As historian Edward B Baptist noted in a Vox interview in 2019, the 19th century was the period “when you see the US go from being a colonial, primarily agricultural economy to being the second biggest industrial power in the world”. Add to that the many accounts that bankers in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston held, assets that enabled loans for more whites to buy more land and more enslaved Black people.Īnd add to that the venture capital necessary to build textile mills in New England, for shipping ventures to sell and trade tobacco, rice, and cotton to mill owners in Britain. Add to this the wealth and power produced from land speculation and the buying and selling of humans from Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia to Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. There was the capital generated from owning land and slaves. Plantation slavery was truly an American ideal, and not just a Southern one. By the 1850s, plantation slavery existed in Kansas and threatened to exist in New Mexico and Arizona.
Then, in annexing Texas, and eventually, taking all of the Southwestern US from Mexico. Soon after, in Missouri and Florida, with the support of the US Army and killers of Indigenous people like eventual seventh US president, Andrew Jackson. First in Kentucky and Tennessee, then, after the Louisiana Purchase and the War of 1812, in Alabama and Mississippi. As the new US murdered its way to more land, these men repeated the patterns that grew cash-crop plantation life into the America’s economic engine. Between white vigilantism, law enforcement, and unbridled capitalism, the violence of this first American Dream is very much embedded in everything the US is in 2021.Īmericans willfully forget that millions of white men lustfully stalked this first American Dream before, during, and after the US became a nation-state. Plantation slavery was a system of policing Black bodies and movements, of rape and torture, for profit and perverse pleasure. It contained all the racist, misogynistic, classist, and narcissistic elements synonymous with American dreaming.
It included taking the land and the lives of Indigenous Americans, kidnapping and enslaving Africans, codifying African women’s wombs into property, and growing tobacco, cotton, indigo, and sugarcane as cash crops. Make no mistake, the first American Dream was plantation slavery, or wealth American style. Keep reading list of 4 items list 1 of 4 As vote nears, ‘horrific racism’ mars Australian Voice referendum campaign list 2 of 4 ‘They’re going to come at you’: Paola Egonu on racism and volleyball list 3 of 4 Paola Egonu: Volleyball Star and Advocate for Change list 4 of 4 US sues Tesla over alleged ‘pervasive racial’ abuse against Black workers end of list
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