually worked out a compromise that defused the issue.
Still, tariffs in the s would intensify the political tensions of sectionalism in the s. Competing economic systems, the ideological, political, and social differences that grew out of such systems, the status of slavery in the western territories, and the abolitionist movement continued to make both northern and southern societies deeply suspicious of the other's political power. When southern states decided to secede in the s, they called the action a protest against the over-extension of federal powers that challenged the core of southern society.
The antebellum period in America is a rich era of cultural, economic, and political study. In the years since the Civil War, historians have emphasized the political, economic, and technological forces that shaped the era, its competing ideologies, and the Civil War itself.
Scholars of the last thirty years, however, have increasingly highlighted the actions of reformers and placed the political events into additional analytical frameworks that include racial, class, and gender models that emphasize issues of discrimination, racism, and sexism, as well as agency.
Evans, Sara M. New York: The Free Press, Foner, Eric. Goldfield, Davis, et. Second Edition. Greenberg, Kenneth. Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins University Press, Roark, James L. Wilentz, Sean. Estimates of the cost of culture by free labor, compared to slave labor, were necessarily conjectural, and therefore, uncertain, and usually of but little exactness.
By one pre-war estimate slave labor was totally unprofitable when used for cultivating grain crops. Therefore the planter was paying four times the cost of the former slave labor. In all standard works upon political economy, the institution of slavery has been considered from this narrow point of view, and, for the most part, they concur in maintaining the negative, that under all circumstances it is less advantageous to employ slave than free labor.
The folly of this notion is demonstrated by the fact that throughout the entire south there was no instance of a large plantation cultivated by hired free labor. Wherever agriculture was sufficiently profitable to induce large investments of capital the labor of slaves was preferred, and it was only the small farms in the south which were worked by free labor, generally by that of the owner and his sons.
The universal preference given to slave labor in agricultural enterprises was due to several causes. In the first place, it was on hand, and from generation to generation the habit of cultivating the earth by servile labor had become invincible. The slaves could not be employed conveniently and extensively in other pursuits, which require more intelligence, and which make it necessary to collect them together in dangerously large numbers; and there was, besides, little demand for slave labor except on the plantations.
Following the abolition of compulsory labor in British colonies in the West Indies and the Mauritius, much of the continental sugar-market as those colonies were wont to supply were furnished from the cheaper labor of the foreign slave-plantations.
The necessary tendency of emancipation was to produce one or other of two effects, either a great augmentation in the cost of production, or an abandonment of cultivation. The imperious manners of the slaveholders, who were the great capitalists of the south, were little suited to the direction of free labor.
It was felt, and not without reason, that freemen would revolt and abandon the fields at the most critical periods of the crops rather than submit to the tyrannical driving process which was applied to slaves, and which was regarded as essential by those who had never witnessed anything else. The very existence of slavery had thus produced a condition of things, and generated manners and habits, which made it more profitable to employ slaves than free laborers.
The few sickly manufacturing enterprises which had begun to spring up in the southern States, and to employ free labor, were, for the most part, under the management of northern men, or, at any rate, of men reared in those parts of the south where there were few slaves.
He was a mean man. Everyone was dying to get down south and grow cotton to sell. So old Tunstall separated families right and left. He took two of my aunts and left their husbands up here, and he separated altogether seven husbands and wives.
One woman had twelve children. Pervasive separations. Tears carving lines on faces. Lorenzo remembered his relief at dodging the worst, but he also remembered knowing that it was just a lucky break. No white person was reliable, because money drove their decisions. So Anderson moved to the next question. Did Ivy know if any slaves had been sold here? Now, perhaps, the room grew darker.
For more than a century, white people in the United States had been singling out slave traders as an exception: unscrupulous lower-class outsiders who pried apart paternalist bonds.
Scapegoaters had a noble precedent. Slavery was not about any of these things—not about slave trading, or moving people away from everyone they knew in order to make them make cotton. Therefore, modern America and slavery had nothing to do with each other.
But Ivy spilled out a rush of very different words. Over the hills they came in lines reaching as far as the eye can see. They walked in double lines chained together by twos. To this, day, it still has not. In the span of a single lifetime after the s, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out plantations to a sub-continental empire.
Entrepreneurial enslavers moved more than 1 million enslaved people, by force, from the communities that survivors of the slave trade from Africa had built in the South and in the West to vast territories that were seized—also by force—from their Native American inhabitants. For white enslavers were able to force enslaved African-American migrants to pick cotton faster and more efficiently than free people.
The returns from cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the United States had become the second nation to undergo large-scale industrialization. The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear.
Yet it is the truth. Forced migration had shaped their lives, and also had shaped what they thought about their lives and the wider history in which they were enmeshed. Even as they struggled to stay alive in the midst of disruption, they created ways to talk about this half untold. I sensed that the true narrative had been left out of history—not only American history in general, but even the history of slavery.
I began to look actively for the other half of the story, the one about how slavery constantly grew, changed, and reshaped the modern world. Of how it was both modernizing and modern, and what that meant for the people who lived through its incredible expansion. Once I began to look, I discovered that the traces of the other half were everywhere. The debris of cotton fevers that infected white entrepreneurs and separated man and woman, parent and child, right and left, dusted every set of pre—Civil War letters, newspapers, and court documents.
Most of all, the half not told ran like a layer of iridium left by a dinosaur-killing asteroid through every piece of testimony that ex-slaves, such as Lorenzo Ivy, left on the historical record: thousands of stanzas of an epic of forced separations, violence, and new kinds of labor.
The most difficult challenge was simply the fact that the expansion of slavery in many ways shaped the story of everything in the pre—Civil War United States.
Newspapers dripped with speculations in land and people and the commodities they produced; dramatic changes in how people made money and how much they made; and the dramatic violence that accompanied these practices. The story seemed too big to fit into one framework.
Even Ivy had no idea how to count the chained lines he saw going southwest toward the mountains on the horizon and the vast open spaces beyond. From the s to the s, enslavers moved 1 million people from the old slave states to the new. They went from making no cotton to speak of in to making almost 2 billion pounds of it in Stretching out beyond the slave South, the story encompassed not only Washington politicians and voters across the United States but also Connecticut factories, London banks, opium addicts in China, and consumers in East Africa.
It would have to avoid the old platitudes, such as the easy temptation to tell the story as a collection of topics—here a chapter on slave resistance, there one on women and slavery, and so on. That kind of abstraction cuts the beating heart out of the story. For the half untold was a narrative, a process of movement and change and suspense. Things happened because of what had been done before them—and what people chose to do in response. True, politicians and planters and bankers shaped policies, the movement of people, and the growing and selling of cotton, and even remade the land itself.
Changes that reshaped the entire world began on the auction block where enslaved migrants stood or in the frontier cotton fields where they toiled. Their individual drama was a struggle to survive. Their reward was to endure a brutal transition to new ways of labor that made them reinvent themselves every day.
Enslaved African Americans built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden. One day I found a metaphor that helped. It came from the great African-American author Ralph Ellison. You might know his novel Invisible Man. MacDonnell, Considerations , pp. Robert Wilmot Horton London, , pp. London, , pp. Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery , chs. See also Davis, Slavery and Human Progress , pp.
Before British emancipation the French Revolutionary colonial experience also indicated a high probability of partial or total withdrawal from plantation agriculture unless limited by coercive restraints. For Henry Taylor, at the Colonial Office, the strength of popular demands was such that immediate emancipation without any compensation seemed to be a real possibility by the beginning of Green, British Slave Emancipation , ch. Emmer, ed.
See J. Rice notes that sugar free traders always remained a minority in the movement p. Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery , ch. On the historiography, see Thomas Bender, ed. See, inter alia, ibid. David H. Morgan, Harvesters and Harvesting, — A study of the rural proletariat London, , pp. Klein ed. The volume of migrants from India from until the termination of indentured service in , is calculated from Kingsley Davis, The Population of India and Pakistan Princeton, , pp.
The interhemispheric flow of Asian indentured labor about one million was far smaller than its African counterpart, but the flow of Asians within Asia and to Africa was also largely in the form of indentured service. As Pieter Emmer notes, Production of sugar and coffee in Asia and Africa for export overseas was feasible only in case labor could be subsidized or forced to work below market prices or in case the consumer market was protected.
Pittsburgh, , pp. Lovejoy and Nicholas Rogers, eds. Karl Marx agreed completely with Howick, Merivale and Cairnes that the terms of labor were utterly different in newly developing colonies from those in more densely populated areas. See Karl Marx, Capital , 1, trans.
Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling Moscow, n.
0コメント