sakaisettlersocr

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