This is something I wrote and posted elsewhere, and wanted to keep on my own blog. Where did American slavery and white supremacy come from? Consider this a thumbnail description. Slavery was a solution to labor problem, and it created the social system of the South to accommodate it. But to maintain both slavery and the Southern social system that maintained it, the South had to expand Slavery into western territories which were gained by the Louisiana Purchase, by taking over Texas, by negotiating with the British (Oregon and Washington) and by invading Mexico. That expansion led to the Civil War. the Civil War did not solve the problems created by the social system the South created to maintain slavery, however.
The first slaves were sold into Virginia along with indentured servants in the 17th century. The purchaser bought the individual by effectively paying their ticket to the U.S. It was an investment in labor.
at first. The difference between slaves and indentured servants was that a slave had a black skin and indentured servants did not. When such a person skipped out on the owner before completing the contract it was clear which one was the slave, but the indentured servant was a lost investment in labor. Guess what the social system and the legal system did to protect the purchasers? Slavery of Black-skinned people became economically successful for some strange reason while indentured servitude sort of trailed off. But then in 1791 the Dominican slaves revolted and killed off almost every French person on the island of Haiti. Slave owners everywhere lived in fear of their slaves from then on.
The Southern plantation owners needed a labor force they could force to work for subsistence wages and move at will when the cotton growing land wore out. During the first half of the 19th century Cotton was the major single international commodity, much as oil is today. This was a major spur for British industrialism. The only way for Americans to get rich growing cotton was to farm it using slaves because the work was too difficult to hire labor at fair rates. In Texas any hired white laborer simply left to start his own farm on free land. Only slaves remained for plantation farming - and only plantation farming for the international market made a farmer wealthy.
A side effect of that, particularly in the older slave states, was that white labor was always competing with slave labor that worked at subsistence pay rates. The plantation owners played off the slave labor against the white labor, and the exchange was White Supremacy. Every White man was required to belong to the militia, and the primary purpose of the militia was to prevent slave revolts. White Supremacy didn't pay any better, but it proved to be a major social step up for white men.
People know what they are worth in the market because they look at what their next door neighbor earns. The system that holds labor rates down is not obvious. But White Supremacy is obvious. So the fact that a white guy was required to carry a gun to church on Sunday for fear of a slave revolt made the white guy superior to the Black guys. It was not clear to White Yeoman farmers that this was the situation created by the plantation-owner class, but it was. Before the Civil War, most of the wealthy individuals in the U.S. were southerners.
An interesting side note is that every white male attending college was required to study military science in the South because they were all part of the militia to protect their society from slave revolt. This is in part the source of the superior military capability of the South in the Civil War. But this was a form of keeping the wealthy in control of the society.
Public education was started primarily in the North, as were most of the earliest public colleges and universities. That, too, is a way of protecting the wealthy class. Make higher education a requirement of joining the upper class and make it expensive.
After the Civil War, the fact that the Yankees had destroyed the Southern culture was considered the fault of the Blacks, the carpetbaggers and the scalawags. But Congress was still controlled largely by the Southerners, so (with the assistance of President Andrew Johnson) local segregation laws were established.
Sharecropping replaced slave based plantations (not nearly as profitable as slave-based plantations.) The new wealthy elites became those who owned the company stores that sharecroppers were required to buy from. Usually these were people who still owned the land that was farmed. For cases when the segregation law wasn't enough, there were the terrorist night-riders and a sharp increase in lynchings. Voting by Blacks was effectively eliminated by law and terrorism. White Supremacy became more important than economics.
Industrialism and WW II were the big changes that revised the South. But the Southern social system permitted long-term congressional and Senate terms that more competitive parts of the U.S. did not. The South kept national power because of Congressional tenure.
We are still working our way out of this disastrous social system.
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