Slavery was the economic engine of early American growth

Evidence

As a source of the fledgling nation’s financial might, slavery shaped our political institutions and founding documents, our laws governing private property and financial regulation, our management techniques and accounting systems, and our economic systems and labor unions. By the eve of the Civil War, the Mississippi Valley was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States. Cotton grown and picked by enslaved workers was the nation’s most valuable export. The combined value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation. In the mid-1830s, New Orleans boasted a denser concentration of banking capital than New York City. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 533

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Reinforces the reframing thesis that slavery is foundational, not peripheral, to American capitalism — the load-bearing claim the reader must separate from contested empirics; also connects to Milgrom’s institutional analysis of how systems shape markets.
• XREF: connects to: Slavery made Euro-American trade uniquely self-catalyzing before industrialization. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 873; American territorial expansion, slavery, and cotton drove the Industrial Revolution symbiotically — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 199; American cotton built on expropriated land and slave labor powered the English Industrial Revolution