Brutal U.S Capitalism's Roots are In Slavery

A photograph taken at a medical examination of a man known as Gordon, who escaped from Mississippi and made his way to a Union Army encampment in Baton Rouge, La., in 1863. McPherson & Oliver, via the Library of Congress

"Those searching for reasons the American economy is uniquely severe and unbridled have found answers in many places (religion, politics, culture). But recently, historians have pointed persuasively to the gnatty fields of Georgia and Alabama, to the cotton houses and slave auction blocks, as the birthplace of America’s low-road approach to capitalism."

"An 1829 first-person account from Alabama recorded an overseer’s shoving the faces of women he thought had picked too slow into their cotton baskets and opening up their backs. To the historian Edward Baptist, before the Civil War, Americans “lived in an economy whose bottom gear was torture.”

                                                                                        From an article in Today's N.Y. Times