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What Does America Owe The Slaves?
What, to the American Slave, is your Fourth of July?
—Frederick Douglass
"Jackson has to own that he owes his farm on the banks of the Mobile to the strong arm of the Negro."
—Frederick Douglass
The Founding Fathers understood the divisiveness slavery created within the original thirteen colonies. So that the young union wouldn't die in its infancy, they right or wrongly chose during the Constitutional Convention to let future generations decide the issue.
The United States as a whole was far more dependent on slavery in the first decades of the Republic than most Americans today realize.
While fewer slaves lived in the North, it too reaped the benefits - a prosperous agrarian national economy built on the backs of slaves.
Throughout Andrew Jackson's military and political career, he sought to expand the American Southern frontier, eventually eliminating British, Spanish, and Native Americans in the area. These feats propelled him to national prominence and opened up huge tracks of land to grateful white Americans, who mostly turned these lands into slave-based cotton plantations.
Like most Southerners, Andrew Jackson accepted slavery unquestionably despite the obvious moral dilemmas it poses to us today.
"...wealth accumulation was tied to slavery...Jackson practiced and defended what had been the accustomed way for white men to make money for 200 years."
—John Larson, historian
It was an ancient institution, protected by the Constitution itself, and politicians in the slave holding states felt that anything that threatened to destabilize slavery was dangerous and had to be curbed.
There were others, especially in the North, who thought slavery was wrong and that Americans should look to a future without it.
