THIS IS A HISTORY of the slave-breeding industry, which we define as the complex of businesses and individuals in the United States who profited from the enslavement of African American children at birth.
At the heart of our account is the intricate connection between the legal fact of people as property—the “chattel principle”—and national expansion. Our narrative doubles, then, as a history of the making of the United States as seen from the point of view of the slave trade.
It also traces the history of money in America. In the Southern United States, the “peculiar institution” of slavery was inextricably associated with its own peculiar economy, interconnected with that of the North.
One of the two principal products of the antebellum slave economy was staple crops, which provided the cash flow—primarily cotton, which was the United States’ major export. The other was enslaved people, who counted as capital and functioned as the stable wealth of the South. African American bodies and childbearing potential collateralized massive amounts of credit, the use of which made slaveowners the wealthiest people in the country. When the Southern states seceded to form the Confederacy they partitioned off, and declared independence for, their economic system in which people were money.
Our chronology reaches from earliest colonial times through emancipation, following the two main phases of the slave trade. The first phase, importation, began with the first known sale of kidnapped Africans in Virginia in 1619 and took place largely, though not entirely, during the colonial years. The second phase, breeding, was the era of the domestic, or interstate, slave trade in African Americans. The key date here—from our perspective, one of the most important dates in American history—was the federal prohibition of the “importation of persons” as of January 1, 1808. After that, the interstate trade was, with minor exceptions, the only slave trade in the United States, and it became massified on a previously impossible scale.
The conflict between North and South is a fundamental trope of American history, but in our narrative, the major conflict is intra-Southern: the commercial antagonism between Virginia, the great slave breeder, and South Carolina, the great slave importer, for control of the market that supplied slave labor to an expanding slavery nation. The dramatic power struggle between the two was central to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 and to secession in 1860–61.
Part One is an overview, intended as an extended introduction to the subject.
Part Two, which begins the main chronological body of the text, describes the creation of a slave economy during the colonial years.
Part Three centers on the US Constitution’s role as hinge between the two phases of slave importation and slave breeding.
Parts Four through Six cover the years of the slave-breeding industry, from the end of the War of 1812 through emancipation: the rise, peak, and fall of the cotton kingdom.
Note: This book describes an economy in which people were capital, children were interest, and women were routinely violated. We have tried to avoid gratuitously subjecting the reader to offensive language and images, but we are describing a horrifying reality.