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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Amerika that would become a great civilization akin to<br />
Greece and Rome, a slave Empire led by the necessarily<br />
small elite of aristocratic slave-owners.<br />
These retrogressive dreams had definite shape in<br />
plans for expansion of the "Slave Power" far beyond the<br />
South. After all, if the Spanish Empire had used armies of<br />
Indian slaves to mine the gold, silver and copper of Peru<br />
and Mexico, why could not the Southern planter<br />
bourgeoisie colonize the great minefields of New Mexico,<br />
Utah, Colorado, and California, with millions of Afrikan<br />
helots sending the great mineral wealth of the West back to<br />
Richmond and New Orleans? These superprofits might<br />
finance a new world Empire, just as they once did for semifeudal<br />
Spain.<br />
Why could not the plantation system be extended-not<br />
just to Texas, but to swallow up the West,<br />
Mexico, Cuba, and Central America? If masses of<br />
Afrikans already sweated so profitably in the factories,<br />
mills and mines of Birmingham and Richmond, why<br />
couldn't the industrial process be an integral part of a new<br />
slave Empire that would bestride the world (as Rome once<br />
did Europe and North Afrika)?<br />
The planter capitalists who tantalized themselves<br />
with these bloody dreams had little use for great numbers<br />
of pennyless European immigrants piling up on their<br />
doorstep. While Northerners saw the increasing dangers of<br />
a slave economy, with its mounting, captive armies of<br />
Afrikans, the planters saw the same dangers in importing a<br />
white proletariat. The creation of such an underclass<br />
would inevitably, they thought, divide white society, since<br />
the privileged life of settlerism could only stretch so far. Or<br />
in other words, too many whites meant an inevitable<br />
squabble over dividing up the loot.<br />
In 1836 Thomas R. Dew of William & Mary College<br />
warned his Northern cousins that importing Europeans<br />
who were meant to stay poor could only lead to class<br />
war: "Between the rich and the poor, the capitalist and the<br />
laboror.. . When these things shall come-when the<br />
millions, who are always under the pressure of poverty,<br />
and sometimes on the verge of starvation, shall form your<br />
numerical majority, (as is the case now in the old countries<br />
of the world) and universal suffrage shall throw the<br />
political power into their lands, can you expect that they<br />
will regard as sacred the tenure by which you hold your<br />
property?"(l7)<br />
These were prophetic words, but in any case the<br />
deadlock between these two factions of the settler<br />
bourgeoisie meant that both sides carried out their separate<br />
policies during the first half of the 1800s. While the merchant<br />
and industrial capitalists of the North recruited the<br />
dispossessed of Europe, the Southern planters fought to<br />
expand the "Slave Power". Edmund Ruffin, the famous<br />
Virginia planter, smugly boasted that: "One of the greatest<br />
benefits of the institution of African slavery to the<br />
Southern states is its effect in keeping away from our territory,<br />
and directing to the North and Northwest, the<br />
hordes of immigrants now flowing from Europe."(l8)<br />
Such is the blindness of doomed classes.<br />
EQUAL TO ANY IN THE WORLD ! ! 1<br />
MAY BE PROCURED<br />
. .-- ..~ ~ -<br />
At FROM $8 to $12 PER ACRa<br />
Near Yarkets, Schools, Railroadr, Churcher, and all .the blerringr of Civiliution.<br />
1,200,000 Acrea, in Farms of 40,80, 120, 160 Acre8 and upwar&, in<br />
ILLINOIS, the Garden State of Amerioa,<br />
Tlie Illinois Central Railroad Company oDr, ON LONG CREDIT, the beautflu1 and lertilr PRAIRIE UNDS<br />
lying along tire whole litkc of their Railroad, 700 MILES IN LENGTH, u n the mrt Faoorabk<br />
T-, lor enabling Yamaer.~, Jl.n~acturm.s, Yechonicr. and to nmh<br />
Jm thcmrclver and their fnnbiliu a competcnn~, and a HOME t y can<br />
call THEIR OWN, as will a p r from the Jolloying<br />
dalnnotts :<br />
23