The following is the first chapter of Ahmed Shawki’s Black Liberation and Socialism (2005). Footnotes have been removed. Other chapters of this book will be posted in the coming weeks.

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“Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilization. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map. Being an economic category, slavery has existed in all nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it openly into the New World.” —Karl Marx

The labor of Blacks, forced to come to the New World as slaves, was essential to the economic development not only of the new colonies, whether in the Caribbean, Latin America, or North America, but also the major powers of the “Old World.” But slavery did not come innocent of ideological trappings. A historically distinct ideology designed to justify and maintain the oppression of the slaves developed with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade.

Racism and racial oppression have been features of everyday life for Blacks in the United States for more than 350 years. But the persistence of racism is not inevitable and racism, certainly in its modern form, has not always existed. Far from being the unavoidable result of interaction between different peoples, racism and racial oppression emerged in Europe’s transition from feudalism to capitalism. Ancient and feudal societies before capitalism were able to do without this form of oppression.

Specifically, racism emerged in Western Europe and the New World as a consequence of the slave trade, as the ideological justification for slavery. Prejudice against strangers (xenophobia) and distinctions between “barbarian” and “civilized” existed, but did not take the form of modern racism. So for example, North American Indians whom European settlers first encountered had a conception of “outsider,” i.e., non-members of the band, tribe, or nation. But the fact that it carried no racial connotation is shown not only by the practice of adoption of Indian captives of other nations into the tribe to replace lost loved ones, but also of the adoption of captured white Europeans as full-fledged members of the tribe. “Thousands of Europeans are Indians,” complained Hector de Crévecoeur in his 1782 Letters from an American Farmer, but “we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans!”

As historian Frank Snowden has argued:

Color prejudice has been a major issue in the modern world…. Notable, therefore, is the fact that the ancient world did not make color the focus of irrational sentiments or the basis for uncritical evaluation. The ancients did accept the institution of slavery as a fact of life; they made ethnocentric judgments of other societies; they had narcissistic canons of physical beauty; the Egyptians distinguished between themselves, “the people,” and outsiders; and the Greeks called foreign cultures barbarian. Yet nothing comparable to the virulent color prejudice of modern times existed in the ancient world. This is the view of most scholars who have examined the evidence and have come to conclusions such as these: the ancients did not fall into the error of biological racism; black skin color was not a sign of inferiority; Greeks and Romans did not establish color as an obstacle to integration in society; and ancient society was one that “for all its faults and failures never made color the basis for judging a man.”

The slave system that developed in the New World was different in fundamental respects. Chief among these was the fact that it was “racially” based—Africans were the slaves—even if the reasons for the enslavement of Blacks were economic and not racial. The initial attempts to meet the enormous—and ever-increasing—demand for labor in the New World included attempts to enslave Native peoples and whites. When these attempts failed, Africans became the chief source of labor.

“It has been said of the Spanish conquistadors,” writes Eric Williams, one of the pioneering historians of New World slavery in From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, “that first they fell on their knees, and then they fell on the aborigines.” So after claiming their colonies forGod and the King, the Spaniards set about pressing into servicethe local indigenous population to pump out the colonies’ wealth for the benefit of the Spanish crown.

The Indians were assigned in lots of fifty, a hundred, or more, by written deed or patent, to individual Spaniards to work on their farms and ranches or in the placer mines for gold dust. Sometimes they were given to officials or to parish priests in lieu of part of their annual salary. The effect was simply to parcel out the natives among the settlers to do with as they pleased.

The results were devastating:

The results are to be seen in the best estimates that have been prepared of the trend of population in Hispaniola. These place the population in 1492 at between 200,000 and 300,000. By 1508 the number was reduced to 60,000; in 1510, it was 46,000; in 1512, 20,000; in 1514, 14,000. In 1548 Oviedo doubted whether five hundred Indians of pure stock remained. In 1570 only two villages survived of those about whom Columbus had assured his Sovereigns, less than eighty years before, that “there is no better nor gentler people in the world.”

African slave labor proved more plentiful and cheaper than either Native Americans or white indentured servants and eventually slavery was confined exclusively to Blacks. According to Williams,

Here, then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but the cheapness of the labor. As compared with Indian and white labor, Negro slavery was eminently superior…. The features of the man, his hair, color and dentifrice, his “subhuman” characteristics so widely pleaded, were only the later rationalizations to justify a simple economic fact: that the colonies needed labor and resorted to Negro labor because it was cheapest and best. This was not a theory, it was a practical conclusion deduced from the personal experience of the planter. He would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labor. Africa was nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn was to come.

Unfree Labor in the North American Colonies

The North American colonies started predominantly as private business enterprises in the early 1600s. Unlike the Spanish, whose colonies served to export precious metals back to the colonial center, settlers in the colonies that became Maryland, Rhode Island, and Virginia were planters.8 The settlers’ chief aim was to obtain a labor force that could produce the large amounts of indigo, tobacco, sugar, and other crops that would be sold back to England. From 1607, when Jamestown was founded in Virginia, to about 1685, the primary source of agricultural labor in English North America came from white indentured servants after the settlers failed to build a sustained workforce from the indigenous population.

After their terms expired, many white indentured servants sought to acquire land for themselves. Black slaves worked on plantations in small numbers throughout the 1600s. But until the end of the 1600s, it cost planters more to buy slaves than to buy white servants. Some Blacks who lived in the colonies were free, some were slaves, and some were servants. Free Blacks in Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Vermont had voting rights. In the 1600s, the Chesapeake society of eastern Virginia had a multiracial character:

There is persuasive evidence dating from the 1620s through the 1680s that there were those of European descent in the Chesapeake who were prepared to identify and cooperate with people of African descent. These affinities were forged in the world of plantation work. On many plantations Europeans and West Africans labored side by side in the tobacco fields, performing exactly the same types and amounts of work; they lived and ate together in shared housing; they socialized together; and sometimes they slept together.

For most of the 1600s, the planters depended mainly on a predominantly white workforce of English, Scottish, and Irish servants. But planters found the white workforce was becoming increasingly restive and expensive. As the 1600s was a time of revolutionary upheaval in England, many of the servants began demanding their rights. And those who finished their terms often became direct competitors to the planters in agriculture. With costs of servants increasing, planters asked colonial administrations to begin widespread importation of African slaves.

By the end of the seventeenth century, a planter could buy an African slave for life for the same price as a white servant with a ten-year contract. This decision to turn to a racially specified labor force had enormous human consequences. Between 1640 and 1800, more than four million West Africans were forcibly transferred to the New World.

Perhaps ten to fifteen million Black slaves made it to the Americas by the 1800s, an estimated one-third of the total captured in Africa. The conditions of transport in the Middle Passage (the journey made by slave ships from Africa across the Atlantic) were horrendous, with human beings stacked and chained like firewood, and disease and suffocation killing hundreds of thousands.

Many, if not most, historians place race rather than the demand for labor as the central driving force for slavery. The crudest version of this argument says that slavery developed because of European racism. The more sophisticated version is almost identical except that it acknowledges the need for labor and concludes that slavery was settled upon as a solution, and in particular the enslavement of Africans because of the depths of racism. But these arguments invert the process. As historian Barbara Fields has argued:

Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the United States as primarily a system of race relations—as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco. One historian has gone so far as to call slavery “the ultimate segregator.” He does not ask why Europeans seeking the “ultimate” method of segregating Africans would go to the trouble and expense of transporting them across the ocean for that purpose, when they could have achieved the same end so much more simply by leaving the Africans in Africa. No one dreams of analyzing the struggle of the English against the Irish as a problem in race relations, even though the rationale that the English developed for suppressing the ‘barbarous Irish’ later served nearly word for word as a rationale for suppressing Africans and indigenous American Indians.

The dominant historical view of slavery places ideas—in particular, racial ideas—as the motor force of history. This view of history thoroughly underestimates the material connection between capitalism and the development of racism. Colonial slavery, however, was intimately tied to capitalist development, and was not a remnant of an older mode of production.

As Karl Marx put it:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.

Slavery and the American Revolution

U.S. slavery developed primarily in the rice and tobacco plantations of the Southern colonies. Slavery also existed in the North, although it was largely peripheral to the Northern economy. By 1776, slaves composed 40 percent of the population of the colonies from Maryland south to Georgia, but well below 10 percent in colonies to the North. Blacks made up one in five of the total population at the time of the American War of Independence in 1776.

The American Revolution did not end slavery, despite the growth of a powerful current in favor of abolition. The original draft of the Declaration of Independence in June 1776 included an attack on the slave trade as “a cruel war against human nature itself,” but it was abandoned in the final version. Northern merchants were themselves involved in the slave trade, and the use of slavery had become widespread, especially in the Southern states.

It is a paradox of the American Revolution that it cast off the chains of colonial rule, but shackled one-fifth of the population of the newly independent states in the chains of slavery. Thus American democracy and American racism emerged as “Siamese twins,” as Fields described them. In feudal societies of kings, lords, vassals, and serfs, slavery did not demand an elaborate justification, as it seemed to fit with the natural, hierarchical, and unequal order of things. But in a society that proclaimed “all men are created equal,” a systematic explanation for why some people were denied rights that others were entitled to needed to be developed. “That is why the slave society of the United States was the only one in the hemisphere that developed a systematic pro-slavery doctrine,” Fields concluded.

“You don’t find that anywhere else. Bondage does not need justifying as long as it seems to be the natural order of things. You need a radical affirmation of bondage only where you have a radical affirmation of freedom.” Frederick Engels made much the same point, noting the fundamental contradiction: “It is significant,” he wrote, “that the American Constitution, the first to recognize the rights of man, in the same breath confirmed the slavery of the colored races existing in America: class privileges were proscribed, race privileges sanctified.”

The leaders of the American Revolution were clear that an end to the tyranny of the British king did not mean an end to the tyranny of class rule—certainly not when they were the dominant class. Alexander Hamilton represented the views of the most aristocratic among the new ruling order:

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and wellborn, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government…. Can a democratic assembly, who annually revolve in the mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good? Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.

One of Hamilton’s proposals at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was the selection of a president and Senate for life. The Convention didn’t take his suggestions for the creation of a “permanent body” to rule and check the “imprudence of democracy.” But it did severely limit popular participation in elections. Senators were to be elected by state legislations, the president was to be elected by electors chosen by the state legislators, and the Supreme Court was to be appointed by the president. Ten of the original thirteen states limited the right to vote for members of the House of Representatives to property owners.

These limitations on the rights of the “mass of the people” were not simply an expression of the aristocratic beliefs of the Founding Fathers; nor were they primarily concerned with elections in their own right. They were, rather, an expression of the growing conflict between those who were rich and powerful and the vast majority who were neither. By 1787, the elites were acutely aware of the need to establish a strong central government to protect their interests—and to suppress popular rebellions.

The threat from below was very real. In the summer of 1786 an uprising in western Massachusetts by discontented farmers—Shay’s Rebellion—underlined the point. As one farmer put it:

I have been greatly abused, have been obliged to do more than my part in the war; been loaded with class rates, town rates, province rates, Continental rates and all rates…been pulled and hauled by sheriffs, constables and collectors, and had my cattle sold for less than they were worth…. The great men are going to get all we have and I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it, and have no more courts, nor sheriffs, nor collectors nor lawyers.

The rich and powerful that ruled America decided to close ranks and try to resolve their differences in order to establish a strong, central state. A veteran of George Washington’s army, General Henry Knox, founded an organization of army veterans who would be on alert for signs of rebellion from below. As Knox wrote to Washington in 1786 of Shay’s Rebellion:

The people who are insurgents have never paid any, or but very little taxes—But they see the weakness of government; They feel at once their own poverty, compared with the opulent, and their own force, and they are determined to make use of the latter, in order to remedy the former. Their creed is “That the property of the United States has been protected from the confiscations of Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all. And he that attempts opposition to this creed is an enemy to equity and justice, and ought to be swept off the face of the earth.”

At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the rich and powerful gathered to debate and settle their differences. The convention brought together fifty-five men, many of whom were slaveholders and some of whom considered themselves abolitionists. The question of slavery loomed large. As James Madison put it, in many of the debates “the institution of slavery and its consequences formed the line of discrimination.” The Constitution was a compromise between slaveholding interests in the South and moneyed interests in the North. The Southern ruling class knew that its wealth and power derived almost exclusively from their ownership of slaves.

The South Carolina delegation expressed this sentiment with the utmost clarity and with no hint of embarrassment. Without slaves, stated General Pinckney, “South Carolina would soon be a desert waste.” Speaking against ratification of the Constitution, Rawlin Lowndes, a delegate from South Carolina, stated, “Without Negroes, this state would degenerate into one of the most contemptible in the union…. Negroes are our wealth, our only natural resource.”

Michael Goldfield writes,

Although the Continental Congress rejected the South Carolinian attempt to place the adjective white in the Constitution, it acceded or compromised on almost every other demand. Yet, this complete capitulation in accepting the legality of slavery did not eliminate it as a major issue. Sectional disputes on how to regard Negro slavery came up over taxation (1783) and representation (1787). The Founding Fathers made a final compromise on July 12, 1787, by assigning three-fifths representation for both purposes. The three-fifths compromise had momentous consequences.

As Donald Robinson puts it, the three-fifths compromise “gave constitutional sanction to the fact that the United States was composed of some persons who were ‘free’ and others who were not.” Furthermore, he argues, it established a new idea, “new in republican theory, that a man who lived among slaves had a greater share in the election of representatives than the man who did not. With one stroke, despite the disclaimers of its advocates, it acknowledged slaver y and rewarded slave owners. It is a measure of their adjustment to slavery that Americans in the eighteenth century found this settlement natural and just.”

The main provisions in the Constitution regarding slavery can quickly be summarized: First, Congress was prohibited from outlawing the importation of slaves before the year 1808. Second, states were obliged constitutionally to return all fugitives from slavery to their owners. Third, for purposes of electoral representation and taxation three-fifths of the slaves and the free population would be counted. Later in the Constitutional Convention, the delegates agreed upon the method for electing presidents. Rejecting direct elections (because the voters couldn’t be trusted), the delegates agreed to set up an electoral college to select the president. Then, it was decided, each state would elect the president by casting a fixed number of winner-take-all electoral college votes equivalent to its total of representatives in the House. This in turn would be proportional to the state’s population— artificially boosted in the South by the three-fifths clause. Enslaved and denied a vote, Blacks added political power to their Southern white oppressors.

In order to abate the sensibilities of some of the delegates at the Convention, the words “slave” and “slavery” do not appear in the final document. Instead the document refers to slaves as “other persons” and persons “held to service or labor.” Luther Martin, a Maryland attorney who strongly argued against ratification, noted that his fellow delegates “anxiously sought to avoid the admission of expressions which might be odious in the ears of Americans.” But, they were “willing to admit into their system those things which the expressions signified.”

The Constitution was made more palatable when the first Congress, responding to pressure and criticism, passed a set of amendments known as the Bill of Rights. These amendments give the appearance that the new government was not in fact run in the interests of the rich, but rather was an institution that rose above class interests and was the guardian of everyone’s freedom to speak, to publish, to assemble, and to be tried fairly. This packaging of the amendments was designed to garner popular support for the government. The difference between appearance and reality was made clear soon enough, however. The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, passed in 1791 by Congress, provides that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Yet, only seven years after the First Amendment became part of the Constitution, Congress passed a law doing just that—the Sedition Act of 1798, passed under John Adams’ administration. As one historian put it, “The fears of men like Adams and Hamilton had been aggravated by the social unrest of the 1780s and particularly by Shay’s Rebellion in 1786. This event, however shocking it was, paled in significance when compared with the French Revolution.” The law made it a crime to say or write anything “false, scandalous and malicious against the government, Congress, or the United States or either house of the Congress of the United States or the United States President, with intent to defame said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or bring them…into contempt or disrepute, or to excite against them…the hatred of the good people of the United States.”

In 1790, Adams had already complained that “too many Frenchmen, after the example of too many Americans, pant for equality of persons and property.” Years later he recalled that the idea of a democratic government in France had always struck him as “unnatural, irrational and impracticable.” As he said then, “the French Revolution I dreaded.”

Some antislavery proponents believed that slavery would die a slow death as a result of the 1808 slave trade ban. But the enormous growth in demand for cotton—in large part due to the growth of the textile industry in Britain—ensured that the opposite took place. The prohibition by Congress against the importation of slaves after 1807 could not slow the expansion of the cotton plantations in the fifteen Southern states. Slavery had become too entrenched. In any case, the prohibition of the importation of slaves was quite different to the prohibition of slavery. Even pro-slavery advocates supported an end to the slave trade as a prudent measure to reduce the possibility of slave rebellions. The slave system would instead rely on the internal reproduction and trade in slaves.

Members of the ruling class, who had in the past expressed hostility to slavery, came to make their peace with its slow disappearance in the Northern states. In 1790, 698,000 slaves were in the United States; by the close of the century, the number had reached 893,000. An estimated 35,900 slaves still lived in the North: the Emancipation Laws41 had usually freed the children of slaves rather than slaves themselves. In New York, for instance, the Emancipation Law of 1799 freed no living slave; it merely provided for the liberty of any child born to a slave mother and only after he or she had served the mother’s master until adulthood as compensation for the owner’s future loss of property rights.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison illustrate the quandary of the antislavery wing among U.S. rulers. In private communications, Jefferson continued to express his opposition to the enslavement of so many Blacks. But, he was quick to add, the price of any change would be even greater: “We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”

James Madison, who followed Jefferson as president, did not let his personal reservations about slavery cloud his understanding of the economic significance of the slave system. Responding to a critic of slavery, he declared his total agreement “as to the evil, moral, political, and economical” of slavery. But he suggested that there could be “much improvement” in slave culture “particularly where slaves are held in small numbers, by good masters and managers.” He appealed to his critic to reconsider. After all, he argued, the risks of running a plantation were considerably smaller than those of a speculation on stocks or bonds: “look at the wrecks everywhere giving warning of the danger.” How else would the United States expand agriculturally? Madison asked: If into large landed property, where there are no slaves, “will you cultivate it yourself? Then beware of the difficulty of procuring faithful and complying laborers. Will you dispose of its leases? Ask those who have made the experiment what sort of tenants are to be found where an ownership of the soil is so attainable.”

Until the early 1790s, cultivation of cotton had been overwhelmingly concentrated in the coastal regions. The invention of Whitney’s cotton gin in 1793 made it possible to shift production and processing much further inland. By 1860, the slave population in the Southern states had grown to almost four million. U.S. exports of raw cotton grew from five hundred thousand pounds in 1793 to eighteen million pounds in 1800 and eighty-three million pounds by 1815.45 As Marx put it in Capital:

While the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, in the United States it gave the impulse for the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact the veiled slavery of the wage laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal…. Capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.

Antebellum Society

The plantation system that developed in the South was different in several respects to slavery in the Caribbean and Latin America. These differences shaped the kind of resistance that developed among slaves. Unlike Brazil, for example, where slaves who successfully escaped their plantations could find uninhabited areas and establish communities of escaped slaves, this was less likely in the United States. In the South, slaves were a minority in most states. The majority of slaves also lived on plantations whose owners had twenty or fewer slaves, in contrast to the mass plantations of the Caribbean.

The Southern society that the slave economy created was highly unequal and culturally backward. The South’s wealth, already highly concentrated among the planter class, became increasingly so in the half century before the Civil War. In 1800, one-third of white families in the region owned slaves; in 1860, only one-quarter did. In 1860, half of Southern slaveholders owned less than five Blacks, while 72 percent owned less than ten each and held approximately one-fourth of all slaves.

Only a small minority of white families in the prime cotton producing counties dominated staple output: the top 10 percent of farms there contributed over 68 percent of total cotton production. Of the farms in these counties 28 percent produced no cotton at all; half of them held no slaves. The wealth of the combined Southern states was greater than either France or Germany in 1860, and income for the wealthiest of the planter class—defined as owning fifty slaves or more—was more than sixty times the per capita income of the day. Yet, only a few thousand families made up this planting elite, and over two-thirds of the white Southern population owned no slaves at all. And unlike the successful slave revolt of Saint Domingue, where Toussaint L’Ouverture successfully used splits among the slaveholding powers to his advantage, both the North and South were committed to slavery until the 1860s.

It is important to point out that the majority of the South’s population did not have any direct interest in slavery. Fully two-thirds of Southern whites didn’t own any slaves at all. Only 1,733 white families owned more than 100 slaves each before the outbreak of the Civil War. But instead of opposing slavery, the majority of whites accepted the racist ideology of the planter class, thus tying them to the slave masters. The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, explained the reasons: “The hostility between the whites and Blacks of the South is easily explained. It has its root and sap in the relation of slavery, and was incited on both sides by the cunning of the slave masters. Those masters secured their ascendancy over both the poor whites and the Blacks by putting enmity between them. They divided both to conquer each.”

Slavery not only oppressed Black slaves, it also ensured the subordination of the poor whites, Douglass argued:

The slaveholders…by encouraging the enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the Blacks, succeeds in making the said white man almost as much a slave as the Black slave himself…. Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers. The slave is robbed, by his master, of all his earnings, above what is required for his physical necessities; and the white man is robbed by the slave system, of the just results of his labor, because he is flung into competition with a class of laborers who work without wages…. At present, the slaveholders blind them to this competition, by keeping alive their prejudice against the slaves, as men—not against them as slaves. They appeal to their pride, often denouncing emancipation, as tending to place the white working man, on an equality with Negroes, and, by this means, they succeed in drawing off the minds of the poor whites from the real fact, that, by the rich slave-master, they are already regarded as but a single remove from equality with the slave.

What Douglass describes in the South was mirrored in the North among white workers. While slavery flourished in the South, the Northern economy was entering a period of rapid expansion. The emerging labor movement of the 1830s was blunted by nativism and racism. The bulk of “native” workers reacted violently to the mass migrations of Irish workers in the 1840s and 1850s. Historian Mike Davis described the reaction of native-born workers to Irish immigrants:

“[The Irish] were met by the universal hostility of a native working class which rioted against them, evicted them from workplaces, refused them admission into trade unions, and tried to exclude them from the franchise.”

Both native and immigrant labor competed for jobs, and accepted the argument that the emancipation of slaves would “flood” the labor market with four million Blacks. Free Blacks in the North (who numbered 250,000) were excluded from all the existing trade unions. The question of slavery was thus also crucial to the working class in the North. Marx put it

succinctly: “In the United States of America, every independent workers’ movement was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor in a white skin cannot

emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.”

The status of free Blacks in the North was largely determined by conditions in the South and the threat of enslavement loomed large, especially after Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. But while the position of Blacks in the United States was determined by slavery, not all Blacks were affected equally. Even under slavery, a small Black elite that tied its interests with capitalism and set itself against those of the mass of slaves developed. According to scholar and civil rights activist Earl Ofari, “It has been estimated that in 1830 there were 3,777 Black slave masters in the United States.” While many of these slave owners purchased slaves in order to emancipate them, others hired them out for profit. In Louisiana there arose a class of wealthy Black and mixed-race planters, which, although never as numerous or as influential as the white planters, owned slaves just the same.

Historian Manning Marable explains:

Even before the Civil War, there were a number of southern Blacks who had access to property and considerable privileges. A group of over eight hundred free Blacks in New Orleans possessed property and private businesses worth nearly $2.5 million in 1836, plus titles to a total of 620 slaves. By 1860 New Orleans’s free Creole and Black elites were worth over $9 million. North Carolina free Blacks owned about one million dollars’ worth of personal property and real estate in 1860, and Virginia’s free Blacks controlled 60,000 acres of farm property.

This elite was tiny in comparison to the Southern slaveocracy, but nevertheless constituted the early class differentiation of the Black population. Moreover, as will become clear, the relatively insecure position of the Black elite—and skilled Blacks generally—became the material basis for the adoption of separatist Black capitalist solutions that at the same time sought accommodation within U.S. capitalism.