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Workers Vanguard No. 942 |
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Slavery and the Origins of American Capitalism
11 September 2009 |
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Part One
We print below, in slightly edited form, a presentation by Jacob Zorn to a Spartacist League educational in New York on 30 March 2008, the first of several classes on black history and the development of the American labor movement.
This is not going to be a history class of everything that happened from 1492 to 1860; the material is too immense. I want to focus on the salient political points for this period, and also to try to set up the next class, on the Civil War. We are historical materialists, and as such we say that black oppression—and we say this often in WV—is not just a bunch of bad ideas but has a material, that is to say, a historical and class, basis. What I want to do in the class is explain the origins of this material basis. In the second class and in subsequent classes, this will be developed further. These are the three things I specifically want to drive home:
1. How slavery in the Americas was central to the development of capitalism, both on an international level and also here in the United States.
2. How elements of the contemporary black question, including the very concept of race, have their roots in the system of slavery.
3. How throughout every step of the development of the United States up through 1860 slavery was integral, from the colonial period, through the American war of independence, to the Constitution, and then culminating in the struggle that led up to the Civil War.
Marx and Primitive Capitalist Accumulation
I want to begin with what Marx calls the primitive accumulation of capital, which was discussed in one of the readings for this class, in the first volume of Capital. Marx has a very powerful quote in there: “In actual history, it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part.” And that’s kind of a summary of what I’m going to be talking about: enslavement, robbery and murder.
I’m not going to go over much of the European background, although it’s worth reviewing our pamphlet, Enlightenment Rationalism and the Origins of Marxism (1998), and also some of the articles we’ve written on the English Civil War, in addition to the Capital reading. Marx talks about the bloody origins of capitalism, and one of the key events was the enclosure acts that threw the peasantry off the land in England and Scotland in order to kind of kick-start capitalism. As Marx describes, in Europe this resulted both in a class that owned the means of production (because land became necessary as a means of production, for wool and other things) and also a class that owned nothing but its labor power. One result, necessary for the British colonization of North America, is that it created a large surplus of people in England who were subject to incredibly harsh punishment for very small crimes and for whom even colonial Virginia looked like a good escape.
Marx also talks about how the conquest of America, both North and South America and the Caribbean, was also key in the development of world capitalism. A key element of this was the dispossession of the indigenous population, a dispossession that was extremely violent and genocidal. If you want a taste of what this was like, you should read the writings of a Spanish priest by the name of Bartolomé de las Casas, which go into a lot of the gratuitous violence: about 95 percent of the pre-Colombian indigenous population was killed, perhaps 90 million people. But this early Spanish colonization, which was largely based on extracting gold and silver, fueled the development not only of Spanish but also of Dutch and English capitalism.
In North America, primitive capitalist accumulation meant not only dispossessing the indigenous population of the land, but also finding somebody to do the work, since in North America the English really didn’t use the Indians as a labor force. A comrade brought to my attention a really good article in WV No. 581 (30 July 1993), “Genocide ‘Made in USA’,” that shows how the destruction of millions of people was key in the building of the American nation and the laying of the basis for the development of North American capitalism, and how it left a birthmark of racism on American capitalism from the get-go. But fundamentally the colonists in North America had the opposite problem from what the ruling class in Britain had: that is, there was an abundance of land but a shortage of people to work on it.
I want to make the point that a lot of the history of the Americas, especially here in the United States, tends to be focused on North America. But in the early years of colonization, the most desired area of the Americas was really the Caribbean, and it was much later that North America was colonized—and not only by the English: there were Spanish outposts (for example, St. Augustine, Florida, is the longest continuously settled city founded by Europeans in the current U.S.); there was French fur trading in Quebec and plantation agriculture in Louisiana; and also obviously the Dutch in New Jersey and New York, as well as the British in Virginia. There was a lot of competition among these different European powers, and we’ll look especially at the rivalry of the Dutch and the English in terms of mercantilism.
Capitalism and Slavery
The readings talk about “chattel slavery.” So what exactly is a chattel slave? It’s not a concept that is used much today. “Chattel” means personal property. It’s related to the word “cattle.” And that is what slaves were: they were legally property that was sold and sometimes killed.
In the abstract, capitalism and slavery are fundamentally counterposed systems. One is based on free labor, and the other, on slave labor. Many of the advocates of capitalism opposed chattel slavery not only because they thought it was morally wrong, but also because they thought it was retrogressive. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith wrote: “From the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves” and “Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.”
Likewise, Alexander Hamilton, about whom we will be talking in a bit, said that slavery “relaxes the sinews of industry, clips the wings of commerce, and introduces misery and indigence in every shape” (quoted in James Oliver Horton, “Alexander Hamilton: Slavery and Race in a Revolutionary Generation,” New-York Journal of American History [Spring 2004]). The piece that comrades read from Eugene Genovese, “The Slave South: An Interpretation,” in The Political Economy of Slavery (1965) shows how, as a system, slavery was not capitalist; the slavocracy in the American South had its own productive system, its own values—or, to use Genovese’s phrase, its own “civilization”—that derived from this non-bourgeois system. Slavery was fundamentally different from capitalism.
However, capitalism did not evolve in the abstract, but in the concrete, and slavery was fundamental to this development. Even though the slave system itself was not capitalist, slavery was central to the development of capitalism, both in the U.S. and internationally. Slavery was also a very profitable “industry”—for lack of a better term—in its own right, and international and American capitalists are indelibly stained with slavery.
Slavery, of course, is not only a precapitalist, but also a prefeudal system of production. There is a brilliant book by Karl Kautsky called the Foundations of Christianity (1908) that, among other things, analyzes the importance of slavery in ancient Rome. Many of the elements of slavery in America are actually discussed by Kautsky in his treatment of plantation or mining slavery in Rome. He distinguishes, for example, between slavery for domestic use and slavery for profit, or commodity slavery. Obviously, commodity production in ancient Rome did not reach the level that it does under capitalism, but he made the point that when slaves make commodities that are then sold for the profit of their masters, the masters increase the exploitation of the slaves, which can only be done through immense oppression and brutality. Kautsky describes in detail a lot of the very brutal nature of Roman slavery, and he traces the decline of Rome to the contradictions in its slave system. For our purposes, one of the key elements, however, that is missing in Kautsky’s piece is race. This is not an accident, because, as we’ll see, Roman slavery was not a racial form of slavery.
With the destruction of the centralized Roman state in West Europe and the development of feudalism, slavery largely died out in medieval Europe. In 1086, for example, about 10 percent of the English population were slaves, but slavery was not central to medieval society. It was still practiced in the Mediterranean and parts of the Arab world, but in West Europe, feudalism was the dominant system, with serfdom the main productive form of labor.
The development of the English colonies in the Americas was concurrent with the development of capitalism in Britain—it was going on at the same time as the English Civil War, and there were various political intrigues over whom the colonies would support; there are cities in the United States named after both King Charles I and Cromwell, for example. Yet, the contradiction is that the rise of capitalism was accompanied with a new rise of slavery. Particularly in the English case, this was accompanied by the creation of the world sugar market. Eating sugar is not based on slavery, but the creation of the sugar market was.
I want to make some points about the development of slavery in the Americas. The first is that there is a prehistory: before the Spanish arrived in America, the Portuguese had begun using slave labor on plantations in their island colonies off Africa, such as Madeira and the Azores. By 1452, the Pope had given the Portuguese the right to trade slaves, and in 1479 the Spanish crown gave Portugal a monopoly over the slave trade. By 1502, there is evidence of black slaves in the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo
—that is to say 130 years before the English planters really began using slaves in the Caribbean and almost 200 years before slavery became entrenched in what would become the United States, in Virginia.
Slavery was crucial in almost every European colony throughout the Americas, and from the 16th century through the mid 19th century between 10 and 12 million Africans were “traded” as slaves. And it was extremely violent: depending on what century you’re looking at, between 10 and 40 percent of the slaves died in transit. Ninety-five percent of these African slaves ended up in either the Caribbean or Latin America. North America received a relatively small fraction of all the African slaves, and this would have important ramifications on how slavery developed here.
Although the first slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619, for most of the 17th century the dominant labor system in Virginia was indentured servitude, which was a really nasty and brutal system. If it weren’t for the slave system that came after, we would probably label indentured servitude one of the most brutal systems known. Indentured servants agreed to work for a period of years, usually between five and seven, in exchange for transportation to America. They might be promised land at the end of their terms.
But to begin with, many indentured servants did not live to the end of their terms of service. While they were servants, they were subjected to extremely harsh discipline and punishment. They could be whipped, they could be beaten, they could be sold for the duration of their terms of service. They worked a lot harder than English peasants worked, and a lot of what we think of as unique to slavery was also present in various ways in indentured servitude. Many servants ran away.
By the mid-to-late 1600s, from the point of view of the planters, there developed several problems with indentured servitude. Servants were living longer. (Incidentally, one of the reasons that they began to live longer is that they began to drink more alcohol and not drink polluted water.) This meant that there began to develop a layer of unruly and dissatisfied ex-indentured servants, making Virginia more and more unstable. The danger of this was highlighted in 1676 with Bacon’s Rebellion, when poor whites, mostly former indentured servants, and blacks united against the colonial government—in this case, to demand that the colonial government, among other things, drive out the Indians. But at the same time, fewer and fewer Europeans were willing to come to America as servants, partly because England was developing economically and partly because news got around England of what servitude was like, and it did not seem so attractive as it might have before.
So the fact that servants were living longer at the end of the 17th century made slavery (which was for life) more attractive, from the point of view of the planters, than servitude (which was usually for less than a decade). The planters in Virginia began to import slaves in larger and larger numbers. By the first decade of the 18th century, Virginia had been transformed from a society in which slaves were present into a society in which slavery was the central productive relationship, a slave society. This was not the only slave society in the Americas, but it was quite different from the slave societies in the Caribbean or Brazil.
When I was preparing this class, comrade Foster raised the interesting question: why did it take a revolution—the Civil War—to get rid of slavery in the United States, whereas in many other countries (not all of them, Haiti also obviously had a revolution) it did not take a revolution to get rid of slavery. There are various reasons, but one is that in the American South there were more slaveowners, many owning relatively few slaves, so that slavery was much more entrenched in colonial society and in later U.S. society. But importantly, from the point of view of the planters, slavery not only offered a source of labor, but also it offered a source of social stability, because with slavery came what veteran American Trotskyist Richard S. Fraser calls the concept of race.
The Race Concept
I’m not going to talk a lot about it because comrades are familiar, but there is no scientific basis for this concept of race. At the same time, various academics like to talk about race being “socially constructed.” But even though race is not scientifically real, it is very, very real. It affects almost every aspect of one’s life in this country, as we are reminded when we look at the newspaper every day. Marx, dealing with religion, wrote in The German Ideology (1846) that religion has no history—that is to say, no history independent of the social conditions that created it. So as Marxists, we understand that race is not just a bad idea, but one that developed out of a social system of production, a system of social relations, chattel slavery. This is explained very well in Fraser’s “The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution” [in Prometheus Research Series No. 3, August 1990, “In Memoriam: Richard S. Fraser”]. And for comrades who are interested in a more in-depth look at it, there is also a very good book on the creation of the idea of race in America by Winthrop Jordan, called White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968), that goes back to the 16th century.
Chattel slavery is an inherently inhuman system. It involves degrading an entire group of people, putting them by definition outside the realm of both legal and moral protection. Chattel slaves are not legally human. As John Locke said in Two Treatises of Government, in 1690, slaves “are by the Right of Nature subjected to the Absolute Dominion and Arbitrary Power of their masters. These Men cannot in that state be considered as any part of Civil Society….” This would later be paraphrased in the Dred Scott decision that the black man had no rights that the white man was bound to respect. The concept of race served as a justification for slavery, conflating class status—slavery—with physical features: skin color. While there were some free blacks, even in the South, being black became equated with being a slave, that is, outside of the norms of human society. It’s also useful to keep in mind that, of course, Africans at the time of slavery were not all of the same “race,” either: there were very different societies in Africa, and if we could borrow a term, we could talk about “how Africans became black.” Frederick Douglass has an important statement from when slavery was still in existence:
“We are then a persecuted people, not because we are colored, but simply because that color has for a series of years been coupled in the public mind with the degradation of slavery and servitude.”
—“Prejudice Against Color” (1850), in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 2,
ed. Philip S. Foner (1950)
This is the beginning of the material basis for the creation of a race-color caste in North America. And it’s not an accident that laws banning interracial sex and marriage were passed in Virginia and Maryland at the same time that slavery became consolidated in the late 1600s and early 1700s.
The idea of race was defended using the so-called “Curse of Ham” from the Bible, which is the idea that blackness was a curse from God, going back to Noah. And there was in fact slavery in biblical times, and you can find lots of passages in the Bible about slavery, and these were used to justify American slavery. I don’t want to defend the honor of the Old Testament, but nowhere is racial slavery mentioned in the Bible because it did not exist. Comrade Don pointed out a very interesting article by George Breitman that was published in the Spring 1954 issue of Fourth International, called “When Anti-Negro Prejudice Began,” that looks at the development of racism. And he shows that in the ancient world, there was no one group of people that was by definition enslaved, nor was slavery confined to one particular group. This idea of race did not make sense—it didn’t exist. So, racial slavery did not exist.
I also want to make an aside that race in the U.S. is different than race in other places, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, which had different types of slavery. There’s a myth in Brazil called “racial democracy,” which is that there’s really no such thing as race in Brazil; everybody’s Brazilian. This is obviously untrue, but it does reflect the fact that there was a different expression of slavery there. A lot of the difference has to do with how slavery developed in North America and the nature of British mercantilism. At the time the Virginian planters began to use slaves, the Dutch had already taken over the slave trade from the Portuguese, and because of Dutch-English rivalries, in 1651 Navigation Acts were passed, making it illegal for British colonists to buy products from other countries. Slaves were included as “products,” obviously. This had an important ramification on the importation of slaves. In fact, many of the early slaves in Virginia were not actually from Africa, but from Barbados. It’s also important to keep in mind that from the British perspective, the center of the slave trade was not in North America but in the Caribbean.
Therefore, the slave population in North America became a lot more stable, tended to live a lot longer and have more children. The details, for example, of slavery in Jamaica are horrid. The average slave tended to die within seven years of arriving in Jamaica. Therefore, although the slave trade provided only half a million African slaves to North America, by the time of the Civil War, the slave population in the United States had grown to four million people. A lot of this has to do with the demographics. In the British Caribbean, many plantations were left in the hands of overseers, while their absentee owners were content to stay in Britain. Eric Williams talks about this in his book, Capitalism and Slavery (1944). In North America, the planters became more Americanized, and they tended to stay in North America. For example, the Lee family of Virginia arrived around 1639; the Washingtons arrived around the same time.
In the Caribbean, the plantations were much larger, and slaveowners there had more slaves than in North America. One result of this is that African culture was destroyed through the experience of slavery to a much larger degree in North America than in the Caribbean or Brazil. As Fraser put it in “The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution,” in the United States “the Negro people are among the oldest of all the immigrant groups. They are essentially American.” And this is also shown in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in which Douglass pointedly calls himself An American Slave in the title. He illustrates that slaves in the U.S. spoke English, were largely Christian (he’s very powerful on the role of Christianity in supporting slavery), and were an organic part of American society. This is different than in Haiti, for example, where at the time of the Haitian Revolution, two-thirds of the black population were born in Africa. Or in Cuba. There’s a book by Miguel Barnet, The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (1966), based on interviews with a former slave who was born 50 years after Douglass, Esteban Montejo, that talks about how even in the late 19th century there were lots of aspects of African culture that survived in Cuba.
So that’s an important part of understanding the integral and unique nature of slavery in the U.S., which has programmatic implications today: there’s no separate black nation, and our program is one of revolutionary integrationism.
Slavery and the Development of Capitalism
One of the strengths of the Williams book is that he shows how the development of British industrial capitalism was to a large degree based upon slavery. The bourgeoisie in Liverpool, Manchester and the City of London became rich through the slave trade, later through sugar trading, and then with textile production that used slave-produced cotton. Of course slavery was not what provided the labor in England in the development of English capitalism or the industrial revolution. But after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and then slavery itself in the British Caribbean in the 1830s, British capitalism still depended on slavery because the textile mills of Manchester, for example, needed cotton. In 1860, about 75 percent of all British cotton came from the American South. This is part of the reason, as Marx wrote at the time, that a section of the British bourgeoisie supported the South during the American Civil War.
Also, throughout the late 18th century, there was slavery in much of the North (comrades might remember the very good “Slavery in New York” exhibit at the New York Historical Society), even though it was not the central method of production. By the early 19th century, slavery as a social relationship had mostly disappeared from the North (the last Northern state to free its slaves was New Jersey, in 1846). But the main connection between the nascent bourgeoisie and slavery was not that they owned slaves.
There is a very interesting book called Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (2005), written by three reporters for the Hartford Courant. It shows how the Northern bourgeoisie was connected to the slave system by a million threads: they bought molasses, which was made with slave labor, and sold rum as part of the Triangle Trade; they lent money to Southern planters; and most of the cotton that was sold to Britain was shipped through Northern ports, including here in New York City. They financed the slave trade, and even after it became illegal, there were still ships leaving from New York that were involved in slave trading. And they sold manufactured goods to the South. This is the background to the relationship between Northern capitalism and slavery. Capitalism is very different from slavery, but at the same time they are very historically connected.
Part Two
We print below, in slightly edited form, Part Two of a presentation by Jacob Zorn to a Spartacist League educational in New York on 30 March 2008. Part One of this talk, published in WV No. 942 (11 September), focused on the centrality of black chattel slavery to the early development of capitalism.
I want to talk about the American Revolution, which we don’t write about all that much. I think there are two essential pitfalls in dealing with the American Revolution. One was shown most fully by Earl Browder, the head of the Communist Party (CP) during its popular-front phase in the mid 1930s. In What Is Communism?—the same book in which he tried to show that “Communism is the Americanism of the twentieth century”—Browder argued that the American Revolution of 1776 was essentially the model of the popular front. (There’s a novel by Howard Fast called Citizen Tom Paine, written during World War II, where he also makes this argument, that Tom Paine came up with the idea of a popular front against British colonialism.) The second pitfall is to pretend that the American Revolution isn’t really important at all.
There’s a WV article that was part of the readings, called “Why We Don’t Celebrate July 4” [WV No. 116, 2 July 1976], which is very useful. But just because we don’t celebrate the Fourth of July doesn’t mean that we think the revolution was unimportant. The revolution was, so far as it went, both important and progressive—the main thing is that it didn’t go all that far. The American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution in the sense that it laid the basis for the development of American capitalism, but keep in mind that Britain in 1776 was not a feudal society—the English Civil War had happened more than 100 years earlier. Socially, the revolution was an alliance between the planter elites of the Southern colonies, which obviously were based on slavery, and the merchants of the Northern colonies because both of them wanted to break away from the constraints of British mercantilism. Thus, the revolution spurred not only the development of American capitalism, but also the development of the slave system in the South. The revolution itself cemented the alliance between capitalism and slavery, an alliance that would later—to borrow a phrase from the Communist Manifesto—have to be burst asunder. But one of the interesting points about the American Revolution is that this relationship was almost not burst asunder. The revolution did not solve the question of which of these two systems would dominate; and in that sense, the Civil War really was the Second American Revolution. This is another part of the answer to comrade Foster’s question: Why did there need to be a Civil War? I think the American Revolution kind of set it up, in that sense.
I want to talk about the political significance of the revolution, however. Many of the ideals of the revolution, which drew upon the Parliamentary side of the English Civil War, are, in and of themselves, important. The right to bear arms, the separation of church and state, representative democracy, republicanism and colonial independence are good things. It’s worth reading Common Sense by Thomas Paine. Some of these ideas were quite radical for the time—and I would just remind comrades that in Britain there is still both a crown and an established church. Plus, the founding fathers were by and large secular. I don’t think that if George Washington had said that God had told him to fight England that people would have taken him seriously. That’s another point that our article on the Fourth of July makes—that even by bourgeois standards, the leaders of the American Revolution stand several heads and shoulders above the current leaders.
The Nature of the American Revolution
The American Revolution, however, was not a social revolution, unlike either the French or the Haitian revolutions that immediately followed it. The question of the revolution was not whether the goal of the colonies was to be capitalist, or to make money, but for whom the colonies would be making money. It is important to keep in mind that of all the British colonies in America, the West Indies—the so-called “sugar colonies”—were much more important than the mainland North American colonies. The Northern colonies, as Eric Williams describes, essentially existed to provide food and other supplies to the Caribbean colonies. They preferred importing food, even at very high prices, from North America to wasting land that could otherwise be used for sugar. And in an earlier book, The Negro in the Caribbean (1942), Williams described how even then, most of the fish eaten in the Caribbean was imported from elsewhere, even though obviously the Caribbean is made up of islands. And the West Indian planters were a powerful section of the British ruling class, including many representatives in Parliament. So Parliament was not going to do anything that would harm the interests of these planters.
Under British mercantilism, there were basically two ways that the North American colonies were important to Britain. Under the Navigation Act of 1651, and later the Molasses Act of 1733, they were supposed to trade only with other British colonies. For the North, these acts were largely dead letters; they traded with whomever they wanted to trade. Northern merchants regularly bought molasses from French colonies, which tended to be more productive and sold cheaper, and they sold rum and other products—made directly or indirectly from slave labor—to non-British colonies. The planters in the South were expected to sell tobacco only to the British, but they found ways to get around this. The other important role of the North American colonies was to pay taxes. And tobacco was taxed at this time, in much of the 18th century, not by its value (i.e., by the price), but by how much was actually grown, so that as the planters’ profits declined, their taxes often still increased. So, in much of the 18th century, even though the sugar colonies were much more profitable, they paid much less in taxes than did Virginia. And Virginia, in fact, paid more taxes to the royal treasury than any other colony. Nonetheless, for most of this period, the British government had a policy that was called salutary—or benign—neglect, allowing the colonies to ignore much of the mercantile laws while the colonies ran themselves.
This all changed at the end of the Seven Years (or the French and Indian) War, in 1763, which, in America at least, was fought in part over control of the Caribbean and French Canada. It was very complicated, and in some ways perhaps the first world war, drawing in every European power. But two trends merged at the end of this war. Britain ended the war with immense holdings in North America, with a large empire, and the newly crowned George III wanted to reassert a vigorous role for the British Crown. But the British were broke after the war and looked to America as a way of paying for this. As the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, the British “felt that the colonies were ungrateful children, ready to profit from the security our arms had gained for them, but unwilling to pay the price.”
So Parliament and George III, in a rather ham-handed way, passed a series of laws regarding the colonies (if you remember ninth grade, you probably went through them). But the bottom line is that these laws convinced both the American planters in the South and the merchants in the North that as long as they continued to remain a part of the British system, they would not be able to develop in the way that they wanted. And slavery was central to all of this, both because the main product that was being sent from Virginia—tobacco—was made with slave labor, but also because sugar and other things that were being traded in the North were an integral part of the Triangle Trade between Europe, the American colonies and Africa.
Slavery and the American Revolution
There is a great article that deals with the American Revolution in WV No. 764, called “The Haitian Revolution and the American Slavocracy.” Many comrades don’t remember it because it was published on September 14, 2001, but it explains how the American Revolution did not involve a social revolutionary component that was equivalent, for example, to the sans-culottes in France. It did not fundamentally change the class structure of the United States. But in order to mobilize the mass of the white populace—small farmers, artisans, shopkeepers—to risk their lives and livelihoods against Britain, the wealthy colonial elites had to tell them that all men, having been created equal, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
One of the key ways they were able to do this was through the institution of slavery, and the American rulers could give political rights to whites because the central labor force in the American South was slaves, who were excluded from all this. This is one of the reasons that there was no regime of plebeian terror in the American Revolution as there was in France; there was no Robespierre or, as in the English Civil War, Cromwell. Famously, in writing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, himself a slaveholder (he owned about 200 slaves), had put in some mild anti-slavery language, blaming George III for supporting the slave trade. This was taken out at the insistence of the slaveholders. That is to say, slavery couldn’t be touched.
From the revolution until the Constitution was adopted, the law of the land was what is called the Articles of Confederation. They allowed each state to regulate its own affairs, including whether to have slavery or not—this is the concept which later is called “states’ rights.” Earl Browder, in the same piece I referenced earlier, wrote that the Constitution was a “counter-revolution engineered by Alexander Hamilton.” (Given that this was about the same time that Browder was defending the Stalinist Moscow Trials in the USSR, his idea of a political counterrevolution might be somewhat suspect.) The CP fundamentally preferred the side of Jefferson—their school here in New York City, for example, was called the Jefferson School of Social Science. Jefferson liked to talk of individual liberties, and in some ways he is one of the more eloquent spokesmen for the American Revolution. But the system that was set up was really a cover, to a large degree, for slavery. Jefferson’s traditional enemy is considered to be Alexander Hamilton, and there are a lot of bad things about Alexander Hamilton, I suppose—he was willing to sacrifice political liberty upon the altar of bourgeois development, and he feared the people having too much power. But one of the key things was that he opposed slavery. If any of the founding fathers were vindicated by the Civil War, I think it was really Alexander Hamilton, who was in favor of a strong central government to develop capitalism, was opposed to slavery, and who also proposed arming blacks in the American Revolution, something that, again, the slaveholders opposed. Part of this is probably his own background, because he came from the British Caribbean and was intimately familiar with slavery.
Although the Constitution did represent a move away from the more egalitarian goals, or at least the rhetoric, of the revolution, it was carried out largely by the same men who made the revolution—as our piece in 1976 put it, they died of old age. It was not really a political counterrevolution in the same way that you can talk about Thermidor in the French Revolution, because there was not really a Robespierre in the American Revolution. The closest you would have, I guess, would be Daniel Shays, who in late 1786 in western Massachusetts rebelled against high taxes. It was fundamentally a different type of revolution.
The Constitution of 1787 was pushed by Alexander Hamilton in order to create a centralized government that would have the power to help create a unified, capitalist country. It was not very democratic, even if we exclude the question of slavery. In this context, I recommend section three in the July 2003 amici curiae (friends of the court) brief by the Partisan Defense Committee on Jose Padilla, which is called, “It Took a Civil War to Establish the Rights and Privileges of United States Citizenship.” It makes the point that federalism—the so-called separation of powers, including between the states and the national government—really allowed slavery to exist until the Civil War. Therefore, the Constitution of 1787 codified the coexistence of two battling social systems, with the South given extra power.
I’m sure comrades have listened to, or at least read, Barack Obama’s recent “A More Perfect Union” speech, where he argues that:
“The answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution—a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.”
Well, no, the Constitution actually made resolving this question short of a Civil War largely impossible. Also—it’s interesting—when he lists all the bad things about the Constitution, he leaves out the most important part, which is the three-fifths compromise, which not only said that blacks are 60 percent human beings, but essentially gave the slave South control of the federal government. As Frederick Douglass put it in an article titled “The Constitution and Slavery” (1849): “Under it, the slave system has enjoyed a large and domineering representation in Congress, which has given laws to the whole Union in regard to slavery, ever since the formation of the government.” Out of the three-fifths clause we also have the amazing contraption of the electoral college, which basically was designed to, and did, give the South the presidency, by giving more power to states that owned slaves. Some nine out of the first 15 presidents were Southerners, most from Virginia. So slavery was not, as Obama put it—and it’s not just Obama, it’s a common liberal myth—a “stain” on early American politics and society, but an essential thread woven throughout the development of American capitalism. It’s a fundamental aspect, not extraneous or peripheral.
The Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791 in order to get the states to support the adoption of the Constitution, and this is what the Padilla brief calls the “Second Constitution.” And these recognized important rights, but they still did not define any sense of national citizenship, something that would not come until the Civil War. In fact, one of the reasons that the framers didn’t put these rights in the original Constitution is that they didn’t want to start off saying that “all men are equal” again. That is to say, they didn’t want to have anything that could be seen as challenging slavery. Of course, a point that is made in the Padilla brief and that we have often made since the “war on terror” began is that rights are not just granted by a piece of paper but also reflect what type of social struggle is going on in society.
Part Three
We print below, in slightly edited form, the third and final part of a presentation by Jacob Zorn to a Spartacist League educational in New York on 30 March 2008. The first two parts were published in WV Nos. 942 and 943 (11 September and 25 September).
One way of contrasting the American Revolution to the French Revolution is to look at the case of Tom Paine. In the American Revolution, he was the far-left wing. But when he went to France, while he supported the French Revolution, he ended up essentially on the right wing of the revolution. It wasn’t his ideas that changed so much as the context. And when the Haitian Revolution erupted in 1791, even the elements of the American Revolution that supported the French Revolution, such as Jefferson, hated the Haitian Revolution and wanted to drown it in blood, because they saw in it a spectre that would threaten slavery in the South. Interestingly, Hamilton was one of the more open to recognizing Haiti as an independent country, partly because he hated France. Also, it’s interesting that the leaders of the American Revolution who were the most anti-slavery—Alexander Hamilton and Tom Paine—were not really American in the traditional sense. Tom Paine had just come over from Britain, and Hamilton was from the West Indies.
I do not want to suggest that the American Revolution was nothing more than a pro-slavery rebellion. As the article on Haiti points out, “To be sure, some radical elements in the American Revolution, including Thomas Paine, denounced slavery as a moral evil and called for its abolition. And Jefferson himself was well aware—and was constantly reminded by his liberal and radical English and French friends—that black chattel slavery was blatantly incompatible with the democratic principles he so eloquently proclaimed” (WV No. 764, 14 September 2001).
The common way liberals and idealists deal with this problem, especially with Jefferson, is to say that the ideals of Jefferson transcended the reality of Jefferson (and other founders)—that this was their own personal weakness. But in reality, whatever his personal weaknesses, Jefferson’s beliefs reflected the interests of his class, which was the slavocracy, and it was social struggle that expanded bourgeois-democratic rights to black people, including through the Civil War, and not a closer reading of the Declaration of Independence.
Incidentally, abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison rejected the entire Constitution—they called it a “covenant with death”—because it was pro-slavery, but in some ways they drew the wrong conclusion. That is to say, they avoided political struggle in favor of “moral suasion.” But their analysis of the Constitution as pro-slavery was correct. When Frederick Douglass broke with Garrison, he also changed his views of the Constitution.
The Early U.S. and Slavery
To many, the pro-slavery nature of the Constitution at the time may have appeared justified because many people thought that slavery would die a slow but natural death: the international slave trade was going to be abolished, the fertility of the soil in tobacco country was declining, and tobacco prices were in decline. But two things gave the Southern slavocracy a renewed lease on life, and Jefferson was at least indirectly involved in both. One was the invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s that made slave-produced cotton profitable. Jefferson as secretary of state approved the patent by Eli Whitney, and he also bought one of the earliest models. The second was the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, in which Jefferson as president basically illegally doubled the size of the United States. There is a whole debate in the history books over whether Napoleon or Jefferson was the one most responsible for the Louisiana Purchase. But in reality I think it was Toussaint L’Ouverture—by having defeated the French in Haiti, he made it so that Napoleon wanted to wash his hands of any colonies in America as quickly as possible.
Taken together, these developments increased the power of the Southern slavocracy and propelled them into conflict with the North. As we all know, this conflict between the capitalist North and the slave South eventually led to the Civil War, the second bourgeois revolution in the United States. However, the Northern capitalists were not engaged in one unceasing revolutionary struggle. Key elements of the Northern bourgeoisie were all too eager to cohabit with slavery because it was profitable. However, by the mid 19th century, the development of capitalism as a whole increasingly came into conflict with the domination of the Southern system in national politics. Marx in 1861 sarcastically described what he called the Northern bourgeoisie’s “long hesitations, and an exhibition of forbearance unknown in the annals of European history,” in describing their willingness to compromise with the South.
And in fact, Marx was one of the greatest observers of the class dynamics of American politics. Here’s a rather long quote from the same article by Marx:
“The progressive abuse of the Union by the slave power, working through its alliance with the Northern Democratic party, is, so to say, the general formula of the United States history since the beginning of this century. The successive compromise measures mark the successive degrees of the encroachment by which the Union became more and more transformed into the slave of the slave-owner. Each of these compromises denotes a new encroachment of the South, a new concession of the North. At the same time none of the successive victories of the South was carried but after a hot contest with an antagonistic force in the North, appearing under different party names with different watchwords and under different colors. If the positive and final result of each single contest told in favor of the South, the attentive observer of history could not but see that every new advance of the slave power was a step forward to its ultimate defeat. Even at the times of the Missouri Compromise the contending forces were so evenly balanced that Jefferson, as we see from his memoirs, apprehended the Union to be in danger of splitting on that deadly antagonism. The encroachments of the slaveholding power reached their maximum point, when, by the Kansas-Nebraska bill, for the first time in the history of the United States, as Mr. [Stephen] Douglas himself confessed, every legal barrier to the diffusion of Slavery within the United States territories was broken down, when, afterward, a Northern candidate bought his Presidential nomination by pledging the Union to conquer or purchase in Cuba a new field of dominion for the slaveholder; when, later on, by the Dred Scott decision, diffusion of Slavery by the Federal power was proclaimed as the law of the American Constitution, and lastly, when the African slave-trade was de facto reopened on a larger scale than during the times of its legal existence. But, concurrently with this climax of Southern encroachments, carried by the connivance of the Northern Democratic party, there were unmistakable signs of Northern antagonistic agencies having gathered such strength as must soon turn the balance of power.”
—“The American Question in England” (1861)
So the point is that there was what New York Senator William Henry Seward called an “irrepressible conflict” between slavery and freedom. I’m going to give somewhat short shrift to the 1850s, not because it’s an unimportant period, but because it’s so important that comrades are probably more familiar with it than with the earlier stuff. I also think that the first volume of James McPherson’s Ordeal by Fire (1982) covers this ground very well. But I want to draw comrades’ attention to several factors. One is the role of the political parties, and the second is the role of expansion.
As Marx illustrates, the Democratic Party—including in the North—was a pro-slavery party. The contemporary political system that we have today is relatively new. For much of the antebellum period, there were two parties, the Whigs and the Democrats. The Democratic Party, formed by Jefferson in 1792 and reformed by President Andrew Jackson in the 1830s, was a populist party. They were in favor of what is often called “Jacksonian Democracy,” which goes down in various history books as the expansion of democracy in the United States. They were for the rule of the “little man”; they were against banks and entrenched economic power. They opposed the creation of a national bank. They were a white man’s party, viciously anti-Indian—Jackson carried out one of the brutal series of attacks that pushed the Indians out of the Southeast and further west—and also viciously pro-slavery and anti-black. This was also the time of increasing Irish immigration, and the Democratic Party, especially in big Northern cities like here in New York, based themselves on immigration.
In the South, the Democrats were an openly pro-slavery party. Although he had his differences with Jackson, one key Democratic leader was John C. Calhoun, who was in many ways the intellectual grandfather of the Confederacy. He developed the idea—“nullification”—that a state could refuse to abide by the federal government if it disagreed. He also believed, unlike Jefferson, that slavery was not only necessary, but was positively good. And this is really the history of the Democratic Party. There is a new book that is very interesting, by Bruce Bartlett, who writes for the Wall Street Journal, called Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past (2008). He is pro-Republican and so has an ax to grind, but it goes through the history of the Democratic Party on the question of slavery and then later on Reconstruction, up through the Dixiecrats.
The other political party was called the Whigs. They opposed what they saw as increased presidential power. They wanted the government to intervene into the economy to help spur capitalist development, such as through a national bank, protective tariffs to develop industry, and government spending on what were called “internal improvements,” or infrastructure. Both these parties had supporters in the North and the South, but as slavery became a more important issue, they were increasingly torn apart.
The other party that developed, as the slave question basically corroded the Whigs in the 1850s, was the Republican Party. The Republicans were not an abolitionist party, but they were perhaps the most radical mainstream party that the country has ever seen. They were dedicated not to eliminating slavery, but to rolling back the power of the slave South—the so-called Slave Power. There is a good book by Eric Foner that sums up the goal of the early Republicans, called Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1970). The Republican Party became the party of the American bourgeoisie in its struggle against the slavocracy—it was a class-based party, something that we are told doesn’t exist in the United States.
And then there were the abolitionists, who were seen as a radical fringe, but who played a very important role in pushing the question of slavery forward. I said that there is really no radical Cromwell or Robespierre figure in the American Revolution, but it’s the abolitionists who are the real radical bourgeois revolutionaries in the history of the United States. It is to them that we look, not Thomas Jefferson.
Why did the two systems keep butting heads? It was not about the morality of slavery or about broader philosophical issues. It was because both slavery and capitalism had built-in tendencies to expand, and the expansion of one came at the expense of the other. So, as Marx wrote, one had to vanquish the other. There are three reasons why the Southern slavocracy needed to expand:
1. Exhausted soil. Just as in Roman times, the slavery system used up the soil rapidly. The emphasis was on getting the most crops possible now, and not on preserving the soil. In the North, they were able to invest capital in order to fertilize farm land, but in the South they didn’t do that. So there was an endless need for more land. According to Eugene Genovese’s The Political Economy of Slavery (1967), by 1858 some 40 percent of the South’s cotton land was already exhausted.
2. Political. The three-fifths compromise was designed to give the South more power than its population warranted, but it still could not allow the North to obtain more free states. Every free state needed to be offset by a slave state, to prevent the North from getting the upper hand.
3. Domestic slave trade. Less important, but still real, was that the slaveholders in the older states, like Virginia and Maryland, raised money by selling slaves to the Lower South, so they had an interest in keeping slavery expanding.
So the whole politics of the South was one of expanding slavery, and they saw any interference with the growth and expansion of slavery as a dagger aimed at the heart of the entire slave system.
But the free North also needed to expand. The key reason was, as we all know, that capitalism has to have expanding markets as its productivity increases. Capitalism depends on growing markets, and although a fair number of capitalists made a profit on selling to the South, slaves were not very big consumers, and there was a limit to the planters’ demand for goods. So from the point of view of the North, the South was really a stagnant economy, compared to the West, which the Northeastern and Northern capitalists saw as a vast potential market. They were increasingly selling to the West, but this depended on the expansion of free labor and not slavery to the West.
The second reason was political. The North did not want to be dominated by the South more than it already was, so it needed to offset the growth of slave states. Both the North and the South had agreed in theory that expansion was good. This was the period of so-called “Manifest Destiny”—the idea that God had uniquely blessed the United States with the job of civilizing the American continent. This idea was popular in the North and in the South, but the devil was in the details, and the question was what to do about the land that became part of the United States.
The first real crisis came with the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Missouri was the second state admitted from the Louisiana Purchase, and essentially what was agreed on in 1820 was the temporary measure of drawing a line, anything north of which would become free, and anything south of which would become slave. But the problem was broached again every several years.
A key thing, to which I’m going to give a lot less attention than it deserves, was Texas. In the 1830s, slaveholders had moved to Texas, and they basically engineered a split from Mexico. The South supported this because they wanted Texas to join the country as a slave state. The so-called Texas Revolution of 1835-36 was basically a rebellion against Mexico in order to protect slavery. The North did not want Texas to join as a slave state or, God forbid, several slave states.
So, a lot of the roots of the immediate struggle over slavery in the 1840s and ’50s go back to how to deal with the question of Texas. Mexico, for obvious reasons, did not want its former territory to be annexed by the United States, and when in 1845 the Southern states essentially were able to annex Texas, that act provoked a war with Mexico. And so, in 1846 the United States invaded Mexico and ended up occupying Mexico City and important cities like Veracruz and Monterrey. As a result of the 1846-48 war, the U.S. took over half of Mexico’s territory, and the acquisition of these new territories gave rise to disputes between the North and South that helped lead to the Civil War (see “Mexican-American War: Prelude to American Civil War,” WV Nos. 933 and 934, 27 March and 10 April).
The situation created compromise after compromise. Many Northerners preferred to compromise with the South, and so there were a series of compromises, but the crisis over Texas and the invasion of Mexico basically made continued compromises impossible. Northerners, including Democrats, had been less willing to support the invasion of Mexico because it was seen as a war to expand slavery. Not just the abolitionists—although the abolitionists were the most fervent—but many people in the North were against the invasion of Mexico because they thought it was a pro-slavery conspiracy, which to a large degree it was.
The U.S. obviously won the war against Mexico, which had important effects on the development of both U.S. and Mexican capitalism. Yet the immediate result of the victory was to bring the United States even closer to civil war. The first sign of this was the Wilmot Proviso, in which Northern states refused to finance the war against Mexico so long as it was seen as increasing the number of slave states. The Wilmot Proviso declared that the war would only be funded if the states that were gained from it did not become slave. This cut across party lines—Wilmot was a Democrat from Pennsylvania—and it heralded the realignment of American politics along sectional lines.
Soon after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which finalized the taking over of half of Mexico, there was the Compromise of 1850, and by this time the split of the country was already posed; it was already talked about. And in fact Calhoun, who would die shortly afterward, all but advocated a division of the country, that is, the secession of the South. The Compromise of 1850 allowed California to become a free state, but it put off deciding on the rest of the former Mexican territories, and this was seen as allowing the possibility of slavery there. More grotesquely, it also created the Fugitive Slave Act, which made Northern states complicit in “returning” slaves who had run away from the South to the North. When they attempted to capture Anthony Burns, a runaway slave, in Boston and provoked angry mass protests, it really posed the question of the relationship between the North and the South. Frederick Douglass spelled this out when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed:
“By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. By that act, Mason and Dixon’s line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women and children, as slaves, remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States. The power is co-extensive with the star-spangled banner, and American Christianity.”
—“The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” (1852)
From the 1850 Compromise on—there were still more compromises—the Southern states were increasingly pushing the envelope. There was the Dred Scott decision, where the Supreme Court ruled, as we mention in our Mumia articles, that slavery was not only the law of the land in the South, but was the law of the land anyplace. It ruled that slave property must be protected, including in free states and that, in its famous statement, blacks had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” This really gave rise to what would be a final showdown between the capitalist system in the North and the slavocracy in the South.
I want to make the point, however, that it was not something that even at the time was obvious, or that even many of the bourgeoisie accepted. When John Brown carried out his raid in 1859, he was roundly denounced by many, including by Abraham Lincoln. But it posed the question: How was the United States going to be ruled? Was it going to develop as a capitalist country or as a slave society? This is something that the Civil War, which is the subject of the next class, would decide, in what we call the Second American Revolution.
http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/944/slavery.html
Slavery as Capitalism The Shape of American SlaveryThe Shape of American SlaveryThe slave system in America was unique in human history. Sometimes slaves were treated cruelly; at other times with kindness. They were more often used as a sign of affluence, a way of displaying one's wealth and of enjoying luxury, rather than as the means for the systematic accumulation of wealth. Previously, slavery had existed in hierarchical societies in which the slave was at the bottom of a social ladder, the most inferior in a society of unequals. While each society normally preferred to choose its slaves from alien people, it did not limit its selection exclusively to the members of any one race. Slave inferiority did not lead necessarily to racial inferiority. In contrast to this, slavery in America was set apart by three characteristics: capitalism, individualism, and racism. Capitalism increased the degree of dehumanization and depersonalization implicit in the institution of slavery. While it had been normal in other forms of slavery for the slave to be legally defined as a thing, a piece of property, in America he also became a form of capital. Here his life was regimented to fill the needs of a highly organized productive system sensitively attuned to the driving forces of competitive free enterprise. American masters were probably no more cruel and no more sadistic than others, and, in fact, the spread of humanitarianism in the modern world may have made the opposite true. Nevertheless, their capitalistic mentality firmly fixed their eyes on minimizing expenses and maximizing profits. Besides being a piece of property, the American slave was transformed into part of the plantation machine, a part of the ever-growing investment in the master' mushrooming wealth. The development of slavery in America resulted from the working of economic forces and not from climatic or geographic conditions. When the first twenty Africans reached Virginia in 1619, the colony was comprised of small plantations dependent on free white labor. While some historians believe that these immigrants were held in slavery from the beginning, most think they were given the status of indentured servants. English law contained no such category as slavery, and the institution did not receive legal justification in the colony until early in the 1660s. Although the fact of slavery had undoubtedly preceded its legal definition, there was a period of forty years within which the Africans had some room for personal freedom and individual opportunity. Rumors of deplorable working conditions and of indefinite servitude were reaching England and discouraging the flow of free white labor. To counter this, a series of acts were passed which legally established the rights of white labor, but they did nothing to improve the status of the African. In fact, their passage pushed them relentlessly towards the status of slave. The price of tobacco declined sharply in the 1660s and drove the small white farmer to the wall. Only those with enough capital to engage in large-scale operations could continue to make a profit. In order to fill the need for the huge labor supply required large-scale agriculture, the colonial legislature passed laws giving legal justification to slavery. At the same time, Charles II granted a royal charter establishing a company to transport African slaves across the ocean and thereby increasing the supply of slaves available to the colonial planter. Until this time, the number of Africans in the colony had been very small, but thereafter their numbers grew rapidly. The African slaves provided the large, dependable, and permanent supply of labor which these plantations required. The small white planter and the free white laborer found the road to economic success had become much more difficult. To be a successful planter meant that he had to begin with substantial capital investments. Capitalist agriculture substantially altered the social structure of the colony. On one hand, it created a small class of rich and powerful white planters. On the other, it victimized the small white planters, or white laborers, and the ever-growing mass of African slaves. The second unique factor in American slavery was the growth of individualism. While this democratic spirit attracted many European immigrants, it only served to increase the burden of slavery for the African. Instead of being at the bottom of the social ladder, the slave in America was an inferior among equals. A society which represented itself as recognizing individual worth and providing room for the development of talent, rigidly organized the entire life of the slave and gave him little opportunity to develop his skills. In America, a person's worth became identified with economic achievement. To be a success in Virginia was to be a prosperous planter, and white individualism could easily become white oppression leaving no room for black individualism. The existence of slavery in a society which maintained its belief in equality was a contradiction which men strove diligently to ignore. Perhaps this contradiction can be partly understood by seeing the way in which individual rights had come into being in English society. Instead of springing from a belief in abstract human rights, they were an accumulation of concrete legal and political privileges which had developed since Magna Charta. Viewing it in this light, it may have been easier for the white colonists to insist on their rights while denying them to the slaves. Nevertheless, the existence of slavery in the midst of a society believing in individualism increased its dehumanizing effects. The third characteristic which set American slavery apart was its racial basis. In America, with only a few early and insignificant exceptions, all slaves were Africans, and almost all Africans were slaves. This placed the label of inferiority on black skin and on African culture. In other societies, it had been possible for a slave who obtained his freedom to take his place in his society with relative ease. In America, however, when a slave became free, he was still obviously an African. The taint of inferiority clung to him. Not only did white America become convinced of white superiority and black inferiority, but it strove to impose these racial beliefs on the Africans themselves. Slave masters gave a great deal of attention to the education and training of the ideal slave, In general, there were five steps in molding the character of such a slave: strict discipline, a sense of his own inferiority, belief in the master's superior power, acceptance of the master's standards, and, finally, a deep sense of his own helplessness and dependence. At every point this education was built on the belief in white superiority and black inferiority. Besides teaching the slave to despise his own history and culture, the master strove to inculcate his own value system into the African's outlook. The white man's belief in the African's inferiority paralleled African self hate. Slavery has always been an evil institution, and being a slave has always been undesirable. However, the slave in America was systematically exploited for the accumulation of wealth. Being a slave in a democracy, he was put outside of the bounds of society. Finally, because his slavery was racially defined, his plight was incurable. Although he might flee from slavery, he could not escape his race. North American and South American SlaverySlavery, as it existed in British North America, contained interesting points of comparison and contrast with the slave system existing in Portuguese and Spanish South America. Although both institutions were geared to the needs of capitalistic agriculture, the rights and privileges of the South American planter were restricted and challenged at many points by the traditional powers the Crown and the Church. On one hand, capitalism, unimpeded by other powerful institutions, created a closed slave system which regimented the totality of the slave's life. On the other hand, through the clash of competing institutions, the slave as been left with a little opportunity in which he could develop as a person. In the seventeenth century, while the British colonies were being established in North America and their slave system was being created, the English Crown underwent a series of severe shocks including two revolutions. Although it eventually emerged secure, the monarchy managed to survive only by making its peace with the emerging commercial and industrial forces. These same crises undermined the authority of the Church as a powerful institution in society. The nonconformist sects were the stronghold of the merchant class and spread rapidly in the American colonies. There, instead of being a check on the commercial spirit, the Church itself had become dominated by the middle class. Equally important is the fact that in colonial America the level of religious life was very low. Most colonists, with the exception of the original founders who had fled religious persecution, did not come for religious freedom but for economic advancement. When some Virginians at the end of the seventeenth century, petitioned the government to build a college for the training of ministers, they were told to forget about the cure of souls and instead to cure tobacco. The result was that the planter class, unchallenged by any other powerful institutions, was free to shape a slave system to meet its labor needs. In any conflict which arose between personality rights and property rights the property rights of the master were always protected. In contrast, the South American planter would not have such a free hand in shaping his own affairs. The Renaissance and Reformation had not made the same impact on Spain and Portugal as they did on the rest of Western Europe. Consequently, secularization and commercialization had not progressed as far in eroding the traditional power and prestige of the Crown and the Church. Although both institutions readily compromised with capitalist interests and strove to develop a working alliance with them, neither the Crown nor the Church in Spain and Portugal had ever been taken over by the commercial interests. Both Spain and Portugal had had continuous contact with slavery extending back into ancient times. Roman law as well as the Church fathers had concerned themselves with it, and these concepts had been incorporated into Spanish and Portuguese law. Also, slaves continued to exist in both countries down to modern times. Therefore, when Portugal began importing slaves from West Africa in the fifteenth century, the institution of slavery was already in existence. Before long, significant numbers of African slaves were to be found in both Portugal and Spain. When the South American planters began importing slaves, slavery already had a framework and a tradition within which the planter had to operate . The Spanish Crown devoted a great deal of time and energy to the supervision of its overseas possessions. Instead of permitting considerable local autonomy as the British did, the Spanish Council of the Indies in Madrid assumed a stance of illiberal, paternal, bureaucratic control. From the point of view of the colonial capitalists, the cumbersome royal bureaucracy was always involved in troublesome meddling which impeded their progress. As part of the careful management of its colonies, the Crown strove to control the operation of the slave trade. Similarly, it was concerned with the treatment of the African slaves within the colonies. The Spanish Crown included the slaves as persons instead of relegating them solely to the status of property at the disposal of their owners. The Church, as a powerful institution, jealously guarded its right to be the guardian and protector of social morality. Besides being concerned with influencing individual behavior, the Church insisted that it was a social institution with the right to interfere in matters relating to public morals. In fact, it was through this role that the Church was able to exercise its worldly powers. While condemning slavery as an evil and warning that it endangered those who participated in it, the Church found it expedient to accept slavery as a labor system. However, it insisted that the African slaves must be Christianized. Missionaries were sent to the trading stations on the African coast where the captives were baptized and catechized. The Church feared that the purity of the faith might be undermined by the infusion of pagan influences. Then, when a slave ship reached the New World, a friar boarded the ship and examined the slaves to see that the requirements had been met. The Church also insisted that the slaves become regular communicants, and it liked to view itself as the champion of their human rights. The degree to which the individual rights of the slave were either protected or totally suppressed provides a clearer insight to the differences between North American and South American slavery. The laws outlining the rights of slaves have been traditionally placed into four categories: term of servitude, marriage and the family, police and disciplinary powers, and, finally, property and other civil rights. In both systems the term of servitude was for life, and the child's status was inherited from its mother. Children of slave mothers were slaves, and children of free mothers were free regardless of the status of the father. Inherited lifetime slavery was the norm. Manumission--granting freedom--was infrequent in British North America. Occasionally, masters who had fathered slave children would later give them their freedom. A few other slaves were able to purchase their own freedom although, strictly speaking, this was a legal impossibility. The slave was not able to own property according to the law, and this meant that the money with which he purchased his freedom had always belonged to his master. Obviously, he could only do this with his master's fullest cooperation. In South America, however, manumission was much more frequent. This practice received highly favorable social sanction, and masters often celebrated national holidays, anniversaries, birthdays, and other special events by manumitting one or more of their favorite slaves. The law also defended the right of the slave to purchase his own freedom. He had the right to own property and could accumulate funds with which he might eventually achieve his dream. He also had the right to demand that his master or the courts set a fixed price for his purchase which he could then pay over a period of years. Sundays and holidays were for the slave to use as he saw fit, and, in some cases, he was also guaranteed a couple of hours every day for his own use. During this time he could sell his services and save the proceeds. The law also stated that parents of ten or more children were to be set free. Finally, slaves could be freed by the courts as the result of mistreatment by their masters. While there was much sentiment in North America supporting marriages among slaves, and there was much animosity against masters who separated families through sale, the law was unambiguous on this point. Slaves were property, and therefore could not enter into contracts including contracts of marriage. Jurists also noted that to prevent the sale of separate members of a family would lower the sale price, and this was to tamper with a man's property. Therefore, property rights had to be placed above marriage rights. In contrast, in South America the Church insisted that slave unions be brought within the sacrament of marriage. The Church also strove to limit promiscuous relationships between slaves as well as between masters and slaves, and it encouraged marriage instead of informal mating. Also, the law forbade the separate sale of members of the family, husband, wife, and children under the age of ten. The general thrust of the laws outlining police and disciplinary powers in North America was to entrust complete jurisdiction to the master. One judge had laid down the law that the master's power must be absolute in order to render slave obedience perfect, and, although the courts were empowered to discipline slaves in certain situations, the masters generally acted as judges, juries, and dispensers of punishments. In those rare cases where the law did protect the slave against extreme mistreatment, its protection was nullified by the universal proscription against any slave or Black person testifying in court against any white. The court also had assumed that it was irrational for a man to destroy his own property, and, therefore, it was impossible for a master to commit premeditated murder against one of his own slaves. However, in South America the court exercised much more Jurisdiction over the slave. Crimes committed by a slave were prosecuted by the court, and, if a slave was murdered, this case was prosecuted by the court as if the victim had been a free man. The law also made a more concerted attempt to protect the slave against mistreatment by his master. A certain type of state lawyer was an official protector of the slaves; he received regular reports on slave conditions from priests as well as from special investigative officials who had been appointed by the state for this purpose. Mistreatment could lead both to the freedom of the slave and to the imprisoning of the master. The law had devised an ingenious system whereby the fine was divided equally between the judge, the informer, and the state treasury. Finally, the slave in North America could not own property and had absolutely no civil rights. The.law clearly stated that he could neither own, inherit, or will property nor engage in buying and selling except at the pleasure of his master. In contrast, the slave in South America could own property, could engage in buying and selling, and was guaranteed Sundays, holidays, and other times which to work for his own advancement. In short, the law implied that while the master could own a man's labor, he could not own the man as a person It is not easy to make a final comparison between these two slave systems. South American masters often evaded the law and would be exceedingly brutal, and North American masters were often much more lenient than the law required. Conditions moreover, were usually more severe in South America, and this fact may have worsened the actual material situation of South American slave. Nevertheless, in North America the slave was consistently treated as a "thing." In South America there was some attempt to treat him as a man. This fact made a profound difference in the way in which the two systems affected the slave as an individual, and in the way in which they impinged upon the development of his personality. Slavery and the Formation of CharacterThe study of American slavery, frequently consisting of a heated debate concerning the institution's merits, has, in recent years, branched into new directions. Scholars have become engaged in the comparative examination of differing slave systems such as those of North and South America. More recently, Stanley M. Elkins has begun an inquiry into the impact of a slave system in forming the individual character of the slaves within that system. In his provocative study, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, he has made some interesting comparisons between the American slave system and the German concentration camps and has endeavored to account for their respective impacts on character formation through the social- psychological theories of personality formation. In Elkins's thinking, the concentration camps were a modern example of a rigid system controlling mass behavior. Because some of those who experienced them were social scientists trained in the skills of observation and analysis, they provide a basis for insights into the way in which a particular social system can influence mass character. While there is also much literature about American slavery written both by slaves and masters, none of it was written from the viewpoint of modern social sciences. However, Elkins postulates that a slave type must have existed as the result of the attempt to control mass behavior, and he believes that this type probably bore a marked resemblance to the literary stereotype of "Sambo." Studying concentration camps and their impact on personality provides a tool for new insights into the working of slavery, but, warns Elkins, the comparison can only be used for limited purposes. Although slavery was not unlike the concentration camp in many respects, the concentration camp can be viewed as a highly perverted form of slavery, and both systems were ways of controlling mass behavior The "Sambo" of American slave literature was portrayed as being docile but irresponsible, loyal but lazy, humble but chronically given to lying and stealing. He was a child figure, often demonstrating infantile silliness and exaggeration, exasperating but lovable and, above all, utterly dependent on and attached to his master. The master explained this behavior as the result of the slave's race or of his primitive African culture. While assuming that many slaves did approximate the character of "Sambo," Elkins absolutely rejects any racial or cultural explanation. Modern African studies have not led to any evidence of a "Sambo" type in Africa. Similarly, the literature of South America does not contain any figure comparable to him. Apparently, "Sambo" was not merely the result of slavery, but he was the result of the unique form of slavery which developed in North America. Unrestricted in his powers by institutions such as the crown and the Church, the American slave master had gained total control of his slave property. In a desire to maximize the profits of his investment, he strove to develop the perfect slave. Although the slave might endeavor to conform externally while maintaining his inner integrity, eventually his performance as an ideal slave must have affected the shape of his personality. Modern existentialism has argued that how we behave determines what we are, and it is in this sense that the controlled behavior in the concentration camp and its impact on personality formation provide an illuminating parallel to the study of American slavery. The experienced gained in the German concentration camps during the Second World War showed that it was possible to induce widespread infantile behavior in masses of adults. Childlike action extended beyond obedience to the guards and showed that a basic character transformation had occurred. Previous social-psychological theory stressed the ways in which an individual's personality was shaped during his earliest childhood years and emphasized the tenacity with which these early traits resisted attempt at alteration. Personality theory was not adequate to what occurred in the camps. The concentration camp experience began with what has become labeled as shock procurement. As terror was one of the many tools of the system, surprise late-night arrests were the favorite technique. Camp inmates generally agreed that the train ride to the camp was the point at which they experienced the first brutal torture. Herded together into cattle cars, without adequate space, ventilation, or sanitary conditions, they had to endure the horrible crowding and the harassment of the guards. When they reached the camp, they had to stand naked in line and undergo a detailed examination by the camp physician. Then, each was given a tag and a number. These two events were calculated to strip away one's identity and to reduce the individual to an item within an impersonal system. One's sense of personhood was further undermined by the fact that there was never any privacy. The individual had lost both his identity and his power. Everything was done to him or for him, but nothing was ever done by him. The guards had the power to dispense food, clothing, shelter, punishment, and even death Prisoners had to request permission to use the sanitary facilities, and permission was not always forthcoming. As the inmates were not sentenced for specified periods of time, they tended to view camp life as having a limitless future. In a relatively short time, this experience of total dependence developed characteristics of infantile behavior in those prisoners who managed to avoid the extermination chambers. A childish humor and infantile giggling were common. Boasting and lying were widely practiced. Patterns of hero worship emerged, and the guards became the heroes. The prisoners came to accept their values including their German nationalism and anti-Semitism. Some even altered their uniforms to resemble those of the guards, and they slavishly followed orders beyond necessity. Attempts at resistance were very rare, and, when the liberating American forces arrived at the end of the war, they were surprised that there was not some attempt at mass revenge. In comparison, the African who became an American slave underwent an experience which had some marked similarities to those of the German concentration camp. He too underwent a kind of shock procurement. Although millions of men became slaves, the event was unique to each man. Usually, he had been captured in the course of warfare which, in itself, was a humiliation. After being chained together and marched to the coast, his horror must have increased when he realized that he was being sold to Europeans. It was widely believed by Africans that white men were cannibals. At the coastal station, he also had to endure the humiliation of a naked inspection by a physician. This was followed by a lengthy transoceanic trip which must have exceeded the horrors of the train ride to the concentration camp. The crowded unsanitary conditions in the slave ships were at least as bad as those in the cattle cars, and the Africans also were beaten and harassed to keep them docile. Moreover, the trip itself was much rougher and longer. After undergoing another inspection, the African was purchased and had to face lifetime of bondage in an alien environment. He was stripped of identity, given a new name, and he was taught to envision himself and his African heritage as inferior and barbaric. The White master insisted on total obedience and created a situation of utter dependence. He supplied food, clothing, shelter, discipline, and he was in a position to control the slave's friends and mating. The "Sambo" of literature mirrored reality, this life of dependency created infantile characteristics in many of the slaves and taught them to reject their past while adopting the values of their masters. The American slave system, besides exploiting the Africans labor, possessed and violated his person. Three schools of mass behavior have been suggested as explanations: Freudian psychology, the interpersonal theories of Henry Stack Sullivan, and role psychology. Freudian psychology has put total emphases on early childhood experiences and is the least suited for this purpose. It could be argued that the shock procurement and the total detachment from previous life which it achieved both in the concentration camps and in American slavery emptied the super-ego or conscience of its contents. Then, the creation of total dependence which followed could have resulted in infantile regression. This would account for the childlike behavior of both "Sambo" and the camp inmates. The slave master the camp guard, each in his own way, became a father figure, and the respective victims internalized the value system of this symbolic father. The interpersonal school of psychology states that the determining factor in influencing personality development can be found in the estimation and expectation of "significant others." Those responsible for the physical and emotional security of an individual are his "significant others." For a child these are his parents. As he matures, the number of "significant others" in one's experience increases. This permits one to make decisions of one's own and to develop some individuality. However, the child has already internalized the estimations and expectations of his parents, and this tends to shape his personality for rest of his life. Still, acquiring new "significant others" as adult can be important in reshaping the adult personality. Both the American slaves and the camp prisoners were thrust into situations in which they had a new single "significant other." This was a situation similar to that of childhood, and it could have had the same impact in shaping personality. All previous "significant others" had been made insignificant, and, in each case, the estimations and expectations of this new -'significant other" became internalized into the personality of the victims. Role psychology holds the most promise for explaining the impact of a social situation in determining the development of individual personality. In role psychology the individual and society can be compared to the actor and the theater. Society provides the individual with a number of roles, and the individual's behavior is his performance, the way in which he plays them. Normally, each individual plays a number of roles simultaneously. While some are pervasive and extensive in scope, others are limited and transitory, The role of man or woman is extensive, but that of customer or student is transitory. Society also endows some roles with considerable clarity, while leaving others open to individual interpretation, The roles people play and the way in which they play them determine personality. Within American slavery as well as within the German concentration camps, the number of roles available were severely limited, and both the slave master and the camp guard defined them very clearly. Both demanded a precise and careful performance. There were those whose performance was faultless in playing their roles. While the concentration camp guard guaranteed its performance through terror and torture, the slave master usually used more subtle means. Besides punishment for missed cues, masters displayed considerable fondness for slaves who played their part well. By restricting role availability and by carefully defining the performance, society could create a group personality type, and, through changing roles, society could change personality. Although the innovative use of personality types has further illuminated the nature of the American slave system, it has tended to blur the individual experiences and contributions of millions of Africans into a vague amorphous abstraction. The technique has provided important insights into the plight of the slave as the victim of a dehumanizing system, but it tends to obscure the active participation of Africans in American life. Further, it is a crude generalization which, in fact, included many types within it. While most slaves were plantation field hands, there were many whose lives followed different lines and for whom slavery was a very different experience. Some slaves departed sharply enough from the "Sambo" image to become leaders in insurrections. These men were usually urban slaves possessing unusual talents, and thereby escaping much of the emasculation which the typical slave had to endure. Emphasizing the slave as the victim of the slave system further reduces him to a passive object by insisting that the slave was effectively detached from his African heritage. Many scholars, including Elkins, believe that the attempt to discover Africanisms in America by researchers such as Melville J. Herskovits has led to trivial and insignificant results. This belief is reinforced by the example of the German concentration camps. There, people from wide variety of social and educational backgrounds reacted in highly similar ways. Apparently the individual had been detached from his prior life, and his reactions to the camp were shaped in standardized manner. Similarly, it is argued, the slave was stripped of his heritage, so that none of his African background could influence his life in America. His personality and behavior were shaped exclusively by the unique form of American slavery. However, if we apply the experiences gained in the Chinese prisoner-of-war camps during the Korean War, some doubts on this point can be raised. While Americans from a wide variety of social and educational backgrounds behaved with a marked similarity to each other, thereby appearing to prove that their previous experiences were irrelevant to their reactions to the camp, there was, to the contrary, a significant difference between the behavior the American and Turkish prisoners who had both been fighting the Korean War. The morale of the American prisoners was easily broken, and each one strove to look out for himself even at expense of his comrade's life. In contrast, the Turks maintained military discipline and group solidarity. This evidence would seem indicate that, while individual differences were insignificant, cultural differences did influence adjustment to the camp situation. There are also grounds to believe that different value systems influenced the way in which contrasting cultures adjusted to slavery. While the African made the adjustment successfully, the American Indian, when he was enslaved, did not. The African's agricultural labor had contained many similarities to the work required on the plantation, but the Indian, accustomed to a migratory hunting existence, was totally unprepared for plantation slavery. He found nothing in it to sustain his values or his will to live, and he was unable to make the adjustment. If the African's agricultural background helped his adaptation to American slavery, then we must assume that his detachment from his heritage was not complete. Perhaps, besides influencing his life as a slave, his African background may have found its way into other aspects of American society. However, it would seem that because the African came to believe in his own inferiority, there must have been very little conscious attempt to keep his culture alive. Certainly, the recent Black Power movement, which intended to revive pride in race and in the past, bears eloquent testimony to the degree to which any conscious link with the African past had been suppressed. Nevertheless, mental and emotional habit can continue without any conscious intention, and habits of this kind are important for the formation of personality, Moreover, it is possible that the image of "Sambo" as an exasperating child may tell as much about the mentality of the white master who perpetuated the picture as it does about the slave whom it depicted. Perhaps the picture of the childlike slave is also a reverse image of the sober, patronizing white master whose life was rooted in austerity. To such a man spontaneity and exuberance might well have seemed infantile. The life of a slave did not give him much opportunity to create artifacts which could later be catalogued as evidence of African influence. However, he did create a unique music. While Negro spirituals were not imported directly from Africa, they were more than an attempt to copy the master's music. They represent highly complex fusion of African and European music, of African and European religion, and of African and European emotion. Blues and jazz, which emerged at a later date, represent a similar creative tension. They clearly evolve from the experience of the African in America and include in them elements which can be traced directly to Africa. Jazz is now viewed throughout the world as American music. It demonstrates the fact that the African immigrant was not totally detached from his heritage and that he has made significant contributions to American culture. While American slavery did violate the person of the slave, some Africans, in the face of it all, managed to maintain some sense of individuality and manhood. Slave ResponseUndoubtedly, the slave's most common response to his condition was one of submission. There was no hope of his returning to Africa, and there was no realistic expectation that the situation would be significantly altered. The hopelessness of his plight created a deep sense of apathy. However, even this acceptance of his master's values may have reflected African influences. It was common for a defeated tribe in West Africa to adopt the gods of its victors within the framework of its own religion. This attitude would have facilitated the African's adjustment to slavery in an alien culture. The majority of slaves worked in the fields on large plantations. The majority of them were herded into large work gangs, supervised by overseers, and carefully directed in the accomplishment of whatever task was necessary for that day. Others were regularly assigned to a specific task without constant supervision and were held responsible for its completion. In this way it was possible for them to develop some sense of initiative. House slave were usually better off than field hands, but, because they lived in such proximity to their masters, they were much quicker to adopt the master's values and tended to be more obsequious. Another significant group of slaves, both on the plantation and in the city, developed their talents and became skilled craftsmen: barbers, blacksmiths, carpenters, and a wide variety of other trades. Masters who could not fully utilize the skills of such a craftsman rented their property to their neighbors. In some cases, master permitted the slave to be responsible for hiring himself out and allowed him to keep some of the profits. The variety of experiences permitted within slavery allowed significant variations in the types of slaves who emerged. Even apparently submissive slaves developed techniques of passive resistance. The laziness, stealing, lying, and faked illnesses, which were usually attributed to the slave's childlike behavior, may have been deliberate ways of opposing the system. Masters complained that many of their slaves were chronic shirkers. When slaves dragged their feet while working, it was seen as evidence of their inferiority. When white union workers behave similarly, it is labeled a slowdown. Other slaves appear to have indulged in deliberate mischief, trampling down crops, breaking tools, and abusing livestock. A southern physician, Dr. Cartwright, concluded that this behavior was symptomatic of a mental disease peculiar to Africans. He labeled the disease Dysaethesia Aethiopica and insisted that masters were wrong in thinking that it was merely rascality. He also concluded that the slave's chronic tendency to run away was in reality the symptom of yet another African disease, Drapetomania, which he believed would eventually be medically cured. Finally, some slaves engaged in active resistance. Most of the slave insurrections in America were very small, and most were unsuccessful. The three best known insurrections were those led by Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner. These revolts will be treated more fully in the next chapter. The masters consistently refused to see examples of passive or active resistance as signs of manhood. Lying and stealing were never interpreted as passive resistance, but were always attributed to an inferior savage heritage, as was slave violence. Prosser, Vesey, and Turner, instead of being numbered among the world's heroes fighting for the freedom of their people, were usually represented as something closer to savages, criminals, or psychopaths. Modern historical scholarship has been influenced by the interpretation of slave behavior, which stressed the impact of the system on the slave, rather than his response to it. Consequently, it has failed to give proper recognition to African contributions to American life. |
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