The United States and Its Slave Regime

  

The United States and Its Slave Regime

Peter Schultz

 

                  Regimes are created politically, that is, created by the most powerful forces present at the creation and then are mythologized. The regime created in the United States in the late 18^th century and afterwards cannot be adequately understood unless the central role play by slavery is recognized. Edward Baptist in his book The Half Has Never Been Told illuminates how slavery influenced, in fact controlled the creation of an American regime with the drafting of a new constitution and its implementation. It is not inaccurate to label that regime a slave regime.

 

Conventionally, slavery in the US is treated as just one aspect of the new nation, and as a shameful aspect at that. Lincoln talked of the twenty-year delay in outlawing the Atlantic slave trade as an indication of that shame over slavery. But as Baptist makes clear, a slave regime was built in the United States and that regime lay at the base of America’s emerging greatness. The twenty-year delay in outlawing the Atlantic slave trade was one aspect of that regime.

 

The constitutional convention was guided by the likes of Rutledge and Ellsworth, who argued that “the economic interests of white Americans dictate[d] [that] the Atlantic slave trade [not] be closed.” [10] As Rutledge put it: “’If the Northern States consult their interests, they will not oppose an increase of slaves which will increase the commodities of which they will become the carriers.’” [11] In the end, a deal was struck involving the Atlantic slave trade – as well as the 3/5’s clause – because “interest was the governing principle shaping the Constitution…. The outcome was plain: the upper and lower South would get to expand slavery through both the Atlantic trade and the internal trade. Meanwhile, the North would earn profits by transporting the commodities generated by slavery’s growth.” [11] In other words, slavery was not grudgingly accepted by the convention; rather, it became the central feature of the “more perfect Union” being created. Via the Constitution and its compromises, a slave regime was being created, being built in the United States.

 

Jefferson contributed to this regime insofar as he and “his allies wanted to neutralize the discussion of slavery.” [28] But what Baptist calls “neutralization” meant acceptance of slavery and acceptance soon became approval, with slavery becoming a regime, “a way of life” in the South. As political animals, humans build “regimes,” as Aristotle pointed out. Regimes are “ways of life” and these ways of life, although first facts of life, become valued and valuable. In fact, particular regimes come to be embraced as “the way of life,” that is, the best way of life. Democrats, oligarchs, aristocrats, et. al., embrace their regimes, each thinking and acting as if their way life was best. It might be said that regimes are created when a way of life becomes the way of life. So, Jefferson’s neuralization of slavery contributed to the acceptance and approval of slavery as the way of life. “Allowing slavery to continue and even expand meant political unity” for the United States, a unity based on a way of life built around slavery. North and South would be “yoked” together for decades to come.

 

This regime was fed by material interests and constitutional jurisprudence. “Many northern Republicans invested in Yahoo bonds. Many Georgians recognized how they could benefit if [the Yahoo] sale stood.” Moreover, “many congressmen examined their financial interests and chose to ensure that Mississippi became a slave territory.” [29] John Marshall, in the case of Fletcher v. Peck, established the inviolability of contracts and, so, “Marshall’s ruling … gave every future defender of slavery and its expansion an incredible tool.” [33] In sum, “the interlinked expansion of both slavery and financial capitalism was … driving … an emerging national economic system” highly valued by nationally dispersed elites, that is, elites in the north as well as the south. “Forced migration and the expansion of slavery became a … permanent and inevitable element of the mutually-agreed-to structure of lies that, defended by the agile legal realism of Marshall and the myth of diffusion, made the nation.” [36, emphasis added]

 

The diffusion argument, pressed by Jefferson among others, illustrates the power of the regime in controlling people’s thoughts and actions. The diffusion argument was that spreading slavery out would hasten its decline. Baptist captures the irony of such an argument well: “Make slavery bigger in order to make it smaller. Spread it out to contain its effects.” [30] Make it bigger so it would become smaller. Spread it out to contain it. The illogic is obvious of course. But the argument took no notice that the slavers had no desire and saw no reason to make slavery smaller or to contain it. To them, a slave regime was the best way of life. The diffusion argument, for them, was little more than a way to disguise their pro-slavery agenda as an anti-slavery agenda. And many otherwise intelligent people bought it.

 

Regimes are creations, they are constructions. They don’t grow, they aren’t spontaneous events. They are created by the most powerful social and political forces. In the earliest years of what became the United States, slavery lay at the base of the most powerful forces, economic as well as political. Overwhelmingly, the nation’s earliest presidents were slave owners, with John Adams being the only exception, a testament to power of slavers and their allies, both north and south.  It is baffling that the United States is so rarely thought of as a slave nation, whose founders had created a slave regime, deliberately and not accidentally. But then, so it goes.