Salon: The “original sin” of the Southern political class is cheap, powerless labor

[HiPointDem]

40. you seem to think my point is "the north had slaves too." but my point is that slave-trade

Last edited Thu Feb 21, 2013, 04:32 AM - Edit history (1)

capital financed northern industrialization.

that includes capital aggregated from the earliest colonization of north america from actual slave trading, slave labor, and slave products, to the capital aggregated selling northern slaves south, financing southern slave voyages, brokering & selling slave-grown products like cotton, and using slave-grown products for further production as in early textile mills.

You don't get it and apparently don't wish to get it because you have some schemata in your head that says "North = good, South = bad/Northerners = good, Southerners = bad"

Reality is not nearly so tidy.

For example, here are James & Thomas Handasyd Perkins talking about trading slaves in the Caribbean and Georgia circa 1790 (after the Revolution, note):

http://books.google.com/books?id=lmPFnzXU7o0C&pg=PA534&dq=this+was,+for+J+and+T+Handasyde+perkins+of+boston,+as+they&hl=en&sa=X&ei=V8MlUZOxIobliwKt7YGABg&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=this%20was%2C%20for%20J%20and%20T%20Handasyde%20perkins%20of%20boston%2C%20as%20they&f=false

And if you know anything about the Perkins family, you know it's one of Boston's elite families, intermarried with most of Boston's old financial aristocracy that became a modern financial aristocracy -- the Cabots, Lowells, Jacksons, Forbes, Higginsons, Lees, etc.

Perkins was also a major industrial investor within Massachusetts. He owned the Granite Railway, the first commercial American railroad, which was built to carry granite from Quincy quarries to Charlestown for construction of the Bunker Hill Monument and other city buildings in Boston. He also held significant holdings in the Elliot textile mills in Newton, the mills at Holyoke and Lowell, New England canals and railroads, and lead and iron mines including the Monkton Iron Company in Vermont.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Handasyd_Perkins

Perkins was one of the "Boston Associates" that developed Lowell, MA as a textile mill town and built the first integrated textile mill in the US:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell,_Massachusetts


To detail all the relations between Perkins capital & industrialization would require a heavy tome, but here's just one: William Hathaway Forbes was the major financier of Bell Telephone. He was a great-grandson of James Perkins & a grandson of Margaret Perkins + Ralph Bennett Forbes.

http://books.google.com/books?id=OiEmyTq8lzYC&pg=PA154&lpg=PA154&dq=william+hathaway+forbes+bell+telephone&source=bl&ots=NDSyqRoDh7&sig=DWu_NfmBwD68G20Zd8w1pHxEeXw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=OsclUY_jJMXrigKl2IDwCg&ved=0CFIQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=william%20hathaway%20forbes%20bell%20telephone&f=false

And the Perkins family wasn't the only Boston family that made money directly or indirectly from the slave trade by a long shot. Capital amassed from this was re-invested in industrialization.

For example, the Forbes also had their slavery connection:

John Murray Forbes, the railroad barn owned a cottage at Magnolia Springs. He had inherited a fortune passed down from his grandfather who had been a partner in the Panton, Leslie & Co. Indian trading firm....

http://archives.clayclerk.com/Places-Towns-MagnoliaSprings.html

Panton, Leslie (later to become John Forbes & Co.,) also dealt in slaves; they owned them, and they traded them.

http://books.google.com/books?id=PYuKmaAtQ_kC&pg=PA90&dq=panton+leslie+slaves+1802&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ZtklUd2lHumViALdhIDQCg&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=panton%20leslie%20slaves%201802&f=false

Senator John Forbes Kerry is a modern-day relation.

Here's another Northern (offices in Philadelphia, New York, Liverpool, Baltimore) family fortune amassed in the slave trade:

Records and letters at the New York Historical Society show James and William Brown built their merchant bank — today's Brown Bros. Harriman — by lending to Southern planters, brokering slave-grown cotton and acting as a clearinghouse for the South's complex financial system. The firm earned commissions arranging cotton shipments from Southern ports to mills in New England and Britain. It also loaned millions directly to planters, merchants and cotton brokers throughout the South.

Company records show Brown Bros. loaned to plantation owners who told the firm that they needed the cash to buy slaves. When those planters or their banks failed, Brown Bros. took possession of the assets. It used its local agents to run repossessed plantations and manage the slaves working there.

The fullest picture of the Browns as slaveholders comes from 1840s and 1850s Louisiana court records affirming Brown's claim to three Concordia Parish cotton plantations totaling 4,614 acres, and the plantations' 346 slaves, each named in court records.

Brown Bros. & Co. merged with two other firms in 1931 to create Brown Bros. Harriman.

Donald Murphy, a partner, says the investment bank has no pre-Civil War records and sees no need to go through its records. "As an institution, I and my partners could look you in the eye and say we abhor that slavery ever existed in this or any other country. And yet I don't feel qualified to comment on practices and actions of a different society of 175 years ago," he says.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/general/2002/02/21/slave-brown-bros.htm

And Brown Bros Harriman, as we all know, still survives as one of the largest investment banks in the *world*. Built on a foundation of slavery. Also well-known because of prominent execs like Prescott Bush and the railroad-building Harrimans, later to move into politics (Averell Harriman).

What is so surprising about the fact that many of these wealthy families would turn 'abolitionist' once they'd made a lot of money from slavery & were moving toward a new financial model? There was more money to be made in new & more profitable ways and eliminating Southern capital picked off some of the competition, among other benefits.

The simplistic schemata we learn in school teaches us a myth that effectively 'disappears' elites from the story of slavery. The myth says slavery was about 'bad people' who were 'racist', and so our task is to always be on guard against 'racism'.

But racism is just one of the ex-post-facto justifications people resort to when they want to *use* and *exploit* other people, and becomes institutionalized as that exploitation becomes institutionalized -- and that institutionalization is a product of elite power.

The people who run the world today are often times descendants of people who ran the world 100 years ago -- or more. And many of them amassed capital in the slave trade. This is why narratives like "Southerners bad" or "white privilege" -- while containing a partial truth -- are nevertheless deceptive at their core. The average joe gained little from slavery other than the dubious 'privilege' of competing with slave labor while feeling superior to black people.

Cui bono? is the operative question.