Slavery and Capitalism

"On the White mountains of New Hampshire we find the sugar of Louisiana, and in the plains beyond the Mississippi the cotton cloths of Rhode island are domesticated." ~ Editor, Hezekiah Niles, 1827

The capital stored in slaves exceeded the combined value of all the nation's railroads and factories.

19th-Century Americans had little difficulty grasping slavery's capitalism. Advocates of national economic development presumed the reciprocal relationship of the slaveholding and non-slaveholding states as well as the mutual interest of the slaveholder, manufacturer, and merchants. 

Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison recognized the North as the partner in inequity and credited the panic of 1837 with delivering a deserved ruin to those New York City mercantile firms engaged in commerce with the South.

While the relationship of slavery to British economic development has generated a robust endowment, research on slavery's importance to American capitalism has been sporadic at best. 

Here are a few literary examples:

• Philip Foner's 1941 account of New York merchants deep ties to the cotton trade.
• A brief mention of the value of North-South trade in Douglas C. North's 1961 volume of economic history.
• Barrington Moore's reference of the importance of slave-grown cotton to American capitalism. 
• James Oakes's 1982 argument for slave-holders as robust devotees of liberal conceptions of private property.
• John Asworth's 1995 effort to link slave resistance in the South to middle-class sensibility in the North.
• Adrian Davis's powerful naming of slavery's "sexual political economy" of coerced reproduction.
• Robin Einhorn's 2006 study of slavery as foundational to the American love of low taxes offer select examples of empirical work that embeds slavery in US economic development.