This is a platform for the honest and unfettered conversation about reparations for slavery in the United States of America. We welcome and discuss only facts and not opinions about slavery in the United States of America. We understand opinions are shaped by facts which we acknowledge and accept and also by myths which we acknowledge but discredit.
We intend to separate the facts from the myths. In the end, we expect the acceptance of the debt of slavery owed to the descendants of slaves. The debt of slavery is the stolen wealth of forced labor from the lives lost of a black population group kidnapped from Africa by European-Americans who denied the exponential accumulation of that wealth to the slave descendants.
It is a fact that descendants of slaves are not only black Americans but also white Americans. Because there is only one race of peoples, the terms “mixed race” or “multiracial” are factually meaningless constructs used to divide peoples. The fact of color distinctions is undeniable. Ascribing any superiority based on color is scientifically erroneous but an effective tool for visual control of a subject people.
Also a past inheritance cannot be denied any more than a present inheritance can be denied.
This platform is about reconciling the debt of slavery in the United States of America. The clock is the running debt, like the clock of the U.S. National Debt. The value of wages for uncompensated labor is a debt. Slavery is such uncompensated labor or contingent liability owned by America.
Eli Whitney “is given credit for unleashing the explosion of American cotton production which was, in turn, propelled by the seemingly insatiable appetite for cotton from the British cotton textile mills. A quick glance at the numbers shows what happened. American cotton production soared 25X from 156,000 bales in 1800 to more than 4,000,000 bales in 1860 (a bale is a compressed bundle of cotton weighing between 400 and 500 pounds). This astonishing increase in supply did not cause a long-term decrease in the price of cotton. The cotton boom, however, was the main cause of the increased demand for slaves – the number of slaves in America grew from 700,000 in 1790 to 4,000,000 in 1860. A materialistic America was well aware of the fact that the price of a slave generally correlated to the price of cotton. Thus, the cotton economy controlled the destiny of African slaves.” Eugene R. Dattel, a Mississippi native and economic historian, is a former international investment banker. His first book, The Sun That Never Rose, predicted Japan’s economic stagnation in the 1990s. His next book, Cotton and Race in America (1787-1930): The Human Price of Economic Growth, published in 2007. http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/articles/161/cotton-in-a-global-economy-mississippi-1800-1860”
Starting in the 1790s, New England, and, especially, Rhode Island, housed the leaders in early cotton textile manufacturing. Providence merchants funded some of the first successful cotton spinning mills, and they drew on the talents of Samuel Slater, an immigrant British machinist. He trained many of the first important textile mechanics, and investors in various parts of Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York hired them to build mills. Between 1815 and 1820, power-loom weaving began to be commercially feasible, and this effort was led by firms in Rhode Island and, especially, in Massachusetts. Boston merchants, starting with the Boston Manufacturing Company at Waltham, devised a business plan which targeted large-scale, integrated cotton textile manufacturing, with a marketing/sales arm housed in a separate firm. They enlarged their effort significantly after 1820, and much of the impetus to the growth of the cotton textile industry came from the success entrepreneurs had in lowering the cost of production. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-roots-of-american-industrialization-1790-1860/.
“The income generated by this “export sector” [led by cotton] was a major impetus for growth not only in the South, but in the rest of the American/U.S. economy as well. Douglass North, in his pioneering study of the antebellum U.S. economy, examined the flows of trade within the United States to demonstrate how all regions benefited from the South’s concentration on cotton production (North 1961). Northern merchants gained from Southern demands for shipping cotton to markets abroad, and from the demand by Southerners for Northern and imported consumption goods. The low price of raw cotton produced by slave labor in the American South enabled textile manufacturers — both in the United States and in Britain — to expand production and provide benefits to consumers through a declining cost of textile products. As manufacturing of all kinds expanded at home and abroad, the need for food in cities created markets for foodstuffs that could be produced in the areas north of the Ohio River. And the primary force at work was the economic stimulus from the export of Southern Cotton.” Roger L. Ransom, University of California, Riverside, The Economics of the Civil War, at p. 3, https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economics-of-the-civil-war/.
“When James Hammond exclaimed in 1859 that “Cotton is King!” no one rose to dispute the point.” Roger L. Ransom, University of California, Riverside, The Economics of the Civil War, at p. 3, https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economics-of-the-civil-war/.
We surmise that Cotton was King because it was produced by uncompensated African-American Labor. Therefore, “African-American Labor is King!!”
Steven Deyle, in his book, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life, shows that in 1860, the value of the slaves was “roughly three times greater than the total amount invested in banks,” and it was “equal to about seven times the total value of all currency in circulation in the country, three times the value of the entire livestock population, twelve times the value of the entire U.S. cotton crop and forty-eight times the total expenditure of the federal government that year.” As mentioned here in a previous column, the invention of the cotton gin greatly increased the productivity of cotton harvesting by slaves. This resulted in dramatically higher profits for planters, which in turn led to a seemingly insatiable increase in the demand for more slaves, in a savage, brutal and vicious cycle.
Now, the value of cotton: Slave-produced cotton “brought commercial ascendancy to New York City, was the driving force for territorial expansion in the Old Southwest and fostered trade between Europe and the United States,” according to Gene Dattel. In fact, cotton productivity, no doubt due to the sharecropping system that replaced slavery, remained central to the American economy for a very long time: “Cotton was the leading American export from 1803 to 1937.” Why Was Cotton ‘King’? by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. | Originally posted on The Root. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/why-was-cotton-king/.
The value of a slave is actually the value of labor. In 1860, the average price of a prime male hand in New Orleans reached more than $1,800, an amount equal to $30,000 in 2015 dollars. Deyle, Steven, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life.
According to conservative valuation by economic historians, the total value of all slave (labor) property in the South in 1860 was at least $3 billion. Compare, https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economics-of-the-civil-war/.
So the value of successive generation of slave (labor) value from 1790-1815 ($400 Million); 1815-1835 ($1billion) and; 1835-1860 ($3 billion) is $4.4 billion.
So the Reparations Debt Clock on this platform is the present value of $4.4 billion, which represents the cumulative value of three (3) generations of slave (labor); this the reparation debt owed, using 5.32% US Treasury Bond interest rate in 1871, (see Shiller, R., U.S. Stock Price Data with Consumption, both short and Long Rates, 1871 to 2009. http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm.).
The running debt clock on this platform is based on the cumulative value of slave labor from 1790, the year the United States began as a republic, to 1860. Interest on the cumulative value of slave labor for 4 million black slaves along with their descendants starts to run at the end of reconstruction in 1871 and based on U.S long bond interest rate in 1871.
In reconciling this United States national debt on this platform, credit will be entered for any recognized and generally accepted past and present reparations payment. A separate credit payment clock will be kept in the background. The main clock represents the net debt balance.
This is a discussion platform that seeks to collect and contribute facts of actual historical or present events relating to reparations for uncompensated African slave labor in the US.
We invite conversation and expect to reconcile differences of opinions around the United States Reparation Debt, based on the facts.
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