Slavery Documents

Document 1: How Slavery Helped Build a World Economy

Howard Dodson

By 1850, 1.8 million of the 2.5 million enslaved Africans employed in agriculture in the United States were working on cotton plantations.

            The vast majority of enslaved Africans employed in plantation agriculture were field hands…Each plantation economy was part of a larger national…economy….By the 1830s, "cotton was king" in the South. It was also king in the United States, which was competing for economic leadership in the global…economy. Plantation-grown cotton was the foundation….

            But the American financial and shipping industries were also dependent on slave-produced cotton. Cotton was not shipped directly to Europe from the South. Rather, it was shipped to New York and then transshipped to England and other centers of cotton manufacturing in the United States and Europe.

            …banks and financial houses in New York supplied the loan capital and/or investment capital to purchase land and slaves….Enslaved Africans were legally a form of property—a commodity….They were also traded for other kinds of goods and services.

            The value of the investments slaveholders held in their slaves was often used to secure loans to purchase additional land or slaves. Slaves were also used to pay off outstanding debts. When calculating the value of estates, the estimated value of each slave was included. This became the source of tax revenue for local and state governments. Taxes were also levied on slave transactions.

…In sum, the slavery system in the United States was a national system that touched the very core of its economic and political life.

Document 2: Cotton and Slavery Statistics

Statistic # 1:

"All told, more than $600 million, or almost half of the economic activity in the United States in 1836, derived directly or indirectly from cotton produced by the million-odd slaves -- 6 percent of the total US population -- who in that year toiled in labor camps on slavery's frontier."

Statistic # 2:

"Many enslaved cotton pickers in the late 1850s had peaked at well over 200 pounds per day," Baptist notes. "In the 1930s, after a half-century of massive scientific experimentation, all to make the cotton boll more pickable, the great-grandchildren of the enslaved often picked only 100 to 120 pounds per day."

Statistic # 3:

“The steady stream of large quantities of cotton was the lifeblood of textile mills in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and generated wealth for the owners of those mills. By 1832, Lowell mills consumed 100,000 days of enslaved people's labor every year…”