establish

In this way the slave-holding section of the dominant class in America first diffused its own [35] necessary contempt for the Negro among the other sections of the ruling class, and the ideas of this class as a whole became through the agency of press, pulpit and platform, the ideas of “the American People” on the Negro.

[35]

In further application of the materialistic method to this subject, it is curious and interesting to note how the southern attitude toward the Negro changed with the changing industrial system. When the wasteful agricultural methods of chattel slavery had exhausted the soil of the south and no new land loomed up on the horizon of the system, slavery began to decay. The planters of that section settled down into the patriarchal type of family relations with their slaves, who were then simply a means of keeping the master’s hands free from the contamination of work and not a means of ever-increasing profits. Slavery was then in a fair way to die of its own weight. But with the invention of Whitney’s cotton-gin, which enabled one man to do the work of three hundred, cotton came to the front as the chief agricultural staple in America. The black slave became a source of increasing revenue as a fertilizer of capital. The idyllic relations of the preceding forty years came to a sudden end. Increased profits demanded increased exploitation and the ethics of advantage dictated the despising of the Negro.

method

De Bow’s Review, the great organ of southern opinion, appeared, and in serious scientific articles maintained the proposition that the Negro was not [36] a man but a beast. About that time (and conformably to that opinion) the practice was begun of spelling the word, Negro, with a small “n”—a practice still current in America, even in the socialist press.

[36]

In the meanwhile, the system of industrial production known as the machine system developed in the north. The factory proletariat whose condition determined that of the other northern workers could fertilize capital more rapidly and cheaply than the slaves. This form of production (and its products) came into competition with the slave system and the tremendous conflict reflected itself upon the political field as a struggle for the restriction of slavery within its original bounds. The Louisiana Purchase, the annexation of Texas, the Missouri Compromise, the Dred Scot Decision, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill,—all these were political episodes 

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