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applegrove

(118,737 posts) Sun Nov 26, 2017, 09:08 PM Nov 2017

How slave labor built and financed major U.S. cities

https://www.salon.com/2017/11/26/how-slave-labor-built-and-financed-major-u-s-cities/

CARL ANTHONY at Salon

"SNIP..........

Slaves constructed Fort Amsterdam and its successors along the Battery. They built the wall from which Wall Street gets its name. They built the roads, the docks, and most of the important buildings of the early city—the first city hall, the first Dutch and English churches, Fraunces Tavern, the city prison and the city hospital. (New-York Historical Society 2016)

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In 1991, construction workers in Lower Manhattan discovered a seventeenth-century burial ground for both free and enslaved Africans during an excavation for building a federal office building. After years of scientific, archeological, and historical research, the General Services Administration partnered with the National Parks Service to dedicate, create, and open the African Burial Ground National Monument and visitor center in 2007. I was fortunate to be living in Manhattan at the time and closely followed the reports and reflections in the media. I wondered about the relationship between the Lower Manhattan of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the Lower Manhattan of the twenty-first century—an integral center of the global economy. I asked myself what the significance of this rediscovery might be for contemporary urban planning and development. My first thought was that people would become more conscious of the impact and significance of historical underpinnings like the kidnapping and exploitation of African people. Such awareness can lead to a deeper understanding and greater capacity for resolving problems we face today.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, entrepreneurs in the North capitalized on the expanding production and trade of cotton and sugar in the South to make New York City the leading port and global financial center. It is no surprise that African Americans—enslaved and free—provided the bulk of the labor that built not only the New York infrastructure but also the White House, the US Capitol, and other early government buildings. In order to assume any kind of moral authority in today’s world, Americans need to understand and acknowledge their enormous debt to black people, as well as to the indigenous people from whom they took the land. It has become increasingly apparent that Americans owe enslaved Africans and their descendants deep appreciation and an enormous debt of gratitude. No amount of reparations could repay the debt incurred.

Recognition of the price paid in human life and liberty for economic advancement—and the costs of resources extracted as nature’s systems were exploited—must inform and guide us as we work to transform our cities and regions. We must forge a new path illuminated by justice, respect for the dignity of each and every human being, and determination to maintain and restore the web of life as the foundation for health and sustainability.

...........SNIP"

8 replies

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How slave labor built and financed major U.S. cities (Original Post) applegrove Nov 2017 OP

Thanks for posting that. MineralMan Nov 2017 #1

Good stuff DangerousUrNot Nov 2017 #2

Recommended. And reparations will never be paid, just as thanks will never be given. guillaumeb Nov 2017 #3

California with its big cities did not join the Union until 1850, and then under the Compromise, Sophia4 Nov 2017 #4

No. Out west the used Mexican, italian, and Chinese labor Drahthaardogs Nov 2017 #5

Most cities in the Western Hemisphere were built with slave labor csziggy Nov 2017 #6

Can't disagree with that. But most cities in the West were not built by African slaves Sophia4 Nov 2017 #7

Descendants of African slaves have hellped build most of this country csziggy Nov 2017 #8

MineralMan

(146,324 posts)

1. Thanks for posting that.

Reply to applegrove (Original post)

Sun Nov 26, 2017, 09:15 PM

Nov 2017

I'll be looking more into it.

DangerousUrNot

(431 posts)

2. Good stuff

Reply to applegrove (Original post)

Sun Nov 26, 2017, 09:22 PM

Nov 2017

guillaumeb

(42,641 posts)

3. Recommended. And reparations will never be paid, just as thanks will never be given.

Reply to applegrove (Original post)

Sun Nov 26, 2017, 09:23 PM

Nov 2017

All part of rewriting history to emphasize the contributions of famous white inventors and politicians and ignore the people who actually did the work.

Sophia4

(3,515 posts)

4. California with its big cities did not join the Union until 1850, and then under the Compromise,

Reply to applegrove (Original post)

Sun Nov 26, 2017, 09:33 PM

Nov 2017

as a free state -- no slaves.

https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=23856

I understand what is meant in the OP, and it is true for some of the large cities on the Eastern Coast in particular, but not for the cities of California. The Chinese immigrants helped build California cities, and we are a neatly majority ethnic/racial minority state. But our cities were not built by slaves, and they are among the largest in the US.

Chicago was founded by a free Black trader per this website:

Early Chicago

Chicago’s first permanent resident was a trader named Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a free black man apparently from Haiti, who came here in the late 1770s. In 1795, the U.S. government built Fort Dearborn at what is now the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive (look for the bronze markers in the pavement). It was burned to the ground by Native Americans in 1812, rebuilt and demolished in 1857.

https://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/about/history.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chicago

American Midwestern and Western cities did not grow very large until the railroads were well established and that was mostly although not entirely AFTER the end of slavery.

So the OP is mostly talking about Eastern cities and maybe Eastern up to and including St. Louis.

Drahthaardogs

(6,843 posts)

5. No. Out west the used Mexican, italian, and Chinese labor

Reply to Sophia4 (Reply #4)

Sun Nov 26, 2017, 09:38 PM

Nov 2017

Paid them in scrip and made them live in company housing. They were not slaves but we're indentured

csziggy

(34,136 posts)

6. Most cities in the Western Hemisphere were built with slave labor

Reply to Sophia4 (Reply #4)

Sun Nov 26, 2017, 09:51 PM

Nov 2017

Whether enslaved Indians, Africans, or Asians, nearly every city and most of the infrastructure in the first three centuries after the arrival of Columbus was built by unwilling workers. For a decent history of the abuse of people during the colonization of the Americas, read Charles Mann's "1493" - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/books/review/1493-uncovering-the-new-world-columbus-created-by-charles-c-mann-book-review.html

Certainly US cities built after the end of the American Civil War were built by non-slaves - but the workers were not paid the true value of their labor and for the most part were treated badly by their employers. Even now in many parts of the "New World" workers are treated as badly as enslaved people were. While many are not officially slaves, for the most part they do not have the freedom to walk away from low wage jobs to seek better lives.

Sophia4

(3,515 posts)

7. Can't disagree with that. But most cities in the West were not built by African slaves

Reply to csziggy (Reply #6)

Sun Nov 26, 2017, 10:06 PM

Nov 2017

or former slaves. Asians, maybe some Indians, but mostly probably white people built the cities of the West.

csziggy

(34,136 posts)

8. Descendants of African slaves have hellped build most of this country

Reply to Sophia4 (Reply #7)

Sun Nov 26, 2017, 10:47 PM

Nov 2017

They moved west at the same time whites did. But the same as the contributions of women to our history have been made invisible, most of the contributions of non-whites have been made invisible.

The numbers of Africans imported as servants and slaves into the Americas far outnumbered the numbers of Europeans who attempted to settle the hemisphere.

From 1493 by Charles C. Mann:

For millennia, almost all Europeans were found in Europe, few Africans existed outside Africa, and Asians lived, nearly without exception, in Asia alone. . .Colon's voyages inaugurated an unprecedented reshuffling of Homo sapiens: the human wing of the Columbian Exchange. . . Europeans became the majority in Argentina and Australia. Africans were found from Sao Paulo to Seattle, and Chinatowns sprang up all over the globe.

The movement was dominated by the African slave trade. . .For a long time the scale of slavery in the Americas was not fully grasped. The first systematic attempt at a count, Philip Curtin's The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, did not appear until 1969, more than a century after its subject's extirpation. Partly stimulated by Curtin's study, David Eltis and Martin Halbert of Emory University, in Atlanta, led a remarkable effort in which scholars from a dozen nations pooled their work to create an online database of records from almost 35,000 separate slave voyages. Its most recent iteration, released in 2009, estimates that between 1500 and 1840, the heyday of the slave trade, 11.7 million captive Africans left for the Americas - a massive transfer of human flesh unlike anything before it. Roughly speaking, for every European who can to the American, three Africans made the trip.

The implications of these figures are as staggering as their size. Textbooks commonly present American history in terms of Europeans moving into a lightly settled hemisphere. In fact, the hemisphere was full of Indians - tens of millions of them. And most of the movement into the Americas was by Africans, who soon became the majority population in almost every place that wasn't controlled by Indians. Demographically speaking, Eltis has written, "America was an extension of Africa rather than Europe until late in the nineteenth century."

<SNIP>

This great transformation, a turning point in the story of our species, was wrought largely be African hands. The crowds thronging the streets of the new cities were mainly African crowds. The farmers growing rice and wheat in the new farms were mainly African farmers. The people rowing boats on rivers, then the most important highways, were mainly African people. The men and women on the ships and in the battles and around the mills were mainly African men and women. Slavery was the foundations institution of the modern Americas.
pp. 366-368.

Mann goes on to say that it was not until the nineteenth century that European immigrants dominated the Americas. My take: It is not surprising that this latter wave of immigrants were ignorant or uncaring of the vast contributions of their African predecessors. It is also not surprising that the eugenics, KKK, Nazis, and white power movements all seem to be dominated by the descendants of that later wave of immigrants to the Americas.

Mann does discuss the influx of Asians into the Americas - in fact that began far earlier than I had ever known since ships built in the Philippines for the Spanish silver trade with Chinese merchants in the 1500s often had Asian crews for their eastward voyages who abandoned ship to settle in South and Central America. In the 1600s there was a trade war between Spanish tailors and Chinese trailers in Mexico - even when the Chinese tailors were driven out of the city centers, they still drew more business due to their superior work.

The use of Chinese labor to build railroads was a very late introduction of Asian labor - Chinese laborers were effectively kidnapped and used as slave labor on the guano islands off the coast of Peru before the first railroad crossed the US.

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