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.12
For most of the 1600s, the planters depended mainly on a predominantly white workforce of English, Scottish, and Irish servants.13 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.14 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.15 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.16 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.17
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.18
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.19
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.20 Blacks made up one in five of the total population at the time of the American War of Independence in 1776.21
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.22
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.”23 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.”24
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.25
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.26 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.27
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