A Segunda Escravidão e a Primeira República Americana

Baptist, Edward E.

doi:10.1590/2236-463320130501

Resumo

Este artigo reescreve a história dos Estados Unidos antes da Guerra Civil, tomando por base quatro fases de sua história financeira. Essas fases mapeiam os ciclos cambiantes de boom and bust, movidos pelos anseios dos empresários em expandir a escravidão por meio de um sistema financeiro inovador e desregulado. A habilidade dos escravizadores em usar o Estado para formar os mercados, extrair rendas, subscrever os fluxos de crédito da comunidade mundial de investidores e socializar as perdas, ao mesmo tempo em que aumentavam constantemente a produtividade da escravidão nos campos de algodão, foi a força motora que ditou a expansão mais ampla economia norte-americana e suas crises periódicas.

Palavras-chave:
Estados Unidos; escravidão; história financeira

Abstract

This article rewrites the history of the Antebellum United States around the four phases of its financial history. These phases map out changing boom-and-bust cycles, driven by the entrepreneurs' desire to create innovative and deregulated financing of the expansion of slavery. The ability of enslavers to use the state to create markets, extract rents, underwrite credit flows from the worldwide community of investors, and socialize losses was the main driving force for the broader expansion of the U.S. economy and for its periodic crises as well.

Keywords:
United States; slavery; financial history

Texto completo disponível apenas em PDF.

Full text available only in PDF format.

1
NORTHUP, Solomon. Twelve years A Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New York. Buffalo, NY: Derby, Orton and Mulligan, 1853. p.321; NICHOLS, Charles H. Who Read the Slave Narratives. Phylon, n.20, 1959, p.149-162.
2
St. Albans' (Vt.) Messenger, 11 de dezembro de 1856. FISKE, David. Solomon Northup: His Life Before And After Slavery. Prelo, 2012.
3
Variety, 11 de novembro de 2011, http://variety. com/2011/film/news/fassbender-mcqueen-reteam-for-slave-1118044258/ (acessado em 20 de março de 2013).
4
POMERANZ, Kenneth C. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2000.
5
TOMICH, Dale W. Through the Prism of Slavery. Labor, Capital, and World Economy. Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
6
BLACKBURN, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 14921800. London: Verso, 1997.
7
DAVIS, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975; BLACKBURN, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery. London: Verso, 1988; BROWN, Christopher L. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
8
OLMSTEAD, Alan; ROHDE, Paul. Biological Innovation and Productivity Growth in the Antebellum Cotton Economy. NBER, Working Paper, n.14142, p.22, junho de 2008.
9
Leitores vêm ignorando essa realidade extraordinária há mais de um século. Ao longo dos últimos duzentos anos, na verdade, de Adam Smith ou Frederick Law Olmstead à maioria dos historiadores modernos, analistas têm afirmado que a produção agrícola de escravos era menos eficiente que a produção de trabalhadores livres. Mesmo aqueles que mediram a agricultura escravista, como Robert Fogel, que percebeu que as fazendas de algodão eram mais produtivas quando comparadas às fazendas do norte livre, apontaram para o motivo errado. FOGEL, Robert. Without Consent or Contract. New York: Norton, 1989. p.72-80; OLSON, John. Clock Time Versus Real Time: A Comparison of the Lengths of the Northern and Southern Agricultural Work Years. In: FOGEL, Robert W.; ENGERMAN, Stanley L. (org.). Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery. Markets and Production: Technical Papers Volume I. New York: Norton, 1991. p.216-240; FOGEL, Robert W. ; ENGERMAN, Stanley L. Explaining the Relative Efficiency of Slave Agriculture in the Antebellum South. American Economic Review, n.67, p.275-296, 1977; METZER, Jacob. Rational Management, Modern Business Practices, and Economies of Scale in Antebellum Southern Plantations. Explorations in Economic History, n.12, p.123150, 1975.
10
SELLERS, Charles G. The Market Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, talvez seja o exemplo mais enfático disso.
11
CASSIDY, John. How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009; KLEIN, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2007; BURGIN, Angus. The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012; PHILIPS-FEIN, Kimberly. Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement From the New Deal to Reagan. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009; HODGSON, Godfrey. More Equal Than Others: America From Nixon to the New Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004; COWIE, Jefferson; SALVATORE, Nick. The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History. International Labor and Working-Class History. n.74, p.3-32, 2008; COWIE, Jefferson. Stayin' Alive: The Last Days of the American Working Class. New York: New Press, 2010.
12
E.g. a forma como pesquisadores falavam sobre BALLEISEN, Edward. Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Failure in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001, como se o livro explicasse a etiologia e consequências do Pânico de 1837 quando, na verdade, ele explica a forma como negociantes pensaram acerca de falências.
13
BLACKBURN, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery... Op. Cit.; cf. MINTZ, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985; BRAUDEL, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Centuries. 3 Vols. New York: Harper & Row, 1982-1984.
14
Cf. GUDMESTAD, Robert. A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003; KAMENSKY, Jane. The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America's First Banking Collapse. New York: Viking, 2008.
15
NOLTE, Vincent. Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres: or, Reminiscences of the Life of a Former Merchant. New York: Redfield, 1854; HIDY, Ralph. The House of Baring in American Trade and Finance: English Merchant Bankers at Work,1763-1861. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1949.
16
NOLTE, Vincent. Op. Cit.; NORTH, Douglass C. Economic Growth of the United States, 17901860. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961.
17
DEYLE, Steven. Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005; JOHNSON, Walter L. Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
18
BRUCHEY, Stuart. Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 1790-1860. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967. p.7.
19
DUPRE, Daniel. Transforming the Cotton Frontier: Madison County, Alabama. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997; CATERALL, Ralph. The Second Bank of the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902. p.21-92.
20
KINDLEBERGER, Charles. Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises. New York: Basic Books, 1978.
21
HAMMOND, Bray. Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957; KILBOURNE, Richard H. Slave Agriculture and Financial Markets in Antebellum America: The Bank of the United States in Mississippi, 1831-1852. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006.
22
DOUGLASS, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855. p.448.
23
GUDMESTAD, Robert. Op. Cit.
24
BAPTIST, Edward E. 'Cuffy,' 'Fancy Maids,' and 'One-Eyed Men,': Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the U.S. American Historical Review, v.106, n.5, p.1619-1650, 2001.
25
WILENTZ, Sean. The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. New York: Norton, 2005.
26
BAPTIST, Edward E. Toxic Debt, Liar Loans, Collateralized and Securitized Human Beings, and the Panic of 1837. In: ZAKIM, Michael; KORNBLITH, Gary J. (org.). Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. p.69-92.
27
MCGRANE, Reginald. Foreign Bondholders and American State Debts. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1935. p.228-229; R.T. Hoskins to R.T. Brownrigg, 19 de dezembro de 1835, Fol. 3, Brownrigg Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; MILES, Edwin A. Jacksonian Democracy in Mississippi. Chapel Hill: 1960. p.140-141; ROEDER, Robert E. New Orleans Merchants, 1790-1837. Tese de Doutorado. Harvard University, 1959, p.334.
28
The Founders' Constitution, Vol.3, p.279-281.
29
FEHRENBACHER, Donald. The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the U.S. Government's Relations With Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001; LIGHTNER, David. Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle Against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. VAN CLEVE, George W. A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics and the Constitution in the Early American Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010; ROBINSON, Donald. Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765-1820. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.
30
MAGRATH, C. Peter. Yazoo: Law and Politics in the New republic: The case of Fletcher V. Peck. WW Norton & Company, 1967; JANE, Kamensky. Op. Cit.
31
JOHN, Richard R. Rethinking The Early American State. Polity, n.40, p.332-339, julho de 2008.
32
MILLER, William Lee. Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1996.
33
ROEDIGER, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York, London: Verso, 1991; MAY, Robert E. The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 18541861. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973.
34
FONER, Philip. Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1941; BRAUER, Kinley J. Cotton Versus Conscience: Massachusetts Whig Politics and Southwestern Expansion. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967.
35
CRONON, William. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.
36
WOODMAN, Harold. King Cotton's Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800-1925. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968; MARTIN, Bonnie. Slavery's Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human Property. Journal of Southern History, v.76, n.4, p.817-866.
37
Controversy and the Road to the Civil WarSILBEY, Joel H. Storm Over Texas: The Annexation . New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
38
E.g. FLETCHER, George. Our Secret Constitution: How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
39
FONER, Eric. Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.
40
NORTHUP, Solomon. Op. Cit., p.308. Eu adaptei os dialetos mais estereotipados.
41
Tradução: Leonardo Marques

Datas de Publicação

Publicação nesta coleção
Jun 2013

Histórico

Recebido
01 Abr 2013
Aceito
30 Abr 2013

Este é um artigo publicado em acesso aberto sob uma licença Creative Commons

[1] 1
NORTHUP, Solomon. Twelve years A Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New York. Buffalo, NY: Derby, Orton and Mulligan, 1853. p.321; NICHOLS, Charles H. Who Read the Slave Narratives. Phylon, n.20, 1959, p.149-162.

[2] 2
St. Albans' (Vt.) Messenger, 11 de dezembro de 1856. FISKE, David. Solomon Northup: His Life Before And After Slavery. Prelo, 2012.

[3] 3
Variety, 11 de novembro de 2011, http://variety. com/2011/film/news/fassbender-mcqueen-reteam-for-slave-1118044258/ (acessado em 20 de março de 2013).

[4] 4
POMERANZ, Kenneth C. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2000.

[5] 5
TOMICH, Dale W. Through the Prism of Slavery. Labor, Capital, and World Economy. Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.

[6] 6
BLACKBURN, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 14921800. London: Verso, 1997.

[7] 7
DAVIS, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975; BLACKBURN, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery. London: Verso, 1988; BROWN, Christopher L. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

[8] 8
OLMSTEAD, Alan; ROHDE, Paul. Biological Innovation and Productivity Growth in the Antebellum Cotton Economy. NBER, Working Paper, n.14142, p.22, junho de 2008.

[9] 9
Leitores vêm ignorando essa realidade extraordinária há mais de um século. Ao longo dos últimos duzentos anos, na verdade, de Adam Smith ou Frederick Law Olmstead à maioria dos historiadores modernos, analistas têm afirmado que a produção agrícola de escravos era menos eficiente que a produção de trabalhadores livres. Mesmo aqueles que mediram a agricultura escravista, como Robert Fogel, que percebeu que as fazendas de algodão eram mais produtivas quando comparadas às fazendas do norte livre, apontaram para o motivo errado. FOGEL, Robert. Without Consent or Contract. New York: Norton, 1989. p.72-80; OLSON, John. Clock Time Versus Real Time: A Comparison of the Lengths of the Northern and Southern Agricultural Work Years. In: FOGEL, Robert W.; ENGERMAN, Stanley L. (org.). Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery. Markets and Production: Technical Papers Volume I. New York: Norton, 1991. p.216-240; FOGEL, Robert W. ; ENGERMAN, Stanley L. Explaining the Relative Efficiency of Slave Agriculture in the Antebellum South. American Economic Review, n.67, p.275-296, 1977; METZER, Jacob. Rational Management, Modern Business Practices, and Economies of Scale in Antebellum Southern Plantations. Explorations in Economic History, n.12, p.123150, 1975.

[10] 10
SELLERS, Charles G. The Market Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, talvez seja o exemplo mais enfático disso.

[11] 11
CASSIDY, John. How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009; KLEIN, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2007; BURGIN, Angus. The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012; PHILIPS-FEIN, Kimberly. Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement From the New Deal to Reagan. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009; HODGSON, Godfrey. More Equal Than Others: America From Nixon to the New Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004; COWIE, Jefferson; SALVATORE, Nick. The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History. International Labor and Working-Class History. n.74, p.3-32, 2008; COWIE, Jefferson. Stayin' Alive: The Last Days of the American Working Class. New York: New Press, 2010.

[12] 12
E.g. a forma como pesquisadores falavam sobre BALLEISEN, Edward. Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Failure in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001, como se o livro explicasse a etiologia e consequências do Pânico de 1837 quando, na verdade, ele explica a forma como negociantes pensaram acerca de falências.

[13] 13
BLACKBURN, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery... Op. Cit.; cf. MINTZ, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985; BRAUDEL, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Centuries. 3 Vols. New York: Harper & Row, 1982-1984.

[14] 14
Cf. GUDMESTAD, Robert. A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003; KAMENSKY, Jane. The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America's First Banking Collapse. New York: Viking, 2008.

[15] 15
NOLTE, Vincent. Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres: or, Reminiscences of the Life of a Former Merchant. New York: Redfield, 1854; HIDY, Ralph. The House of Baring in American Trade and Finance: English Merchant Bankers at Work,1763-1861. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1949.

[16] 16
NOLTE, Vincent. Op. Cit.; NORTH, Douglass C. Economic Growth of the United States, 17901860. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961.

[17] 17
DEYLE, Steven. Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005; JOHNSON, Walter L. Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

[18] 18
BRUCHEY, Stuart. Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 1790-1860. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967. p.7.

[19] 19
DUPRE, Daniel. Transforming the Cotton Frontier: Madison County, Alabama. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997; CATERALL, Ralph. The Second Bank of the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902. p.21-92.

[20] 20
KINDLEBERGER, Charles. Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises. New York: Basic Books, 1978.

[21] 21
HAMMOND, Bray. Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957; KILBOURNE, Richard H. Slave Agriculture and Financial Markets in Antebellum America: The Bank of the United States in Mississippi, 1831-1852. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006.

[22] 22
DOUGLASS, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855. p.448.

[23] 23
GUDMESTAD, Robert. Op. Cit.

[24] 24
BAPTIST, Edward E. 'Cuffy,' 'Fancy Maids,' and 'One-Eyed Men,': Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the U.S. American Historical Review, v.106, n.5, p.1619-1650, 2001.

[25] 25
WILENTZ, Sean. The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. New York: Norton, 2005.

[26] 26
BAPTIST, Edward E. Toxic Debt, Liar Loans, Collateralized and Securitized Human Beings, and the Panic of 1837. In: ZAKIM, Michael; KORNBLITH, Gary J. (org.). Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. p.69-92.

[27] 27
MCGRANE, Reginald. Foreign Bondholders and American State Debts. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1935. p.228-229; R.T. Hoskins to R.T. Brownrigg, 19 de dezembro de 1835, Fol. 3, Brownrigg Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; MILES, Edwin A. Jacksonian Democracy in Mississippi. Chapel Hill: 1960. p.140-141; ROEDER, Robert E. New Orleans Merchants, 1790-1837. Tese de Doutorado. Harvard University, 1959, p.334.

[28] 28
The Founders' Constitution, Vol.3, p.279-281.

[29] 29
FEHRENBACHER, Donald. The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the U.S. Government's Relations With Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001; LIGHTNER, David. Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle Against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. VAN CLEVE, George W. A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics and the Constitution in the Early American Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010; ROBINSON, Donald. Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765-1820. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.

[30] 30
MAGRATH, C. Peter. Yazoo: Law and Politics in the New republic: The case of Fletcher V. Peck. WW Norton & Company, 1967; JANE, Kamensky. Op. Cit.

[31] 31
JOHN, Richard R. Rethinking The Early American State. Polity, n.40, p.332-339, julho de 2008.

[32] 32
MILLER, William Lee. Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1996.

[33] 33
ROEDIGER, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York, London: Verso, 1991; MAY, Robert E. The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 18541861. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973.

[34] 34
FONER, Philip. Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1941; BRAUER, Kinley J. Cotton Versus Conscience: Massachusetts Whig Politics and Southwestern Expansion. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967.

[35] 35
CRONON, William. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.

[36] 36
WOODMAN, Harold. King Cotton's Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800-1925. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968; MARTIN, Bonnie. Slavery's Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human Property. Journal of Southern History, v.76, n.4, p.817-866.

[37] 37
Controversy and the Road to the Civil WarSILBEY, Joel H. Storm Over Texas: The Annexation . New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

[38] 38
E.g. FLETCHER, George. Our Secret Constitution: How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

[39] 39
FONER, Eric. Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.

[40] 40
NORTHUP, Solomon. Op. Cit., p.308. Eu adaptei os dialetos mais estereotipados.

[41] 41
Tradução: Leonardo Marques

Brasil