Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States: The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12Grimké, Archibald Henry
History
Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States: The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12
Grimké, Archibald Henry
African Americans -- Economic conditions; African Americans -- Employment; Working class -- United States
Two other circumstances combined with the one just mentioned to produce
this unexpected and deplorable result. They were the slave compromises of
the Constitution and the early territorial expansion of the republic
southward. These compromises gathered the reviving slave system, as it
were, under the wings of the general government, and so tempered the
adverse forces with which it had to struggle for existence within the
Union to its tender condition. They embraced the right to import Negroes
into the United States, as slaves, until the year 1808, which operated to
satisfy, in part, the rising demand of the South for slave labor; also the
right to recover fugitive slaves in any part of the country, which added
immensely to the security of this species of property, and the right of
the slave-holding States, under the three-fifths rule of representation in
the lower house of Congress, to count five slaves as three freemen, which
rule, taken in conjunction with the equality of State representation in
the upper branch of that body, gave to that section an immediate and
controlling influence upon federal policy and legislation.
The territorial expansion of the republic southward coincided curiously in
point of time with the territorial needs of the slave system incident to
its industrial revival. Increased demand for the products of slave labor
in the market of the world had, by the action of natural causes, raised
the demand for that labor in the South. This increased demand was
satisfied, to a limited extent, by the Constitutional provision relative
to the importation of that labor into the United States prior to the year
1808, and to an unlimited extent by the peculiar Southern industry of
slave breeding, and the domestic slave trade, which, owing to favorable
economic conditions, became presently great and thriving enterprises for
the production of wealth. The crop of slaves grew in time to be as
valuable as the crop of cotton, and the slave section waxed, in
consequence, rich and prosperous apace. But as our expanding slave system
was essentially agricultural, it required large and expanding areas within
which to operate efficiently. Wherefore there arose early in the
slave-holding section an industrial demand for more slave soil. There was
a political reason, also, which intensified this demand for more slave
soil, but as it was merely incidental to the economic cause, I will leave
it undiscussed for the present. This economic demand of the expanding
slave system for more land was met by the opportune cession to the United
States by Georgia and North Carolina of the southwest region, out of which
the States of Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee were subsequently carved,
and by the acquisition of the Louisiana and the Florida territories. So
much for the causes, conditions and circumstances in the early history of
the republic, which combined to revive slavery, and to make it an
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