Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
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The Charleston conspiracy of 1822, led by Denmark<br />
Vesey (a free carpenter), was an organization of urban<br />
proletarians-stevedores, millers, lumberyard<br />
workers, blacksmiths, etc.. Similarly, the great conspiracy<br />
of 1856 was organized among coal mine, mill and factory<br />
workers across Kentucky and Tennessee. In its failure,<br />
some 65 Afrikans were killed at Senator Bell's iron works<br />
alone. It was particularly alarming to the settlers that those<br />
Afrikans who had been given the advantages of urban living,<br />
and who had skilled positions, just used their relative<br />
mobility to strike at the colonial system all the more effectively.(ll)<br />
From among the ranks of free Afrikans outside<br />
the South came courageous organizers, who moved<br />
through the South like guerrillas leading their brethren to<br />
freedom. And not just a few exceptional leaders, such as<br />
Harriet Tubman; in 1860 we know that five hundred<br />
underground organizers went into the South from Canada<br />
alone. On the plantations the Afrikan masses resisted in a<br />
conscious, political culture. A letter from a Charleston,<br />
S.C. plantation owner in 1844 tells how all the slaves in the<br />
area secretly celebrated every August 1st - the anniversary<br />
of the end of slavery in the British West Indies.(ll)<br />
Abolishing slavery was the commonly proposed<br />
answer to this increasing instability in the colonial system.<br />
The settler bourgeoisie, however, which had immense<br />
capital tied up in slaves, could hardly be expected to take<br />
such a step willingly. One immediate response in the 1830's<br />
was to break up the Afrikan communities in the cities. In<br />
the wake of the Vesey conspiracy, for instance, the<br />
Charleston City Council urged that the number of male<br />
Afrikans in the city "be greatly diminished".(l2) And they<br />
were.<br />
Throughout the South much of the Afrikan<br />
population was gradually shipped back to the plantations,<br />
declining year after year until the Civil War. In New<br />
Orleans the drop was from 50% to 15% of the city population;<br />
in St. Louis from 25% to only 2% of the city population.(l3)<br />
The needs of the new industrial economy were far<br />
less important to the bourgeoisie than breaking up the<br />
dangerous concentrations of oppressed, and regaining a<br />
safe, Euro-Amerikan physical domination over the key urban<br />
centers.<br />
One Northern writer traveling through the South<br />
noted in 1859 that the Afrikans had been learning too<br />
much in the cities: "This has alarmed their masters, and<br />
they are sending them off, as fast as possible, to theplantations<br />
where, as in a tomb, no sight or sound of knowledge<br />
can reach them. "(14) In addition to the physical restrictions,<br />
the mass terror, etc. that we all know were imposed,<br />
it is important to see that settler Amerika reacted to the<br />
growing consciousness of Afrikans by attempting to isolate<br />
and physically break up the oppressed communities. It is a<br />
measure of how strongly the threat of Revolution was rising<br />
in the Afrikan nation that the settlers had to restructure<br />
their society in response. The relative backwardness of the<br />
Southern economy was an expression of the living contradictions<br />
of the slave system.<br />
2. Slavery vs. Settlerism<br />
Slavery had become an obstacle to both the con- awaited, that could only be held by millions of loyal settinued<br />
growth of settler society and the interests of the tlers. After Haiti, it was increasingly obvious that a "thin,<br />
Euro-Amerikan bourgeoisie. It was not that slavery was white line" of a few soldiers, administrators and planters<br />
unprofitable itself. It was, worker for worker, much more could not safely hold down whole oppressed nations. Only<br />
profitable than white wage-labor. Afrikan slaves in in- the weight of masses of oppressors could provide the Eurodustry<br />
cost the capitalists less than one-third the wages of Amerikan bourgeoisie with the Empire they desired. This<br />
white workingmen. Even when slaves were rented from was a fundamental element in the antagonistic, but symanother<br />
capitalist, the savings in the factory or mine were biotic, relationship of the white masses to their rulers.<br />
still considerable.For example, in the 1830's almost onethird<br />
of the workers at the U.S. Navy shipyard at Norfolk<br />
The slave system had committed the fatal sin of<br />
were Afrikans, rented at only two-thirds the cost of white restricting the white population, while massing great<br />
wage-labor.(l5)<br />
numbers of Afrikans. In the 1860 Census we can see the<br />
disparity of the settler populations of North and South.<br />
But the Amerikan capitalists needed to greatly ex- Excluding the border States of Delaware and Maryland,<br />
pand their labor force. While the planters believed that im- the slave States had a median population density of a bare<br />
porting ney millions of Afrikan slaves would most pro- 18 whites per sq. mile. The most heavily populated slave<br />
fitably meet this need, it was clear that this would only add State-Kentucky-had a population of only 31 whites per<br />
fuel to the fires of the already insurrectionary Afrikan col- sq.mile. In sharp contrast, Northern States such as Ohio,<br />
ony. Profit had to be seen not in the squeezing of a few New Jersey, and Massachusetts had populations of 59, 81,<br />
more dollars on a short-term, individual basis, but in terms and 158 whites per sq. mile respectively.(l6) This disparity<br />
of the needs of an entire Empire and its future. And it was was not only large, but was qualitatively significant for the<br />
not just the demand for labor alone that outmoded the future of the Euro-Amerikan Empire.<br />
slave system.<br />
It is no surprise that the planter bourgeoisie view-<br />
Capitalism needed giant armies of settlers, waves ed society far differently than did the New York banker or<br />
and waves of new European shock-troops to help cofiquer Massachusetts mill owner. The thought of an Amerika<br />
and hold new territory, to develop it for the bourgeoisie, crowded with millions and millions of poverty-stricken<br />
and garrison it against the oppressed. The Mississippi European laborers, all sharing citizenship with their<br />
Valley, the Plains, the Northern territories of Mexico, the mansion-dwelling brothers, horrified the planter elite.<br />
Pacific West-a whole continent of land and resources 22 They viewed themselves as the founders of a future