11/05/2025
In the century of the country’s founding, British colonies in the New World imported 1.5 million enslaved Africans. That is more than three times the number of European immigrants who sailed westward searching for some version of Jefferson’s vision. By the middle of the 19th century, the four million people of African descent in the U.S. made it the largest slave society in the world.
But these demographics are only one piece of the underappraised role of Africans and their descendants in building early America. Equally obscure for many is just how central that role was—a crucial factor of one of the biggest economic takeoffs in history. The role is even shunted aside by prominent experts.
By 1820, the country produced 167.5 million pounds, already making slave-produced cotton the dominant economic product of the early republic. Across the ocean, cotton had begun to produce more wealth for Britain than iron, coal or wool. By 1830, 1 in 6 British workers labored in textiles. By the eve of the Civil War, America’s prodigious cotton cultivation had grown by orders of magnitude once again, nearing two billion pounds. Taken alone, cotton generated 61% of the value of the country’s exports.
Meanwhile, many other industries flourished through their association with the cotton boom. These ranged from hauling and shipping to the grading, storage and brokerage of commodities, to the countless consumables derived from slave-grown sugar to textiles and clothing.
Enslaved Black people, therefore, proved crucial to many corners of the economy—as did their utility as a sure store of value and a source of credit, both locally in the South and through Northern banks, which thrived on this sort of finance.
SOURCE:
https://www.wsj.com/economy/slavery-us-economy-role-94ba2ad0?mod=RSSMSN
