Joon Cho

Professor Johnson
06/08/2015

Connecting Slavery in the Past to Our World Today

Hands that cradled her smiling, innocent child’s face were the same hands that
struck that face to an eternal sleep. For Margaret Garner, eternal escape from a life of
enslavement was worth the stain of her child’s blood.1 Although she could wash her stains
the next day, no one could wash the stains of blood that soaked the cotton picked by her
hands. That blood spilled from every vein of the cotton empire, an empire that stretched
from the trader’s desk in London to the Choctaw’s home in the west. No matter where we
travel in this empire of forced labour and torture, we are stained by the suffering made
from those who chose “to strike, to beat,” and “to plow” the enslaved men and women of the
Lower Mississippi River Valley.2 To understand U.S slavery in the 19th century is to
understand that it, “in short, is fucked.”3 That understanding becomes more vivid when
theaters release movies like Twelve Years a Slave. However, vividness can create a false fog,
for the absence of whipping posts and auction houses today blurs our connection with the
past. We are as susceptible to the conditions that spawned slavery in the 19th century.
Indeed, slavery was a construction built by economic motives, a truth that becomes clear
only by viewing U.S slavery in its international context. By scrutinizing the economic actors
that created slavery in the U.S, the financial engineering that generated its tragedies, and
the power of commercial interests in transforming the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations, we
can see how our dark past was forged by economic forces that still exist today.
If the Lower Mississippi River Valley had a last name, its last name was Europe.
While U.S slavery created unique structures and experiences, those structures and
experiences were birthed because “Europe must, and will[,] have cotton for her
manufacturers.”4 Furthermore, the River Valley’s middle name was the small scale farm of
India, the Caribbean, and Brazil that could not produce enough cotton to satisfy Britain’s
textile mills. U.S slavery was a child created from the divorce of hungry textile mills and
unproductive international farms. Viewing slavery as an economic conjunction does not
ignore the racism and brutality of the country that allowed it. Instead, it prohibits
distancing ourselves from slavery’s legacy, for we cannot blame its creation solely on the
unique culture of a previous time. Therefore, it raises the stakes of our present, for we must
be wary of the consequences of the supply and demand curves that exist today.
If supply and demand planted the seeds of the cotton empire, the financier in
Europe watered those seeds to germination. The money that entrepreneurs like Vincent
Nolte “channeled from Britain into this room at Maspero’s stimulated greater and greater
cotton production along the river valleys.”5 Only with foreign money was Nolte able to buy
huge quantities of cotton from the interior and ship it to Liverpool ports. Farmers

1 Holt, Thomas C., and Elsa Barkley. Brown. Major Problems in African-American History: Documents and Essays. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2000. 246-249.
2 Baptist, E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Basic Books, 2014. 234.
3 Baptist, E. The Half. 236.
4 Baptist E. The Half. 104.
5 Baptist E. The Half. 107.
producing that cotton reaped the benefits of foreign money through the B.U.S, which
depended on its “ability to lure foreign investment in its bonds.”6 Foreign investment
enabled vast credit lines that funded “canals, roads, and river-clearance projects to lower
the cost of transportation and encourage production for distant markets.”7 The same credit
went into the hands of auctioneers, who procured slaves from Virginia and Maryland, and
the entrepreneurs that bought them in hopes of a bigger harvest next year. Yes, U.S slavery
was made on the backs of slaves, but it was also made on greenbacks supplied by European
partners. To ignore international financing of U.S slavery is to allow distance to absolve the
guilt of those that were equally responsible for its crimes. And it forces us to confront the
reality that cornerstones of evil institutions lie in far away places, for they shroud
themselves with the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean.
Yet, to prevent unjust distance does not bring us close enough to understanding why
Garner would choose her children’s death over a life on the Mississippi plantation. The
plantations were built upon foreign investment, but foreign investment did not forge their
everyday practices. Indeed, slavery in the New South was unique, for slaveholders
employed a new “pushing system,” which used “measurement to calibrate torture in order
to force cotton pickers to figure out how to increase their own productivity.”8 But again, it is
too narrow-minded to blame such practices on properties exclusive to those farms. Instead,
we must look again at the institutions across the Atlantic that financed U.S slavery. The
pushing system was born from an international chain of financial engineering that
exacerbated the monetary lens of U.S slaveholders. The chain began at regional banks like
the C.A.P.L, which collected slaveholder debt, and ended in London, where “a British bank
could now sell an investor a completely commodified slave.”9 The securities sold in London
were sold as a bet on increased growth for both the bonds’ value and the revenue of the
enslaved that acted as their collateral. This sort of commodification was passed down to
slaveholders, whose livelihoods now depended upon the gap between their returns and the
interest rates on their loans. To be clear, the gap always existed, but slaveholders shifted
from living contently within that gap, to battling the boundaries of that gap each day. To
reiterate, systematic torture grew from the financial innovations that escalated U.S
slaveholders’ monetary motivations. An ideology of growth and profit resulted in an
subsequent ideology of bloodshed and torture.
Even if we agree that blood was shed because of economic motives, we cannot
discount the racism and concepts of human property that were unique to the Mississippi.
The gap between our present circumstances and the past remain unresolved until we
evaluate the spread of slavery from the U.S to the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations. This
spread highlights the way in which a different society was propelled by economic
motivations to instill the same sort of suffering to the enslaved. Chattel slavery arose for
the first time in the southern Indian nations only after the U.S granted increasing monetary
benefits to those that were able to successfully mass produce goods. Indeed, by the “early
decades of the nineteenth century, the frontier exchange economy of earlier generations
had given way to a market economy in which Indians manufactured and sold items for

6 Baptist E. The Half. 113.

7 Baptist, E. The Half. 113.
8 Baptist, E. The Half. 151.
9 Baptist, E. The Half. 265.
profit.”10 The allure of profit is so powerful that it even changed the political and social
values of distinct society. Indeed, many southern Indians began to view “individual material
wealth, including slaves and the products of their labor, as the foundation of political and
social power.”11 If economic motives could transform a different society’s values, we must
understand that values today can be shifted in the same manner.
Since slavery hinges on values regarding race, we must also look at the way that
economic gain transformed the racial ideology of the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations.
These nations did not “blindly adopt and imitate the racial ideology of their Euro-American
neighbors.” They instead crafted their own ideologies from the “particular social, economic,
and political conditions of their time and place.”12 These new social, economic, and politic
conditions came from the success of chattel slavery. That success altered old, “positive
associations of horticulture with female identity” by placing agriculture exclusively within
the hemisphere of the demeaned and enslaved.13 This alteration conveys the ability of
monetary motivations to not just shift, but completely transform values regarding labor
and race in an opposite direction.
It is clear that the forces that created U.S slavery are not remnants of the past;
enslavement for economic gain is a phenomena that exists today. Consider the case of
Brianna, who at the age of 12, was forced into sexual slavery by a family friend. Her body
was sold on backpages.com, an escort advertising website. The website is owned by Village
Voice Media, and significant minority stakes have been held in recent years by Goldman
Sachs.14 Sexual slavery is alive, and it is financed by firms that play a mainstream role in our
society. The story of slavery in the U.S and the its spread to the Choctaw nation is not just a
story of evil, but a story of human beings that turned to evil in a chase for profit. To battle
evil is to battle an empire of money that controls our society to this day. That empire
created U.S slavery, and is capable of creating systems of suffering and torture in novel
ways. Armed with this knowledge, it becomes our responsibility not to repeat the past.

Works Cited:

Holt, Thomas C., and Elsa Barkley. Brown. Major Problems in African-American History:
Documents and Essays. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. 246-249.

Krauthamer, B. Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the
Native American South. University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

10 Krauthamer, B. Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South.
University of North Carolina Press, 2013. 46.
11 Krauthamer, B. Indian Masters. 52.
12 Krauthamer, B. Indian Masters. 33.
13 Krauhamer, B. Indian Masters. 54.
14 Kristof, Nicholas. "Not Quite a Teen, Yet Sold for Sex." New York Times. N.p., 18 Apr. 2012. Web. 6 June 2015.
Kristof, Nicholas. "Not Quite a Teen, Yet Sold for Sex." New York Times. N.p., 18 Apr. 2012.
Web. 6 June 2015.

Baptist, E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.
Basic Books, 2014.