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1619 is a New York Times Magazine project about slavery in America, since before it became the United States, and its foundational role in the country. This thread is to talk about this project, chattel slavery in general, and its legacy.
A few thread rules:
All the usual rules.
Everyone is coming at this with different levels of knowledge, so avoid “I know this already!” posts about it. Some people didn’t.
Avoid turning this into primary proxy battle, somehow. It would be deeply embarrassing for all of us.
I’m not deep into it, because I’m a slow reader, but everything I’ve read so far has been superb, and they’ve hit out of the park with the design.
You should read it all, but some particular parts that I thought were excellent:
The introductory piece by Nikole Hannah-Jones where she writes about how when she was younger she struggled to square her father's patriotism with the way the country treated him was the highlight to me.
The links between plantation slavery and modern capitalism by Matthew Desmond is definitely worth reading.
Kevin Kruse's article on how 20th century infrastructure was designed to reinforce segregation is short and worth contemplating (Phoenix goes to the polls to vote on a light rail project next week...)
Jamelle Bouie and Wesley Morris are just really good writers.
The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
+20
AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
Seeing a mod post what looked like a spam thread got me quite intrigued, as I had literally 0 knowledge of the importance of this date... Or that it was the 400th anniversary.
That's going to change. I need to read this.
He/Him | "We who believe in freedom cannot rest." - Dr. Johnetta Cole, 7/22/2024
Just read the introduction and the article about capitalism.
Holy crap. That is all I am able to say right now.
Yeah, I'm reading the first article, and I am not getting back to sleep. Lincoln's words and thoughts and such... just... The fuck. The idea that just having black people around destroys the possibility of unity? It's... unconscionable. And yet, reflecting on it I see it all around me.
Edit: This line: "It was the poor white man who was freed by the war, not the N[...]" is hitting me like a truck. Because I've always wondered when and where the public school movement in the US started.
Edit 2: Sorry for constantly just.. ugh...
But to see a ledger of slaves with 6 month and 1 year olds on it, marked with a starting value of $75 and expected to raise to $100 at the end of the year... Logically I had to know, but putting that kind of value on a human life so matter of factly is just.. *shudders* Also, they were worth more than John, the 70 year old in that ledger. Again, makes cold sense, but... God, I hate American greed.
Athenor on
He/Him | "We who believe in freedom cannot rest." - Dr. Johnetta Cole, 7/22/2024
Edit: This line: "It was the poor white man who was freed by the war, not the N[...]" is hitting me like a truck. Because I've always wondered when and where the public school movement in the US started.
Yeah that was hitting me as well. That they had that brief period of reconstruction, only for white America being threatened by it and going "nope, not in America" and it took a hundred years for anything resembling the rights black people had right after the war to come around again.
Edit: This line: "It was the poor white man who was freed by the war, not the N[...]" is hitting me like a truck. Because I've always wondered when and where the public school movement in the US started.
Public schools in the former confederacy.
The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
Ha shit, I’ve been thinking of a thread for us to post articles about and discuss essentially this topic(s) for a while...basically a “A Distant Mirror: North America Edition”
Just read the introduction and the article about capitalism.
Holy crap. That is all I am able to say right now.
Yeah, I'm reading the first article, and I am not getting back to sleep. Lincoln's words and thoughts and such... just... The fuck. The idea that just having black people around destroys the possibility of unity? It's... unconscionable. And yet, reflecting on it I see it all around me.
Edit: This line: "It was the poor white man who was freed by the war, not the N[...]" is hitting me like a truck. Because I've always wondered when and where the public school movement in the US started.
Edit 2: Sorry for constantly just.. ugh...
But to see a ledger of slaves with 6 month and 1 year olds on it, marked with a starting value of $75 and expected to raise to $100 at the end of the year... Logically I had to know, but putting that kind of value on a human life so matter of factly is just.. *shudders* Also, they were worth more than John, the 70 year old in that ledger. Again, makes cold sense, but... God, I hate American greed.
I highly recommend if you come to DC the African American Museum and its main area. It walks through all this in a visual way that isn't something you would normally see. It is brutal and much like the Holocaust museum leaves little question of the horrible actions taken.
Edit: This line: "It was the poor white man who was freed by the war, not the N[...]" is hitting me like a truck. Because I've always wondered when and where the public school movement in the US started.
Yeah that was hitting me as well. That they had that brief period of reconstruction, only for white America being threatened by it and going "nope, not in America" and it took a hundred years for anything resembling the rights black people had right after the war to come around again.
Yeah in a way that quote is completely right. Working white people in the slavery era south hated competing with slave labor.
Reconstruction stopped that and gave them free reign to abuse the former slaves into submission .
While the planter class continued to fuck over everyone
Edit: This line: "It was the poor white man who was freed by the war, not the N[...]" is hitting me like a truck. Because I've always wondered when and where the public school movement in the US started.
Yeah that was hitting me as well. That they had that brief period of reconstruction, only for white America being threatened by it and going "nope, not in America" and it took a hundred years for anything resembling the rights black people had right after the war to come around again.
Yeah in a way that quote is completely right. Working white people in the slavery era south hated competing with slave labor.
Reconstruction stopped that and gave them free reign to abuse the former slaves into submission .
While the planter class continued to fuck over everyone
The trouble with the South was that there weren't actually that many white tradesmen, especially in rural areas. Instead, you had a lot of subsistence farmers with no formal education who saw slavery as a way of earning extra money via being a member of the local militia, slave catching, or providing odd jobs and surplus crops to the big plantations. The idea that they could massively improve their lot by banning slavery, funding public education, and gaining professional skills wasn't a part of the local conversation.
The Southern economy was not developed to support that kind of thing. This was the major economic tension going on between the North and South since before the US even formed.
The Southern economy was not developed to support that kind of thing. This was the major economic tension going on between the North and South since before the US even formed.
Well when one half of your country is developing to be one of the modern nations of the time and the other is developing into a modern feudal society there's bad times a coming for sure.
RedTide#1907 on Battle.net
Come Overwatch with meeeee
The Southern economy was not developed to support that kind of thing. This was the major economic tension going on between the North and South since before the US even formed.
Well when one half of your country is developing to be one of the modern nations of the time and the other is developing into a modern feudal society there's bad times a coming for sure.
The one was reliant on the other.
The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
+15
AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
The Southern economy was not developed to support that kind of thing. This was the major economic tension going on between the North and South since before the US even formed.
Well when one half of your country is developing to be one of the modern nations of the time and the other is developing into a modern feudal society there's bad times a coming for sure.
That's the thing about the articles, though. It wasn't just developing into a modern nation. The North (and pre-EU countries) were just as hungry for slave-produced goods as anyone else, they just tried to keep their hands clean.
And it kind of scares me for the parallels today. The part of modern accounting coming out of overseer journals was shaking, because I know that feeling of overachieving and being a source of pain for others. No where near as extreme, of course, but you don't want to stand out or fall behind, and corporations control people through so many evil ways...
He/Him | "We who believe in freedom cannot rest." - Dr. Johnetta Cole, 7/22/2024
The Southern economy was not developed to support that kind of thing. This was the major economic tension going on between the North and South since before the US even formed.
Well when one half of your country is developing to be one of the modern nations of the time and the other is developing into a modern feudal society there's bad times a coming for sure.
That's the thing about the articles, though. It wasn't just developing into a modern nation. The North (and pre-EU countries) were just as hungry for slave-produced goods as anyone else, they just tried to keep their hands clean.
And it kind of scares me for the parallels today. The part of modern accounting coming out of overseer journals was shaking, because I know that feeling of overachieving and being a source of pain for others. No where near as extreme, of course, but you don't want to stand out or fall behind, and corporations control people through so many evil ways...
If you follow the modern historical work around the 13th Amendment and Slavery by Another Name, it's hard to ignore that the South never really let go of slave labor. They just criminalized a ton of black behavior, convinced whites that African Americans were inherently dangerous, then built the world's largest penal system to conceal that they had created a massive, for-profit slave labor system.
All of that Northern industry needed cheap raw materials, and the US Constitution is, if absolutely nothing else, a remarkably effective Free Trade Zone.
Most white people in the South had pretty strong connections to slavery just through being related to slave owners or being in a slave owning household. 32 percent of white families owned slaves in the South in 1860 and the figure was 46 percent in South Carolina and 49 percent in Mississippi.
I am appreciating the banality of talking about spreadsheets and management that slavers used to enforce their maximum production. It's something that people dont talk about often, just how normal it was to these people.
I am appreciating the banality of talking about spreadsheets and management that slavers used to enforce their maximum production. It's something that people dont talk about often, just how normal it was to these people.
There were literally livestock magazines in the 19th century, by the same publishers who put out journals on raising swine and cattle, on the best ways to breed and manage slaves.
The Southern economy was not developed to support that kind of thing. This was the major economic tension going on between the North and South since before the US even formed.
Well when one half of your country is developing to be one of the modern nations of the time and the other is developing into a modern feudal society there's bad times a coming for sure.
The one was reliant on the other.
The North had no problem buying cotton produced by slavery and the planter class did very well economically, but it wasn't necessary for the cotton to be produced by slavery or the South to be doing almost nothing to diversify away from cotton. Slave labor in the South was likely more expensive than non-slave labor in places like India. Slave labor was profitable but not necessarily very cheap for the South.
The Southern economy was not developed to support that kind of thing. This was the major economic tension going on between the North and South since before the US even formed.
Well when one half of your country is developing to be one of the modern nations of the time and the other is developing into a modern feudal society there's bad times a coming for sure.
I think this kind of division really tries to oversell what was going on while also underselling the extent of the integration. This wasn't modern vs feudal, it was just different economies. It was more like agricultural vs industrial, with differing political and policy goals for the people benefiting from one vs the other. (eg - X policy is better for me, as a merchant and Y policy is better for you, as a plantation owner, so we fight about it) And slavery is just kinda undergirding the whole thing.
Like, there were clear differences in the types of economies at work and thus their direct connection to and need for slave labour but I think that's just part of a larger difference in how the two region's economies were functioning.
Also, anyone reading this and saying "well I don't live in that part of the US, so my hands are clean" is kinda missing the point.
One theory Ive read is that some people have a vested interest in making sure that past participation in the systems of power are at worst morally neutral because they know itll be the only defense of their own legacy.
The Southern economy was not developed to support that kind of thing. This was the major economic tension going on between the North and South since before the US even formed.
Well when one half of your country is developing to be one of the modern nations of the time and the other is developing into a modern feudal society there's bad times a coming for sure.
The one was reliant on the other.
Some relationships are both co-dependant and toxic, but enough about my marriage.
RedTide#1907 on Battle.net
Come Overwatch with meeeee
The Southern economy was not developed to support that kind of thing. This was the major economic tension going on between the North and South since before the US even formed.
Well when one half of your country is developing to be one of the modern nations of the time and the other is developing into a modern feudal society there's bad times a coming for sure.
I think this kind of division really tries to oversell what was going on while also underselling the extent of the integration. This wasn't modern vs feudal, it was just different economies. It was more like agricultural vs industrial, with differing political and policy goals for the people benefiting from one vs the other. (eg - X policy is better for me, as a merchant and Y policy is better for you, as a plantation owner, so we fight about it) And slavery is just kinda undergirding the whole thing.
Like, there were clear differences in the types of economies at work and thus their direct connection to and need for slave labour but I think that's just part of a larger difference in how the two region's economies were functioning.
At the same time, the Southern political structure was very much neo-feudal - plantations were structured much like feudal holdings, lineage was (and in many places in the South, continues to be) incredibly important among the higher classes, and access to political power was tied back to the structure - states would require officeholders to possess a certain number of slaves, for example. It wasn't just economic - the system pervaded every facet of life.
The Southern economy was not developed to support that kind of thing. This was the major economic tension going on between the North and South since before the US even formed.
Well when one half of your country is developing to be one of the modern nations of the time and the other is developing into a modern feudal society there's bad times a coming for sure.
The one was reliant on the other.
The North had no problem buying cotton produced by slavery and the planter class did very well economically, but it wasn't necessary for the cotton to be produced by slavery or the South to be doing almost nothing to diversify away from cotton. Slave labor in the South was likely more expensive than non-slave labor in places like India. Slave labor was profitable but not necessarily very cheap for the South.
The South's economic model died the day the British Empire realized that cotton grew extremely well in Egypt. That it took the Civil War disrupting supplies for the Empire to fully invest in Egyptian cotton accelerated the problem, but it was always coming.
Southerners knew this, and their main strategies to prevent the inevitable were failing by the 1860s. They wanted to have slavery enshrined as a special and supported system by the Federal government, and the limitations on creating new slave states meant that they were losing the power to force the rest of the country to prop up slavery. The other avenue out of the problem - training slaves as factory workers in an effort to build a modern slave economy - were also failing in the face that industrial workers needed a level of education, autonomy, and motivation that a slave-society could never afford to provide to its slaves.
That's why the move to the prison system was so crucial. By casting it in that light, you can get state and federal funds to "preserve law and order" being used to subsidize housing and violent coercision while still letting local leaders and businesses benefit from free labor.
Libertarians like to hide the fact that the explosion in American libertarianism came from conservatives who felt they had found an intellectually and morally defensible philosophy to argue against civil rights legislation.
You should read it all, but some particular parts that I thought were excellent:
The introductory piece by Nikole Hannah-Jones where she writes about how when she was younger she struggled to square her father's patriotism with the way the country treated him was the highlight to me.
The links between plantation slavery and modern capitalism by Matthew Desmond is definitely worth reading.
Kevin Kruse's article on how 20th century infrastructure was designed to reinforce segregation is short and worth contemplating (Phoenix goes to the polls to vote on a light rail project next week...)
Jamelle Bouie and Wesley Morris are just really good writers.
The Southern economy was not developed to support that kind of thing. This was the major economic tension going on between the North and South since before the US even formed.
Well when one half of your country is developing to be one of the modern nations of the time and the other is developing into a modern feudal society there's bad times a coming for sure.
The one was reliant on the other.
The North had no problem buying cotton produced by slavery and the planter class did very well economically, but it wasn't necessary for the cotton to be produced by slavery or the South to be doing almost nothing to diversify away from cotton. Slave labor in the South was likely more expensive than non-slave labor in places like India. Slave labor was profitable but not necessarily very cheap for the South.
The South's economic model died the day the British Empire realized that cotton grew extremely well in Egypt. That it took the Civil War disrupting supplies for the Empire to fully invest in Egyptian cotton accelerated the problem, but it was always coming.
Southerners knew this, and their main strategies to prevent the inevitable were failing by the 1860s. They wanted to have slavery enshrined as a special and supported system by the Federal government, and the limitations on creating new slave states meant that they were losing the power to force the rest of the country to prop up slavery. The other avenue out of the problem - training slaves as factory workers in an effort to build a modern slave economy - were also failing in the face that industrial workers needed a level of education, autonomy, and motivation that a slave-society could never afford to provide to its slaves.
That's why the move to the prison system was so crucial. By casting it in that light, you can get state and federal funds to "preserve law and order" being used to subsidize housing and violent coercision while still letting local leaders and businesses benefit from free labor.
IIRC Cotton was still the primary ag export of the South until the 20th century; they might not have needed American Cotton, and would never again get the majority of their raw cotton from the US, but cotton via sharecropping was cheap enough to still make it competitive with Eygpt and India.
As for local, I suspect taxes probably made American cotton cheaper than foreign imports. There was no peacetime federal income tax until 1913 and the 16th amendment so duties were still a major part of tax income.
0
MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
The Southern economy was not developed to support that kind of thing. This was the major economic tension going on between the North and South since before the US even formed.
Well when one half of your country is developing to be one of the modern nations of the time and the other is developing into a modern feudal society there's bad times a coming for sure.
The one was reliant on the other.
The North had no problem buying cotton produced by slavery and the planter class did very well economically, but it wasn't necessary for the cotton to be produced by slavery or the South to be doing almost nothing to diversify away from cotton. Slave labor in the South was likely more expensive than non-slave labor in places like India. Slave labor was profitable but not necessarily very cheap for the South.
The South's economic model died the day the British Empire realized that cotton grew extremely well in Egypt. That it took the Civil War disrupting supplies for the Empire to fully invest in Egyptian cotton accelerated the problem, but it was always coming.
Southerners knew this, and their main strategies to prevent the inevitable were failing by the 1860s. They wanted to have slavery enshrined as a special and supported system by the Federal government, and the limitations on creating new slave states meant that they were losing the power to force the rest of the country to prop up slavery. The other avenue out of the problem - training slaves as factory workers in an effort to build a modern slave economy - were also failing in the face that industrial workers needed a level of education, autonomy, and motivation that a slave-society could never afford to provide to its slaves.
That's why the move to the prison system was so crucial. By casting it in that light, you can get state and federal funds to "preserve law and order" being used to subsidize housing and violent coercision while still letting local leaders and businesses benefit from free labor.
Although I have no trouble believing that there was continuity between slave labor and prison labor, I can't help but suspect this strongly overstates the centrality of prison labor to Southern economies. More than 50% of the population of the prewar South were enslaved--these were majority slave economies. By contrast, no US state currently imprisons more than 1% of its population.--and even that appears to be the product of an overall trendline that's been going up over time as far back as I can see on this graph (1925, when it was .15%). Although 1% is crazy high by international standards, and very linked to US race politics, there's no way that the relative output of 1% of the population in a low-skilled prison context in a modern economy is going to add up to be anything like relative output of 50%+ of the population enslaved in an agricultural economy.
Some random stats I found on google for exactly how much of the wealth in the South--and especially among the wealthiest--was in property in the form of slaves
The southern slave economy permitted a small number of wealthy planters to accumulate extraordinary fortunes. The 1860 census data show that the median wealth of the richest 1% of Southerners was more than three times higher than for the richest 1% of Northerners. In a largely rural and agricultural economy, slavery eliminated the labour constraints that limited the size of northern farms and allowed for a much greater concentration of wealth (Wright 1970, 1978, Ransom 1989). Of course, there were different vehicles for wealth accumulation in the two regions – in the North, real estate accounted for two-thirds or more of property ownership among the top 45% of wealth holders, but personal property (which included slaves) made up close to three-fifths of total wealth held by the top 10% of Southerners.
The Civil War and emancipation destroyed an immense amount of Southern wealth. Given the prominent role of slaves among the property of the wealthiest southerners, it is reasonable to conjecture that the effects of emancipation may have been most pronounced at the top of the wealth distribution. While northern wealth holders above the 55th percentile experienced an approximately 50% increase in property holding over the 1860s, the value of property owned by southerners fell by nearly 75%. The drop was especially pronounced for personal property; those in the top 10% of the Southern wealth distribution experienced a 90% drop in the value of their personal property, while real property wealth was cut approximately in half. As a result, after the war the relative shares of real and personal property in the South converged toward those in the North, with real property making up 60-70% of wealth, at least among the wealthier household heads.
Edit: got curious, so tried a more direct check--according to the Prison Initiative, prison labor is worth at least 2 billion a year. The economist says the federal bureau of prisoners nets 500 million in sales. By contrast, the lowest Southern State's GDP is 115 billion (Mississippi). Prison labor is certainly worth enough for people to care about exploiting it, but it is small potatoes in the overall economic scheme; facts about how best to utilize prison labor are not gonna explain how contemporary society is organized or what its wealthiest interests care about.
This magazine/insert needs to be published and distributed like the Gideon bible.
I was disappointed that there doesn't seem to be any obvious link to order a copy from the Times. Is it possible to get a copy of the NY Times Magazine from the magazine rack at Barnes & Noble or the like?
I’m not sure there’s a way to get it directly from the Times (yet), but according Hannah, the main person curating the project, they printed a sizable number of free copies to give to expand beyond the limited audience of people who have a subscription.
AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
I want a copy on magazine paper, as newspapers tend to fade and leave ink all over the hands and such.
Like, again - if we can have all this stuff that is banal commercialism, let's promote something that is actually real and raw.
He/Him | "We who believe in freedom cannot rest." - Dr. Johnetta Cole, 7/22/2024
+6
AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
New Orleans must be a painful city. This (contemporary) poetry piece calls it the city of the dead, referring to how slaves were bought and sold and their lives shattered there. Given it's appearance to me (a white cis male from Central Illinois), all I've ever seen in Mardi Gras and Jazz/Blues... oversimplication, I know, but I'm having a difficult time putting things in words. And what's more, I don't know if it is still seen this way.. but if it were me, this would feel like a city built on death and destruction, and would be hard to approach. But at the same time, it's home, right?
He/Him | "We who believe in freedom cannot rest." - Dr. Johnetta Cole, 7/22/2024
Posts
You should read it all, but some particular parts that I thought were excellent:
The introductory piece by Nikole Hannah-Jones where she writes about how when she was younger she struggled to square her father's patriotism with the way the country treated him was the highlight to me.
The links between plantation slavery and modern capitalism by Matthew Desmond is definitely worth reading.
Kevin Kruse's article on how 20th century infrastructure was designed to reinforce segregation is short and worth contemplating (Phoenix goes to the polls to vote on a light rail project next week...)
Jamelle Bouie and Wesley Morris are just really good writers.
EDIT: Also, they have curriculum stuff if you're a teacher. Probably can't stick it in an algebra classroom though without getting cringey.
That's going to change. I need to read this.
Holy crap. That is all I am able to say right now.
Yeah, I'm reading the first article, and I am not getting back to sleep. Lincoln's words and thoughts and such... just... The fuck. The idea that just having black people around destroys the possibility of unity? It's... unconscionable. And yet, reflecting on it I see it all around me.
Edit: This line: "It was the poor white man who was freed by the war, not the N[...]" is hitting me like a truck. Because I've always wondered when and where the public school movement in the US started.
Edit 2: Sorry for constantly just.. ugh...
But to see a ledger of slaves with 6 month and 1 year olds on it, marked with a starting value of $75 and expected to raise to $100 at the end of the year... Logically I had to know, but putting that kind of value on a human life so matter of factly is just.. *shudders* Also, they were worth more than John, the 70 year old in that ledger. Again, makes cold sense, but... God, I hate American greed.
Yeah that was hitting me as well. That they had that brief period of reconstruction, only for white America being threatened by it and going "nope, not in America" and it took a hundred years for anything resembling the rights black people had right after the war to come around again.
Public schools in the former confederacy.
I highly recommend if you come to DC the African American Museum and its main area. It walks through all this in a visual way that isn't something you would normally see. It is brutal and much like the Holocaust museum leaves little question of the horrible actions taken.
Yeah in a way that quote is completely right. Working white people in the slavery era south hated competing with slave labor.
Reconstruction stopped that and gave them free reign to abuse the former slaves into submission .
While the planter class continued to fuck over everyone
The trouble with the South was that there weren't actually that many white tradesmen, especially in rural areas. Instead, you had a lot of subsistence farmers with no formal education who saw slavery as a way of earning extra money via being a member of the local militia, slave catching, or providing odd jobs and surplus crops to the big plantations. The idea that they could massively improve their lot by banning slavery, funding public education, and gaining professional skills wasn't a part of the local conversation.
Well when one half of your country is developing to be one of the modern nations of the time and the other is developing into a modern feudal society there's bad times a coming for sure.
Come Overwatch with meeeee
The one was reliant on the other.
That's the thing about the articles, though. It wasn't just developing into a modern nation. The North (and pre-EU countries) were just as hungry for slave-produced goods as anyone else, they just tried to keep their hands clean.
And it kind of scares me for the parallels today. The part of modern accounting coming out of overseer journals was shaking, because I know that feeling of overachieving and being a source of pain for others. No where near as extreme, of course, but you don't want to stand out or fall behind, and corporations control people through so many evil ways...
If you follow the modern historical work around the 13th Amendment and Slavery by Another Name, it's hard to ignore that the South never really let go of slave labor. They just criminalized a ton of black behavior, convinced whites that African Americans were inherently dangerous, then built the world's largest penal system to conceal that they had created a massive, for-profit slave labor system.
All of that Northern industry needed cheap raw materials, and the US Constitution is, if absolutely nothing else, a remarkably effective Free Trade Zone.
There were literally livestock magazines in the 19th century, by the same publishers who put out journals on raising swine and cattle, on the best ways to breed and manage slaves.
The North had no problem buying cotton produced by slavery and the planter class did very well economically, but it wasn't necessary for the cotton to be produced by slavery or the South to be doing almost nothing to diversify away from cotton. Slave labor in the South was likely more expensive than non-slave labor in places like India. Slave labor was profitable but not necessarily very cheap for the South.
I think this kind of division really tries to oversell what was going on while also underselling the extent of the integration. This wasn't modern vs feudal, it was just different economies. It was more like agricultural vs industrial, with differing political and policy goals for the people benefiting from one vs the other. (eg - X policy is better for me, as a merchant and Y policy is better for you, as a plantation owner, so we fight about it) And slavery is just kinda undergirding the whole thing.
Like, there were clear differences in the types of economies at work and thus their direct connection to and need for slave labour but I think that's just part of a larger difference in how the two region's economies were functioning.
One theory Ive read is that some people have a vested interest in making sure that past participation in the systems of power are at worst morally neutral because they know itll be the only defense of their own legacy.
Some relationships are both co-dependant and toxic, but enough about my marriage.
Come Overwatch with meeeee
At the same time, the Southern political structure was very much neo-feudal - plantations were structured much like feudal holdings, lineage was (and in many places in the South, continues to be) incredibly important among the higher classes, and access to political power was tied back to the structure - states would require officeholders to possess a certain number of slaves, for example. It wasn't just economic - the system pervaded every facet of life.
The South's economic model died the day the British Empire realized that cotton grew extremely well in Egypt. That it took the Civil War disrupting supplies for the Empire to fully invest in Egyptian cotton accelerated the problem, but it was always coming.
Southerners knew this, and their main strategies to prevent the inevitable were failing by the 1860s. They wanted to have slavery enshrined as a special and supported system by the Federal government, and the limitations on creating new slave states meant that they were losing the power to force the rest of the country to prop up slavery. The other avenue out of the problem - training slaves as factory workers in an effort to build a modern slave economy - were also failing in the face that industrial workers needed a level of education, autonomy, and motivation that a slave-society could never afford to provide to its slaves.
That's why the move to the prison system was so crucial. By casting it in that light, you can get state and federal funds to "preserve law and order" being used to subsidize housing and violent coercision while still letting local leaders and businesses benefit from free labor.
Which really says it all, doesn't it?
Libertarians like to hide the fact that the explosion in American libertarianism came from conservatives who felt they had found an intellectually and morally defensible philosophy to argue against civil rights legislation.
The curriculum bit is super good since I’m teaching Ethnic Studies this year. Might just dedicate my whole 2nd quarter around this.
3DS: 2981-5304-3227
IIRC Cotton was still the primary ag export of the South until the 20th century; they might not have needed American Cotton, and would never again get the majority of their raw cotton from the US, but cotton via sharecropping was cheap enough to still make it competitive with Eygpt and India.
As for local, I suspect taxes probably made American cotton cheaper than foreign imports. There was no peacetime federal income tax until 1913 and the 16th amendment so duties were still a major part of tax income.
Although I have no trouble believing that there was continuity between slave labor and prison labor, I can't help but suspect this strongly overstates the centrality of prison labor to Southern economies. More than 50% of the population of the prewar South were enslaved--these were majority slave economies. By contrast, no US state currently imprisons more than 1% of its population.--and even that appears to be the product of an overall trendline that's been going up over time as far back as I can see on this graph (1925, when it was .15%). Although 1% is crazy high by international standards, and very linked to US race politics, there's no way that the relative output of 1% of the population in a low-skilled prison context in a modern economy is going to add up to be anything like relative output of 50%+ of the population enslaved in an agricultural economy.
Some random stats I found on google for exactly how much of the wealth in the South--and especially among the wealthiest--was in property in the form of slaves
The Civil War and emancipation destroyed an immense amount of Southern wealth. Given the prominent role of slaves among the property of the wealthiest southerners, it is reasonable to conjecture that the effects of emancipation may have been most pronounced at the top of the wealth distribution. While northern wealth holders above the 55th percentile experienced an approximately 50% increase in property holding over the 1860s, the value of property owned by southerners fell by nearly 75%. The drop was especially pronounced for personal property; those in the top 10% of the Southern wealth distribution experienced a 90% drop in the value of their personal property, while real property wealth was cut approximately in half. As a result, after the war the relative shares of real and personal property in the South converged toward those in the North, with real property making up 60-70% of wealth, at least among the wealthier household heads.
Edit: got curious, so tried a more direct check--according to the Prison Initiative, prison labor is worth at least 2 billion a year. The economist says the federal bureau of prisoners nets 500 million in sales. By contrast, the lowest Southern State's GDP is 115 billion (Mississippi). Prison labor is certainly worth enough for people to care about exploiting it, but it is small potatoes in the overall economic scheme; facts about how best to utilize prison labor are not gonna explain how contemporary society is organized or what its wealthiest interests care about.
I was disappointed that there doesn't seem to be any obvious link to order a copy from the Times. Is it possible to get a copy of the NY Times Magazine from the magazine rack at Barnes & Noble or the like?
Like, again - if we can have all this stuff that is banal commercialism, let's promote something that is actually real and raw.