Slavery expanded sharply after independence despite gradual Northern abolition.

Evidence

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, many Northern states that were less reliant on enslaved labor did pass gradual abolition laws, and some enslavers in the Upper South did free their captives, but most in the South did not. Jefferson himself freed only two enslaved people in his lifetime. Americans in both the North and the South came to see slavery as a necessary evil, the only way to pay off their debts and build the new nation. Cotton gins were invented to speedily remove seeds from cotton fibers, making cotton produced by enslaved labor immensely profitable and leading to an insatiable demand for more land and more labor. Enslavers were marching into the Louisiana Territory, which Jefferson secured from France in 1803. The number of enslaved Africans swelled by 70 percent, from 697,681 in the first federal census of 1790 to 1,191,362 in 1810, and more than tripled over the next fifty years. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1255

Categorization

• XREF: The causal chain (cotton gin → profitability → land demand → Louisiana Purchase → enslaved population growth) is the kind of specific mechanism the reader wants to distinguish from the reframing thesis. — connects to: Regional income convergence happened as Northern inequality rose to Southern levels — Ken-Hou Lin & Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Financialization and U.S. Income…, 184; Rushdoony argued transatlantic slavery increased Black freedom. — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 459