BREAKTHROUGH/page 23 Slavery was actually declining when the invention of the cotton gin and the world boom in cotton textiles gave it new life. Plantation cotton culture exhausted the soil rapidly. It was expand or die for the slave economy which included not only the plantations of the South but also the textile mills of the North (many in England, too) and those who jobbed in food and tools and animals for the plantations; the shipping and the necessary transportation involved were also important. The expansion of the slave economy to the West and the Southwest encountered obstacles. There was the existence of Northern Mexico: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California. In the North there was the combination of homesteaders, capitalist agriculture and processing, and the manufacture and sale of consumer goods based upon the internal market which clashed with the interest of those tied directly to slavery. Another obstacle was the presence and resistance of Native Americans living in the Middle West. The first obstruction was met by the ' 'rebellion" of Texas and its absorption by the US, followed by war with Mexico and grabbing the Southwest and California. The next obstacle was met by determined efforts of the South and its Northern allies to control the Federal government and guarantee the future by seeing to it that new states be admitted to the union as slave states. This came to be called the "irrepressible conflict." On the surface it was never about slavery as such, but about expansion of the slavery-based part of the capitalist economy versus the expansion of that part which was based more upon "free" land (seized from Native Americans and Mexico), "free" labor, and free capital. The North was ultimately stronger. Not only was it more productive, in the last resort it had the grudging support of free labor and the energetic assistance of the Black slaves. The fight against slavery as such was engendered and sustained first of all by the slaves themselves as the only class with a clear and conscious motivation for the fierce and long and costly struggle. The "free" workers of the North and South were held back and degraded by being part of a slave-based economy and a slave-owning nation. Yet their special privilege and superior social status as whites, miserable though it might be, when combined with dreams of future free land and glorious continental expansion to the West, worked to retard proletarian class and revolutionary consciousness and organization, although there were some small beginnings. As a result, the working class entered the Civil War not as a consciously revolu-
tionary class acting in unity with rebelling slaves, but as partly reluctant allies of a capitalist class which was consciously preparing conditions for its own further and more rapid expansion. There was within the dominant white nation a whole organized force of largely middle-class based women, intellectuals, farmers, etc. who supported the initiative of free Blacks and escaped slaves like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman and went on to create both the abolitionists and also the women's movements. From Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Grimke sisters to Garrison and John Brown they fought valiantly. Through the efforts of slaves and many white allies, South and North, the Civil War and Reconstruction became the high point of principled and massive revolutionary class struggle of US history to date. Nevertheless, the expanding capitalists of the North —now very consciously become empire builders—joined forces with the defeated slave-owners to carry out counter-revolution in the South by terror, demagogy, and maneuver. The leadership (populist) of the white allies of the freed Blacks now deserted. Black leaders were whipped and lynched and some were bought over. The way was then open for capitalist exploitation of the entire continental US. The color line which had been perilously threatened in the South by Reconstruction was restored stronger than ever and driven through the entire country — against Mexicans, Native Americans and Asians as well as Blacks. This period was especially marked by genocidal wars against Native Americans and by the heroic resistance of the Indian nations. The US made and broke treaties, whichever suited it best. The US seized Indian land and resources and confined Native Americans to reservation concentration camps by starvation and by force. Mexican small land-holders were robbed of their land and turned into farm and ranch hands and railroad and mine laborers. Chinese were also imported as railroad and mine and lumber camp laborers. With the building of the transcontinental railroads, the land and timber and mining operations of the robber barons and the coming of the great trusts and finance capital and monopoly, the labor movement also grew and fought fierce and militant battles. Labor developed as a class and even as an anti-capitalist movement with beginnings of Socialist consciousness. The Knights of Labor, the Ancient Brotherhood of Hibernians (Molly Maguires), even early AFL unions that engaged in the struggle for the 8