A brief survey of slavery and White Supremacy in America

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.

The Slave Trade and its effects on African civilization

When reading about the "Triangular Slave Trade" a logical question is what did the slave trade do to the local cultures in Africa where the slaves came from? I have found little written about that, largely because Europeans did not want to admit that Africans had strong cultures of their own before Europeans colonized Africa.

However, I have found this very interesting video on UTube.



This is an interesting companion to the fourth of the TV series "Guns, Germs, and Steel." Jared Diamond makes the point that Africans had a strong culture, one that was well adapted to the tropical conditions of Central Africa. He pointed to the Bantu Civilization and to the South African Zulu Empire. the Bantu Civilization was built around native African crops such as millet, and the villages were small (which prevented rapid transmission of Malaria) and were set on high ground away from the rivers and lakes that teemed with mosquitoes (Malaria carriers.)

Nineteenth Century European industrial society demanded raw materials such as Gold, Copper and Diamonds, so European colonialists moved to the tropics of Africa and destroyed the villages of the native Africans, forcing them to move to urban centers near mines and water transportation.

Since writing is an urban phenomenon and native Africans had been forced by malaria to avoid building large cities (which are normally built next to water transport) the African societies did not have much native written history. The European colonialists were interested first in cheap slave labor to operate plantations in the Caribbean, Brazil and in the American South (to feed international trade) and later in African raw materials to feed the developing European industrial society, they had no interest at all in learning about native African cultures and societies. Labor was all they needed from the African peoples.

Today tropical Africa is a set of countries with borders drawn by European colonialists and racked with malaria and AIDS. The malaria results from the destruction of purposes of European trade of their earlier societies which had been designed to minimize malaria.

As soon as those two diseases are controlled Africa will become a prosperous continent.

The UTube movie above gives strong indications of how West Africa became what it is today.

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One thing the UTube movie points out is that the slave trade was not just a European thing. Muslim invaders from the Middle East also captured and exports slaves from Africa to the Middle East. Here is another UTube video that addresses the Muslim slaver trade.



One difference between the European and the Muslim slave trade was that the Islamic societies did not have the large scale international trade to be fed by factory-style plantations designed to produce cash crops (Sugar, Indigo and Cotton) to feed that trade, so the profit motive to degrade slave labor on a massive scale did not exist as it did in the Americas.

I've never understood the Islamic history of slave armies, but the Muslim use of slave women in harems is no different from the current sexual slave trade in the modern world.

In any case, though, slavery is always a case of the powerful preying on the less powerful, and it is nearly as destructive of the more powerful societies as it is the less powerful ones.

There are other UTube videos on the history of Black Slavery at This UTube location if you are interested. Unfortunately I have been unable to determine what organization is producing them, so I can't at this time vouch for their historical accuracy.

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The Andover University Library offers a list of books on the slave trade.

A map that shows slavery was the cause of the Civil War

I like maps. They provide the most compact form of information display known to man. And if you click here, you will see the map that displayed the percentage of slaves in each county in America in 1861.

Abraham Lincoln was obsessed with this map and with the progress of the war as it freed those slaves. The map itself makes it clear that slavery was at the base of "The Rebellion," and Lincolns obsession with this map makes it clear how important the Civil War and its effect to free slaves was to him.

Slavery was clearly the cause of the American Civil War

Ron Paul has been infected by the typical Southern conservative view that the Civil War was not about slavery. That's a load of defensive Southern crap. Eric at The Edge of the American West explains why slavery was the direct cause of the American Civil War, and I have added a comment that agrees with him. Here are the article and my comment:

Slavery did too cause the Civil War.

December 24, 2007 in history and current events by eric

I know everyone’s having a grand time debating the causes of the Civil War all over again, so I thought I would light my own piece of touch-paper: just because Lincoln did not mean to fight a war to end slavery, doesn’t mean slavery didn’t cause the Civil War.

On a basic theory of causation, we’re talking about that x without which no y, where y is the Civil War. It is profoundly difficult to believe any Civil War would have occurred without slavery, or if you want to be precise, without slavery concentrated in one part of the country. Even if you think some version of the states’-rights debate would have occurred without a geographically concentrated slave interest (which I don’t) it’s hard to believe it would have come to war.

And yes, I’ll concede that that imaginary American republic — the one without slavery, which preserved a compact theory of the Union — might have been a nice place to live. But we don’t live there.

We live here, where the war was about ending slavery. Don’t take my word for it, consider an astute student of the war:

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.

Does this mean that the war was necessary to end slavery? No; Paul could be right that slavery would, eventually have gone away. Does this mean the war was the best way to end slavery — where “best” means cheapest, most painless, most just? Probably not — in theory, it would have been much better to have an immediate and peaceful emancipation.

But of course we don’t live in theory, we live in America. And it pretty much appears that in this country, forcible emancipation had become by the middle nineteenth century, the only plausible kind of immediate emancipation. And, you know, justice delayed is justice denied. The need of ending slavery was not only the first but the final cause of the Civil War.

So you’re in favor either of force or of indefinitely continued slavery. Note that yes, prior to the outbreak of war, Lincoln and most white people favored indefinitely continued slavery. Would we be morally better than they, were we transported back then? Perhaps not. Should we be better, having as we do the luxury of hindsight, and knowing what penalty our forebears paid for their comfortable positions? Yes. Is Ron Paul acting as if he had this luxury? No, and I don’t know why not.

By the the time you get to the Civil Rights Act, Paul is onto entirely untenable positions. With the conclusion of the Civil War you had the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. That was what you bought with your 600,000 dead — a new Union devoted to — in the frank words of the Civil Rights Act of 1866,

All persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall have the same right in every State and Territory to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property as is enjoyed by white citizens.

All persons shall have the same rights as white persons — Congress of the United States, 1866. That was what you bought with your war, with (to repeat) your 600,000 dead, with the wrenching crisis of the Union: a new Constitution and racial justice.

Only, you didn’t: because Andrew Johnson and a bunch of weak-kneed Republicans fumbled it away in the face of racist resistance, because the Supreme Court helped gut those amendments, leaving them all but meaningless, thus necessitating a century-long march toward reclaiming the civil rights recognized in 1866. Was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 wrong, Mr. Paul? No, because the side that thought so lost the Civil War.

Only our collective betrayal of that war, our shared desecration of the memory of the dead, in which we participate every time we deny the purpose of the war and the meaning of the victory the United States Army and Navy won in it, has made the absurd position of Ron Paul possible.

And a Merry Christmas to you!

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Followed by my comment

I think you have it exactly right. The existence of slavery was the cause of the Civil War. And I think there are two clear reasons for that.

First, had the slave owners simply remained in control of their own states, the threat of slavery would not have been considered so bad by the North. But the slavers were aggressive, and tried to push the legality of slavery as far West and North as they could make it go. They not only wanted “Their special institution”, they wanted it spread to where it hadn’t been before. Normal political reactions to such aggressiveness will cause or intensify opposition.

The Second reason to consider that slavery caused the Civil War includes your analysis and my first point. The attack on Fort Sumter was purely Southern aggressiveness caused by the distaste of the South for the northern abolitionists and for Lincoln’s election, but it was a local rebellion. There was no real reason for Lincoln to have considered it any more significant than Shay’s Rebellion during George Washington’s administration. Lincoln took the very rational decision to put down the rebellion, just as Washington had done seven decades earlier.

The difference is that putting down Shay’s Rebellion did not spread the rebellion. Putting down the rebellion in South Carolina caused a spread of the rebellion across the entire South and Texas. What was the difference between the two incidents? Slavery as the basis for a society. The rest of the slave states saw the federal government effort to put down the local rebellion in South Carolina as an attack on all of them and on their way of life. The only unique factor of their way of life was slavery.

There is no reasonable way to look at the beginning of the Civil War and try to say that slavery was not its’ cause. None.

Agree or disagree with the two of us, but if you have any interest in American history I strongly suggest that you bookmark this site.

[Of course, I see no possible way that you could disagree with me. :-} ]

This discussion was, of course, set off by the uncontrolled, irrelevant and ignorant ruminations of Ron Paul yesterday morning on Tim Russert's TV show. Here is earlier post at on the subject of Ron Paul's comments.