The Half-Hearted Emancipation

It was out of the following concerns that the author chose the termination of slavery in the United States as the subject of this thesis: 1) As one of the central themes of the American national experience, chattel slavery was considered a significant subject in the study of American history. Significant as the subject is, the historical reassessment of American Negro slavery remains far from complete today, with a number of important academic questions still in existence, including some basic ones, despite the constant intellectual debates. 2) Relatively speaking, scholarship in the field of American history is quite weak in China. Our understanding of the slavery issue in the U. S. is inadequate, if not incomplete. The present thesis, therefore, is an effort to address such inadequacy in the study of chattel slavery in China, with the hope that more intellectual attention could be drawn toward such an important yet long ignored issue that would have affected our understanding of American history as a whole.The main arguments are: 1) Viewed from a purely economic perspective, chattel slavery and capitalist industrialization were not contradictory but compatible. Cotton slaves served as an important labor ingredient in the textile industries. The revival of American slavery in the early 19th century was a part of the Industrial Revolution across the Atlantic. 2) It was not economic drive, but political concerns that terminated slavery in the United States, for the American political tradition (the concept of natural law as its philosophical cornerstone) as well as its latest evolution in the 19th century (represented by the"free-labor"ideology advocated by the rising Republican Party) could not tolerate the existence of slavery in the United States any more. 3) The paradoxical philosophy and the institutional flaw eventually led to the breakout of the Civil War. It was as a wartime expedient that Emancipation was technically realized. Therefore it was half-hearted in nature. 4) After the Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction, the laborers working in Asian/African colonial countries and the factory workers in the industrialized nations substituted chattel slaves as the necessary labor ingredient of the rising global capitalism. Slavery didn't really die at the moment of the Emancipation. It was also in this sense that the Emancipation was half-hearted.This thesis contributes to the historical interpretation of American chattel slavery with a new approach, in which the slavery system in the 19th century American South was brought to comparison with capitalist industrialization as well as colonial economy. Such a comparative analysis reveals the similarity between the three cheap-labor varieties within the western capitalist system, namely chattel slaves, industrial workers and the indigenous labor force in colonized countries. This new approach to the interpretation of the termination of slavery in the U.S. suggests a new understanding of not only the nature of early capitalist industrialization, but the politico-economic relationship between imperialist suzerain countries and their colonies as well. In this sense, this thesis is not irrelevant to today's world, in that it explains from a historical perspective the origin of the unjust world order at present, in which the Western superiority is to a large extent built upon the exploitation of the labor force in the developing world.