Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

111. THE CONTRADICTIONS
OF NATION & CLASS
1 Crisis Within the Slave System
The slave system had served Amerika well, but as
the settler nation matured what once was a foundation
stone increasingly became a drag on the growth of the new
Euro-Amerikan Empire. The slave system, once essential
to the life of white society, now became worse than an
anachronism; it became a growing threat to the well-being
of settler life. While the settler masses and their bourgeois
leaders still intended to exploit the oppressed to the fullest
extent, increasingly they came to believe that one specific
form of exploitation-Afrikan slavery-had to be shattered.
Nothing is gained without a price. As "natural"
and "Heaven-sent" as the great production of Afrikan
slave labor seemed to the planters, this wealth was bought
at the cost of mounting danger to settlers as a whole. For
the slave system imported and concentrated a vast, enemy
army of oppressed right in the sinews of white society. This
was the fatal contradiction in the "Slave Power" so clearly
seen by early settler critics of slavery. Benjamin Franklin,
for example, not only gave up slave-owning himself, but in
1755 wrote that slavery should be banned and only Europeans
permitted to live in North America.(l) Twenty years
later, as the Articles of Confederation were being debated,
South Carolina's Lynch stated that since Afrikans were
property they shouldn't be taxed any more than sheep
were. Franklin acidly replied: "Sheep will never make insurrection!
"(2)
Thomas Jefferson of Virginia probably personified
this contradiction more visibly than any other settler.
He is well-known in settler history books as the liberal
planter who constantly told his friends how he agonized
over the immorality of slavery. He is usually depicted as an
exceptional human being of great compassion and much
intellect. What was pushing and pressuring his capitalist
mind was the contradiction between his greed for the easy
life of the slave-master, and his fear for the safety of his
settler nation.(3)
He knew that successful revolution against settler
rule was a possibility, and that in a land governed by exslaves
the fate of the former slave-masters would be hard.
As he put it: "... a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an
exchange of situation is among possible events.. ." That is
why, as U.S. President in 1791, he viewed the great Haitian
Revolution led by Toussaint L'Ouverture as a monstrous
danger. His Administration quickly appropriated relief
funds to subsidize the French planters fleeing that island.
Jefferson's agile mind came up with a theoretical
solution to their "Negro problem"-gradual genocide.He
estimated that returning all slaves to Afrika would cost
Amerika $900 Million in lost capital and transportation expenses-a
sum 45 times the annual export earnings of the
settler economy at the time! This was an impossible cost,
one that would have bankrupted not only the planters but
the entire settler society as well.
President Jefferson's solution to this dilemma was
to take all Afrikan children away from their parents for
compact shipment to the West Indies and Afrika, while
keeping the adults enslaved to support the Amerikan
economy for the rest of their lives.* This would
theoretically generate the necessary profits to prop up the
capitalist economy, while still moving towards an all-white
Amerika. Jefferson mused: "...the old stock would die off
in the ordinary course of nature ... until its final disappearance.
" The President thought this Hitlerian fantasy
both "practicable" and "blessed".
It is easy to understand why this fantastic: plau
never became reality: the oppressor will never willingly
remove his claws from the oppressed so long as there are
still more profits to be wrung from them. Jefferson himself
actively bought more and more slaves to maintain his
pseudo-Grecian lifestyle. As President he signed the 1808
bill allegedly banning the importation of new slaves in
part, we suspect, because this only raised the price he could
obtain from his slave-breeding business.
Jefferson gloated over the increase in his wealth
from the birth of new slaves: " ... I consider the labor of a
breeding woman as no object, and that a child raised every
two years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring
man." It sums matters up to note that President Jefferson,
who believed that the planters should restrict and then
wipe out entirely the Afrikan colony, ended his days owning
more slaves than he started with.(4)
The Northern States had slowly begun abolishing
slavery as early as Vermont in 1777, in the hopes that the
numbers of Afrikans could be kept down. It was also widely
believed by settlers that in small numbers the "childlike"
ex-slaves could be kept docile and easily ruled. The
explosive growth of the number of Afrikans held prisoner
within the slave system, and the resultant eruptions of
Afrikan struggles in all spheres of life, blew this settler illusion
away.
The Haitian Revolution of 1791 marked a decisive
point in the politics of both settler and slave. The news
from Santo Domingo that Afrikan prisoners had risen and
successfully set up a new nation electrified the entire
Western Hemisphere. When it became undeniably true
that Afrikan peoples armies, under the leadership of a 50
year-old former field hand, had in protracted war outmaneuvered
and outfought the professional armies of the
* Although Jefferson never admitted it, most of these
20 children would probably never survive.