Chattel Slavery In Colonial America

Industrialization was in full force throughout most of the United States and the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 allowed the “peculiar institution” to become the most profitable industry in the world. The cotton gin streamlined the laborious task of cotton sorting. Cotton soon surpassed tobacco as the United States’ most valued export. Cotton processed in the south was processed in textile plants in New England, which was bolstered by Elias Howe’s invention of the first, cross-stitching sewing machine in 1846. Slaves were insured by northern insurance companies and clothed with “slave cloth” from textile mills. Chattel slavery drove the American economic juggernaut and built a nation. The institution was so ubiquitous that Marx commented, “Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no …show more content…
At issue was the survival of chattel slavery, Mississippi defined it’s grievance in its Declaration of Secession, “Our position is thoroughly defined with the institution of slavery— the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth” (Sanders 1861:86-8). The bourgeoisie was literally creating a new government to protect its “material interest” in the means of production. Ultimately, the Civil War brought an end to the “peculiar institution” in America. As the first, industrialized war on the continent, it utilized all of the tools of Modern Industry: infrastructure, high powered weaponry, transport and communication. The industry that supported chattel slavery resulted in the deadliest war in the history of the nation. Indeed, 620,000 Americans died over who controlled the nation’s means of production, and in 1865, the Confederacy