The quote of Henry about his parting from his wife is very humanizing, thank you. Just as a side note, in today’s dollars, Henry’s fourth son sold for $40,890, just to put the immense value they represented, even children. By the 1840s it was very clear that black child enslaved Americans were the “prime” in trading since they could be best trained to pick cotton the fastest and could be trained to be ambidextrous. Older male slaves were found to be difficult to retrain when sent to the new cotton states like Georgia in 1800 as they were too big and slow, trained for heavy work like cutting wood and other things, and had been conditioned to use just the dominant hand. White enslavers grew frustrated until they saw women pick faster, and then discovered children after being weaned (typically age 6) could be sold down the river to pick. Cotton was far more valuable than another crop in history, causing international investors from Europe to join in, and the value of black enslaved humans as an asset class by 1855 amounted to 20 percent of the total value of America, with land in the South being a distant second, followed by everything else. Looking at the value of one child in today’s worth, and thinking how there were about 3 million enslaved people, one can imagine who deeply in debt Southern whites were and also how much money they had invested in a region that became like the world’s first mono-crop area, stretching from the east coast states in Georgia, South Carolina and Florida all the way to West Texas and into other states added as slave states. The fight for westward expansion, called Manifest Destiny, meant for the Southerner power rich whites a call to expand slavers and cotton from coast to coast, taking all the land from the Native Indigenous. Those expansionists lived in most white wealthy states, with 7 of 8 in the top wealth class, with only Connecticut in their with Southern states and only because in the 1950s it had started it’s own textile industry after stealing (via an industrial spy) textile machinery plans from the British who had all the machinery and took all the cotton prior to 1840.
When you do the “ownership math” of these asset classes of investment into cotton production generating this vast wealth (land, enslaved black Americans) then it would have been much easy to end this nasty anti-democracy institution.
