(The following chapter contains instances of overt white supremacism, slavery, the slave trade and mistreatment of slaves, which, just to make it clear to absolutely everyone, are absolutely vile things to do)
America
“It was thought, at the time of the drafting of the Philadelphia Constitution, that the biggest issue of the nascent United States would be slavery. To these effects, provisions relating to slavery, such as the Three-Fifths Compromise and the ban of the slave trade starting in 1808, were placed on the Constitution with the intent to ensure that all States would be reasonably happy with the status of slavery within each state, while agreeing to some basic elements in relation to international slavery and the establishment of a phasing-out system of slavery in the United States.
This was possible, most importantly, because of the generalized decline of the Southern economy, due to the fact that the South’s economy required very intensive labor due to the difficulty of the slave trade, and could not compete with the larger populations of the Nile River and the Indian subcontinent. Therefore, slavery in the early 1800s seemed far weaker than it would later in the United States; the Southern economy, further devastated by constant occupation, war and slave uprisings, led to the fact that the United States South’s cotton output decreased consistently every year, both in general terms as well as proportional to other cotton exporters, between 1790 and 1830. However, after the end of the War of the Supremes, this started to turn around sharply. The Carolinian Confederacy had started heavily subsidizing plantation farms, ensuring that those in the three Southern states would not suffer the devastation of the Whig West or Virginia. Once the country was mostly pacified and the Jackson Government was firmly in place, the Jacksonian government built on the previous subsidies of the Carolinian population, looking to grow the plantation system throughout the United States.
The cotton gin, however, did not act alone, and the development of slavery did not have an exclusively economic development. As economic development came to the forefront of the Jacksonian agenda at the end of the War of the Supremes, many feared the marginalization of slavers that had been present under the previous Federalist administrations would continue under Jackson. Thus, Finis Davis and other important Southern politicians (including the “disgraced” John C. Calhoun) would often look for private audiences with Jackson to lobby for the cause of slavery. However, it is still puzzling why these politicians were so concerned about the future of slavery. Had they only stared outside the windows of their carriages while strolling into the Hermitage, Jackson’s private plantation which doubled as the winter residency of the President of America during the Jacksonian epoch, would reveal that Jackson would not have the slightest interest in emancipating over two hundred of his own slaves. At the bottom of his heart, Jackson was a slaver through and through; and thus, he acted, in his own economic interests as well as what he saw were the best for the United States’ development as an agrarian (slaver) superpower.
These plantations were especially useful for the adaptation of the cotton gin into most American plantations. Although forms of the cotton gin had existed in India and the Far East since the V Century BCE, and the modern version had been invented in the 1790s by Eli Whitney, there was no widespread application of the cotton gin before the Jacksonian dictatorship in the United States, due to the general disrepair and instability of the American south, which prevented any sort of large-scale investment into the economic infrastructure of the country. However, the cotton gin was a gamechanger. Soon, productivity for each individual slave could shoot up, which entailed a great benefit to plantation farmers. With the system of plantation economy growing rapidly and heavily subsidized by the United States central government, it was no wonder that demand on slavery would increase.
The slave trade (although, inexplicably, not slavery itself) was by this point seen as a blight on nature by all European powers, including the United States. However, economic pressure would soon move the United States to change its perception of it, and the Jackson dictatorship ensured that all prohibition of the slave trade was repealed (without passing substitute laws that would legalize it, thus invoking the ire of the British and the French). The message, despite being more or less hidden under a veneer of plausible deniability, couldn’t be clearer. Scuttles of ships soon moved into the United States smuggling slaves, both from Latin America as well as from the rest of the world; most importantly, from Africa, where slave raiders began to act under a (somewhat) legal veneer for the first time in almost 20 years.
A membership card of the American Colonization Society.
The American Colonization Society’s founding of the town of Jackson, in the island of Sherbro, as an “observation outpost” supposed to oversee the nearby African coastline to found a city to take African freedmen. However, its true intention was much darker; instead it soon became a hub of the underground slave trade, kidnapping thousands of Africans from the nearby shorelines as well as from the island to bring them back to the United States. Particularly disturbing was the fact that many of those captured were former slaves taken by the British to the nearby city of Freetown in Sierra Leone. Soon, the floodgates of American importation meant the Atlantic trade would once again begin; heavily suppressed by British ships, of course, but nonetheless rather successful in bringing thousands of Africans to the United States where they would be subject to torturous slavery.
An unlikely ally of the United States in this period was the Brazilian Empire, which, unlike Colombia, which had already declared manumission of all slaves, retained the slave trade until far later in history. The Brazilians soon began openly trading with the United States in terms of slaves, exporting slaves in exchange for foreign investment, arms and other goods. In fact it is often said that the conflict between Colombia and the Brazilian Empire in 1846 was mostly a way to directly confront the relationship forming between the Brazilian Empire and the United States, although this seems as a particularly unlikely and Amerocentric view of Latin American relationships which doesn’t really hold up when considering that the Riograndese War was only intervened by the San Martín Government after the end of the Jacksonian regime. This probably is another in a long list of conspiracy theories that show Colombia as a foil to the United States and not as a country in its own right, popular in discussion groups amongst the “Papist Department Studies” in the United States and really nowhere else.
A map of Africa, 1836. Traditionally depleted areas of African territory which had been particularly raided by previous slave drives were hit particularly hard by the American and Brazilian unilateral (and mostly illegal) reopening of the slave trade. In particular, the settlement-rich area west of the Gulf of Guinea was affected by American private "filibusters", who ensured the impunity of the American government when other countries argued they were acting against international law; Brazil's naval Divisão Naval do Leste, in Cabinda, was particularly heinous, as, supposedly protecting the kingdoms of Kongo and Loango against the slave trade, they also subreptitiously brought many slaves back to the Brazilian Empire and America.
As important as the renovation of an international slave trade was, the most important element of the Jacksonian slave policy was internal. The elimination of independent State legislation after the end of the War of the Supremes had the unfortunate effect of legalizing slavery throughout the country, leading to the infamous effects of slaves moving into large Northern cities, which they thought would have both the benefits of living in a large mercantile city as well as providing a way out of the risk that being a slaver in the civil war South provided (few slavers survived the slave revolts that took over their plantations). However, the effect of the legalization of slavery was far more insidious, as it entailed that everyone born a slave would always be a slave, save express manumission, throughout the entire country. This meant the re-enslavement of thousands of freedmen who had rebelled against their slavers, fled to the North, who had been freed but were unable to prove this status in court, or simply free blacks who were born free. Black men and women throughout the North were bonded and taken to auction (children’s rights were, more or less, more tolerated in Jacksonian law enforcement; probably because children were easily to keep tabs on, which meant that once they were old enough they would be captured and auctioned off).
Furthermore, the Jackson government had authorized massive expropriations from rebels, which meant, especially to Native rebels in Muscogee (the State was notably a slave state, and therefore had a large Black population enslaved by the Civilized Tribes) and to Whigs in the West (especially in the State of Kentucky) meant that new slaves rushed into the internal market, ensuring that the high rise in demand would be met by a corresponding rise in supply (although the difficulties of kidnapping and forcing slaves into the markets entailed that prices still were very high). The arrival of new slaves from Brazil and Africa meant a rapid upswing in the slave populations. Thus, the black population of the United States rose from 18.1% in 1830 to 25.7% in 1850 (slaves, much like Natives, were not counted in the US Census, as they were not counted as people by a dreadfully supremacist Jackson government).
Native people being forced from their lands by American troops in a period of Native expropriation. Most Indians were not enslaved, but their slaves were taken and redistributed to white landowners.
It is interesting to note that Natives were enslaved throughout the Jackson government, but most of them were not exposed to the suffering of forced kidnapping and slavery, but instead carted off to the West in their own Trail of Tears. This is an interesting phenomenon, and one that has not been fully explained by historians. It is thought that a perception that Natives were too savage for hard work common amongst Americans at the time, and the low population base of Natives in comparison to plentiful Brazilian slavery, explains this. However, this does not recognize the fact that enslaving Natives would probably have been far cheaper than the risky international trade, which faced high costs
per se as well as the high risks provided by the probability of a British, French, or Colombian intervention.
In any case, in the long term, the growth of slavery during the Jackson administration cannot be understated. Plantations grew throughout the United States throughout the period, settling the entire South, and the Mississippi Valley, where cheap homesteads ensured the rapid growth of plantation economies even in territories that were not apt for cotton growing, where large plantations of grain became the north. Even in the northern X Province, where the Red River acted as the Trenton Government’s claimed border with the United Kingdom (and which actually was at the time mostly under British control), several timber plantations were created. This would leave a double mark on American history; the stain of slavery would mean it was no longer considered a purely Southern sin (although this perception of slavery as a Southern artifact started to fade even earlier, as, even before the war of the Supremes, William Henry Harrison, Wabash’s second governor, implicitly legalized slavery in his state), but also, it brought Black people to occupy every major waterway and Province within the United States, thus making the African diaspora fundamental in making America the country it is today.
Slavery covered the North, as well as the South, during the Jacksonian dictatorship. In Wabash and Mississippi, among other States in the North and West, slaves were used for a variety of jobs, such as grain farming in large plantations across the Mississippi, lumbering and the clearing of land. To this day, the coastlines of the Mississippi remain majority black as far north as the Minnesota River. Slavery would no longer become a purely Southern phenomenon.
Now, the Jacksonian policy on slavery was not an unmitigated success, even for slavers (and was definitely a blatant failure in all regards for the moral soul of the United States); in fact, in the long term, the policy probably did the institution more harm than it benefitted it in the long term. Bringing slavery to the North did not make the North “complicit in slavery, and thus force them to abandon their outlandish ideas that slavery is an evil and not a positive good”, as Finis Davis, Jackson’s Vice-President, would write; instead, it emboldened abolitionists, who now saw slavery spread up into formerly Free territories. It also galvanized the North into confronting slavery, which had been ignored as a necessary evil to maintain the unity of the country by many Northerners when it was limited to the seven (eight) southernmost States. The abolitionist movement was greatly emboldened during the Jackson administration, where its most prominent leaders engaged in direct action against slavers; John Brown, today considered the father of abolitionism, started becoming important in raiding slave plantations throughout the Mississippi, bringing freed slaves to the underground resistance that still managed a low-grade insurgency against the Jackson government in the former State of Mississippi.”
-Slavery in the United States: A Brief History, an article to
Times and Changes Magazine, Harvard Department of History.
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Colombia
Because of the general manumission law passed by the Colombian Empire in its founding, the number of slaves in Colombia had gradually dwindled through time. It was true that slaves were still allowed in the country (and would continue to be, albeit indirectly, until the 1850s); however, by 1840 the youngest slaves were no longer newborn, but were perhaps 17 or 18, thanks to Colombia’s Free Wombs Law, which entailed that any person born in Colombian territory was free. Therefore, by the time of Francista war against Haiti, it was estimated that the population of enslaved Colombians had shrunk by as much as 30% from its height just before independence, until a spike of nearly 60% after the Peace of Port-au-Prince (widely thought to be caused by slaveowners reporting more slaves than they actually had in order to get higher compensation rate for their freed slaves).
I propose that the reduction of slavery was not as large as posited by traditional Colombian historiography. While the Law of Free Wombs did help many young Colombians achieve freedom, many were unfairly stripped of their right to freedom through modification of their birth certificates, through denial of their existance, or through other subterfuge means. Meanwhile, the reduction in slave population that did occur was caused through death due to wide-spread abuse of Black Africans (especially those in places like Peru and New Granada that were mostly employed in mining), as well as by a large Maroon population that would subsist throughout rural territories in Colombia.
However, the motives for Francia’s agreement with the Haitians seem much darker, considering its consequences. The liberation of the slaves was unambiguously a good thing which caused the end of an oppressive system in the Americas; however, it is also true that it was used by the Colombian Federal Government, as well as by State Governments, to gather data on Black Colombians for later deportation. An especially prescient case is that of the Deportation of the Palenque de San Basilio.
San Basilio had long been a thorn in the side of Creole authorities, both Spanish and independent. Located in the western part of the Canal del Dique, an alternate connection between the Magdalena River and the large port city of Cartagena, San Basilio had been an independent Black township since the rebellion led by Benkos Biohó in 1691. Creoles had called the palenque a barbarous town, or a rallying cry for slaves, ever since; and had long since tried to get rid of the small free territory that so irked white Cartagenians. However, the Maroon population of the city had stood strong against Spanish and independence-minded incursions and had mostly been forgotten and ignored, as an uncomfortable afterthought of a successful slave rebellion.
The Colombo-Haitian community remains large and connected to their territorial roots. Here, about 500 descendants from the San Basilio settlement meet in the Statue of Benkos Biohó, in Port-au-Prince, for the Day of Remembrance, which recalls their forced displacement from northern New Granada. To this day, these people have not received redress or compensation, although in the Falklands Case of 2019 the Supreme Court of Colombia opened the gate for reparations to exiled freedmen's descendants.
Santander, supreme leader of New Granada, resolved to fix this and saw Francia (who he deeply and strongly disliked, but often made common cause with as to avoid the repositioning of military-minded Bolivarians in the Colombian throne)’s deal with Boyer as a golden opportunity. He pressured the Neogranadine Parliament into passing a new law that would approve general amnesty for all “Maroons or runaway slaves”, and reintegration into ordinary Colombian life, with the granting of deeds of land on the table. This enticed the large population of Maroons that lived off the land but were interested in actually becoming their legal owners in the Colombian perception, and nearly the entire town’s male population registered on the system.
Santander had arranged for new plots of land to be given to them; plots of land that just happened to be located in the mostly barren Île de la Gonâve, in Haiti. Deportation swiftly proceeded. Similar events occurred throughout other known Maroon settlements throughout New Granada, such as around Quibdó and in Ipiales.
Fortunately, the white supremacist ambitions of the Colombian Empire were not realised, and a large black population remains in the country. Furthermore, those that were forced out, after initial decades of struggle and difficulty, managed to become citizens of a state that would become rather wealthy, even in comparison with its neighbor powers. However, it must not be ignored that this was an act of ethnic cleansing realised by the Neogranadine government. Similar acts occurred throughout the Colombian Empire, often cleansing entire regions of their black populations.
The Colombian Empire, after declaring peace with Haiti, arranged to abolish slavery “immediately”. In order to avoid strong conservative backlash from their decision, the country agreed to give an indemnization value of 300 Spanish dollars per slave to their owners (notably, while refusing to give any money to the freed slaves so that they started their own free lives, only paying for those who left for Haiti). Historical studies (Lamarck et. al.) have noticed that the grants of indemnity to slaveowners were considered one of the largest forms of upward concentration of wealth in history, as large amounts of State money was very rapidly given to what already was the wealthiest percentile of Colombia’s population.
In fact, it’s interesting to note that many current Colombian capitalist families – the Santamarías, the Quinteros, the Echeverris, the De Sotos, and many other names among them – initially transferred their funds from the previously lucrative slave mining and planting businesses to industry during the 1840s and 1850s. Historically, this has been attributed to the Colombian State (especially after the 1848 Revolution) became stronger and started supporting capitalism within the country. However, Lamarck (2011) argues that the main reason for this was a large influx of mobile capital achieved through the rapid liquidation of assets caused by manumission, which permitted the traditional owners of the means of production in a traditionally feudal society to transition to capitalism. (Footnote: it must be noted that Lamarck’s analysis is clearly very steeply based on the Marxist school of economics). Zhang (2009) and George (2017), in the style of the latter’s great-grandfather, argue that the main reason behind the growth of Colombian capitalism was the redistribution of land during the 1840s, which mostly benefitted people who were already landowners before, such as in the
estancia system and the legalization of White coffeemakers in New Granada, while Native and Black traditional owners of land were deported or, especially after 1848, punished for their land-use.
-"Land, Wealth and Dominance - A Critical Approach at the Colombian Miracle, 1830-1850", by Juan José Mosquera, published at Quibdó University, 1971.
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Brazil
Brazil is often ignored, even by race-critical theorists, when talking about the great upheaval of race relations in the American continent in the 1830s and 1840s. Focus comes exclusively into Colombian ethnic cleansing or American worsening of slavery. However, just as the Americans were starting to greatly worsen their race relations, a series of events came into being in Brazil that would provide a similar effect for the third big area in the American continent. This is because, while political issues shaped the changes in racial relations in Colombia and America, Brazil's approach was subtler, and based on the economics of the greatest slave-dependent economy of the world at the time. Although a great agricultural powerhouse, the country had fallen into hard times due to the instability of the regency era of the country, and its exportations of cotton and grain had fallen well below America's and, by 1832, even Colombia's. This greatly destabilized the Brazilian Empire, which, in and by itself, was also suffering from growing pains after Pedro I left the country and left his young son in charge. The Liberal regency had pretended to show that Republican government was viable in the country through a successful regency, but the opposite had happened. Massive revolts by Conservatives, who wished to be ruled by the Portuguese monarch, popped up in the northeast, while poor people in Grão-Pará and Maranhão rebelled against increasingly worse economic situations.
Contemporary paintings of the Sabinada (left) in Bahia, the Balaiada (centre) in Maranhão and the Cabanagem (right) in Grão-Pará. These massive rebellions were put down extremely brutally by Brazilian authorities and would forever become part of Northern Brazilian identity; for instance, "Balaiada: A Guerra do Maranhão" (title screen below) is currently the most watched animated series in Maranhão and much of Latin America, and has been praised for its excellent character-building and storyline.
Respite seemed to come to the Brazilians, as they rapidly became the last slave power in the continent, after the War of the Supremes. America had for over a decade been, at best, agnostic towards the continuation of slavery; both Burrites and Federalists disliked the practice and would prefer to see it phased out, and America's ambiguous support for the continuation of the slave trade which had been posited at the very start of the XIX century had all but disappeared during the Trenton System. Yet the Jacksonian government seemed to completely change this situation as, unofficially, but known to pretty much everyone, the slave trade once again began in the country. This emboldened Brazilians, who could now count on an ally to support their "endeavors" in the African continent. The Naval Division of the East, headquartered in Cabinda, in paper continued to "fight against the slave trade", as the British recognition of Brazilian independence rested upon this; in fact, instructions were given to keep a blind eye, and some particularly corrupt naval officers even participated in the slave trade by themselves.
With the reopening of a semi-legal slave trade from Africa, the Brazilian Empire suddenly had no need to take even the slightest of precautions when putting down slave revolts. Thus, the Sabinada, the Cabinada and the Cabinagem, large slave rebellions that had appeared in northern Brazil during the 1830s, were put down with undue ferocity, with the intent of "teaching the slaves a lesson". Thousands, up to 40% of the population of Maranhão, were murdered by Brazilian forces, as well as sickness and hunger resulting from the war. Even large amounts of revenge killings were meted out to the families of enslaved people, or those within the same plantation, as to leave a sense of fear and disconnect the rebel slave populations from any possible instigation.
While this revolt and improving economic conditions mostly put down all revolts in Maranhão, this violent attack on slaves of course had the opposite effect, as hatred towards what was seen as corrupt and violent Brazilian authorities continued to strengthen. The weak court had no choice but to continue attempting its plan of opposition to revolt, and throw more troops at the problem hoping that eventually slaves would not rebel anymore.
Of course, this left the Brazilian government blindsided when, in the south, the white, wealthy Riograndeses decided to rebel as well.