Many people are
aware that advancing technology has an effect on society and individual
behavior. From the displacement of human
labor from the production process to video game or social media addiction,
technology often seems to benefit only a relatively small number of people at
the expense of everyone else.
This is not really
the fault of advancing technology, but of ownership patterns and the financing
of new capital. To illustrate, let us
take the example of two inventions that changed the economic and political face
of America, the cotton gin and the McCormick reaper. Today we will look at the cotton gin.
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| Signing of the U.S. Constitution |
Although it seems
counter intuitive, chattel slavery was beginning to look like a dying institution
in late eighteenth century America. The
framers of the U.S. Constitution were even able to get a sunset date for the
importation of new slaves inserted into the document, with the obvious intent
of following the growing anti-slavery sentiment and gradually abolishing the
institution.
Then came Eli
Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793.
Whitney began to
work on his project after moving to Georgia in search of work. Farmers were desperately searching for a way
to make cotton pay, so a woman named Catharine Green financed Whitney’s
invention. Whitney created two types: a small, hand-cranked version and a large
one that use horse- or water-power.
Prior to Whitney’s invention,
cotton had required considerable labor to clean and separate the fibers from
the seeds, taking a slave an average of ten hours to clean a single pound. The first version of the cotton gin operated
by two slaves could clean fifty pounds a day, a 2,500% increase in processing
capacity that eliminated the bottleneck to supplying the world with inexpensive
fiber.
Practically
overnight the whole picture of U.S. southern agriculture changed. Cotton changed from a crop at which no one
was able to make a living, to a veritable gold mine. As a result, from 1803 to 1937 cotton was the
single largest export of the United States.
Fortunes were built and maintained on the cultivation of cotton, and it
had all been made possible by the invention of the cotton gin.
Demand for slaves
and land increased in proportion. Cotton is easy to grow but depletes soil
of essential nutrients. Absent a program
of rotating crops or otherwise restoring the land, cotton cultivation — and
slavery — had to keep moving west into the new territories. The Missouri Compromise of 1820, the
Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 attempted to maintain a
balance of political power between slave states and free states, but economic
pressures were building up. Cotton was
simply too profitable.
In 1855 David
Christy, a former abolitionist, published Cotton
is King. (David Christy, Cotton is
King, or, The
Culture of Cotton, and its Relation to Agriculture, Manufactures and Commerce;
to the Free Colored People; and to Those Who Hold that Slavery is In Itself
Sinful; by an American. Cincinnati, Ohio: Moore, Wilstach, Keys, 1855.)
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| David Christy |
Christy claimed
that the economic survival of the United States and the British Empire depended
on the slave cultivation of cotton. Economic
necessity therefore dictated slavery must continue. True, Christy was not the first one to make
these arguments but he did give them their most persuasive form. See, for example, “Whig Principles: What’s
Left of Them” from the Democratic magazine, The
United States Review, December 1854, Vol. 34, No. 12, 465-477.
Two years later the
United States Supreme Court handed down a decision that not only changed the
entire basis of the government of the United States, it changed history — and
not for the better. This was Scott v. Sandford, (60 U.S. 393 (1857)) known
to history as the Dred Scott case, one of the worst decisions ever handed down
by a court of law in a presumably free society.
The facts are straightforward. Dred Scott (1799-1858) argued that since he
had been taken to a state where slavery was illegal, he was ipso facto free. Scott had previously attempted to purchase
his freedom, but his master refused. The
Missouri Supreme Court held for Scott but was overturned on appeal to the
United States Supreme Court.
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| Roger Brooke Taney |
In his opinion Chief
Justice Roger Brooke Taney (1777-1864) ignored thousands of years of natural
law theory as well as the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the Declaration of
Independence. Contrary to the intent of
the framers, Taney held that “persons” and “citizens” are synonymous terms in
the U.S. Constitution. Since citizenship
is granted by the State (so Taney argued), so are the “natural” rights that
confer personality. (Ibid.)
In Taney’s line
of reasoning, because Dred Scott was not a citizen but an “inferior being,” he
was ipso facto not a person. He therefore had no standing in the court and
could not sue for anything, much less his freedom: “[W]hether emancipated or
not, [Negroes have] no rights or privileges but such as those who [hold] the
power and the Government might choose to grant them.” (Ibid.)
Taney’s decision
changed the U.S. Constitution from a delegation of rights from people in order
to create a government, to a grant of rights from the government to create
persons. He rejected the theory, pivotal
in the formation of the United States, that certain rights inhere by nature in
human beings, making them automatically and irrevocably persons.
As a Catholic,
Taney’s decision is incomprehensible unless it is assumed that, as had many
Americans by this time, he imbibed the doctrines of the New Christianity,
Neo-Catholicism, and European type liberalism.
If that was in fact the case, Taney would have assumed as a matter of
course that sovereignty resides not in the human person, but in the abstraction
of the collective — exactly as de Lamennais had asserted in his “theory of
certitude.”
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| Hugues Felicite Robert de Lamennais |
As a
Neo-Catholic, Taney’s decision would have been a logical development resulting
from the principles of European type democracy and liberalism. Reinforced by political and economic pressure
from the South, and the growing acceptance of positivism among intellectuals, the
opinion in Scott prepared the ground
for an enormous expansion of State power.
Thus, as analyzed
by constitutional scholar William Winslow Crosskey (1894-1968) in his study, Politics and the Constitution in the History
of the United States (1953), the question decided in the Dred Scott case
was not, as many authorities today claim, whether a black human being could be
a citizen as that term is used in the
U.S. Constitution. Instead, the Court
decided the more fundamental issue — over which it had no jurisdiction! — of
whether a black human being could be a person
— “person” being something that has rights, status, and a position in society
by nature itself, not by a grant from the State or any authority other than
God.
In effect then,
according to Taney, the United States government in the person of the Supreme
Court has the power of God and can deny to anyone it chooses rights previously
regarded as inherent in each and every human being. Specifically, as Crosskey explained, Scott decided whether any “‘man of
African descent, whether a slave or not,’ could enjoy, under the Constitution
of the United States, any right or protection whatsoever. All such men were left, by the principles of
the Dred Scott case, to the absolute, unrestrained power of the separate
states.” (William Winslow Crosskey, Politics
and the Constitution in the History of the United States. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago
Press, 1953, 1084.)
As Crosskey, who
died before the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe
v. Wade, (410 U.S. 113 (1973).) commented
regarding the decision,
This, to the present-day mind,
seems an unbelievable decision; but to those familiar with the political
demands of the South of the time when the decision was rendered, such a tenor
in the Court’s holding will not be difficult to credit. For it was exactly what the South, for a long
time, had been demanding. (Crosskey, Politics
and the Constitution, op. cit., 1089.)
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