The Atlantic Slave-Trade

“Another aspect of the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on Africa concerns the role of African chiefs, Muslim traders, and merchant princes in the trade. Although there is no doubt that local rulers in West Africa engaged in slaving and received certain advantages from it, some scholars have challenged the premise that traditional chiefs in the vicinity of the Gold Coast engaged in wars of expansion for the sole purpose of acquiring slaves for the export market.

In the case of Asante, for example, rulers of that kingdom are known to have supplied slaves to both Muslim traders in the north and to Europeans on the coast. Even so, the Asante waged war for purposes other than simply to secure slaves. They also fought to pacify territories that in theory were under Asante’s control, to exact tribute payments from subordinate kingdoms, and to secure access to trade routes – particularly those that connected the interior with the coast. 

It is important to understand however, that the supply of slaves to the Gold Coast was entirely in African hands. Although powerful traditional chiefs, such as the rulers of Asante, Fante, and Ahanta, were known to have engaged in the slave trade, individual African merchants such as John Kabes, John Konny, Thomas Ewusi, and a broker known only as Noim, commanded large bands of armed men, many of them slaves, and engaged in various forms of commercial activities with the Europeans on the coast.

The volume of the slave trade in West Africa grew rapidly from its inception around the beginning of the 14^th Century to its peak in the 18^th Century. Philip Curtin, a leading authority on the African slave trade, estimates that roughly 6.5 million slaves were shipped from West Africa to North America and South America, about 4.5 million of that number between 1701 and 1810. Perhaps 5,000 a year were shipped from the Gold Coast alone.

In 1807 Britain outlawed slavery and, in 1808, the importation of slaves was ended in America per Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution. In 1820 the king of the African kingdom of Ashanti inquired why the Christians did not want to trade slaves with him anymore, since they worshipped the same god as the Muslims, and the Muslims were continuing the trade like before (a mistaken impression since the Christian “God” and the Muslim “Allah” are truly separate entities in the eyes of the faithful).

The demographic impact of the slave trade on West Africa was probably substantially greater than the number actually enslaved because a significant number of Africans perished during slaving raids, while in captivity awaiting transshipment, or during the “middle passage”. All nations with an interest in West Africa participated in the slave trade. Relations between the Europeans and the local populations were often strained, and distrust led to frequent clashes. Disease caused high losses among the Europeans engaged in the slave trade, but the profits realized from the trade continued to attract them.

This global economic demand for African slaves altered African practices of slavery. In much of Africa, slavery became a more central, structural element of African life, as rulers and wealthy elites sought to accumulate more and more slaves – for sale as well as for their own use. In addition to the systematic and institutional practice of slave raiding, other practices were introduced in African states to bring in even more slaves, including enslavement as punishment for crimes and religious wrongdoing. As a result, by the 19^th Century, vast numbers of Black-Africans in West and Central Africa faced the threat of being enslaved.

Millions of slaves died on ships and of diseases, millions of blacks worked for free to allow the Western economies to prosper, and the economic interests in slavery became so strong that, as we have seen, the southern States of the United States virulently opposed repealing it to the point of going to war to preserve their “peculiar institution”. But those millions of slaves were just one of the many instances of mass exploitation.

The industrial revolution was exported to America by entrepreneurs importing and exploiting millions of poor immigrants from continental Europe and Ireland. The fate of those immigrants was not much better than the fate of the slaves in the South. As a matter of fact, many slaves enjoyed far better living conditions in the southern plantations than European immigrants did in the industrial cities (which were sometimes comparable to concentration camps).

It is not a coincidence that the movement to abolish slavery occurred during the same period when millions of European and Chinese immigrants provided the same kind of cheap labor.

 It is also fair to say that, while there is never, ever any excuse or justification for one human being to enslave another and while almost everyone tolerated it, comparatively few whites practiced slavery in America: in 1860, there were 385,000 American citizens who owned slaves, or about 1% of the white population. That percentage was zero in the states that did not allow slavery. Only one-quarter – 25% of the white population – lived in states that allowed slavery.

Incidentally, in 1830 about 25% of the free Negro slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves: that is a much higher percentage (ten times more) than the number of white slave owners. Thus slave owners were a tiny minority and it was not only whites: it was just about anybody who could, including blacks themselves. 

Moral opposition to slavery became widespread even before Lincoln, and throughout Europe. On the other hand, opposition to slavery was never particularly strong in Africa itself, where slavery is only slowly being eradicated in our own times. One can suspect that slavery would have remained common in most African kingdoms until this day: what crushed slavery in Africa was that all of those African kingdoms became colonies of Western European countries that (for one reason or another) eventually decided to outlaw slavery. 

The Atlantic slave trade with black Africa was pioneered by Arabs; its economic mechanism was invented by the Italians and the Portuguese; it was mostly run by Western Europeans; and it was conducted with the full cooperation of many African kings. America fostered free criticism of the phenomenon: for a long time, no such criticism was allowed in the Muslim and Christian nations that started trading goods for slaves, and no such criticism was allowed in the African nations that started selling their own people (and, even today, slavery is a taboo subject in the Arab world). 

Famous 19^th Century Scottish Congregationalist pioneer medical missionary and  explorer of Africa, David Livingstone, wrote of the slave trade:

 “To overdraw its evils is a simple impossibility … We passed a slave woman shot or stabbed through the body and lying on the path. [Onlookers] said an Arab who passed early that morning had done it in anger at losing the price he had given for her, because she was unable to walk any longer. We passed a woman tied by the neck to a tree and dead … We came upon a man dead from starvation … The strangest disease I have seen in this country seems really to be broken heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves.” 

 Livingstone estimated that 80,000 Africans died each year before ever reaching the slave markets of  Zanzibar. Zanzibar, on the Indian Ocean, was once East Africa’s main slave-trading port, and under Omani Arabs in the 19^th Century as many as 50,000 slaves were passing through the city each year.

 In America before the Civil War, perhaps the best example of abolitionist spirit occurred during the case of the slave-ship AMISTAD. In February of 1839, Portuguese slave hunters abducted a large group of Africans from Sierra Leone and shipped them to Havana, in Spanish Cuba, a center for the slave-trade. This abduction violated all of the treaties then in existence.

 “Fifty-three Africans were purchased by two Spanish planters and put aboard the Cuban schooner Amistad for shipment to a Caribbean plantation. (Ironically, amistad is Spanish for “friendship”.) On July 1, 1839, the Africans seized the ship, killed the captain and the cook, and ordered the planters to sail to Africa. The planters did not comply and, on August 24, 1839, the Amistad was seized off Long Island, NY, by the U.S. Navy brig Washington.

 The planters were freed and the Africans were imprisoned in New Haven, CT, on charges of murder. Although the murder charges were dismissed, the Africans continued to be held in confinement as the focus of the case turned to salvage claims and property rights. Democrat President Martin Van Buren was in favor of extraditing the Africans to Cuba. However, abolitionists in the North opposed extradition and raised money to defend the Africans.

 Claims to the Africans by the planters, the government of Spain, and the captain of the brig led the case to trial in the Federal District Court in Connecticut. The court ruled that the case fell within Federal jurisdiction and that the claims to the Africans as property were not legitimate because they were illegally held as slaves. The case went to the Supreme Court in January 1841, and former President John Quincy Adams argued the defendants’ case. Adams defended the right of the accused to fight to regain their freedom.

 After the Federal District Court ruled in favor of the Africans, the U.S. District Attorney filed an appeal to the Supreme Court. In the trial before the Supreme Court, the Africans were again represented by Adams. For 8 ½ hours, the 73-year-old Adams passionately and eloquently defended the Africans’ right to freedom on both legal and moral grounds, referring to treaties prohibiting the slave trade and to the Declaration of Independence.

 John Quincy Adams began his argument on February 24th.  He did not disappoint. He argued that if the President had the power to send the Africans to Cuba, he would equally as well have the power to seize forty Americans and send them overseas for trial. He argued that Spain was asking the President to “first turn man-robber…next turn jailer… and lastly turn catchpole and convey them to Havana, to appease the vengeance of the African slave-traders of the bar-racoons.” He attacked the President for his ordering a naval vessel to stand ready in New Haven harbor, he attacked a southern intellectual’s defense of slavery, and he quoted the Declaration of Independence: “The moment you come to the Declaration of Independence, that every man has a right to life and liberty, an inalienable right, this case is decided. I ask nothing more in behalf of these unfortunate men than this Declaration.” Adams ended his Supreme Court argument on a personal, reflective note:

 “May it please your Honors: On the 7th of February 1804, now more than thirty-seven years past, my name was entered, and yet stands recorded, on both the rolls, as one of the Attorneys and Counselors of this Court. Five years later, in February and March 1809, I appeared for the last time before this Court, in defense of the cause of justice, and of important rights, in which many of my fellow-citizens had property to a large amount at stake. Very shortly afterwards, I was called to the discharge of other duties–first in distant lands, and in later years, within our own country, but in different departments of her Government.

 Little did I imagine that I should ever again be required to claim the right of appearing in the capacity of an officer of this Court; yet such has been the dictate of my destiny–and I appear again to plead the cause of justice and now of liberty and life, in behalf of many of my fellow men, before the same Court, which in a former age, I had addressed in support of rights of property. I stand again, I trust for the last time, before the same Court–hic caestus, artemque repono. I stand before the same Court, but not before the same judges–nor aided by the same associates–nor resisted by the same opponents.

 As I cast my eyes along those seats of honor and of public trust, now occupied by you, they seek in vain for one of those honored and honorable persons whose indulgence listened then to my voice. Marshall–Cushing–Chase–Washington–Johnson–Livingston–Todd– Where are they? . . . Where is the marshal–where are the criers of the Court? Alas! where is one of the very judges of the Court, arbiters of life and death, before whom I commenced this anxious argument, even now prematurely closed? Where are they all? Gone! Gone! All gone! Gone from the services which, in their day and generation, they faithfully rendered to their country. . . .

 In taking, then, my final leave of this Bar, and of this Honorable Court, I can only exclaim a fervent petition to Heaven, that every member of it may go to his final account with as little of earthly frailty to answer for as those illustrious dead, and that you may, every one, after the close of a long and virtuous career in this world, be received at the portals of the next with the approving sentence, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.'” [As Quincy Adams apparently understood, not even the Supreme Court is free from religion.]

 The Supreme Court decided in favor of the Africans, and 35 of them were returned, as free men, to their homeland. The others died at sea or in prison while awaiting trial for crimes committed in the United States. In November 1841, the sailing ship Gentleman was chartered for $1840 to carry the Africans back to Freetown, where the Governor of Sierra Leone said the group would be met and guided on a four-day journey to their homeland. After a moving and tearful round of goodbyes, the thirty-five surviving Africans of the Amistad and four American missionaries boarded the Gentleman, bound for West Africa. (Only one African, Sarah, would ever return to America. She attended Oberlin College in Ohio.)

 A precise replica of the Amistad was built in Mystic, CT and launched in 2000. It now sails to ports around the United States and the Atlantic basin to tell the story of the slave-trade.

 Today it is politically correct to solely blame some European countries and empires and America for slavery (forgetting that it has been practiced since prehistoric times). But one rarely reads the other side of the story: that the nations who were the first to develop a repulsion for slavery and eventually abolish slavery were precisely those indicted countries (especially Britain and America).

 In fact, more than 1.25 million European Christians (and Americans) were eventually enslaved by the Muslim “Barbary states” of northern Africa. As late as 1801, America attacked Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli precisely to stop that Arab slave trade of Christians. The rate of mortality of those Christian slaves in the Islamic world was roughly the same as the mortality rate in the Atlantic slave trade of the same period.

In 1787, as America’s own Constitution was being written in Philadelphia, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in England: it was the first society anywhere in the world opposed to slavery. In 1792 English Prime Minister William Pitt called publicly for the end of the slave trade: it was the first time in history (anywhere in the world) that the ruler of a country had called for the abolition of slavery. No African king and emperor had ever done so; no Muslim Caliph or Sultan had ever done so; no European monarch had done so; no Indian Raja, no Chinese khan or Russian Czar has ever done so. As author Dinesh D’Souza writes;

“What is uniquely Western is not slavery but the movement to abolish slavery”.

France became one of the first countries in Europe to abolish slavery in 1794. However, slavery was again allowed by Napoleon in 1802 and not abolished for good until 1848. In 1803, Denmark-Norway became the first country from Europe to implement a ban on the slave trade. Slavery itself was not banned until 1848. Britain followed in 1807 with the passage of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade Act by Parliament – as did the United States in 1808 – which implemented the Constitutional mandate of 1788 to end the importation of slaves twenty years after ratification.

 This British law allowed stiff fines for captains of slave ships, increasing with the number of slaves transported. Britain followed this with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833  which freed all slaves in the British Empire. British pressure on other countries resulted in them agreeing to end the slave-trade from Africa. For example, the 1820 U.S. Law on Slave Trade made slave trading piracy, punishable by death. Finally, a weakened and dysfunctional  Muslim Ottoman Empire abolished slave trade from Africa in 1847 under British pressure but with little consequence.

 The British took an active approach to stopping the illegal Atlantic slave-trade during this period. The West African Squadron was credited with capturing 1,600 slave ships between 1808 and 1860 and freeing 150,000 Africans who were aboard these ships. Action was also taken against African leaders who refused to agree to British treaties to outlaw the trade, for example against ‘the usurping King of Lagos ’, deposed in 1851. Anti-slavery treaties were signed with over 50 African rulers.

 Of course, what was also (horribly) unique about the Western slave-trade was the scale (the millions shipped from Equatorial Africa to another continent in a relatively short period of time) and, that it eventually became a racist affair, discriminating against blacks by enslaving only black Africans, whereas previous slave trading had not discriminated based on the color of the skin.

What is unique about America in particular, is the unfair treatment that black  citizens received in Democrat controlled States , under Jim Crow Laws, AFTER emancipation (which is, after all, the real source of the whole controversy because otherwise, just about everybody on this planet can claim to be the descendant of an ancient slave somewhere in their family tree). That does not mean that Atlantic slave-traders were justified in what they did, but placing all the responsibility solely on them is a way to absolve all of the others – including the particularly heinous African princes and potentates who willingly sold their own people into bondage.

 Also, it is worth noting that the death rate among the white crews of the slave ships – approximately 20% – was higher than the rate among black slaves (15%) because slaves were more valuable than sailors but nobody has written books and filmed epics about those sailors – often unwillingly enrolled or even kidnapped – a practice known as “being shanghaied” in ports around Europe – many when they were drunk. 

To this day, too many Africans, Arabs and Europeans believe that the African slave trade was an aberration of the United States of America, not their own invention. Unfortunately, too many mis-educated Americans believe this also, when in fact, by the time the slave trade was abolished in the West, there were many more slaves in Africa – black slaves of black owners – than in the Americas.

While the Atlantic slave trade was dying down around 1850, the trans-Saharan and East African slave trades were at their peaks. In the 1850s the Ottoman Empire, under British pressure, nominally outlawed slavery in much of the Islamic world, but this had only a minor effect on the slave trade.

One of the main justifications European powers gave for colonizing nearly the entire African continent during the 1880s and 1890s was the desire to end slave-trading and slavery in Africa. It may have been one reason but, the exploitation of raw-material wealth was the primary reason.

The continuing anti-slavery movement in Europe became an excuse and a casus belli  for the European conquest and colonization of much of the African continent. It was the central theme of the Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference of 1889-90 . In the late 19th Century, the “Scramble for Africa” saw the continent rapidly divided between imperialistic European powers, seeking to control trade in raw materials necessary for modernity but a secondary focus of all colonial regimes was the suppression of slavery and the slave-trade.

By the dawn of the 20^th Century, European forces had defeated most African slave-trading states, and the trans-Saharan and East African slave-trades came to an end. In response to this pressure, Ethiopia officially abolished slavery in 1892; the Sokoto Caliphate abolished slavery in 1900 and the rest of the Sahel in 1911. By the end of the colonial period they were mostly successful in this aim, though slavery is still very active in Africa even though Africa has gradually moved to a wage economy. Recall that this was happening at the same time as the Plains Indians Wars were ending in America – marshalling in the end of the Epoch of Conquest.

Although colonial authorities began outlawing slavery in some African territories as early as the 1830s, the complete legal abolition of slavery in Africa did not take place until the first quarter of the 20^th Century. By that time, however, slavery had been deeply ingrained in most African societies for centuries, and thus the practice continued illegally.

Independent nations attempting to westernize or impress Europe sometimes cultivated an image of slavery suppression. Slavery has never been eradicated in Africa, and it commonly appears in African states, such as Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, Niger and the Sudan, in places where law and order have collapsed.

Slaves who became liberated often did so by escaping and going to the colonial authorities or by simply leaving the areas in which they had been held to take up residence elsewhere. In some places, enslaved persons held that status throughout their lives, despite the legal prohibition. It was not until the 1930s that the visible slave trade in Africa was almost totally eliminated.

Next time: Slavery in America.

Abolitionist to Progressivist

Who were the defilers of the Constitution? The answer was not apparent at this time in the early 1950s. They were the intellectual descendants of the influential “progressive movement” leaders of the latter half of the 19^th Century, inspired by the revolutionary spirit of European socialists of the 1840’s and 50’s, who embraced the coercive challenges presented by Marks and Engels in the mid-19^th Century’s The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.

 These “progressives” took up the “defense” of the popularly ‘exploited’ poor to advance their causes through coercion in institutions like labor unions, the arts, the press and government – people like Eugene Debs, William Jennings Bryan, Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, George Norris, Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, the anarchist Emma Goldman, ‘Mother’ Jones, Margaret Sanger and, perhaps the most influential, John Reed. Their great coercive triumph was the 16^th Amendment to the Constitution which established the ultimate coercive power and the gateway into every facet of the People’s lives for the federal government – the confiscatory income tax and the infamous and terrifying tax audit – a virtual and random “fishing expedition” into any American’s most private affairs and a chilling threat to every small business owner.

 Their history begins with good intentions in 1789 with the ratification of the Constitution and its provision in Article I that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person. Out of this grew the Abolitionist Movement which helped coerce the States into tortured compromises in 1820, 1850 and 1854 that led to the Civil War, eventually resulting in the utter destruction of the slave industry and the amending of the Constitution (13^th and 14^th Amendments) in the late 1860’s. Some veterans then moved on to other “causes”.

 From the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength in the northern United States, led by free blacks such as  Fredrick Douglas and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the radical newspaper The Liberator, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who published the bestselling antislavery novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1852). While many abolitionists based their activism on the belief that slaveholding was a sin, others were more inclined to the non-religious “free-labor” argument, which held that slaveholding was regressive, inefficient and made little economic sense.

 Free blacks and other antislavery northerners had begun helping fugitive slaves escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the 1780s. This practice, known as the Underground Railroad, gained real momentum in the 1830s and although estimates vary widely, it may have helped anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 slaves reach freedom. The success of the Underground Railroad helped spread abolitionist feelings in the North; it also undoubtedly increased sectional tensions, convincing pro-slavery southerners of their northern countrymen’s determination to destroy the institution that sustained them.

America’s explosive growth – and its expansion westward in the first half of the 19^th Century – would provide a larger stage for the growing conflict over slavery in America and its future limitation or expansion. In 1820, a bitter debate over the federal government’s right to restrict slavery over Missouri’s application for statehood ended in a compromise: Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state and all western territories north of Missouri’s southern border were to be free soil. Although the Missouri Compromise was designed to maintain an even balance between slave and free states, it was able to help quell the forces of sectionalism only temporarily.

In 1850, another tenuous compromise was negotiated to resolve the question of territory won during the Mexican War. Four years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act  opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict, leading pro- and anti-slavery forces to battle it out (with much bloodshed) in the new state of  Kansas. Outrage in the North over the Kansas-Nebraska Act spelled the downfall of the old Whig Party and the birth of a new, all-northern Republican Party.

By the mid-19^th Century, America’s westward expansion, along with a growing abolition movement in the North, would provoke a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody American Civil War.

The root cause of the civil War, or, depending upon your politics, the War of Northern Aggression, or the War of the Rebellion, we all know – although some are loathe to admit it – was the elephant in the “political room” – slavery.

But, for those who actually fought for the Southern Cause, the reasons were varied. Some were standing up to a federal government they believed were abusing the Constitutional confederation of the States by treating some States more equally than others. A case in point:

“The Fugitive Slave Law or Fugitive Slave Act was passed by the Congress on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern slave-holding interests and Northern Free-Soilers.

The Act was one of the most controversial elements of the 1850 compromise and heightened Northern fears of a “slave power  conspiracy”. It required that all escaped slaves were, upon capture, to be returned to their masters and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate in the enforcement of this law. Abolitionists  nicknamed it the “Bloodhound Law” for the dogs that were used to track down runaway slaves.

But, why was this law required by Southern politicians and patricians. Because, by 1843, several hundred slaves a year were successfully escaping to the North, making slavery an unstable institution in the border States causing economic strain on planters in the South.

The earlier Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 was a Federal law which was written with the intent to enforce Article 4, Section 2 of the United States Constitution, which required the return of runaway slaves. It sought to force the authorities in free States to return fugitive slaves to their masters but was largely ignored in the North.

Many Northern states wanted to circumvent the Fugitive Slave Act. Some jurisdictions passed “personal liberty laws”, mandating a jury trial before alleged fugitive slaves could be moved; others forbade the use of local jails or the assistance of state officials in the arrest or return of alleged fugitive slaves. In some cases, juries  refused to convict individuals who had been indicted under the Federal law. [an early and proud example of “jury nullification”].

The Missouri Supreme Court routinely held with the laws of neighboring free states, that slaves who had been voluntarily transported by their owners into free states, with the intent of the masters’ residing there permanently or indefinitely, gained their freedom as a result. The Fugitive Slave Law dealt with slaves who escaped to free states without their master’s consent. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), that states did not have to offer aid in the hunting or recapture of slaves, greatly weakening the law of 1793.

After 1840, the black population of rural Cass County, Michigan grew rapidly as families were attracted by white defiance of discriminatory laws, by numerous highly supportive Quakers, and by low-priced land. Free and runaway blacks found Cass County a haven.

Their good fortune attracted the attention of southern slaveholders. In 1847 and 1849, planters from Bourbon and Boone counties in northern Kentucky led raids into Cass County to recapture runaway slaves. The raids failed but the situation contributed to Southern demands in 1850 for passage of the strengthened Fugitive Slave Act.

In response to the weakening of the original fugitive slave act, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 penalized officials who did not arrest an alleged runaway slave, and made them liable to a fine of $1,000 (about $29,000 in present-day value). Law-enforcement officials everywhere were required to arrest people suspected of being a runaway slave on as little as a claimant’s sworn testimony of ownership. The suspected slave could not ask for a jury trial or testify on his or her own behalf. In addition, any person aiding a runaway slave by providing food or shelter was subject to six months’ imprisonment and a $1,000 fine. Officers who captured a fugitive slave were entitled to a bonus or promotion for their work.

Slave owners needed only to supply an affidavit to a Federal marshal to capture an escaped slave. Since a suspected slave was not eligible for a trial, the law resulted in the kidnapping and conscription of free blacks into slavery, as suspected fugitive slaves had no rights in court and could not defend themselves against accusations. [The highly acclaimed recent film, 12 Years a Slave is based upon one freeman’s kidnapping under this regimen.]

The Act adversely affected the prospects of slave escape, particularly in states close to the North. One study finds that while slave prices rose across the South in the years after 1850 it appears that “the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act increased prices in border states by 15% to 30% more than in states further south”, illustrating how the Act altered the chance of successful escape.

In 1855, the Wisconsis Supreme Court became the only state high court to declare the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional, as a result of a case involving fugitive slave Joshua Glover and Sherman Booth, who led efforts that thwarted Glover’s recapture. In 1859 in Ableman v. Booth, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the state court.

In November 1850, the Vermont legislature passed the “Habeas Corpus Law,” requiring Vermont judicial and law enforcement officials to assist captured fugitive slaves. It also established a state judicial process, parallel to the federal process, for people accused of being fugitive slaves. This law rendered the federal Fugitive Slave Act effectively unenforceable in Vermont and caused a storm of controversy nationally. It was considered a “nullification” of federal law, a concept popular in the South among states that wanted to nullify other aspects of federal law, and was part of highly charged debates over slavery.

Noted poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier had called for such laws, and the Whittier controversy heightened angry pro-slavery reactions to the Vermont law. Virginia governor John B. Floyd  warned that nullification could push the South toward secession, while President Millard Fillmore threatened to use the army to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act in Vermont. No test events took place in Vermont, but the rhetoric of this flare-up echoed South Carolina’s 1832 nullification crisis and Thomas Jefferson’s 1798 Kentucky Resolutions.

“Jury Nullification” occurred as local Northern juries acquitted men accused of violating the law. Secretary of State Daniel Webster was a key supporter of the law as expressed in his famous “Seventh of March” speech. He wanted high-profile convictions. The jury nullifications ruined his presidential aspirations and his last-ditch efforts to find a compromise between North and South.

Webster led the prosecution against men accused of rescuing  Shadrach Minkins in 1851 from Boston officials who intended to return Minkins to his owner; the juries convicted none of the men. Webster sought to enforce a law that was extremely unpopular in the North, and his Whig Party passed him over again when they chose a presidential nominee in 1852.

The Fugitive Slave Law brought the issue home to anti-slavery citizens in the North, as it made them and their institutions responsible for enforcing slavery. “Where before many in the North had little or no opinions or feelings on slavery, this law seemed to demand their direct assent to the practice of human bondage, and it galvanized Northern sentiments against slavery.” Moderate abolitionists were faced with the immediate choice of defying what they believed to be an unjust law, or breaking with their own consciences and beliefs. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to highlight the evils of slavery.

Many abolitionists defied the law openly. Reverend Luther Lee, pastor of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of Syracuse, New York, wrote in 1855:

I never would obey it. I had assisted thirty slaves to escape to Canada during the last month. If the authorities wanted anything of me, my residence was at 39 Onondaga Street. I would admit that and they could take me and lock me up in the Penitentiary on the hill; but if they did such a foolish thing as that I had friends enough in Onondaga County to level it to the ground before the next morning.

This was far from empty rhetoric. Several years before, in the Jerry Rescue, Syracuse abolitionists freed by force a fugitive slave who was to be sent back to the South; they successfully smuggled him to Canada. The case of Anthony Burns was an example of an unsuccessful attempt by opponents of the Fugitive Slave Law to use force to free a captured slave. Other famous examples include Shadrach Minkins in 1851 and Lucy Bagby in 1861, whose forcible return in 1861 has been cited by historians as important and “allegorical.” Pittsburgh abolitionists organized groups whose purpose was the seizure and release of any slave passing through the city, as in the case of a free black servant of the Slaymaker family, erroneously “rescued” by black waiters in a hotel dining room.

To many in the South, there never appeared to be any organized or effective response to these acts of nullification by the federal government. Another case:

Have you ever heard of the Morrill Act? Probably not. Although it is known best for its creation of “Land-Grant Colleges”, it also eliminated the ability of States to trade with any country by creating a tariff on such trade, which the Southern States did not believe was within the enumerated powers of the Constitution.

To add insult to injury, more than 80% of the tariff revenues were spent on Northern public works and industrial subsidies – “further enriching the North at the expense of the South”. It was such an inequity that even Northern newspapers proposed that the Act was “at the root of much of the problems with making it impossible for the South to stay in the Union.”

In fact, many of the Civil War era soldiers, both North and South, did not fight to preserve slavery or to abolish it. Historians, over the years, have poured over thousands of letters from these soldiers writing home that have been discovered in estates all over the country. According to these historians, only a small fraction of the letters revealed the soldier’s intent was to preserve slavery.

So, why did so many soldiers fight for the Confederacy? Because they felt that they had been illegally invaded by the North. Virtually always, when a captured Confederate soldier was asked why he was fighting the answer was; “Because you’re here.” They were defending their home and their families. It was that simple.

In fact, only four of the eleven States that seceded from the Union identified in their respective declarations of secession the intent to preserve slavery. Tennessee is a case in point. When Tennessee held its convention on secession, they voted not to secede. It was only after President Lincoln requested troops to suppress the rebellion that Tennesseans reconvened their convention and voted to secede rather than take up arms against their neighbors, the last State to do so – and the first to be returned to the Union after being overrun by General U.S. Grant in 1862. There is much more on this subject dispersed throughout this treatise.

After stunning victories at Forts Henry and Donaldson in Northwest Tennessee, Grant sent Navy gunboats and soldiers up the Cumberland River to Nashville, the State capitol.When they arrived, all of the officials, including Governor Austin Peay, had abandoned the city leaving only terrified residents.

Though the Union victory freed the nation’s four million slaves, the legacy of slavery continued to influence American history, from the tumultuous years of percolating racial hatred, both black and white alike, personified in the Jim Crow Laws during Reconstruction (1865-77) to the civil rights movement that emerged in the 1960s, a century after emancipation.

The end of the war brought the end to slavery in America with the passage of the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th amendments to the Constitution. The abolitionists had won and although the victory was bittersweet with the institution of “Jim Crow” laws in the South, the true believers in social justice had to move on to new campaigns. They now became “progressives” and social justice became social engineering.

In 1848 the Women’s Suffrage Movement began in Seneca Falls, NY and gained strength and influence after the Civil War when women were denied equal treatment in the 14^thand 15^th Amendments. Some also took up additional “causes” under the “progressive” banner.

 The Industrial Revolution came late to America but was hurried along by the Civil War. By the early 1870’s the industrialization of America was in full swing and laborers rightly began to feel exploited by industrialists who were literally inventing an entirely new world. Led by the National Labor Union, which was formed in 1866, American workers organized around ideas from European labor organizations which were decades ahead of America in industrialization and in socio-political movements that went along with it, most importantly – socialism – the ultimate form of elected coercive government. Like the suffragettes, other movements with other “causes” joined labor under the “progressive” banner.

 For context from widely available sources, more about socialism;

” The revival of republicanism (not the political party) in the American Revolution of 1776 and the egalitarian values introduced by the French Revolution of 1789 gave rise to socialism as a distinct political movement.

 Modern socialism originated from an 18^th Century political movement, primarily in France, that criticized the effects on society of a capitalism of nascent industrialization and the large holdings of private property by the gentry. The political philosophies of several groups survived the French Revolution to provide tactical inspiration for later social movements.

 Since the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1848, the sympathy for the troubles of historic allies – specifically, the French working class – by many Americans during America’s industrialization was a significant inspiration in the tactical development of the intense social and political competition between labor and capital that marked the history of the Progressive Movement in America.

 In the French Revolution of 1789, the sans-culottes [French for “without pants” – their “uniform” being knee-length britches] were essentially an organization of Paris street-gangs rallied to provide critical crowd-support for the radical and far-left factions of the successive revolutionary governments. Shifting crowds of militant sans-culottes also provided the strength behind some of the more violent and visceral events of the revolution.

 Another group was the Jacobin Club. Lead by lawyer Maximillien Robespierre, the Jacobins established a revolutionary dictatorship. The Jacobin dictatorship was known for enacting the Reign of Terror, which targeted speculators, monarchists  and traitors, and led to many beheadings. When the moderate bourgeois Jacobin Club took over the National Convention in 1793, many sans-culottes even supported Robespierre’s bloody Reign of Terror.

 The rise and fall of Napoleon and numerous governments after him left France, along with most of Europe, unprepared to deal with the historic changes the Industrial Revolution would bring to the poor and middle classes alike. By 1848, European population had exploded and the Industrial Revolution had changed the very nature of life on the Continent. With changes came social unrest and growing conflict between a disorganized working urban poor and a disorganized middle class of land owners and industrialists, large and small. Both wanted reforms.

 To this environment came two German social philosophers writing in London, Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, who published The Communist Manifesto in 1848 – criticizing the idealistic aspects of socialism and instead advocating socialism as a phase of industrialization which would come about through social revolution instigated by class conflict, sometimes violent, within capitalism.

 Using their organizing principles, isolated worker insurrections became more organized on the Continent. While much of the impetus came from the middle classes, much of the cannon fodder came from the working classes. Tens of thousands died. They were immortalized as revolutionaries in Victor Hugo’s classic, Les Miserables, in 1862. The uprisings throughout Europe failed within a year.

 By the latter Nineteenth century, “socialism” had come to signify opposition to capitalism and advocacy for an alternative, post-capitalist, system based on some form of social ownership. Alongside this there appeared other movements such as anarchism, Marxist-Leninism and social-democracy as well as the confluence of socialism with anti-imperialist and anti-racist struggles around the world.

 The socialist movement came to be the most influential worldwide movement and political-economic worldview of the 20^th Century. Today, socialist parties and ideas remain a political force with varying degrees of power and influence in all continents except North America – leading national governments in many countries.

 In America, since Chief Justice John Marshall had been so successful in defining the centrality of private property (originally, concepts known as jus publicum and jus privatum) basic tenets of the Justinian Code – named for the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian in the early 6^th Century and revived during the Enlightenment in the 17^th Century), a distinct middle class had arisen. Class-warfare never became a popular political movement in America because of the many examples of upward social mobility based on personal initiative and the sanctity of private property – not to mention that half of the country didn’t have to pay for labor at all.

Young American readers, especially boys, were treated to wonderful examples of the value of how hard work and determination could lead to success in America by nearly 100 volumes of “juvenile novels” written by author Horatio Alger beginning in 1864.

Horatio Alger, Jr. (1832 –1899) was a prolific 19^th Century American author, best known for his many juvenile-targeted novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of middle-class security and comfort through hard work, determination, courage, and honesty. His writings were characterized by the ” rags-to-riches” narrative, which had a formative effect on America during post-Civil War industrialization and the Gilded Age.

Essentially, all of Alger’s novels share the same theme: a young boy works hard work to escape poverty. Often though, it is not the hard work itself that rescues the boy from his fate, but rather some extraordinary act of bravery or honesty, which brings him into contact with a wealthy elder gentleman. The boy might return a large sum of money that was lost or rescue someone from an overturned carriage, bringing the boy – and his plight – to the attention of some wealthy individual.

Alger secured his literary niche in 1868 with the publication of his fourth book, Ragged Dick, the story of a poor bootblack’s rise to middle-class respectability. This novel was a huge success. His many books that followed were essentially variations on Ragged Dick and featured casts of stock characters: the valiant hard-working, honest youth, the noble mysterious stranger, the snobbish youth, and the evil, greedy squire.

In the 1870s, Alger’s fiction was growing stale. His publisher suggested he tour the American West for material to incorporate into his fiction. Alger took a trip to California.The trip had little effect on his novels: he remained mired in the tired theme of “poor boy makes good”. However, the scene was changed from the urban world to the American West. Nevertheless, “Horatio Alger” type success stories became part of the American lexicon and remain so today.

As a result of America’s middle-class mentality, socialism never gained a foothold in the United States. However, a movement with similar goals was born in the years immediately following the Civil War during the infancy of the great industrialization of America. This cousin of socialism became known as Progressivism.

 The Progressives in America believed in the Hamiltonian (from the first Secretary of the Treasury – Alexander Hamilton) concept of positive (read activist, coercive) government, of a national government directing the destinies of the nation at home (at the expense of the States) and abroad. They had little but contempt for the strict construction of the Constitution by conservative judges, who would restrict the power of the national government to act against social evils and to extend the blessings of democracy to less favored groups.

 Famous Americans, such as Jane Addams, Samuel Gompers, Wm. Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Robert La Follette and Walter Lippmann, among many others, all contributed to the success of the Progressive agenda.

 Among these, Theodore Roosevelt was the most interesting and influential. His biography is well known but, in short, he could best be described in the phrase “When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. He never met an issue that he didn’t want to bludgeon into submission and no one could influence TR to do anything other than what he wanted to do the way he wanted to do it.

 Unlike most Progressives, he was born to a life of privilege and was inspired by his family and social class to a life of philanthropy and service. To him, progressive ideals were not a political philosophy but were a lifeline for his chronic and compulsive energy. Although a frail youth, he idealized his father and, to live up to his expectations, he drove himself to overcome his health issues and, in a true-life story of “mind over matter”, literally willed himself to robust health with what can only be described as “hyper-kinetic” energy.

 One incident in his youth with which he never came to terms was the failure of his father to serve in the Union cause during the Civil War – choosing instead to buy his way out of service for a few hundred dollars. As TR matured, in all probability, he saw this as the abuse of power in a corrupt system and it probably inspired him to a life of service fighting corruption and abuse of power wherever he found it.

 This mindset and energy was eminently well suited to success in his first appointive government offices as a U.S. Customs Officer in Washington, D.C. and as a New York City Police Commissioner, tasked with rooting out corruption and abuse of power in both locales. However, his success at the local level in NYC and at the State level as Governor of New York did not translate well at the national level when the U.S. Constitution tended to get in the way of “progressive friendly” national reforms he desired to implement.

 His signature policy of ending the power of the industrial trusts is the best example of his activist philosophy. Believing that the trusts – cabals of industrialists and financiers – were anti-capitalist because they amounted to monopolies that prevented fair competition between large and small businesses, he threatened the use of federal government power through “Executive Order”, like nationalizing the coal mines or extorting the meat packing industry, to achieve his ends – the end of the trusts.

 It was his desire to make the American experience a winning one for all – what he called his “Square Deal” in the 1904 Presidential election campaign – that separates him from the European socialist-inspired progressives who desired to create an “equal” experience for all by taking from the rich and giving to the poor – thereby creating winners and losers – something anathema to Theodore Roosevelt.

 In the 1912 election campaign, as the candidate of the Progressive Party, he was “out- progressived” by the Democrat candidate, Woodrow Wilson, and was badly beaten in the election.

Next time: Progressivism in 20th Century America.

The American Industrial Revolution

n 1800, America was undergoing not one, but two revolutions: one political, the other economic. The forces unleashed by these twin revolutions; democracy, industrialization, and capitalism, developed in tandem and transformed the look and character of the country. There’s a world of difference between the America of Thomas Jefferson and that of Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1801, when Jefferson was inaugurated, the United States was a new, underdeveloped country of just over five million people. Although it was a country shaped by immigration, immigrants from one country, England, made up half the population. Some adventurous pioneers had moved west of the Appalachian Mountains, but America was still a seacoast settlement, hugging the Atlantic shoreline.

It was a prosperous nation, but it lagged far behind England, which was industrializing furiously. And with only 10% of its population living in cities and towns, it was still overwhelmingly agrarian. In 1801, all this was about to change. And the change would be sudden, explosive, and deeply disorientating. In the next century, the nation’s boundaries would expand enormously, the result of a relentless westward push. And as America expanded, immigration, capitalism, and technology would reshape the land, old places as well as the new ones. One aspect of the society would remain constant – religion.

In 1901, when Theodore Roosevelt became President, more than 77 million Americans lived in a continental empire that stretched from sea to sea. And Roosevelt’s America was a veritable nation of nations, a melting pot for over 30 nationalities – all striving to be “American”. Forty percent of Americans still worked on farms in 1900, but an equal number lived in cities. And by this time, America had surpassed England as the leading industrial nation on earth.

The forces responsible for these sweeping transformations were gathering as the 19^th Century began. The American Revolution broke the back of state-regulated mercantile capitalism and opened the way for a market revolution that produced the world’s most dynamic economic system.

This was the kind of capitalism that Adam Smith, the famous Scottish economist, had called for in his master work, The Wealth of Nations, which was published, interestingly, in 1776. A child of the Enlightenment, Smith argued that the production of wealth would increase dramatically if individuals were allowed to pursue their enlightened self-interest, with little interference from government. And in serving their own interests, individuals would serve the public interest, unconsciously, as if guided, as he said, by an “invisible hand”. Better the unseen hand than the hand of the State.

 Pursue is the key word in Smith’s hypothesis. His meaning was clear – pursue meant to actively labor for ones just desserts – not to wait in anticipation of others’ largesse. Here were radically new ideas; but not to Americans. Smith’s theory coincided with a long-developing American tradition of individualism and opposition to government interference. The sovereign States of America, not Britain, would be the great testing ground of Adam Smith’s ideas.

 For the most part, they have held true – including the destructive power of unenlightened selfish interests – better known as favoring government handouts over individual initiative and imagination (a perverse interpretation of “others’ largesse”, since the “other” is not charitable organizations or citizens but the legally bound taxpayer).

 Almost everyone recognizes Smith as the founder of laissez-faire economics. Less well known are his ideas about the division of labor. The division of labor, he insisted, would greatly improve the efficiency of workers. To make his point, Smith described the workings of a pin factory.

 “One person making a pin could make perhaps one in a day, maybe a few more. But if the job were divided into ten parts and given to ten workers, each performing a specialized function, a small factory could turn out 48,000 pins a day.” This was the assembly line a century and a half before Henry Ford was credited with inventing it.

_{“Smith’s attack on mercantilism (see below) and his reasoning for “the system of natural liberty” in The Wealth of Nations are usually taken as the beginning of classical political economy. Smith devised a set of concepts that remain strongly associated with capitalism today. His theories regarding the “invisible handi” are commonly interpreted to mean individual pursuit of self-interest unintentionally producing collective good for society.} 

_{It was necessary for Smith to be so forceful in his argument in favor of free markets because he had to overcome the popular mercantilist sentiment of the time. He criticized monopolies, tariffs, duties, and other state enforced restrictions of his time and believed that the market is the most fair and efficient arbitrator of resources.}

_{Mercantilism was a nationalist form of early capitalism that came into existence in the late 16th Century. It is characterized by the intertwining of national business interests to state-interest and imperialism, and consequently, the state apparatus is utilized to advance national business interests abroad. An extreme form can be found in Mussolini’s fascism in Italy. It was not the idea of a state interest (national strategy) in the economy that was disturbing to Smith, it was the action of the state in support of the strategy (regulation) that would overwhelm individual initiative, inventiveness and industry.}

_{An example of this was the colonists living in America who were only allowed to trade with and purchase goods from their respective mother countries (e. g. Britain, Portugal, France).}

_{Mercantilism was driven by the belief that the wealth of a nation is increased through a positive balance of trade with other nations; it corresponds to the phase of capitalist development sometimes called the primitive accumulation of capital.”}

“At the turn of the 19^th Century, America began to change almost precisely in accordance with Smith’s ideas. What we commonly call the American Industrial Revolution was actually two converging revolutions: a technological revolution based on the division of labor, and a commercial revolution powered by a deep faith in economic individualism and the unrestrained competition of a fledgling capitalism. [These were revolutionary and untried ideas that became successful because of the committed courage of the People – something to think about in today’s atmosphere of PLDC fear of economic individualism and competition from the private sector.]

And the concept of competition was key because it prevented the government from limiting the vision, passion, determination, talent, ingenuity, courage and hard work of millions of Americans who were born to succeed through their own wits and wisdom. Here are some thoughts about competition that may provide balance in the PLDC orchestrated public debate that prefers an end to competition in schools because it makes non-winners feel bad.

Firstly, competition for the necessities to sustain life itself – food, shelter, security – is the oldest instinct that human beings have. Competition can be traced back to the beginning of the human species. At first, early humans had to compete with other creatures for food and shelter. Then, they had to compete with their “enemies” for land and other resources. Gradually, they had to compete with their neighbors and other tribal members for higher social ranks and better positions.

Those who excelled at competition survived – those that didn’t, didn’t – they were probably eaten. It is in our DNA and motivates us every day in every way. As the access to these necessities of life has become routine for most, Americans have taken the instinct-to-compete to other core activities – the quest for knowledge, success, family – and in leisure activities. As we shall see below, competition is necessary for mental health as well as for the health of our society.”

“If there is no competition, there will be no social progress. In this sense, human beings are used to competing with each other. Because of this, human beings have attained more [success] than other creatures on this planet. Because of competition, our society becomes more and more developed, and our science and technologies become more and more advanced. 
 
Secondly, if there is no competition, there is no peace. If all human beings were born with the personalities of cooperation, there would be no oppression, no war, or no killing in the world. [But, that is not the case.] Based upon the history of human beings, all peaceful lives [have] been achieved through struggles and competitions. If the Franks had not fought against militant Islam [bad], there would be no Western civilization [good]. If the British and Americans did not fight against Hitler, nobody knows how many years the Second World War would have lasted. If the blacks did not protest the [oppression by some – not all] whites in the United States, nobody knows when they would achieve election rights and vote for their candidates.
 
[There is an] old saying, “competition and cooperation are twin brothers”. But peaceful cooperation rarely appears if you do not compete first and [stand up to] your rivals. In this world, absolute equality does not exist. If you want your rival to cooperate with you, you must win him over with reality first, then direct him to the better course. Otherwise, your rival will [choose to] compete with you sooner or later – in a manner of his choosing.

Which process is stronger and more important? Which process shall we encourage and which discourage? A competition which makes sure that humans are still going forward, or cooperation which assures that we are still human beings and can solve common problems together. Hence, the dilemma that has always existed, a natural choice with which human beings have been confronted. Fortunately, it was the greatest skill of humans to combine these two paradoxically–contradictory processes to produce the [Western Civilization] we are living in now and to keep improving it.
 
Competition can be defined as a process where one [side] rivals the other by reaching certain objectives [first]. Long before human beings appeared on earth, other creatures were competing with each other for survival. The advent of humans didn’t change the basic import of competition. They started to compete not only with other animals around them but also with other humans. Competing in this environment allowed humans to take control of it and produced improvements, innovations and modernizations that we humans have enjoyed throughout evolution.
 
However, competition and cooperation are merely two sides of the same coin. When competition is a rivalry between two or more to reach a certain aim, cooperation is an agreement to reach that aim together. Competition makes sure that only strong competitors survive regardless of the purpose, cooperation insures that that the survival is the purpose. An organization of people [cooperating through competition] for the purpose of reaching a common goal can be loosely described as a society, and society is possible only by cooperation. Cooperation is the force that assured a continuation of progress of human beings.  

Competition [therefore], is also a form of social interaction. According to Tischler, “… competition is a form of conflict in which individuals or groups confine their conflict within agreed upon rules. Competition is a common form of interaction in the modern world, in sports, the marketplace, education system and the political system.
 
When a child starts to grow and interact with other children they start experiencing competition. Parents should not protect their children from competition [but, should project their children into competition]. The child can learn some valuable lessons from healthy competition, such as how to play by the rules, that will serve him or her well as they get older. According to Sara Wilford, the director of the Early Childhood Center and Art of Teaching graduate program at Sara Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y; ” … young children are just starting to understand that rules are the basis of any game [- especially the game of life].

When everyone makes up his or her own rules, no one can play together, and the game isn’t enjoyable. The earlier the child learns this lesson, the more fun he/she’ll have playing with other children, as they grow older.

Of course, anything in life taken to an extreme is bad and so is the case with competition. Although it can be valuable learning opportunities, competitive situations can easily get out of control. A good example that competition is getting out of control is when the child thinks winning is more important than playing the game rather than view the two equally.

Competition is a reality of life, so people – beginning as children – must be taught how to compete. Some are naturally competitive, some aren’t but, if they are never exposed to competition as they develop, they will be unprepared for life. A society that does not value competition – because some might not feel good about being on the short end of a competition – does not value its own survival and a government that supports such an attitude is failing in its first duty to its citizens.”

Returning to our consideration of the American Industrial Revolution – it began with an act of economic and industrial espionage. In 1789, an English mechanic named Samuel Slater left his country for America, disguised as a farmer. In his head were the closely guarded secrets of British textile manufacturing. The following year, Slater built a mill from memory at Pawtucket, Rhode Island with the backing of two local capitalists and “Yankee ingenuity” was born.

“It was America’s first factory. Slater’s mill was a place for making textiles, the woven fabrics used for clothing and hundreds of other products. The cotton cloth was manufactured by spinning machines powered by water. Since America had not yet discovered great deposits of coal, as had the British, its embryonic industrial revolution would be a revolution primarily in water-powered, textile production.

Slater’s biggest problem was finding laborers. Unable to induce farmers to work in his mill, he hired orphans and poor children who were wards of the town government, paying them 25 cents a week. This was America’s first industrial work force. A new age had begun, and it was the cause of concern and debate.

When Alexander Hamilton heard about Slater’s mill, he celebrated its birth a year later in his famous Report of Manufacturers,which laid out the advantages of industrial development for the United States. Thomas Jefferson was less sanguine about Slater’s mill.

Jefferson loved science and technology. He experimented with mechanical gadgets and labor-saving devices, and turned his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, Monticello, into a wonder place of technological contrivances. But Jefferson worried about the new factory system that had sprung up in England and was now threatening to make its appearance in America.

Jefferson associated industrialization with Manchester, England, the recklessly expanding city that had become the center of the British cotton industry. It was a city of fabulous wealth and unimaginable wretchedness, a place where factory smoke literally blacked out the sun, where rivers had been turned into black sewers and workers into virtual industrial slaves. On a visit there, the French writer, Alexis de Tocqueville, captured Manchester’s paradoxical combination of economic ingenuity and social backwardness. “From this foul drain,” he wrote, “the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world…. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its’ most brutish; here civilization works its miracles, and civilized man is turned back almost into a savage.”

Jefferson knew that America couldn’t escape industrialization, but he hoped that American factories could be placed in the countryside and worked by farm families with strong democratic values. That way, we could industrialize without endangering our republican institutions and creating an entrenched urban proletariat. Samuel Slater tried this family system of production in New England after his expanding system of factories ran out of children to employ.

Along with hundreds of other early industrialists, Slater built agricultural villages around his mills to attract displaced farm families. The fathers worked in supervisory and ancillary jobs, and the women and kids in the mill itself. So American industry began in the country, not in the city, and remained there for a long time, for that’s where there was falling water to power the new machines.

The most promising experiment in rural industry was a model town that had been built from scratch in the 1820s on a beautiful spot at the falls of the Merrimack River north of Boston. It was named after another industrial spy, Francis Cabot Lowell. Lowell, a Boston merchant, had gone on a tour of British textile mills, memorized their technological secrets, and on his return to America, began building a textile empire. Lowell became its queen city.

What made Lowell unique was its work force: it was made up almost entirely of young, unmarried women, recruited from local farms. To attract them, a wholesome, handsomely landscaped community was constructed, the American answer to Manchester. For a promising moment, America looked like it would be the Great Exception, the only country to industrialize without savaging the environment or debasing the workers.

The “girls of Lowell” lived in clean, orderly boarding houses supervised by matrons. They worked long hours, but they were farm girls who were used to a seventy-hour work week. What was new, and hard to adjust to, was the tight discipline and the new work routine. The women worked to the pace of their power-driven machinery and to the rhythms of the clock.

The bells in the cupolas over the mills awoke them and called them to their jobs, to meals, and to bed in the evening. And the work was divided into boring, highly specialized tasks. But there were compensations. In their off hours, the women attended uplifting lectures, formed improvement groups, and edited their own magazine, the Lowell Offering.

For the mill owners, the secret to the system was the rotating work force. When workers built up a dowry or helped send a brother through college, they left. This made it easier to handle increasing complaints about pay or the speed-up of the work. There were several strikes in the 1830s, but the agitators weren’t [allowed by the mill operators and their beneficiaries in the local government to remain] there for long.

The Lowell Experiment was killed, not by labor discontent, but by technological change. In the 1830s, steam power began to replace water power in the mills, steam generated by newly-exploited Pennsylvania hard coal, or anthracite. Slater was the first to build large steam driven factories, but soon other cotton mills made the conversion to coal and steam.

Steam power meant bigger mills, faster production runs, closer supervision of the workers, and a greater division of labor in the interest of efficiency. And when this happened, the young Yankee women began to leave the mills. They were replaced by Irish workers fleeing the Potato Famine of the 1840s. The difference was –  the Irish women stayed behind. They were too poor to leave.”

It was here also that the nation’s public school systems emerged – not necessarily to educate the masses but, to enable them to read, write and calculate in order to process work-orders for the mills and perform other clerical functions essential for economic progress and profit.

By 1850, Lowell was a squalid mill town, a miniature Manchester, with the industrial slavery Jefferson had warned about. Fortunately, Jefferson was gone by then – dying on the same day as his friend and fellow Founding Father, John Adams – on July 4, 1826 – 50 years to the day after the announcement of the Declaration of Independence.

Most historians have it wrong. It was the end of the Lowell Experiment, not the beginning that marked the advent of full-scale industrial change in America: an age of coal, steam, and immigrant labor. While the factory system was evolving in the Northeast, the entire country experienced a market revolution that tied the expanding nation together with roads, canals and railroads, and created modern capitalism.

“This commercial revolution revolved around an axis that ran from New York on the coast to Chicago in the heartland. It’s in this geographic corridor, and the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys that serviced it, that the commercial revolution of the early 19th century was concentrated. In 1830, when they began to be make contact with one another, New York and Chicago were vastly different places. New York was a thriving commercial center of almost a quarter of a million people.

It had a spectacular gift from nature; a spacious, sheltered, deep-water port that was connected to the interior of the country by the majestic Hudson River. And its aggressive merchants exploited this location to maximum advantage, making New York the country’s leading export and import center, America’s capital of commerce. New York was a city of the sea with an economic empire that was about to get far larger.

In 1825, the Erie Canal had opened for business from Buffalo on Lake Erie, to Albany at the northern end of the navigable portion of the Hudson River. This made New York the only port on the Atlantic coast linked by water to what was then the American West, a thinly settled area across the Appalachians and extending out to a small settlement at the southern end of Lake Michigan – Chicago.

The Erie Canal lowered shipping costs tremendously. Now pioneering farmers in the West could ship their grain, lumber, and salted pork through frontier lake ports like Detroit, all the way to New York. And New York could trans-ship them almost anywhere in the world with its magnificent merchant fleet. The canal that helped make New York the country’s busiest saltwater port would soon make Chicago the country’s busiest freshwater port.

But in 1830, there was no city of Chicago. Chicago then was an isolated fur trading post on the far edge of American settlement, a dismal prairie swamp located on a small river, the Chicago River, that fed into Lake Michigan. The richest man in New York, the visionary Jacob Astor, had extended his fur trading empire out to Chicago, but the destinies of these two places would be more tightly connected in future years.

Nature had paved the way, eons ago, during the last Ice Age. When the glaciers that covered the northern part of the continent began to melt, they created a rushing river that swept south from the Great Lakes and cut a gap through the Appalachian Mountains – the Mohawk Pass. Early, intrepid settlers, the Erie Canal, and later, railroads running between New York and Chicago, passed through this gap.

Because of the Mohawk Pass, there’s no mountain barrier between New York and Chicago, as there is between other eastern ports and Chicago. This gave New York a huge advantage over its rival Eastern cities and united the economic destinies of New York and Chicago.

The completion of the Erie Canal prompted the newly-formed state of Illinois to begin a canal project of its own. It would build a canal from the Chicago River down to the Illinois River, which flows into the Mississippi. This canal would create an all-freshwater highway from New York down to New Orleans, with Chicago situated at one of its key junctions. It was rumors of this canal that first brought New York speculators to Chicago to assess its economic potential.

What they saw didn’t impress them. Because of the drainage problems, most of the place was underwater for a good part of the year. And most of the inhabitants were wild, hard-drinking French Canadians who had married into local tribes. The place had three raucous taverns but no church or schoolhouse.

The only thing Chicago had going for it was its location, but that was enough to interest New York money. Chicago’s river gave it a protected harbor. And that river ran south and would, with the building the new canal, become an open door into the Tallgrass Prairie, the most splendidly endowed agricultural region in the world. With the canal, Chicago could become a jumping-off point for the settlement of a great part of the Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase.

Next time: The story of Chicago – a quintessential American story.