By Jim McMahan
February 7, 2025

The U.S. independence revolution of 1776 would have been a good time to bring enslavement to an end. Tragically it was not done. Enslavement was discussed a few years later during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. But in the end enslaved people were sold out as matters were left to individual states — laying the basis for the divide between North and South.

Enslavement was abolished in Vermont in 1777 and thereafter abolished in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey — with conditions attached to local emancipations. But overwhelmingly the enslaved Black people lived on southern plantations.

What helped shape the struggle over slavery at this time was the revolutionary impact of the capitalist production of cotton. In England the production of cotton textiles was going through revolutionary changes with the introduction of spinning and weaving machinery. And then the cotton gin was invented and introduced in the South in 1793.

The cotton gin separated the short-staple seed from the fiber with ease compared to what had been a laborious task. This greatly accelerated the clearing of the land and the growth of large scale cotton plantations.

In 1790 the U.S. was home to close to 700,000 enslaved people. But by the eve of the Civil War in 1861 that number had increased to 4 million, and almost 2.5 million of them lived in the Deep South. Most enslaved people now languished in the rapidly expanding states along the Mississippi River. And there they worked on cotton plantations where they supplied the voracious demand for enslaved labor under the expanding conditions of the capitalist industrial revolution.  Enslaved Black people were being “sold down the river” to Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.

Expansion of cotton industry and enslavement

Twice as many enslaved people were transported to the cotton frontier as had originally crossed the Atlantic on ships to North America. Families were separated and torn apart. One enslaved child in three was separated from their parents. The separations left deep emotional scars on survivors, the legacy of which remains to this day.

The expansion of the U.S. cotton industry was astonishing. In 1790 the U.S. produced 1.5 million pounds of cotton a year; by 1825 that had grown to 167.5 million pounds. By 1850 production had expanded to 2.5 million bales of cotton, each weighing about 400 pounds –  1 billion pounds!

Before 1810, enslaved people in the U.S. produced only 0.16% of the world’s cotton. This rose to more than 80% between 1836 and 1860. Had the South been a separate country in 1860, its gross domestic product would have ranked above that of France, Germany and Denmark. The banking industry of the U.S. was closely tied to the enslavement industry, and there was no clear economic division between the enslaved South and the non-enslaved North.

Huge imports of U.S. cotton flooded the port of Liverpool, England. The labor of enslaved people made possible the rapid rise of the capitalist system in England which was becoming the leading capitalist country of the world. After 1830 there were over 2,000 cotton mills and garment factories in the Manchester region alone.

The backbreaking labor of U.S. enslavement was integrated with the oppressing conditions of ‘free labor’ [wage slavery] in English garment factories — it was these conditions that Karl Marx agitated against.

The profits made by the British bourgeoisie show that England also owes a debt in reparations to Black people in the U.S. for the bounty of enslaved labor gained by corporate England along with corporate U.S.

Rebellions hit slavery

Black people always fought back against their bondage whenever possible. The great Haitian Revolution beginning in 1791 was an inspiration to Black masses in the U.S. and everywhere. Nat Turner led a rebellion in Virginia in 1831 involving a large force of fighters which killed 60 white settlers in two days. The rebellion was very violently repressed by white enslavers. This was only one part of over 200 rebellions of enslaved workers which helped spur a rising abolition movement after 1830.

Frederick Douglass, a formerly enslaved man, was a leading spokesperson and consciousness-raiser of the abolitionists. He was also a political collaborator with John Brown, who in 1859 led the raid on an arms depot at Harpers Ferry in West Virginia which pointed the way toward armed struggle against the violent enslavement system of the racist Confederacy.

It took a great Civil War, the first total war of modern times, to make the revolution for emancipation of the enslaved. A Union Army of 2.1 million suffered 360,000 deaths against a Confederacy which had suffered 260,000 deaths. This war militarily defeated the wealthy plantation system, liberating 4 million Black workers from chattel enslavement.

The enlistment of 200,000 Black soldiers and naval fighters fundamentally helped to turn the tide in the war against the racist Confederacy. One-fifth of these fighters died.

Accelerations in the means of production spur on the class struggle. Advances like the cotton gin and large industrialized plantations with workers regimented and driven to their limits brought great wealth for plantation barons and bankers but nothing but misery for the Black masses. Finally this is what causes social revolution. This is what Marxists call historical materialism. The U.S. Civil War was a military conflict between two social systems — the slavocracy and capitalism.

President Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural address in April 1865 acknowledged the debt owed by the U.S. to the enslaved people, referring to “all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil….”

This is an acknowledgement of the debt owed to Black people for 250 years of producing the great fortunes of plantation barons and their financial backers. Added to that are generations of Jim Crow discrimination followed by the New Jim Crow era accompanied by the prison-industrial complex and George Floyd-type murders and treatment under state repression, especially the role of the police. The annual U.S. gross domestic product of over 21 trillion dollars has more than enough resources to pay this debt to African Americans!

Sources for this article: “Freedom, the Overthrowing of Slave Empires” by James Walvin; “From Slavery to Freedom,” Third Edition, by John Hope Franklin.