Radix malorum est cupiditas

Most white Americans wonder why black folks are so hung up on slavery.    The last slaves died long ago.  Slavery is gone, so why can’t we just move on?    Sure, it is a shameful part of American history, but it’s in the past and white Americans didn’t invent slavery.    African tribes had slaves.  American Indians had slaves.  Slavery has been around since man first walked the earth, so why are Americans so vilified just because we carried on a tradition that began long before we were a nation.?    

I wanted to find out why, and what I learned, we certainly weren’t taught in school.

Long before the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the Americas and the buying and selling of Africans like so much livestock, slavery and forced servitude existed across the globe.   Almost all the people of the world had been slaves or slaveholders at some point in time.    The practice of slavery was prevalent in both Western Africa and the Americas long before the beginning of the American slave trade.  

While slavery in Africa was certainly harsh, rights were accorded to slaves, and a slave in Africa might own property.  He or she could join or marry into his master’s family and perhaps even live to inherit the master’s estate.   In time his/her descendants might never know that their ancestor had been a slave.   There were no for-profit farms, so slaves worked as household servants or performed such duties as their master ordered.   In American Indian societies, captured slaves routinely married into and became full-fledged members of the tribe which had captured them.  

Prior to the advent of the American slave trade, slaves were not demeaned and treated as less than human because almost always, both master and slave were the same race.   For these reasons, African and American Indian slavery before the trans-Atlantic trade differed significantly from the system that would develop in the United States.

Pre-American slavery was certainly not pleasant, but it was far a far cry from the capitalist, profit-driven plantation system, which consumed lives, destroyed families, and utterly degraded and humiliated an entire race of people; so much so that the after-effects still resound today.    

Two factors made American slavery different from any that had gone on before; race and profit.   This was the difference between slavery as the world had known it before and what was to be in America. 

Before Americans turned slavery into a commercial enterprise, nobody had ever before combined slavery and Capitalism.  For the first time in history, slavery became a business; a way to make money, and white Americans seized on this opportunity with all the abandon of greed-crazed Capitalists.  This deadly combination of race and profit made American slavery the single cruelest form of slavery in the history of the world.    

Ultimately, capitalism was probably the single biggest factor that doomed the Blacks in America.   Motivated by greed and profit, white Americans looked upon blacks as less than human.   Blacks were simply livestock; a movable chattel commodity that could be consumed as needed in the race for ever greater profits.  

With regular trans-Atlantic shipping becoming a common occurrence, European consumers could finally buy the tobacco and cotton grown in the Americas.    Slavery afforded the means to turn southern farming into Agribusiness.      Bales of cotton and tobacco were transformed by slaves into buckets of money for their white masters.

Slavery in the Southern States was incredibly profitable for whites.   In 1860, the economic value of slaves in the United States exceeded the invested value of all of the nation's railroads, factories, and banks combined.  The white Southern economy and culture was built on the scarred backs and dead bodies of black slaves. 

Between Capitalism and racism; the Africans never stood a chance.  They were just so much grist for the mill of American greed.