Why the big payback should at least be considered, WCAR

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, August 26, 2001

FREE AT LAST
The Enduring Legacy of the South's Civil War Victory
By DAVID BRION DAVIS

Partly as a result of this denial of slavery's centrality in American
history, few Americans today know that black bondage had long been
legal in all 13 colonies when the American Revolution began. Indeed,
black slavery also flourished in 16th-century Mexico, Peru and
Brazil. In the 17th century, it made possible factorylike plantations
in the British, French, Danish and Dutch Caribbean ― the center of
wealth in the Western Hemisphere, as slave-grown sugar and tobacco
became the first luxury goods for an international mass market. In
fact, in 1688, Governor Denonville of French Canada wrote to King
Louis XIV, begging him to end the manpower shortage by authorizing
shipments of African slaves. Though France granted permission, Canada
could not afford the high prices of prized African slaves paid in the
South. In 1716, a high Canadian official attributed the success of
New York and New England to black slave labor, and insisted Canada
could vie for the profitable West Indies markets if given credit to
buy more slaves.

While no New World colony began with a blueprint for becoming a slave
society, the entire Western Hemisphere had become implicated by the
paradox of trying to reconcile racial slavery with aspirations to
escape the sins of the Old World. If some Africans abetted this by
enslaving and making available millions of cheap laborers, it was
Western European and then American entrepreneurs who exploited it.
>From the 1440's, when the Portuguese began transporting black slaves
to Iberia, to the 1860's, when the illegal slave trade to Cuba
finally came to an end, Africa exported an estimated 11 million
slaves.

AFTER decades of research, historians are only now beginning to grasp
the complex interdependencies of a society enmeshed in slavery. There
were shifting interactions among West African enslavers, sellers and
European buyers; European investors in the slave trade, who ranged
from small-town merchants to well-known figures like the philosophers
John Locke and Voltaire; wealthy Virginian and Brazilian middlemen
who purchased large numbers of Africans off the slave ships to sell
to planters; New Englanders who shipped foodstuffs, timber, shoes and
clothing as supplies for slaves in the South and the West Indies;
and, finally, the European and American consumers of slave-produced
sugar, rum, rice, cotton, tobacco, indigo (for dyes), hemp (for rope-
making) and other goods.

full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/26/weekinreview/26DAVI.html