Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

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