It’s an old tactic, perhaps just re-imagined. Historically, dominant powers have taken land from existing communities, often the less powerful or wealthy, to repurposed it for their own gain. While we often think of this in terms of historical, international contexts, some argue we are witnessing a version of this dynamic playing out right now in modern Indianapolis.
The recent events in the Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood have raised significant concerns. Observers are asking if the bureaucratic and financial strategies being deployed in this historically Black community amount to a "post-public" land grab—one that prioritizes corporate and wealthy interests while effectively displacing current residents.
Here is a breakdown of the specific tactics that some say constitute a "Wealthy Citizen" playbook in Martindale-Brightwood as of March 2026.
The "Wealthy Citizen" Playbook: A "Post-Public" Development Model
The evidence increasingly points toward a development model that bypasses community consent, operating as if public approval is a bureaucratic hurdle rather than a democratic necessity. This represents a significant shift in how city and state governments are approaching major development projects.
Here are specific examples driving this narrative:
1. The "Boss" Mentality: Public accountability seems to be taking a backseat. During a February 2026 meeting on the controversial Metrobloks data center project, a city official’s comment reportedly went viral. The official was heard telling residents, "The public isn't my boss," as they advocated for the project's approval. This sentiment encapsulates a worrying perspective where development authorities view themselves as serving interests other than the people they are ostensibly meant to represent.
2. Silencing the "Peasants": Community opposition appears, in some cases, to be treated as irrelevant. In early 2026, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Development Commission's hearing examiner recommended approval for the Metrobloks data center. This recommendation came despite a recorded 100% opposition from the residents of Gale Street and Sherman Drive, the very people most directly impacted by the project. The decision implies that community voice is not a prerequisite for project approval.
3. The "NAACP" Reversal: Even large organizations are finding themselves navigating the complex waters of community versus corporate interests. On March 9, 2026, the Indianapolis NAACP officially reversed its initial stance, moving from support to strong opposition of the Metrobloks project. The organization cited the overwhelming community "backlash" and the realization that the developer's promises did not match the actual needs of Martindale-Brightwood residents. This reversal underscores the depth of the local opposition that was initially overlooked.
Pattern Recognition: Is This "Industrial Colonization"?
Observers have pointed to unsettling parallels between these modern events and the forced displacement of indigenous populations in Indiana during the 1830s. Some are describing the current trajectory as a strategy of Industrial Colonization, where external industrial forces displace established communities.
The parallels being drawn include:
- Coercive "Negotiations": Historically, tribes were coerced into "purchasing" treaties or selling land under extreme duress. In early 2026, a similar narrative emerged regarding Martin University. The university board "negotiated" the closure and a $3.5 million sale of the campus after Governor Braun "nixed" $5 million in promised state funding. Critically, this sale price was for a fraction of the campus's estimated $13.1 million value, suggesting a coercive financial maneuver rather than a true market transaction.
- The Erasure of Resistance: By listing the campus, including nine key residential parcels, for this low price, the board effectively cleared the ground for industrial or tech development. This tactic allowed developers to bypass individual negotiations with the very homeowners and neighbors who would be most impacted, erasing their potential to resist the change.
- The Financial Border (I-70 Toll): A proposed $15.60 "mobility tax" (10 cents per mile) on I-70 starting in 2029 acts as a dynamic financial border. This toll would convert the neighborhood's primary transportation artery into a "pay-to-play" zone, further isolating Martindale-Brightwood and creating a significant barrier for lower-income residents accessing the city's broader economy.
Ransom Place Historic District, Phyllis Wheatley YWCA
The "Tombstone" Strategy: Honoring a Community After Displacing It
The final phase, according to some critics, is the "Tombstone" strategy. This occurs when the displacing authority attempts to "memorialize" the very community it is responsible for removing. While the Metrobloks data center project is pushed forward, there is simultaneous talk from officials about granting "Historic Status" to the existing Martin University buildings.
This is a recurring historical theme:
Remove the living community: (the students, faculty, and neighbors of Martin University).
Repurposed the land for high-wealth industrial assets: (data centers and new logistics corridors).
Erect a plaque to "honor" what was lost: effectively treating the vibrant neighborhood as a museum of its own demise.
The argument is that these actions, taken together, suggest that the residents of Martindale-Brightwood are being told that their full "citizenship" and right to their community no longer extend to the land they call home. The community seems to have been opened to powerful external interests, leaving many to wonder what, if anything, will be left.
History in Indiana doesn't just rhyme; it follows a precise, century-old blueprint of institutional starvation and asset extraction. In the 1830s, the state used "negotiated treaties" to coerce indigenous nations into relinquishing central Indiana for pennies. Today, a new "Trail of Death" is being paved in Martindale-Brightwood, and this time, the "militia" is a Metropolitan Development Commission and the "treaty" is a $3.5 million fire sale of Martin University.
The closure of Martin University—Indiana’s only predominantly Black institution—is being framed by its Board of Trustees as a "painful but necessary" result of a failed financial model. They point to a dwindling enrollment of 164 students as an insurmountable obstacle. But let’s be clear: 164 students isn't a death sentence; it's a manageable recruitment goal. Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee Institute as a former slave in the unreconstructed South with far less. The current Board didn't fail to find students; they failed their fiduciary duty to find the will to fight for them.
Instead, the Board effectively "unlocked the gates for the wolves." By listing a $13.1 million campus for a mere $3.5 million—a 73% "Venmo-speed" discount—they have cleared the way for the "tech bros" from California. This "fire sale" conveniently aligns with Metrobloks’ $500 million data center proposal just down the street at 25th and Sherman.
Governor Mike Braun is NOT for INDIANA!
The pincer movement is completed by the statehouse. Governor Mike Braun’s administration "nixed" a critical $5 million allocation for Martin University in early 2025, essentially redlining the institution into insolvency. Now, the Governor proposes an I-70 tolling plan that would charge local drivers $15.60 to cross the state—a "mobility tax" that funds the very infrastructure needed by these high-capacity industrial hubs. While the state claims these tolls are for "interstate travelers," forecasts show that 82% of the revenue will come from the pockets of local Hoosiers.
This is the IUPUI and Indiana Avenue blueprint updated for the digital age. In the 1960s, the city labeled vibrant Black neighborhoods "blighted" to justify clearing them for university expansion. Today, they use "Data Center Corridors" to justify the same erasure. When a city official recently told residents that "the public isn't my boss," they admitted the quiet part out loud: in the eyes of this administration, only the wealthy are true citizens.
Indian removals in Indiana - Wikipedia
Phase 3 is already visible on the horizon. Once the university "oasis" is replaced by a windowless concrete data center, the "eminent domain cannon" will be turned toward the surrounding residential blocks. The city will argue that these homes are "incompatible" with industrial high-voltage zones, forcing families to move.
The Choctaw tribe was removed to west of the Mississippi starting in 1831. "Louisiana Indians Walking Along a Bayou" by Alfred Boisseau was painted in 1846. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
We must recognize the pattern. We are witnessing the deliberate liquidation of community assets to clear land for an elite class that doesn't live here, doesn't pay our taxes, and doesn't need our permission. If we allow this to continue, the only thing left of Martindale-Brightwood will be the "tombstone" plaques the city eventually erects to honor the community it intentionally erased.
The PBS Origins video above asks a haunting question: Are highways racist? While the term "progress" is often used to describe the 46,000 miles of the Eisenhower Interstate System, the video reveals a darker reality. Between 1957 and 1977, over one million Americans were displaced by highway construction. Though Black Americans made up just 11% of the population at the time, they accounted for over 55% of those displaced [04:13].
This wasn't an accident of geography; it was "Futurama" fueled by a "categorical imperative" to clear what planners labeled as slums [05:03]. In Indianapolis, this blueprint was executed with surgical precision along the I-70 corridor.
The Sherman Drive "Pass-Through"
As the video notes, highways were often designed to go through cities rather than around them, specifically targeting neighborhoods with less political capital [05:03]. In Indianapolis, the stretch between Keystone and Emerson Avenue stands as a monument to this strategy.
While exits were provided for industrial hubs (Keystone/Rural) and growing white suburbs (Emerson), the heart of the Black residential community at Sherman Drive was denied a ramp. This created a "transit desert"—a neighborhood that bears all the environmental and physical burdens of the road [05:54] but is denied the economic access the road was built to provide.
The Final Dispossession: Martin University
The video highlights how these "gashes" through neighborhoods lead to long-term economic decay. We are seeing the final stage of this decay right now. Martin University, located on that very Sherman Drive corridor, is currently liquidating its campus for "pennies on the dollar."
Founded to serve the population displaced by the first wave of highway construction, the university has finally succumbed to the systemic isolation engineered decades ago. When we see the campus being sold at a fraction of its value, we are witnessing the "second wave" of dispossession. The highway didn't just take the homes in the 60s; it ensured the eventual failure of the institutions that tried to rebuild in its shadow.
Breaking the Pattern
As Felicia points out in the video, "infrastructure can benefit some while vastly burdening others" [11:11]. The "propaganda for progress" often masks the patterns of community destruction until it is too late to reverse them.
The story of Indiana Avenue and the current fate of Martin University remind us that a "historic designation" is often just a tombstone for a community already moved. If we want to address the inequality caused by our infrastructure, we must first recognize that the "missing ramps" and "pennies on the dollar" sales are not accidents—they are the intended results of a system designed to bypass some while serving others.
What do you think is the best way to address the generational damage caused by these "Roads to Nowhere"? Join the discussion below.
The U.S. Interstate System is widely regarded as the finest highway network in the world. Former Federal Highway Administration Director Seppo Sillan stated that while many countries have excellent highways, the Eisenhower Interstate System is the "finest system in the world, bar none." This distinction is supported by several key factors: its unmatched safety standards, an engineering scale spanning over 46,000 miles, and an economic impact often called the "conveyor belt" of society.
But lying beneath this "progress" is an engineered system of community erasure. Driving along these interstates, one can easily be lulled into complacency, as if these superstructures have always been part of America's transportation tapestry. They are not ancient; they are relatively new. The construction dates—from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s—should serve as an alarm bell. This era was defined by the post-WWII housing surge, the rise of the suburbs, and a fierce backlash against the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. Through government-sanctioned redlining and "urban renewal," Jim Crow Apartheid was institutionalized in the very asphalt of our cities.
I-70 and Sherman Drive near Martin University (Google Maps)
Nowhere is this "invisible" personalization of policy more evident than the stretch of I-70 in Indianapolis between Keystone and Emerson Avenue.
In the 1960s, planners didn't just build a road; they drew a line of exclusion through the heart of the African American community in Martindale-Brightwood. To the west, the Keystone/Rural exit was maintained to serve industrial interests. To the east, the Emerson Avenue exit was built to funnel white suburbanites into the city. But in the center—at Sherman Drive—there is a conspicuous, haunting gap. There is no exit.
This "missing ramp" was a tactical decision. By denying highway access to the Sherman Drive corridor, planners effectively converted a thriving Black residential hub into a "pass-through zone." The neighborhood was forced to inherit all the burdens of the interstate—the noise, the pollution, and the physical bisection of their streets—without receiving any of the economic connectivity promised by "the finest system in the world."
Martin University, Indianapolis, IN (Google Maps Image)
The consequences of this isolation have reached a tragic crescendo in 2026. Martin University, an institution founded specifically to heal the wounds of this displacement, has been forced to close its doors. Starved of the state support and the physical accessibility denied to it decades ago, the campus is now being liquidated for "pennies on the dollar."
This is the second wave of dispossession. First, the homes were taken by eminent domain to build the road. Now, the community institutions that remained are being hollowed out by the systemic neglect that the road's design ensured. We must stop viewing these infrastructure gaps as engineering oversights. They are the fingerprints of a deliberate strategy to devalue Black land until it can be reclaimed for the next iteration of "progress." Until we recognize the propaganda for what it is, we will continue to drive over the history we chose to bury.
Dr. Claud Anderson's PowerNomics uses specific statistics to illustrate the economic and social predicament of Black Americans, attributing these disparities to historical and systemic racism.
Key Statistics Cited in PowerNomics
Based on information related to Dr. Anderson's work and interviews, he has highlighted the following concrete numbers to underscore the need for his empowerment plan:
Ownership of Resources: Black people in America are cited as controlling less than one percent (1%) of the nation's businesses and owning less than one-half of one percent (0.5%) of anything of value. Anderson argues that to be competitive, Black Americans—who make up around 12-13% of the U.S. population—should own at least a proportional 12% of everything that exists.
Economic Dependency: Black Americans are often described as being zero producers and 100 percent consumers, meaning they are totally dependent on non-Black competitors for the daily necessities of life. This leads to a constant drainage of resources from Black communities.
Incarceration and Productivity: In a significant older data point (cited around 2008 in relation to his institute), it was noted that 40% of Black men between the ages of 18–35 (the most productive years) were either in prison, on probation, or on parole.
Political Representation vs. Group Benefit: While the number of Black elected officials increased by 9,000 percent from 1960 (when there were 103) to a later period (over 9,500), Anderson argues that the quality of life for Black people as a group has deteriorated, indicating a lack of quid pro quo benefits for the community's monolithic political support.
Geographic Concentration: Approximately 75% of all Black Americans live in and around 10 large metropolitan areas that are described as socio-economically devastated.
PowerNomics Core Principles
The central plan put forth in PowerNomics is a framework for Black America to become a self-sufficient and competitive group by creating its own racial monopolies to counter those held by the dominant society. The main action steps revolve around redesigning core areas of life:
Economics (Group Economics): Establishing a unique economic structure, including pooling resources and industrializing Black communities. This involves securing control over industries and enterprises that predominantly serve the Black community and fostering interlinked Black-owned businesses.
Politics (Group Politics): Shifting from passive civil rights advocacy to a strategy that leverages the collective Black voting bloc to demand and secure group benefits. This includes acting as a political majority in cities where Black people are the largest group.
Culture: Promoting a new culture of empowerment, self-respect, and cooperative values to foster group solidarity and replace a Eurocentric framework with one focused on Black autonomy.
Education: Revamping education to emphasize vocational growth, business development, and the principles of PowerNomics to prepare the group for economic competition.
It reveals something painful — and painfully consistent — about the United States that the military has repeatedly relied on the courage, labor, and sacrifice of its African American citizens while failing, generation after generation, to honor the promises made to them.
From the Revolutionary War to Iraq, the pattern is unmistakable: The nation calls on Black Americans when it needs bodies, but too often discards their stories when it comes time for recognition, rights, or remembrance.
Black soldiers fought for a freedom they were denied.
They defended a democracy that routinely excluded them.
They shed blood for a country that refused to see them as equal citizens.
This is not hyperbole; it’s history.
Enslaved men fought for the Continental Army, only to return to chains.
Black veterans of World War I returned home to the “Red Summer” of lynch mobs.
Tuskegee Airmen risked their lives while segregationists fought to keep them on the ground.
Black Vietnam veterans came home to discrimination in housing, education, and employment benefits.
And now, in 2025, we watch the Department of Defense — the most powerful and lavishly funded arm of the federal government — purge, erase, and downgrade the very histories of those soldiers it once depended on.
When the Pentagon scrubs its archives of the Tuskegee Airmen, the Navajo Code Talkers, or Black Medal of Honor recipients, it isn’t just an administrative error. It is an extension of a long tradition: using Black service in wartime, and minimizing it in peacetime.
This isn’t simply indifference — it’s betrayal.
The descendants of people enslaved by government policy have answered every call to defend the United States. Yet the country has repeatedly reneged on the promises made to them: citizenship, equality, safety, opportunity, dignity.
The arbitrary nature of these recent purges — deleting pages with no explanation, removing histories simply because an algorithm flagged them — only underscores the deeper truth:
Erasure is easier than accountability.
Frederick Douglass, B.F. Smith & Son, photographers, 91 Middle Street, Portland.
But if history teaches us anything, it’s that African Americans have never accepted invisibility. From Frederick Douglass recruiting soldiers for the 54th Massachusetts, to Black veterans who fueled the Civil Rights Movement, to families who insist their ancestors’ service be recognized — the fight to be remembered is ongoing.
And necessary.
Because a nation that erases those who built and defended it is a nation afraid of its own truth.
The US Slave Blog returns in 2025 because the truth demands it.
What began years ago as a personal effort to document the hidden, neglected, and deliberately buried history of American slavery has become, unexpectedly, a living archive. This blog grew because people across the country were searching for the truth — the full truth — about the nation we inhabit. They wanted history that was unvarnished, unsanitized, and unafraid to name the brutal foundations of the United States.
And today, that work is more urgent than ever.
We are living in a moment when Black history is being erased in real time.
Government agencies are purging content about Black soldiers, Indigenous heroes, LGBTQ service members, women trailblazers, and anyone whose story disrupts the myth of a whitewashed America.
DEI programs are being dismantled.
Books are being banned.
Public institutions are scrubbing their own archives, deleting the historical record to satisfy the demands of political fear and racial resentment.
This climate is not new — it is simply louder.
From the beginning, the US Slave Blog existed because America has never fully confronted its past. The shame of this nation is not the existence of slavery, but the refusal to grapple with its consequences: the land theft, the generational trauma, the economic exploitation, the legal apartheid, and the ongoing inequalities that reach directly from bondage into the present.
This blog has always been about telling the truth that sits beneath our feet.
Truth like this:
Arlington National Cemetery — the most sacred military ground in the country — was once the plantation of Robert E. Lee, built by the enslaved labor of the Custis estate, Martha Washington’s family.
Those enslaved people were freed during the Civil War and given a small settlement called Freedman’s Village. The U.S. government later betrayed them, seized their land without compensation, and pushed them aside to create the cemetery we honor today.
The marble is beautiful.
The history beneath it is not.
But both are true.
The US Slave Blog was created to preserve stories like these — stories that explain how the past structures the present, how injustice repeats itself when unacknowledged, and how the nation’s collective amnesia harms us all.
In 2025, this space returns with renewed purpose:
To remember what America tries to forget.
To document what institutions choose to delete.
To honor the people whose stories built this country but were never allowed to define it.
To resist historical erasure, wherever it appears.
We will continue to publish archival materials, photographs, documents, forgotten histories, scholarship, maps, oral accounts, and contemporary analysis. We will examine the roots of American inequality, the afterlives of slavery, and the physical landscapes that still whisper their pasts — plantations disguised as parks, universities funded by slave labor, neighborhoods shaped by redlining, and monuments that tell only half the story.
This blog may be dusty in places. It may be imperfect. But it is alive — because the truth is alive.
To every reader who finds your way here: thank you.
Thank you for caring about the parts of history that America prefers to bury.
Thank you for refusing to look away.
Thank you for believing that the truth, even when painful, is a form of liberation.
The US Slave Blog is open again.
Let’s do the work that memory requires.
From the archives ofThe Economist (UK), "The fall of Richmond and its effect upon English commerce," Our [The UK Economist] coverage of the end of America's civil war, on 22 April 1865 -- United States -- THE fall of Richmond is one of the most striking events of modern history. On the one side the great hopes of the Confederates, their equally great efforts, the sympathy they have gained in Europe: on the other side, the undaunted courage of the Federals, their refusal to admit, even to their imagination, the possibility of real failure,—their accumulating power, which for many weeks past has seemed to concentrate like a gathering cloud about the capital of their enemies, give to the real event the intense but melancholy interest that belongs to the catastrophe of a tragedy. It is impossible not to feel a sympathy with the Confederates. There is an attraction in vanquished gallantry which appeals to the good side of human nature. But every Englishman at least will feel a kind of personal sympathy with the victory of the Federals.
They have won, as an Englishman would have won, by obstinacy. They would not admit the possibility of real defeat; they did not know that they were beaten; or, to speak more accurately, they knew that though they seemed to be beaten they were not: they felt that they had in them latent elements of conclusive vigour which, in the end, they should bring out, though they were awkward and slow in so doing. We may alter, perhaps, to suit this event, the terms which, in one of the greatest specimens of English narrative, the great English historian describes on a memorable occasion the conduct of Rome. "But there are moments when rashness is wisdom, and it may be that this was one of them; panic did not for a moment unnerve the iron courage of the American democracy, and their resolute will striving beyond. its present power created, as is the law of our nature, the power which it required."
But leaving history to deal in a becoming manner with the imaginative aspect of this great event, let us look at its present aspect in a business-like manner. The details of it are yet uncertain, and any conclusive judgment on minute results would be absurd. But, as far as we know, what does it amount to, and what will be its result?
It used to be said that Richmond was not essential to the Confederacy; that it was a nominal and accidental capital; that it was not even the original capital; that Virginia was but an outside State in a Confederacy with a vast interior; that even if this superficial outwork was lost, the war could be indefinitely protracted; that the fall of this exterior fortification would have scarcely affected the resistance of the provinces, upon which everything depended, And at the outset of the war when these words were used, they were doubtless substantially true. Subsequent events have in many respects confirmed them, and have in few tended to contradict them.
But now the case is altered. The loss of an outer fortification does not impair the resisting faculty, when it is lost early in the day—when its defenders have not spent upon it the resources which are needful to defend the citadel. It still appears to be true, that if sometime since when the Confederacy, had three armies unbroken—when no hostile army had penetrated their interior—when their organisation was as yet intact, its Government had retired from Richmond, the war would not have ceased on the evacuation. The task of pursuing three armies retiring in a vast and friendly country by converging lines would certainly have been difficult, and might not have been successful. Loose bodies of insurgents, if such there were, would then have had large armies upon which to support their accessory operations. But now the Confederacy have no such armies. What Lee may have saved, what Johnston may still command, we do not know; but we may say without fear that they are incalculably less than the armies of the Confederacy a year ago, that they cannot maintain as compact bodies even a defensive and retiring conflict with the eager armies of the North.
But without organised armies, can the Confederates be defended by loose insurgents and guerilla warfare, acting alone and without support? We believe that history affords no countenance to such an idea. A guerilla warfare requires the aid either of disciplined forces or of inaccessible territory. The history of the Spanish war shows conclusively that the guerilla resistance of the nation would have been useless without the regular resistance of the English army under the Duke of Wellington; the Spaniards enabled him to effect more with fewer troops, but they did little themselves. A territory like Arabia, a mountain chain like the Caucasus, can be defended by a few bodies of men with little discipline as well as by many more with discipline. Nature does so much that any sort of human force is sufficient to complete it. But the territory of the Confederacy though vast is penetrable: it is not a fortress, it is only a battlefield : it is a country in which a martial population, aided by effective armies, may well resist an invading enemy; but it is also a country from which even the most martial population may be brushed off with ease by diffused and disciplined forces.
Even under the most favourable circumstances a guerilla warfare by a nation of slaveowners must have unusual difficulties. The slaves cannot be relied on as a native peasantry can be relied on. It is said that Sherman on his march through Georgia always had good information regularly brought by negroes. We do not vouch for this as a fact, but it illustrates our meaning as an example. It is impossible that the existence of a slave class, which is not a part of the nation, which requires to be kept down by the nation, should not always be an impediment to the rising of the nation; and especially so in this case, when the invading army proclaims liberty to those slaves. We cannot expect a protracted guerilla resistance from a nation which has neither an inaccessible territory, nor a regular army, nor an attached peasant population.
But if the Confederacy cannot long defend itself, if the civil war must soon come to an end, what will be its effect on us? The war itself disturbed as much in its origin and much by its continuance, will it also disturb us much by its cessation?
It is undeniable that the fall of Richmond, such as we have ascertained it to be, would have been of disastrous consequences to several branches of English commerce if it had happened six months ago. When cotton and its substitutes were weakly held at extravagant prices, the sudden occurrence of so great a catastrophe must have caused of itself many failures. So many slow and steady agencies all tending to produce a fall of price were then operating, that the addition of a single one of a striking nature might have produced lamentable results. A great panic in one class of articles would in a sensitive stale of the commercial world have produced a semi-panic in other articles. But now the case is different. Prices have greatly fallen. Whether they may have reached their lowest point exactly may lie argued, but they have fallen so low that no great further drop is possible or likely. Many weak holders have been cleared away, and the nominal price in consequence is firmer and more real than the nominal price of six months since. The peculiar circumstances affecting cotton, we explained in an elaborate article last week. We showed that even on the assumption that "the civil war in America must be near its close," there was no ground for thinking that cotton would experience a further fall, but rather a probability that the present fall had been too great and too sudden to be permanent. In fact, as so often happens, the effect of the defeat of the South has been discounted; the result of the expectation has been as great, if not greater, than the result of the event.
There is another circumstance of great importance. The world is getting "short of clothes," and especially of good clothes. When the war broke out great stores of cotton goods were found to be lying in warehouses at Manchester and elsewhere, and many persons were eager to raise the common cry of over-production: they fancied there was something anomalous and out of place in so vast an accumulation. But Mr Cobden, with that real perception of the facts of commerce which characterised his mind, immediately said, "No, there is no unnecessary accumulation, except in one or two particular markets, as India and China, and in other exceptional cases; we have not more goods on hand than we ought to have." In reality, a very considerable accumulation of stored manufactures is an attendant condition, an inevitable consequence, of the present vast and delicate division of labour. When everybody is working for everybody, everybody is injured by the mischances of everybody. An English middle class consumer is fed and clothed by an immense multiplicity of labourers; their numbers are considerable, and they are of several kinds. If any one important species of these labourers is impeded, we risk the loss of some article of prime necessity. But we insure against it. We keep a stock of each durable article so considerable that we have much to last for a long time, even if the means of producing it have by some casualty suddenly stopped. Some people say the world ought always to have "two years' stock" of clothes on hand, and now we bare nothing like it.
The effect of this will be very remarkable. When the American war broke out we had two years' stock on hand, and we lived on that till other sources of supply were opened and made effectual. The existence of that supply insured us then; its non-existence will insure us now. As we return to a usual and normal state of things, we shall tend to recur to our regular and habitual accumulation. We have not only now to clothe the world—we have to clothe it and something more. We have to make up our stock; to again create the guarantee fund, which shall insure us against any new calamities—against some deprivation of supply as sudden and as unlikely as an American civil war would have seemed five years ago. At that time any one who had prophesied the actual history of those five years would have been deemed a lunatic: our stored resources saved us then, and we must store them up again now to use them in like manner.
And this additional demand will gradually carry off an additional supply—especially if, as is likely, the clothes made with cheap material be better than the clothes made with dear material. There will be a capital demand for cotton and other goods, if once it is understood that the end is attained, that the bottom is reached, that the trader nearest the consumer—the small shopkeeper—had better supply himself at once. The small shops of the world are now only half supplied; if they once take to supplying themselves, the demand will be great.
As far, therefore, as the producing power of America is concerned, we do not think its revival, even if it should occur very rapidly, would derange our market, or affect us except beneficially. Nor, as far as its consuming power is concerned, can we cannot expect much from the conclusion of the war. Some sanguine persons fancy that we shall at once have a vast trade with the United States the moment they are reunited—the moment the war stops. But there is no ground for so thinking either as respects the South or the North. Some additional trade with both, of course, there will be, but not enough to affect Lombard street—to alter the demand for the capital of England. First, as to the North, its tariff cripples to an incredible extent all commerce with it. It has been spending largely and recklessly. It has been borrowing largely and recklessly. It has been misusing its currency. The repentance after these errors will be a time of strait and difficulty, and though under good management its splendid national resources are quite sufficient to cope with this difficulty, yet the difficulty is real and considerable. The additional immediate trade which we shall have with the North will not be of the first magnitude—will not affect the money market.
Nor will the trade with the South. The South is disorganised, and must long be disorganised. What the fate of its peculiar civilisation may be we cannot yet say, for there are no data, and any conclusion is only "one guess among many," one notion a little better perhaps than others, but without any solid ground of evidence. But so much is evident that great changes are in store for the South,—that it must pass through a social revolution,—that during the revolution it will not buy as it used to buy,—that after the revolution tastes will have changed, and it will not buy what it used to buy.
On the whole, therefore, the conclusion is, that though the catastrophe of the American war seems likely to happen more suddenly and more strikingly than could have been expected, yet its principal effect will have been already anticipated, and it will have less influence on prices and transactions than many events of less considerable magnitude. (source: The UK Economist)
From the Wall Street Journal Bookshelf, "When the South Was Flat: The brutal "slave-ocracy" along the Mississippi was far more integrated with the global economy than is often suggested," by Mark M. Smith, on 22 February 2013 -- Observers today speak breathlessly about the global economy and the flatness of the world's financial system as if those were recent trends. Such observations are at least a couple of centuries too late.
In the decades leading up to the American Civil War, the Mississippi Valley grew increasingly flat, physically as well as financially. Slaves there cut down a lot of trees. "Whole forests were literally dragged out by the roots," recalled one bondman. In the process of this radical deforestation, slaveholders literally flattened their world and, in a practical sense, accelerated a process of cotton production and capital accumulation that thoroughly embedded them in the transatlantic economy. The arduous work that slaves performed on the region's plantations, the cotton they grew and the capital they helped planters generate were intimately connected to the cotton traders (called "factors") in New Orleans, the merchant houses of New York and Liverpool, and the textile mills of Britain. As the planters surveyed their world from the banks of the mighty Mississippi, they understood fully their place in this Atlantic arc and began to dream of new connections, especially with Cuba and Nicaragua, links they hoped would secure the future of their slaveholding society.
River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom; By Walter Johnson
It was not supposed to happen this way. The Louisiana Purchase, all 828,000 square miles of it acquired in 1803 for a piddling $15 million, was supposed to protect and project liberty. Thomas Jefferson envisioned an empire populated with self-sufficient, non-commercial white men. In their stead, as Walter Johnson, a professor of history at Harvard University, shows in "River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom," came an exceptionally rapacious slaveocracy, which dominated the region's political economy and subordinated freedom to the irresistible imperatives of a robust, thriving and relentlessly exploitative system.
The Mississippi Valley (which runs through parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee and Missouri) emerged, Mr. Johnson writes, as the "credit-importing, cotton-exporting leading edge of the global economy of the nineteenth century." A rabidly speculative spirit drove the process, and the flush times of the 1830s gave rise to booms in the region's powerful economic triptych: cotton, land and slaves. Into this maelstrom of unabashed acquisitiveness stepped the speculators: the land grabbers, the merchants, the slave traders. Riverboat operators also figured prominently, with steamboats able to move considerable freight upriver, melting away barriers of time and space. By the eve of the Civil War, steamboats carried over $200 million of trade, mainly in cotton, and were a leading sector in the region's economy.
In Mr. Johnson's telling, the antebellum Mississippi Valley is an unexpectedly modern place, more technologically advanced than the mills of Massachusetts or Manchester and certainly just as connected to and driven by the dictates of the world economy. The technology powering steamboats, for example, was new, designed to overcome the river's mighty flow, pushing goods and people upstream at an impressive if not always safe speed. The textile mills of the North and Britain, by contrast, still relied on an ancient, riparian technology, one hostage to the force of gravity. As Mr. Johnson notes: "A mere handful of the steamboats docked along the levee in New Orleans on any given day could have run the entire factory at Lowell."
A great deal of the capital underwriting this technology came directly from the North and Britain. New Orleans bankers managed the circulation of Northern and British capital in the region. With that capital, planters bought slaves, the human capital to cultivate cotton. The slave traders—there were as many as 20 establishments in New Orleans in the antebellum period whose sole business was the buying and selling of bondpeople—thus completed the dismal if highly profitable circuit in capital and labor.
The forces underwriting the region's feverish economic development were also making it a place where uncertainty prevailed. Numerous slaves in the Mississippi Valley were engaged in fomenting insurrection—hundreds of them, armed with axes and shovels, marched on New Orleans in 1811—or resisting the exploitation of their labor by running away or by taking from their masters the food and drink usually denied them. Paper currency could not always be trusted (it was frequently unbacked, and bills of exchange were often far removed from the original issuer). Steamboat travel was highly dangerous, and on land or river, no one was entirely sure of the true character or, indeed, the race of those they encountered in this booming region (was that a light-skinned slave or a free white man?). There was an imprecise, speculative air. But things got done, impressively if sordidly. By 1840, Mr. Johnson writes, there were "more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the United States."
Mr. Johnson's appreciation of the global and imperial aspirations of Mississippi Valley slaveholders helps us to make sense of the events leading up to the Civil War. These "full-throttle capitalists" were filled with expansionist zeal. Valley planters and politicians made dedicated efforts to overthrow Cuba's Spanish colonial government in the 1850s. They feared what might happen if the anti-slavery British gained control of Cuba. Emancipation there might inspire slave insurrections and even race wars in their own part of the world. More optimistically, they thought Cuba could be the key to further economic success, valley-style. "It is sufficient to look over the extensive valley of the Mississippi," wrote one supporter of annexation, "to understand that the natural direction of its growth, the point of connection of its prodigious European commerce and of its rational defense, is Cuba." So, too, with Nicaragua. If Cuba functioned as the imperial slaveholders' transatlantic connection, Nicaragua, at least in the conviction of William Walker (who invaded the country in 1855, proclaimed himself president and promptly reinstituted slavery), represented the slaveholders' ambitions to link to the Pacific. (Walker was overthrown by local troops and shot in Honduras in 1860 after another attempt to establish a colony.)
Louisiana and Mississippi slaveholders were keen to reopen the African slave trade in the late 1850s, which, the thinking went, would allow more whites to own slaves and dilute the tensions from an emerging class of slaveless whites. (As slave prices spiked in the late antebellum period, fewer whites were able to move into the ranks of the small slaveholding class.) For the slaveholders and merchants of New Orleans and the Mississippi Valley, "the issues of Nicaragua and the Atlantic slave trade were more important than the question of Kansas (dismissed by many as a fight over a place where no real slaveholder would ever want to live anyway) and more important than what was happening in Congress."
The valley slaveholders do not fit the standard narrative of the coming of the Civil War, which tends to stress the centrality of expansion into western lands. Their sense of liberty was rooted less in expansion westward to places that seemed unlikely to support cotton culture and far more in efforts to repopulate the South with fresh slaves and to acquire territory outside of the United States where slavery would be more secure.
In this depiction, the coming of the Civil War assumes more of a regional flavor and less of a sectional one. Different imperatives operated in different regions of the South. Exporters of slaves in the upper South (roughly a million people were sold "down river" between 1820 and 1860) were reluctant to reopen the slave trade. Their overriding concern was maintaining their role as the South's exporter of slaves and, by extension, their own economic well-being. "Open the Slave Trade and what will our Negroes be worth?" asked one Virginia editor nervously.
Yet it is important to remember that Mr. Johnson is describing what did not happen rather than what did—what he calls "the history of alternative visions." The slave trade was not reopened, and expeditions in the Caribbean were largely bungled affairs involving relatively few people—more than half of whom, in the case of Walker's Nicaraguan adventure, were not from the valley or the South at all but were, rather, Northern adventurers. The fact that this particular vision of a pro-slavery future never came to pass only emphasizes that these same slaveholders did eventually secede and fight in a war, even if it was for what Mr. Johnson calls "a sort of lowest common dominator," a "politics of negation—of seceding from."
And more than the politics of negation may have linked the Mississippi Valley slaveholders with others elsewhere in the South. Pro-slavery political economists (whom Mr. Johnson examines in detail) were harsh critics of free wage labor and liberal capitalism, but so were the influential pro-slavery divines and theologians (whom Mr. Johnson slights). They saw liberal capitalism as a profound threat to the social hierarchy, which was rooted in self-serving claims about paternalism, the enduring value and desirability of organic social and economic relations, and the intimate connection between slaveholding society writ large and the integrity of individual, patriarchal white households. The arguments developed and circulated by the pro-slavery theologians resonated with slaveholders and non-slaveholders throughout the South.
Recognizing such features of Southern society, as well as acknowledging the tortured way in which paternalism braided together the lives of the enslaved and the enslavers, goes some way toward "unflattening" the world Mr. Johnson describes. Nonetheless, "River of Dark Dreams" is an important, arguably seminal, book. If sometimes dense, it is always trenchant and learned. And in highly compelling fashion, it helps us more fully appreciate how thoroughly the slaveholding South was part of the capitalist transatlantic world of the first half of the 19th century. [source: The Wall Street Journal]
Between Slavery and Capitalism: The Legacy of Emancipation in the American South; Martin Ruef
Princeton University Press -- At the center of the upheavals brought by emancipation in the American South was the economic and social transition from slavery to modern capitalism. In Between Slavery and Capitalism, Martin Ruef examines how this institutional change affected individuals, organizations, and communities in the late nineteenth century, as blacks and whites alike learned to navigate the shoals between two different economic worlds. Analyzing trajectories among average Southerners, this is perhaps the most extensive sociological treatment of the transition from slavery since W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, uncertainty was a pervasive feature of life in the South, affecting the economic behavior and social status of former slaves, Freedmen's Bureau agents, planters, merchants, and politicians, among others. Emancipation brought fundamental questions: How should emancipated slaves be reimbursed in wage contracts? What occupations and class positions would be open to blacks and whites? What forms of agricultural tenure could persist? And what paths to economic growth would be viable? To understand the escalating uncertainty of the postbellum era, Ruef draws on a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including several thousand interviews with former slaves, letters, labor contracts, memoirs, survey responses, census records, and credit reports.
Through a resolutely comparative approach, Between Slavery and Capitalism identifies profound changes between the economic institutions of the Old and New South and sheds new light on how the legacy of emancipation continues to affect political discourse and race and class relations today. (source: Princeton University Press)
As reported in the Insurance Journal, in an article entitled, "Insurance Policy Included in Harrowing New Orleans Slavery Exhibit," by John Pope, on 15 April 2015 -- The cool, soothing exhibit rooms at the Historic New Orleans Collection’s Williams Research Center are a stark contrast to what’s shown: every wall and exhibit case documents the horrors of slavery.
There are inventories and illustrations of the auction of human beings, as well as reward notices for the return of slaves who escaped from plantations. An 1821 insurance policy taken out by William Kenner, the plantation owner whose family gave its name to the East Jefferson municipality, covered a shipment of slaves for the voyage from Savannah, Georgia, to New Orleans.
An 1849 map shows more than 50 slave markets all around the city. An engraving depicts a slave auction in the rotunda of the St. Louis Hotel, which occupied the French Quarter site where the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel stands.
“Under this dome, in this atmosphere of grandeur, paintings, furniture, property and people were bought and sold,” said Erin Greenwald, the curator of “Purchased Lives: New Orleans and the Domestic Slave Trade,” on view at 410 Chartres St. through July 18. Admission is free.
“Slave auctions were on the list of must-see sights,” she said.
Because the St. Louis Hotel wasn’t demolished until 1916, the auction block not only stood for a half-century after emancipation but attracted people who posed next to it in what Greenwald described as “fetishization.”
The people who posed weren’t just tourists. Greenwald said a recently acquired postcard from 1914, destined for the exhibit once it was catalogued, shows a black woman who had been asked to stand on the block where she had been sold into slavery for $1,500.
“It is deeply, deeply creepy,” Greenwald said.
A ship’s manifest showing slaves bound for New Orleans includes Plat Hamilton, the slave name imposed on Solomon Northup after he was kidnapped and sold into bondage. His memoir, “12 Years a Slave,” was the basis of an Oscar-winning movie.
The exhibit also shows a page from the diary of the Marksville lawyer whom Northup’s family hired to sue for his freedom. On Jan. 4, 1853, three days after John Pamplin Waddill wrote that he had been hired, he said that Northup had been freed and that he had collected his fee: $50.
“That’s an extraordinary document,” Greenwald said.
When Northup arrived in New Orleans, he had smallpox, Greenwald said, and was treated at Charity Hospital.
Treating slaves before they were sold was common, she said, adding that a Touro Infirmary patient register in the exhibit shows that about 45 percent of the hospital’s patients between 1855 and 1860 were slaves.
“They were trying to get their human property well so that they could sell them for a higher price,” Greenwald said. “They got a new set of clothes, they were fattened up, and they were made to exercise to build and tone muscles. They were given lessons on how to look lively so they didn’t look downcast or somber when buyers came in.”
In the exhibit are a livery coat for a slave who worked indoors, and a greatcoat, designed for outdoor work such as driving carriages, that Dr. William Newton Mercer provided for his slaves. The garments, with his family crest on silver and pewter buttons, came from Brooks Brothers.
Mercer had plantations in Mississippi and a New Orleans town house, which, Greenwald said, is now the Boston Club.
“If you were a resident of the city of New Orleans in the 1840s, you couldn’t go anywhere without encountering slavery,” she said. “It was just a part of life _ the cooks in hotels, the waiters in hotels, carters and draymen bringing goods back and forth, seamstresses and market women. All these people were people who were enslaved.”
There’s more to the exhibit than paperwork, pictures and garments. One case holds an iron collar, just big enough to encircle someone’s neck, with two tall prongs, each hanging a bell at ear level.
The 4-pound collar would be clamped onto a slave who had tried to escape. It’s “possibly the most viscerally disturbing object in the exhibition,” Greenwald said.
“It was worn 24/7,” she said. “Overseers and plantation owners would use them as a method of punishing and tracking runaway slaves because every time you move, the bell rings.”
Next to the collar is a classified advertisement asking the owners of a 20-year-old slave named William to take him home from the jail where he had been confined as an escapee.
“He is black and has a down look,” the advertisement reads. “When committed, he had around his neck an iron collar with three prongs extending upward; has many scars on his back and shoulders from the whip.”
While slavery was horrible, emancipation didn’t help much, aside from the fact that these men, women and children were no longer property, Greenwald said.
They had nothing, she said, and often had to work as tenant farmers on the land where they had been enslaved. A stereopticon slide in the exhibit shows people wearing rags and, with a few exceptions, barefoot.
Although the Freedmen’s Bureau was established in 1865 to help the formerly enslaved adjust to their new status, it provided no money to people who wanted to reconnect with families that had been torn apart by sales to different slave-owners.
Consequently, they resorted to placing classified advertisements seeking information. A wall is full of these heartbreaking appeals.
Jacob Stewart, who lived in Yazoo City, Miss., placed such an ad trying to find his mother, sister and brother. He hadn’t seen them since 1856, when he was sold in New Orleans.
There is no way to tell how many of these appeals were successful, Greenwald said, but she didn’t offer much hope.
“Some people found their families,” she said, “but the vast majority did not.” (source: Insurance Journal; Copyright 2015 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
