Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power - Historical Analysis of US Slavery & Capitalism | Perfect for American History Studies, Social Justice Discussions & Economic Research

It is often assumed that once the slaves were emancipated abolitionists and other anti-slavery forces would accord them equal rights and integrate them into white society. As Dattel documents, however, many abolitionists and other anti-slavery people in the north and in the western territories wanted to keep African-Americans far away from their own soil, having them remain in the south, or shipping them off to a far away colony, which few of the freed slaves wanted. In a word, they were racist. (Equal rights, voting in particular, were obtained only briefly during Reconstruction in the South and ended with the withdrawal of Union (northern) protection after the 1876 Hayes-Tilden election. During Reconstruction the Republican Party hoped, hypocritically, that keeping the freedmen in the south, voting en bloc, would enhance its political power nationally.)Cotton, the mainstay of southern power before the Civil War, could most profitably be marketed by the slave system. I do not think Dattel makes abundantly clear that it was not slavery per se that makes this the case but that once the slave trade was in place (and continued illegally after 1809) the cheapest supply of labor was slaves. The backbreaking nature of the work failed to attract others voluntarily especially when there was land out west to be settled. (The migration from the old to the new south, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, entailed extension of the slave system as the principal crop in these new southern lands was cotton.)After the Civil War, if the freedmen were welcomed up north—which they were not—there would not have been cheap labor to plant and harvest cotton, which remained the principal source of revenue in the south, albeit precariously as the yield varied with the vicissitudes of weather, insects and prices on the English and New York markets. (The north also benefited from cotton as bankers provided credit to southern planters and manufacturers sold their goods to southern markets when the cotton crop was good.) Retained primarily as sharecroppers and tenant farmers—the distinction between the two is not made clear by Dattel—the freedmen enabled plantation owners to plant and market cotton, although smaller planters were less likely to survive.It was only during and after World War I when labor was in short supply in the north that the migration of African-Americans from the south accelerated. And in the 1930s new technology for cotton harvesting reduced the demand for intensive labor.Dattel provides a different perspective on the relation between north and south before and after the Civil War than most popular books. It is thoroughly researched and confronts the reader with new ideas