The Southern Colonies Become States

Episode 5: Southern States in the New Nation

A New History of the American South

Dr Edward Ayers (2018)

Film Review

Ayers begins this lecture by pointing the overall difficulty of persuading settlers (in the 13 American colonies) to fight a war of independence when when they all identified more with Britain than with each other. A chief purpose of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson wrote was to create solidarity between the colonies by promoting a unifying dream of “equality.”

Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration blames the British monarch for the slave trade and slavery (which it calls a “cruel war against human nature,” an “execrable commerce” and an “assemblage of horrors.” The Continental Congress subsequently deleted this language.

During the Revolutionary War, pro-independence forces capitalized on the fact that the British recruited slaves and Native Americans to their side to mobilize racist animosity against both groups. The British used slaves and Native Americans to help forage for food and serve as scouts and spies. In addition slaves also drove teams of oxen, cooked for British troops and piloted British boats.

Some historians believe African and Native Americans would have been better off had America remained British, in part because the Revolutionary War cut the continent off from Europe’s growing abolition movement. Slavery definitely would have ended in Virginia, where Governor Dunsmore had granted freedom to all indentured servants and slaves in 1775.** According to Ayers, US independence greatly facilitated the spread of slavery to new territories.***

Ayers moves on to discuss the framing of the US Constitution. Here the main debate was between the Federalists, led by James Madison, who favored a strong federal government; and the Anti-Federalists, led by Patrick Henry, who wished states to hold the balance of power. There were Southern slaveholders on both sides of this debate, but the richest, most powerful slaveholders favored a strong central government.

To win support from this faction, the original Constitution postpones any legal effort to end slavery for 20 years, as well as granting southern states the right to count each slave as a 3/5 person in assigning congressional representatives.

Although the Constitution prohibits federal initiatives to end slavery in the first 13 states, in 1784, Congressman Thomas Jefferson introduced a bill to ban slavery in all new western states (including Alabama and Mississippi). Although it lost by one vote, in 1787 he successfully incorporated a ban on slavery in the legislation creating the Northwest Territories.

The constitutional ban didn’t stop the legislatures of northern states from ending slavery. Those with the largest number of slaves did so only gradually (with persons born into slavery required to wait until age 25-28 to claim their freedom. By 1810, 3/4 of northern African Americans were free and by 1830, they all were.

Losing much of his anti-slavery fervor as he grew older, Jefferson became a proponent of scientific racism. The latter asserts that black-skinned people are inferior to those with white skin. He had six children by one of his slaves, a biracial woman named Sally Hemings, starting when she was 15. Jefferson granted all his slaves (including his slave children) their freedom at his death. The state of Virginia had legalized the private manumission**** of slaves in 1792.

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*Ayers finds this ironic as it was mainly the institution of slavery that made the American colonies wealthy enough to attempt independence.

**By 1775, tobacco had depleted much of the Virginia colony’s soil, leading many local farmers (including George Washington) to turn to wheat instead. Wheat was not nearly as labor intensive as tobacco which meant Virginian slaves often had nothing to do.

***The British had banned slavery west of the Appalachians.

****Manumission refers to an official act whereby a slaveowner grants a slave their freedom.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/southern-states-new-nation

Hidden History: The War of 1812

This PBS documentary offers the highly sanitized mainstream version of the War of 1812, a historical event Canadians study in school but not Americans. This was the only war in history in which the US invaded Canada and lost. The main weakness of the documentary is its failure to point out that the US money supply was 80% controlled by London banks – both before and after a pointless war that ended in stalemate (see How the US Uses War to Protect the Dollar).

The “official” justification for the US declaration of war in June 1812 was the British policy of seizing US merchant ships headed for France. Owing to their war against Napoleon (1803-1815), the British seized hundreds of US merchant ships and impressed 6,000 US merchant sailors to serve in the British Navy. The final straw occurred when the British fired on a US naval vessel, the USS Chesapeake, which was harboring four British deserters.

According to the documentary, the true motivation was the desire of President James Madison and young Congressional Republicans to seize Indian and Canadian lands for sentiment and development.

For me the most significant aspect of this war was the strong antiwar movement that arose opposing it. Northern banks refused to finance the war (it was eventually financed by London’s German-owned Baring’s Bank) and New England states, which threatened to secede, refused to volunteer their militias.

For the fist year of the war, the US government relied mainly on state militias, as service in the US army was voluntary and pay and conditions were abysmal. The poorly led US militias made three disastrous attempts to invade Canada at Detroit, across the Niagara River and north through Vermont’s Champlain Valley. The US militias were defeated, despite outnumbering Canadian forces five to one. Most of Britain’s military forces were tied up fighting Napoleon in Europe. The Canadian side relied on a few British regulars, Native American warriors led by Tecumseh and French, Scottish and British farmers defending their land.

In 1814, the British captured Napoleon, releasing 60,000 troops for service elsewhere. In August 1814, they sacked and burned Washington (including the Capitol, the White House, the Library of Congress and the Navy Yard) and the city was only spared by a freak hurricane that forced British troops to retreat.

The Battle of Baltimore and the Battle of New Orleans would spell a reversal of fortune for the US. By this point the US had more professionally trained troops, though they depended heavily on Baltimore residents to build ramparts and state militias to help defend the city. The successful defense of Fort McHenry (Baltimore) in September 1814 would inspire Francis Scott Key to write the Star Spangled Banner. Congress would make it the US national anthem in 1931.

My favorite part of the documentary depicts the Battle of New Orleans in which Revolutionary War hero Andrew Jackson successfully led 4,000 irregulars – consisting of poor white farmers, slaves, creoles, and Native Americans – against 10,000 highly trained and experienced British troops.

The battle is celebrated in Johnny Horton’s 1959 ballad The Battle of New Orleans (the second video). The audio is blocked in the documentary for copyright reasons. Too bad Congress didn’t make Battle of New Orleans the national anthem. They should have.

 

 

 

How the US Uses War to Protect the Dollar

The Gods of Money

William Engdahl (2015)

The first video is a 2015 presentation by William Engdahl about his 2010 book The Gods of Money. It focuses on the use of US economic and military warfare to maintain the supremacy of the US dollar as the global reserve currency.

As his point of departure, he begins with the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, in which the Allied powers agreed to use the gold-backed US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. In 1971 when Nixon was forced to end the gold standard,* the gold-backed US dollar was replaced by the “petrodollar.” According to Engdahl, it was so named because of a secret agreement the US made with Saudi Arabia – in return for a guarantee that OPEC would only trade oil in US dollars, the US guaranteed the Saudis unlimited military hardware.

In this way, oil importing nations (most of the world) were forced to retain substantial US dollar reserves. This was the only way they could provide their economies with a continuous supply of oil.

The petrodollar remained supreme until the mid-1980s, when the collapse of the US Savings and Loan industry (a pre-cursor of the 2007 banking collapse) raised concerns in Europe that the US was failing as a super power. Fearing the US economy was collapsing, they created the euro and the Eurozone, to prevent the Soviet Union or China from filling the power vacuum.

The financial warfare unit of the US treasury responded by feeding hedge fund manager and currency speculator George Soros secret information that enabled him to lead an attack on the British pound. This, in turn, destabilized the British economy to the point the UK no longer qualified to join the euro.

In 1997 the US Treasury and Soros made a a similar attack on economies of Southeast Asia (Thailand, South Korea, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines) that attempted to use currencies other than the dollar as their reserve currencies.

In 2010, after the US government had run three years of $1 trillion deficits, China, Russia and Japan announced their intention of selling US Treasury bonds (which the US government sells to finance its debt) to increase their euro reserves. Concerned this placed the US dollar on the brink of catastrophic collapse, the US Treasury and Soros attacked the Euro directly by collapsing the Greek economy. The mechanism Soros used was to direct his hedge funds to dump the sovereign treasury bonds that financed Greek debt.** When the European Central Bank announced its commitment to a Greek bail-out, the US Treasury and Soros followed up with an attack on Irish, Spanish and Portuguese sovereign bonds.

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*A US economic crisis led to massive foreign demand for US dollar redemption that threatened to deplete US gold reserves.

** The immediate effect of bondholders dumping Greek bonds raised interest rates on Greek debt to a level that threatened to bankrupt their government.

 

 

The second clip is a Guns and Butter radio interview with Engdahl. It focuses on a second area the Gods of Money covers, namely the long US battle to abolish their private central bank (aka the Federal Reserve) and end the ability of private banks to create money out of thin air (see How Banks Create Money Out of Thin Air).

After a brief explanation of fractional reserve banking, whereby 97% of our money is created by private banks, Engdahl traces the history of the First Bank of the United States, created by Alexander Hamilton in 1791. The latter was the first US central bank, 80% owned by private (mostly Rothschild-controlled) banks in the City of London and 20% owned by the US government. President James Madison’s refusal to renew the bank’s charter in 1811 would result in Britain and the US going to war in 1812.

When the war ended in 1815, the American war debt was so substantial, the US had no choice but to charter the Second Bank of the United States, which once again was 80% controlled by London banks.

In 1832, Andrew Jackson refused to renew the bank’s charter, and the US had no central bank between 1832 and 1913. In 1913 when President Woodrow Wilson secretly colluded with the global banking establishment to create the Federal Reserve.

Both Lincoln and Kennedy challenged the exclusive role private banks play in creating the US money supply – Lincoln by issuing greenbacks (rather than borrowing money from private banks) to pay for the civil war and Kennedy by issuing silver certificates directly redeemable by the US Treasury. In both cases, Engdahl feels their defiance of the international banking establishment played a role in the decision to assassinate them.