Southern Slavery Research Paper

It has become fashionable to claim that slavery and slave labor were indispensable to the rise of American capitalism or in other words industrial capitalism of the modern era would not have existed without southern slavery. I agree with this claim because even Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates posits that “the country was built” on slave labor. In other instances, for example when Azealia Banks claimed that American slaves perished in the name of modern capitalism but this is not true. If anything slavery was at its peak during the market revolution which gave rise to modern capitalism. Slavery as an institution evolved during this time and had its own revolution in the South while the North was having the market revolution. …show more content…
To understand the market revolution, we must describe changes in America. One particular change that is engrained with the market revolution is the factory system. The factory system replaced the domestic system. The domestic system was when skilled people (artisans) made commercial products. The factory system was a new way of organizing labor because the new machines were often too large to be in a workers home. To maximize efficiency of the new machines many workers were placed into factories to use the machines to create more goods. This is true especially for the manufacturing of textiles with the spinning jenny which had the ability to produce textiles using waterpower/steam power. In other words its the shift from artisans to factory …show more content…
Unlike the domestic system which rely on artisans, the factory system had a centralized workplace. Instead of different artisans working out of their homes, in a factory many workers would come together to make products and work with large expensive machinery. The machines would also be operated with many workers but the machines will make more products faster. The factory system also had divisions of the labor and interchangeable parts. There would be different workers working in one specific task in making the product, so that each worker will specialize in that one task instead of knowing how the make the entire product. This would allow factory workers to be more proficient in doing one small task because it would take longer for the workers to learn how to make the whole product (the artisans have to make the whole product). Which is why it was called deskilled labor. These factory workers or unskilled workers would only be taught to do the one task and only do that task. Factory workers mass produced interchangeable parts, which means the products built exactly the same. For example, the individual parts of the musket can be replaced with interchangeable parts if made in a factory, but a musket built by artisans would have different parts and therefore not be easily replaced. All these new changes brought with the factory system during the

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